Study Linking Autism to 'Male Brain' Retracted, Replaced
medscape.com
medscape.com
[1]https://twitter.com/sbaroncohen/status/832490232721371136
Simon Baren Cohen is an expert, but he's got some stuff badly wrong before, such as saying that autism is a condition marked by lack of empathy because of alexithymia. Turns out this is incorrect, but it caused considerable hardship for many autistic people who were unable to get a dx because they could see things from someone else's point of view, even if only in a limited way.
In adult life, it can lead to better psychological therapy. Managing anxiety in ASD is different to neurotypical people, for example.
Speaking as somebody too 'high functioning' for a diagnosis... please elaborate
edit: the responses to this feel weird, does anybody have resources for ASD folks experiencing anxiety?
If they're diagnosed as autistic they get suitable help.
If they're not diagnosed as autistic they get treatment for Social Anxiety or Social Anxiety Disorder, and that treatment doesn't work because they don't have SA or SAD.
It's the difference between someone with arachnophobia fearing a toy spider like it was a real danger and someone who is susceptible to black widow poisoning fearing a black widow because it is a greater danger to them.
Doesn't make me the best person to answer, but I also felt the responses to be weird. But I'll relate some of my experiences, if they might be of some use.
I'm not an expert in anxiety by any means, however, one thing that stands out to me is that when my daughter is feeling anxious about something, let's say it would be about the state of geopolitics - or whatever - I could calm her by telling her that it is in fact a rather dire situation. That is, if this is representative, that the uncertainty in/about/through your own interpretation is often more disconcerting than even the worst case scenario. Similarly, I've had friends tell me: Yep, you are being an idiot! Which is accompanied by a figurative, if not literal sigh of relief from me.
While this probably isn't completely alien in anxiety in general, it seems much more pronounced for people close to, or on the spectrum.
For some I also believe a weaker/different perception of time plays a significant role in the difference. Maybe this is more my ADD side, but time can become invisible, everything is a moment which encompasses all of time. Ancient, yet newborn and without temporal roots.
Hence some anxiety might not be as much about the future, but of this current eternal now and all that has been. I rarely get embarrassed even if I done something mind boggling stupid, but I can sometimes get anxious about small things that happened decades ago, of which the outcomes have certainly completely played out. It's as if cause and effect isn't always causally ordered in my subconscious brain, hence the memory evoked doesn't evoke the appropriate emotional state.
Got a real headache, so I'll stop typing now. Quite likely mostly gibberish anyway, tends to become such when I'm in this state, against my best intentions. But hey, practice makes perfect, eh :)
An issue with ASD is the prevalence of higher intelligence levels that mask occurrence of ADD - until those people advance their education or careers until a point where it becomes a problem - and then it becomes a real problem.
Do you have an opinion or position on the subject of ASD/ADD comorbidity?
Edit: During my Master's degree I spent one year studying remotely because of agoraphobia, stuck in my student room. Social anxiety is something I'm kind of used to deal with now... But it didn't blocked me to travel and work abroad. :)
As always, just replace <insert behavioral or mental issue> with "cancer" and see if you sound dismissive or callous. "How does being diagnosed help the cancer patient?"
Anti-vaxxers?
it's a very important shibboleth for modern sexists
> Meet the neuroscientist shattering the myth of the gendered brain
> Are there any significant differences based on sex alone? The answer, she says, is no. To suggest otherwise is “neurofoolishness”.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/feb/24/meet-the-neu...
"Boom! Myth shattered!" - The Guardian
Here's Rippon:
> "The idea of the male brain and the female brain suggests that each is a characteristically homogenous thing and that whoever has got a male brain, say, will have the same kind of aptitudes, preferences and personalities as everyone else with that ‘type’ of brain. We now know that is not the case."
That idea does have support, it's not a strawman. But it's the sort of idea you see from religious fundamentalists, not something any serious scientist has entertained in a very long time. People talking about prenatal testosterone, spatial reasoning fluidity, and gendered variance are not saying, even a little bit, that "everyone with a male brain will have the same aptitudes". The state of the art here is work like Joel on 'mosaic' brains, which looks at gender differences by brain region. It finds that there are many brain features gender-correlated physical differences, but these features have overlap between genders and the level of skew between different features is weakly correlated.
Here's Joel (https://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15468):
> "Our study demonstrates that, although there are sex/gender differences in the brain, human brains do not belong to one of two distinct categories: male brain/female brain."
And a critic of Joel (https://www.pnas.org/content/113/14/E1968):
> "the authors convincingly establish that there is little evidence for this strict sexually dimorphic view of human brains, counter to the popular lay conception of a “male” and “female” brain[...]Critically, however, the conclusion that human brains cannot be categorized into two distinct classes depends largely on the level of analysis[...]In fact, an individual’s biological sex can be classified with extremely high accuracy by considering the brain mosaic as a whole."
