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Pumpkin Person

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Tag Archives: schizophrenia

Autism vs schizophrenia: gray matter vs white matter

05 Thursday Sep 2019

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 43 Comments

Tags

autism, brain pruning, gray matter, men.. women, schizophrenia, sex difference, white matter

image found here

cnn.com reports:

Your brain consists of two types of tissue, gray matter and white matter. In your first decade of life, the gray matter grows and expands rapidly as many new synapses, or connections between nerves, are being made. The gray matter grows as you learn and are exposed to new experiences as a child.

Then, as your body prepares for puberty, your brain starts to prune back some of that gray matter and amp up its production of white matter, which allows different parts of the brain to share information better and faster, said Dr. Jess Shatkin, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Child Study Center at NYU Langone Medical Center….”The brain volume, the total volume, doesn’t really change, but we lose about 1% of gray matter starting around 13 and we gain about 1% of white matter at the same time, and that trade off keeps going,” Shatkin said.

However it seems that in both autism and schizophrenia, this process goes wrong, with autistics ending up with not enough white matter and schizophrenics ending up with not enough gray matter.

Webb MD states:

Researchers say white and gray matter are both necessary for general intelligence, but they perform different functions. Gray matter represents information processing centers in the brain, and white matter represents the network or connections between those processing centers.

The lack of white matter might explain why autistics tend to have narrow interests. If white matter allows different brain parts to share information, which is needed for broad interests, those lacking this may be forced to focus on a single topic.

This may also explain why autistics lack social skills. Reading people requires integrating verbal and non-verbal cues and thus using different parts of the brain at once.

Perhaps this research also reveals why autistics tend to come from high IQ families (or at least higher class ones) or why high people often show a dash of autism. Having a lot of gray matter is linked to high IQ, but if your kid inherits only your gray matter genes without the developmental timing to prune that gray to make room for white matter, he might be severely autitsic.

Meanwhile the high white to gray ratio of schizophrenics may help explain their delusions. Sharing information between unrelated brain parts might lead to a lot of creative theories, but if you lack the gray matter to test these theories with logic, you soon could lose contact with reality.

Research into gray and white matter is further evidence of Crespi and Badcock’s theory that autism is the opposite of schizophrenia.

It also supports Simon Barron Cohen’s extreme male brain theory of autism, in that males tend to have higher gray/white matter ratios than females.

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The IQ’s of the criminally insane

08 Wednesday Oct 2014

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

crime, criminally insane, IQ, schizophrenia

Schizophrenic mental patient from Rob Zombie's 2007 remake of Halloween

Schizophrenic mental patient from Rob Zombie’s 2007 remake of Halloween


Halloween is coming up, so my posts are going to start getting scarier. It’s long been noted that criminals have lower IQ’s than non-criminals, and that psychotics have lower IQ than non-psychotics, so it’s only logical to assume that people who are criminally psychotic would have especially low IQ’s.

How low? Let’s begin with the fact that criminals average IQ’s 10 points lower than the non-criminal population. If we assume the United States has an average IQ of 97, then criminal Americans should have an average IQ of 87. Now it’s known that premorbid schizophrenics average IQ’s 9 points lower than matched controls. I don’t know how closely matched these matched controls are but assuming they are identical in all other ways except schizophrenia (which of course they’re not), we should expect schizophrenic criminals to have premorbid IQ’s 9 points lower than non-schizophrenic criminals. But since in rare cases, schizophrenia actually causes crime, the two variables are obviously not 100% independent, so let’s say schizophrenic criminals have pre-morbid IQ’s only 5 points lower than non-schizophrenic criminals. This implies an average IQ of 82. However once schizophrenia emerges, average IQ drops by 6 points, so their IQ’s would be reduced to 76.

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IQ and autism

05 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

autism, executive function, IQ, schizophrenia

For those who have never studied statistics, the non-autistic population in Western countries is said to have an average IQ of 100 and a standard deviation (SD) of 15. A standard deviation of 15 simply means that the standard amount by which most people deviate from the average is around 15 points, in other worlds, about two thirds of the non-autistic population have IQ’s from 85 to 115.

As for the autistic population, a recent study found 16% of autistic spectrum children had IQ’s below 50, while 3% had IQ’s above 115.

Assuming a normal distribution, an IQ of 116+ is 1.87 Standard Deviations (SD) above the autistic mean, and an IQ below 50 is 1 SD below the autistic mean. This suggests that autistic people have a mean IQ of 72 and an SD of 23 compared to the non-autistic population (mean 100, SD=15). In other words, while the average autistic person has a much lower IQ than the average neurotypical, the autistic population is much more cognitively variable. This resolves the paradox of why autistic people can simultaneously have a reputation for being both mentally disabled and brilliant scientists. Because, compared to neurotypicals, autistic people will be dramatically over-represented at both ends of the bell curve.

