>>14400998>Are there any neurological differences that can be directly observed?If they could find any neurological differences, then it would be neurologists and not psychiatrists who would do the diagnosis. But they can't find anything except in a small number of cases where it's not even clear whether or not it's the behavior that causes the brain structures to differ or not. After all, the brain is plastic.
Kim Peek, on whom rainman is based, had a missing corpus callosum, but then again his "autism" is nowadays seen as a misdiagnosis since his behavior was more in line with someone who was lobotomized.
Genetic studies are similar. They have once talked about how an excessive number of random (de novo) mutations might explain Autism, then failed to mention that once you account for IQ, autistics actually don't have more of them than non-autistics one. It's the intellectually disabled ones, here many of them just rebranded as autistic, who have more of them. However, even then, it's because a number of well known genetic conditions like Down's, Prader etc. are rolled into this group. So again, most intellectually disabled ones actually don't have many random mutations either, they're genetically normal and just suck at IQ tests.
>Earlier discussions mentioned excessive neural branching but I don't know if this is established and if this was autism or Asperger's.If a study claims X, but X doesn't have any follow-up studies and doesn't appear in any hard neurology (as opposed to psychiatry) journals, then X is most likely false and not established.
People really believe anything as long as it says "A study found that..." There are other reasons why the idea that abnormal behavior must be caused by abnormal neurology is extremely problematic.
The underlying argumentation boils down to the idea that humans are supposed to act and feel a certain way, which for some reason happens to be completely commensurate with the needs of a neoliberal society.