While Rippon is jousting with the idea of strict dichotomy, researchers who reject sex differentiation concede that there are widespread statistical differences by sex. (Rippon vaguely acknowledges this too, "Of course there are sex differences", but it goes nowhere.) Other researchers are building models that can predict sex at >90% accuracy from brain-feature data. The Guardian writer implies that differences disappear after correcting for brain size, but the actual results say some significant features disappear. Even after regressing out head size, Chekroud's model retains 70% accuracy. (And of course, brain size has a strong sex correlation, so if you want to talk about real populations you wouldn't control for it.) Finally,
Finally, the story leaps to claiming adult differences are the result of socialization changing the brain. There's a lot going on here, none of it good. For one, it's the usual pop-science journalism format; the first half is study-driven, the second half applies that credibility to an unstudied claim. Do the mosaic differences exist with similar strength in early childhood? That could support or invalidate the entire narrative, and we simply don't know. For another, it makes the all-too-common mistake of conflating "not inborn" with "socialized", switching straight from physical brain structure to stereotypes without even mentioning intermediate factors like hormones. Finally, it heavily misrepresents existing research. Brain plasticity results in black cab drivers are repurposed to say that playing with Legos "very likely" produces lasting, observable brain differences. (But wait, how would gendered play be reflected in the brain? Didn't we just hear that adult men and women, despite all that socialization, don't have clearly observable brain differences? Well yes, it's not a very good article.)
The problem it seems is that they can't understand that, yes, saying females are shorter than males is a valid heuristic, but it is not an absolute relation and should be integrated with actual observations and individual differences.
Yes - of that you can be certain. Was the retraction and modification done to satisfy those people? That's an important question that will probably go unanswered.
They're saying that it was a methodological error, so probably not.
But like anything involving gendered characteristics in humans as expressed in the world, the range of observed behaviors within the two populations overlaps so much it’s hard to draw meaningful conclusions about any individual by differentiating the two.
Based on my personal experience and from talking to others who have medically transitioned, the difference between “inherently male” behaviors and “inherently female” behaviors can be nearly entirely explained by hormones. As in, you change hormones and the behavior changes: testosterone tends to cause elevated anger / aggression while estrogen tends to make people more neurotic with a wider range of emotional response. That’s it. The rest of the differences are either personality or environmental / social factors.
And sexual interest. Hormones actually have many effects, but those are the most immediate/obvious ones.
But other characteristics such as nutrition and genetics matter more: the average German woman (5’5”) is significantly taller than the average Peruvian man (5’1”).
My point here is that the difference between men and women on most metrics tends to be more heavily influenced by other external factors.
I think that's the problem part of your argument. There's no qualification of what "most metrics" includes, much less whether that holds true for must neurological effects (which is more to the point), and that's before we even get around to discussing the fact that I'm sure there's a bunch of metrics we don't even know about.
Your statement might be entirely true. Unfortunately I don't know enough to judge the claims in it, I don't even know if we're at a level where we can judge the claims, and regardless you didn't provide any evidence to support it or help with that in any way. I'm not sure how it brings us any closer to an understanding of the issue.
Edit: rationale on down votes would be appreciated...
Given the topic, I took that as an argument that the neurological differences are not as pronounced as what is created by external factors, and I was responding to the lack of evidence provided for that view (which I interpret as the opposite of the view you suggested).
I actually lean towards your position, but I wasn't trying to express that as an argument (I'm unqualified to). I was just trying to point out what I saw as at best very loose reasoning (at least when provided without evidence).
You could view this as "no difference" though, as your gender identity would not rely on a male or female phenotype.
Aren't 'your' thoughts thought by your brain
Funny enough, estrogen has also been linked to increased aggression just as testosterone. You take a baboon and look at when females act most violently and it spikes just as estrogen spikes. Same for violence in women prisons. At the same time, depression also spikes which further suggest that estrogen causes wild mood swings.
But when we look at more modern studies a new pattern is emerging. For high social status individuals we see the exact same pattern as old studies, but as we go down the social ladder the picture change. For testosterone the current findings seem to link it to increases learned behavior when a individual has their social status challenge. That response in baboons is always more violence, but directed at the nearest individuals below them on the social ladder. For estrogen you see a drop in violence as you go down the social status ladder, while isolationing behavior goes up.
An other relative recent finding is that hormone secretion increase in men after winning social status. Unsurprising that correlated in animal studies when males has the highest probability of reproduction.
Hormones are useful when explaining behavior linked to reproduction, and in that you do get some gender differences. I would however be a bit cautious. A good talk I would recommend is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bnSY4L3V8s&t=30m17s as it explore this a bit further.
Not especially - more like an averted defeat. It's certainly not a win for gendered-brain theories, but it's not much of a loss either. Cohen's work is hugely controversial even after taking the existence of "gendered brains" as a given. He makes his claim from two directions: first, that most autistic people are male, and second, that most autistic women have 'male brains'.
Rejecting first claim is obviously compatible with sex differences. The basic answer is that autism in women is underdiagnosed and Cohen is mistaking test error for base rates. There are lots of possible reasons which are indifferent to brain sex (gender stereotypes, clinician expectations), plus the claim that autism presents differently in men and women, which is compatible with both socialization and deep-seated gender differences.
