Autism

The article that I chose to write about has to deal with Autism. "Autism is a disorder characterized by severe difficulties in social interaction and communication, and with unusual behaviors"(Autism 1). This article gives you a better understanding of what an autistic person is like. There are definitions written in this paper so people can become more knowledgeable of this disorder. Autism is a disorder that has no known cause or cure.

Autism is a disorder that use to be thought of as being rare. Now autism is very common. The rates of people born perfectly normal and than all of a sudden becoming autistic have increased also. "Early epidemiology studies of autism reported rates of two to five cases per 10000 children"(Autism 2). However, since the early 1990's, the rate of autism have increased enormously throughout the world, the rates have increased to as high as sixty children per ten thousand births. Researchers can't seem to find the reasoning of why the rates have increased so much. Researchers seem to think that infants are over vaccinated.

This article also gives you some characteristics of an autistic person. People with autism are usually unable to play imaginatively with objects, toys, other children or adults. They tend to focus on minor or insignificant things around them, for example a wheel instead of the whole car. Some people might spend hours repeatedly flicking or flapping their fingers. Many people with autism engage in repetitive activities, like rocking and banging their heads, or rigidly following familiar patterns in their everyday routines. Another characteristic of people with autism is that they are unable to appreciate the social uses and the pleasure of communication. "Some children with autism never develop meaningful speech"(Autism 1). For the children that do, speech is quite different from that of a normal child.

"Studies based on clinical and epidemiological samples have suggested a three-to-four-fold increase in autism boys"(Autism 2). The reason for this seems to be that boys tend to have a lower threshold than girls for brain dysfunction, and that more severe brain dysfunction.

Even though autism is a disorder that has no known cause researchers are making attempts trying to find an answer. Researchers have found some basic findings that may be the cause of autism. One attempt deals with "deficits in executive functioning skills, that facilitate a person's ability to maintain problem-solving, flexible set-shifting, and forward planning to obtain a desired goal"(Autism 3). "A second model has centered around the construct of central coherence or the capacity to integrate information into coherent or meaningful wholes"(Autism 3). The purpose of these findings is that it gives doctors, parents and family members hope that some day there will be a cure to this terrible disorder. Because the hardest thing for parents to understand is why their son or daughter has this disorder. And what caused them to receive this terrible disease.

In this article it shows pictures of composite functional MRI of 14 normal controls and 14 people with autism. This picture focuses on specific processes of interest. In the picture there are three colors green, orange, and yellow. The green section represents the face area. In the face perception there is a noticeably under activation seen in autistic brain.

There is also another picture of a guy and a lady. This picture shows the pattern of eye tracking data for typically developing young adults and young, high-functioning man with autism. The picture shows the guy looking directly at the woman's mouth; he avoids making any eye contact with the lady. He won't even look at any area of upper part of the woman's face. People with autism avoid eye contact, seem deaf, and start developing language, then abruptly stop talking altogether. Even if a person with autism has a lot of speech they would probably use this to talk at you rather than talk with you. Autistic people don't like to talk about their