Above IQ 100

About 50% of neurotypicals have IQ’s above 100, compared to only 10% of autistic people.

Above IQ 115

About 14% of neurotypicals have IQ’s this high, compared to to only 3% of autistic people.

Above IQ 130

About 2% of neurotypicals score this high, compared to only 0.5% of autistic people

Above IQ 145

Only one in 924 neurotypicals score this high, compared to only one in 1,838 autistic people

Above IQ 160

Only about one in 42,000 neuotypicals scores this high, compared to one in 18,000 autistic people. At this level of giftedness, autistic people are actually OVER-REPRESENTED!!!!!!!!!!!

Above IQ 175

Only about one in five million neurotypicals score this high, compared to about one in 300,000 autistic people.

Above IQ 190

Only about one in 1.5 billion neurotypicals score this high, compared to about one in 14 million autistic people.

The fact that autistic people are so incredibly variable in IQ comfirms Pumpkin Person’s groundbreaking theory that autism is not actually one phenotype, but two phenotypes, that have been arbitrarily conflated by psychologists: Nerdiness (slow life history?) which causes high IQ, and executive dysfunction which causes low IQ.

Analogously, schizophrenia is probably also two phenotypes: coolness (fast life history?), which causes low IQ, and executive dysfunction, which causes even lower IQ.

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Autism, schizophrenia & social class

03 Tuesday Jun 2014

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

autism, cool people, mental illness, nerds, schizophrenia, social class

I’ve come across some fascinating research showing that autism is more common in higher social classes and schizophrenia is more common in lower social classes.  In my opinion, this is because the higher social classes tend to be more nerdy (K selected) and the lower social classes tend to be more cool (r selected).  The higher classes are nerdy in that they are more educated, more monogamous, more scrawny, and less sexually active.  By contrast, the lower classes are “cool” because they are more blue collar, more muscular, more likely to get arrested, more into sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.

Nerds tend to be more focused, less social, more scientific, more rational, and more logical.  These traits are all quite useful, but when a nerdy child is born with executive dysfunction, the result might be autism.

By contrast, cool people tend to be more distracted, more social, more spiritual, more emotional, and more intuitive.  But when a cool child is born with executive dysfunction, the result might be schizophrenia.

As I’ve previously explained, autism and schizophrenia might be the same disorder, just applied to humans at opposite ends of the evolutionary spectrum.  

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Rob Zombie’s Michael Myers probably had an IQ around 80

17 Thursday Apr 2014

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Halloween, Henry Lee Lucas, horror, IQ, Michael Myers, Otis Toole, Rob Zombie, schizophrenia

I previously blogged about how Rob Zombie’s Michael Myers was largely inspired by Henry Lee Lucas and to a lesser extent Otis Toole.  It’s interesting to note that Lucas had an IQ of 87 and Toole had an IQ of 75.  Averaging the IQ’s of the two men who inspired the character gives an IQ of roughly 80, which sounds believable.  An IQ of 80 implies Myers was brighter than about 10% of Americans, but duller than 90%.  Historically IQ was measured in children by dividing one’s mental age by one’s chronological age and then multiplying by 100 to remove the decimal point.  So an IQ of 80 implies that 10 year old Myers had the mental ability of an 8 year old (8/10 = 0.8 * 100 = 80).  Nothing 10 year old Myers did seemed beyond the mental capacity of an average 8 year old.

Now it’s likely that he got older his IQ deteriorated because schizophrenia is known to cause acute drops in IQ.  Rob Zombie said this about the mental state of Myers in RZ Halloween II:

I love the fact that he’s carrying this mask around; this mask is significant to him because he’s had it since he was a little kid. And it’s deteriorating. And in a way, we can literally make the connection between the mask and his state of mind. As the mask deteriorates, so does he. His brain is rotting away and in the sequel he’s becoming more and more insane.

 

Despite his deteriorating mental state, it’s unlikely that Myers’ IQ ever sunk too low, because he hallucinates his mother telling him that his psychiatrist (who wrote a book about him), got rich off of their pain.  It takes a certain amount of intelligence to know when you’re being exploited and Myers, even at his most demented, still exceeded that threshold.  As Zombie explained in the director’s commentary of part 2, that scene showed Myers was not quite as dumb as he appeared.

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