Joscha Bach describes what is autism and why more kids are getting diagnosed?

you talked about kids getting diagnosed with things like adhd and uh this brought to mind for me the number of kids that get diagnosed with autism um i'm in my 40s i now have a bunch of friends that have young kids and several of them have have said oh my my children have autism i don't like this seems like a simplistic question but i don't remember this many children having autism when i was growing up is this a matter of autism is actually increasing or what we're diagnosing is is um more autism and the reason i ask you is because i think you have an interesting insight into the the minds of people and i think most people don't even really have a concept for what autism is if somebody were to say your child has autism they really don't know what that means other than they you know they really need things to be patterned or something yeah also found that when i looked at children my own children and children are friends and that the diagnostic criteria that they're being subjected to they're not always that helpful it's more interesting to uh think what's particularly going on with this particular child then to see where the dsm category fits and uh this determines the treatment the with respect to your question i think both happens so we have more diagnostic criteria when i was young then autism or asperger's was just discovered as a possible diagnosis and adhd also was not something that was frequently diagnosed it was just something where there was not so much on the radar autism did exist but it was mostly applied to more severe cases but the more severe cases have also increased so it's not just that autism gets more diagnosed more readily but children with learning disabilities with difficulty to focus with more increased uh spells of dissociation this difficulty to develop intuitive empathy and so on this seems to be on the rise and the severe cases of autism so not aspergers but people who are unable to learn to speak that cannot walk properly that cannot control their emotions at all and might be crawling at other people or biting them or themselves and hurt themselves in the process and so that is severely dysfunctional this is also increased and i think that autism first of all is a developmental defect it means that your nervous system is not forming in the right way and developmental defects are caused either by genetics which means that there is some problem in your genetic code that is not being weeded out just genetic drift mutations that accumulate randomly over generations in which child mortality is decreasing which means you know the longer selecting for defects and the other thing is that environmental influences can interact with your development and we don't in the u.s have a strong precautionary principle for chemicals basically if something doesn't kill the rats in three months it's fine and unless you find a good reason to believe that it's not and if there is something that is by itself not toxic but it's just disrupting signaling processes during development and very subtle chemical signals that tell cells in your brain what type of cell there should be and what mode they should be in depending on their proximity to certain other points in the brain that secrete certain chemicals and interact with them and these individual cells are locally measuring this chemical gradient this is how the different cells know where they are in the brain and what kind of cell this would differentiate on right and these effects are if they interact with chemicals for instance in your foot or in your water or in your clothing or in your furniture and then it's very difficult to detect these effects in a red experiment because they are going to be different for every species and in humans they play out a very long time you basically need to look over an entire generation on how the effect will be before you know the certainty and this is something that is very deeply concerning to me so if we have in after we change the chemical composition of our foot and allow a number of new chemicals in our foot this in a single generation and within that generation we see a lot of increase of developmental defects i'm very concerned especially since we don't have any coordination to get rid of that that i am uh i'm really glad i asked you this because i'm very surprised by that you're one of the only people in the scientific community i've ever met that said hey i think it could be something in our food or the the clothing that we're wearing could be doused with some kind of chemical it's this has to be something that i mean in in the world that i live in um not many scientific people think this way it would put you pretty far outside of that little um you know enclave oh i don't think so i suspect that um most people that i'm talking to the uh be aware of the fact that for instance estrogen in the drinking water since we introduced the pill is an issue uh right the estrogen that are being as you used as a contraceptive and that is not completely filtered out in water treatment is uh visibly affecting fish and uh and female animals in environment so we see this effect and it's probably also affecting people right if you give everybody estrogen even if it's a low-dose estrogen during their development in uttara and as babies and as children it's going to have a slight effect on their bodies and uh the same is true for um substances in our foot and food chain that are mimicking hormones that is messaging messaging chemicals for instance stalats have the property that they can interact with some of the receptors that are being used by hormones in our own body and as a result give signaling to how our bodies should develop and the same is also true for um not just the lights but probably also for soy so a lot of soil products that got into our food chain might interact at some subtle level uh with our signaling and so if this were if this uh what does a human do right that if it's in your food or in your water i can remember living in uh in africa and there was a time when we thought aflotoxin was in the corn and like corn was everything you ate right it was like the primary um you get a paste called ugali and when you start to have a fear that something is poisonous in the food even in low doses it uh clouds your every thought like basically everything you're