[The following is a guest article by Illuminaticatblog. Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Pumpkin Person]

The most associated myth of autism is that it is a theory of mind deficit. That people with autism cannot understand other people and that they are highly focused on narrow interests. The DSM-5 defines autism as a developmental disorder. But what does that mean? Before there was a neuroscience-based approach to autism people just said that people who are stupid socially were autistic. That they were only interested in things, not people. The reality is that autism is a neurological metabolic problem. Too many connections exist that do not go away fast enough.

The clinical vs psychiatric disorder of autism is simple. Clinical autism as said has too many connections that do not prune away. This creates sensitivity. When an autistic person processes stimuli they get overwhelmed. The signals become overly dense. And this means that outside data becomes too much. Attention in working memory overflows. It is just too much.

In the free energy principle, it is signal density that determines if a person is typically average, autistic, or schizo. Schizos have sparse density signals. In the model, signals fail to propagate and so the schizo needs to be overly stimulated to get their cognitive processes to work. The reason schizos are delusional is that when the signals fail to propagate weird associates form in the brain. Their brain fails to link cause and effect in the right way because of a delay when the signals come together. It makes it so magic becomes real and the mind can cause the environment and people to read your thoughts and act for or against you.

The part of the brain that represents a person’s theory of mind is the right temporal parietal junction. The temporal lobe recognizes objects that move and the parietal lobe recognizes objects in space. They both through the junction use the frontal lobes and emotional limbic system to make judgments on what to do when people act. The medial frontal lobes have to do with the self so together they find a person’s relationship with others as they move in space. In autism, kids with extreme clinical autism may or may not have this area of their brain damaged.

What signifies that an autistic person has a deficit in their theory of mind is when the extreme case happens that they fail to watch other people. They fail because they have too much happening inside themselves to gather an understanding of why people do things naturally. In the schizo, they have an obsessive fixation with people. But fail to connect why people do what they do for the opposite reasons of neglect. Rember that the schizo thinks others can read their mind. And that there is a reason for what people do all the time. They believe every action a person does is intentional. They begin to hallucinate what others are thinking when in reality other people’s motivations are usually unconscious to themselves. People rationalize why they do what they do 95% of the time because they had no true reason for what they did. It is either a hidden emotion or a subconscious urge.

When autism is diagnosed via the DSM it is often done as an excuse for the doctors to label patients because they do not know the cause of the deficits. There may be abuse in the family or school and the kid has shut down. they may be getting the wrong kinds of foods in their diet. They may have executive problems and or low intelligence. Many things can cause symptoms of clinical autism and that is why psychiatry is not a science. It only observes the outside and not the inside. And clinical autism has a gradient o severity. It is not all autism or nothing. Neuron growth happens at different rates in children’s brains so it takes more than observations to rule out clinical autism.

More than half of autism diagnoses can be attributed to neglect and diet. Functional medicine has been shown to cure “autism” in cases where children are evaluated genetically and biochemically. In true clinical autism people have been evaluated to have regulation problems and so have been given pharmaceuticals that balance the signal density to release the processes of overstimulation. In schizophrenia, doctors observe that brains have thining in grey matter and metabolically why propagation fails to reach through the entire brain. they have also been given pharmaceuticals that enhance signal regulation. Often these experimental treatments have stopped neurodegeneration.

In conclusion, schizophrenia, and autism are caused by a failure of the brain to self-regulate. Autism has high-density signals and schizos have low-density signals that fail to propagate. This causes schizos to seek out stimulation and autists to block out and shut down. Schizos are overly fixated on people and hallucinate their intentions and autists cannot pay attention because people overwhelm them. This is a spectrum so neither autists nor schizos fully have on or off deficits in theory of mind. Self-regulation can be restored with the right interventions.