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Brain Hyperconnectivity in Children with Autism and Its Links to Social Deficits (2013)

by stmw on 2/9/25, 3:54 AM with 119 comments

• by SubiculumCode on 2/9/25, 6:26 AM

  Vinod, often flashy and interesting, also often plays a bit fast and loose..a strategy that seems to land his lab good journals, but questionable replication. So I immediately looked at the preprocessing steps in the methods...which is, annoyingly, in supplemental 1. A few comments:

  It is written so vaguely, it is difficult to understand what preprocessing steps were done and in which order (which matters). The steps to avoid motion confounds mostly talk about why they didn't do certain things (e.g. GSR regression), and not what they did do (tissue signal covariates?), what about non-GSR based noise cleaning to remove physiological and motion related noise? The study may be good,I just wish it was written more straightforwardly, and less like they are weaving past potential reviewer objections.

  Vinod (v) To Vinod a paper is to write it so loose and sexy, so fast and seductive, editors are bound to wake up the morning after with a new babe. (Just a little joke among some colleagues of mine).

• by The_Amp_Walrus on 2/9/25, 9:45 AM

  On this topic I really enjoyed reading "Autism as a disorder of dimensionality"

  https://opentheory.net/2023/05/autism-as-a-disorder-of-dimen...

  I'm just a casual reader I can't vouch for the veracity of the content, but I found it very interesting

• by cyocum on 2/9/25, 1:17 PM

  I am not an expert in any way, shape or form but I wonder how this squares with this other journal article in Nature: Molecular Psychiatry which came out in 2024? "11C-UCB-J PET imaging is consistent with lower synaptic density in autistic adults" https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-024-02776-2

  Edited to add title of the article

• by funnym0nk3y on 2/9/25, 12:00 PM

  I wonder how that ties into the hyperconnectivity induced by various psychoactive substances like psilocybin.

  All the research about GABA and glutamate seems too low level to me and not specific enough for treatment targets. Somewhat like using body weight to determine that disease.

• by gtsnexp on 2/9/25, 8:28 AM

  Here is where the original idea (with experimental evidence) came from: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17638926/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21423407/

• by SZJX on 2/10/25, 5:04 AM

  If it’s true, one idea to explain it might be oversensitivity to input (which maybe sometimes leads to withdrawal or avoidance to social situations which could be too stimulating and stressful?), which given the connection between autism and ADHD which has become discovered more and more by research in recent years doesn’t sound entirely unreasonable to me. Then again I have no expertise in this field whatsoever so can only conjecture.

• by davidthewatson on 2/9/25, 7:46 AM

  Does brain science have a Fitt's law?

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law

  This is before we even start talking about serial or parallel, concurrency, etc. And then modify the networks and the wires themselves dynamically in real-time and you have endogenous BDNF, endogenous DMT, and the fact that insulin has a different, psychoactive effect on the other side of the blood brain barrier.

  It would seem that time-speed-distance would be a useful metric here, as well as accounting for the fact that we don't actually know where we are in the 6d chess of triune, bicameral, hippocampal, or glycemic variation moment-to-moment in real-time.

  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

• by linux2647 on 2/9/25, 6:20 AM

  (2013)

• by fallingfrog on 2/10/25, 4:20 AM

  This feels like the work of a highly intelligent person operating on very scant information- it’s easy to construct castles of thought that more or less fit your experiences, but at some point the slow tedious work of conducting experiments and data has to be done, and most of these sorts of elaborate guesses turn out to be wrong.

• by ddmf on 2/10/25, 3:49 PM

  My clinical psychiatrist crudely described autism as taking many - sometimes longer - pathways through the brain to do things and monotropism could be simply a sticky myelin sheath.

  But both could be true - a myelin sheath disorder along with hyperconnectivity could explain so many sensory issues and such singular processing.

• by Anotheroneagain on 2/9/25, 8:49 AM

  There is no deficit. Their neocortexes haven't died, and they are not insane.

  Just like the "intelligent" physicist concocts a theory, and then proves himself completely wrong with an experiment, an "intelligent" man concocts a social conspiracy theory, but nothing proves him wrong: instead, he pronounces those who "don't get it" hopelesly stupid, too socially dumb to participate in a society.

• by codr7 on 2/9/25, 5:48 AM

  What if growing bigger, more connected brains is the next evolutionary step?

  Doesn't seem entirely unreasonable to me.