His second claim basically requires brain sex differences to exist, but it's still possible to accept that while disputing that autistic women have "male brains". For one thing, a lot of the debate about brain sex today works from the same underlying framework (e.g. the 2015 'mosaic brain' work) while reaching very different conclusions about how substantial sex differences are, and that whole model is largely incompatible with Cohen's. For another, lots of people charge that Cohen's data is simply wrong - that his stats on autistic women with 'male brains' come from botched studies which should be discounted regardless of what brains are like.
People who reject major sex differences like Cordelia Fine aim at Cohen a lot, because his model would largely invalidate theirs. But lots of people claiming major sex differences also reject Cohen, either because their models don't match (e.g. "higher male variance" versus Cohen's "male brains"), or because they simply think studies like these are methodologically weak independent of that question.
As for the tweet, Baron-Cohen's language in that tweet seems to be a cry of triumph, using language that he presumably realizes (or ought to) would be inflammatory. There are good reasons that this is a sensitive subject. And how you present and talk about the results is a big part of why.
Science--particularly psychology and neuroscience--has a long-established history of unscientific lies and willful misinterpretations about differences due to sex (and race and other things) that have been demonstrably harmful to millions of people. Only the confidence of ultimate privilege could make you think that now we've finally turned a corner and can be totally objective about such things.
When the biggest names in such research lecture other people about how important it is to be serious about studying oh-so-scientific proof of sex differences while simultaneously cheering on their long-preferred outcome like it's a sporting event is... unprofessional at best. A good scientist should be humble about their own instincts and should be thoughtful and careful about succumbing to confirmation bias. But here we had Simon Baron-Cohen crowing over a single result in the most obnoxiously oversimplified way possible.
There's a huge amount of context here that I am (and probably you are) missing, and I certainly can't judge these people's motives. But I'll say it again: serious scientists who really care about finding out the facts about sex differences in brain development should probably not be crowing about single studies on Twitter in inflammatory ways.
1: Simon-Baron Cohen has become world famous for promoting his "extreme male brain" theory of Autism to the point its hard to imagine he's NOT emotionally attached to it.
2: It is notable women with Autism get diagnosed later and its broadly believed by those familiar with Autism that they are underdiagnosed. The extreme male brain theory however bega the questiom that maybe women possibly lack as extreme male of a brain as the men and thus are less autistic and that explains the diagnosis discrepancy? Which is obviously controversial.
3: Autistic womens brains AREN'T LIKE typical male brains. So the nomenclature of saying they have "male brains" in itself is controversial. Especially when girls grew up bullied for being different often being accused of not being sufficiently girly.
4: Generally the people who advocate for autistic men have grievances against some aspects of masculinity. Yet autistic men in certain ways act hypermasculine (isolation, indifference to pain, etc.) Male autistics are likely to be raised in an unusually feminine environment and ardn't always considered manly and can yearn for some sort of masculine identity. So there is this awkward dynamic.
The group most commonly diagnosed as autistic, white men tend to get no love from their allies in regards to other aspects of their identity. This leads to high functioning autistics like James Damore who literally want to tear down affirmative action policies that nominally benefit autistic people. Men like these proceed to get burned at the stake by their allies. This leads to angry resentful autistics inflaming discussions like this.
5: There is a strong correlation between autism and transgenderism and nobody really knows why. Transwomen are autistic at rates far above the general population. This really pisses off autistic transwomen. Generally autism seems to have a significant impact on gender identity.
There is a surprising amount of tension here anyways.
He discovered his own error that then led to this retraction. The error involved under-documented statistical code which expected the coding of male and female (0,1) to be reversed when training a classifier on each group, is my understanding. He kept the coding of sex the same across both training regimes. This created erroneous results. He became suspicious about the results after new applications of the analysis to new dataset produced over the top beautiful results.
The take is this. The mistake was honest, and way too easy. My office mate is a superb scientist with the highest integrity. He caught a mistake, and fessed up to it. This is good science.
Note: I am not part of the group that published this paper.
There's got to be a specific set!
If that's the reason this seems like a non event, as far as some of the typical gender related internet spats goes.
It's literally in the first sentence:
"The authors of a study that claimed to find a link between typical male brain anatomy and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have retracted it and replaced it with a dramatically changed version after finding an error in their methodology."
> In the letter, Ecker wrote that she and her coauthors had "identified a problem with the script that was used for the prediction of biological sex in male and female individuals with ASD based on their respective neuroanatomy in our original sample."
> That meant that "the probabilities we assumed to be indicative of the default (male) category in the female individuals with ASD, as shown in Figure 1B of our article, were flipped and in fact reflect the probabilities for the category of biological female individuals."
Shitty academia code strikes again. It's sort of unfortunate that most of academic fields have turned to domain-specific software engineering, which graduates are woefully unprepared to do properly.