thinking and doing all day every day swirls around the idea that you may be being poisoned so if if this is what you're thinking about is does this cloud all of your thoughts or was i being hyperbolic no i was living in not at all i'm not trying to think about it that much i'm trying to mostly eat the things that i think my ancestors ate i suspect that people can within a few generations get be fined with most food sources also with a lot of toxins in food because we can just evolve to deal with these toxins but it will be at the expense of child mortality right because the only way that something gets into the next generation is that it mutates into the next generation most mutations are not in the right direction so uh throughout human history there has been a selection for new traits the reason why we have new generations is adaptation because the individual organism cannot adapt very much the individual organism can converge to something that has already been built into it by evolution so a certain range of things that you can adapt to but it can usually not adapt to completely new foot sources very well and if you want to have something that is non-deleterious you need to stay with this for a few generations and allow mutation and selection and of course we all agree we don't want to have selection we don't want to die in childhood or we don't want our children to die so how can can we achieve that i don't really know a solution to this we can do a few things with pre-implementation diagnostics so we can filter out deleterious mutations that we already know that they're not good ones but it's difficult to use something like pre-implantation diagnostics to select for benevolent mutations because we don't know how they will play out so it's very difficult for us to breed a new generation that is able to deal with new food sources and so my tendency would be to be for myself relatively conservative with food i would want to eat similar food as works for my ancestors and if i try new foot i would want to monitor how i feel it interacts with my own body on at scale there is very little we can do because we have certain foot that is very cheap to produce at any given time with enormous amount of people he probably cannot change agricultural food production back to the state that it was in 100 years ago and still feed people comfortably so we have to deal with the fact somehow that our food is now different you know when we were talking before about autism and asperger's and you talk about mutations or like this is a like a mental defect the several friends that i have that have asperger's it is us it's made them extraordinary in some ways like certainly they're a little bit difficult to get along with sometimes or they have some quirks but but that trait combined with high iq has made them capable of doing things or paying attention to things that most normies couldn't even come close to yes but i suspect that the majority of people on the spectrum do not develop superpowers so on average i suspect the they are less employable and the people that you become aware of uh people like mark zuckerberg they are the outliers right so there is a selection bias you will have among your friends mostly those that are super functional that have local superpowers typically at the expense of something else and i think when you have high functioning autism ice buggers and and you have difficulty to make models that are very deep which is often the case so one of the problems that i seem to be seeing often in people that are on the autism spectrum is that there seems to be an issue with signal propagation which means that the signals in their brain do not go very deeply over too many layers it's as if they are operating on a higher frequency so their loops are shorter and as a result they need to integrate over fewer layers and as a compensation their brain will increase the degree to which they can discover patterns on the previous layer so these people often down in the weeds they might not see the big picture very easily but they're very very good at dealing with the small picture and computers are all about the small picture computers are a catnip for many people with asperger's because the world of the computer is essentially flat it's not deep everything is scripted everything is conceptual it's all on the same level it's the opposite of art for art you need to look very deep right you make this connection between what's meaningful to you and what you perceive on the lowest level and you go very very deeply you see the significance of things and there also uh people which are very deep into art often synesthetes and so on are probably also on the spectrum just in the other direction right so when we think of autism we also mostly think of people that are very literal that have sensory overflow issues because they have difficulty to single out stable features from the layers that they are observing and stability requires that you integrate over many layers and you have on the other hand people that are in the permanently holy mode that see everything as extremely significant even the smallest dust mode in the sky and that also not getting anything done for different reasons right and this might be part of the same spectrum in a way where the speed or the the depth of signal transmission in the perceptual system is affected and i suspect that for uh adhd a similar thing happens not for perceptual signals but it happens for control signals so uh people with adhd tend to be very impulsive which means they have difficulty to interact on the long grains on long game reward they often can think long-term but they are often not able to act on the long-term impulses because the short-term impulses take over it's basically as if there is a hierarchy of functions of purposes that determines your behavior and only the purposes that give immediate reward can affect the behavior whereas the purposes that affect the long game cannot become effective it leads to enormous frustration for these individuals because they know better at some level they just don't find that they act on the understanding of the world [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] hey [Applause] [Music]

Channel: VCP Shorts

Views: 5,494

Keywords: Vance Crowe, VCP

Id: Cv0FhdIZAjg

Length: 14min 1sec (841 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 05 2022