alt Hacker NewsOk, that makes sense - so ASD is basically that we’ve noticed some prototypical behaviors, which is where the grouping comes from, but it’s possible what we’re seeing is sort of the “carcinization” of mental operating modes - many different pathways into the same output point, which is why the genetic search has been so difficult - that right enough for a non-scientist?
What I know of the brain is that it’s basically a chaos machine - a ton of activity that’s just on the edge of a cascade, a bunch of feedback loops, a bunch of emergent behavior, and it’s kind of impressive we function at all to begin with, so it’s not surprising there’s so many ways to perturb the output behavior.
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My understanding is that that's what makes it a disorder - that it's just a collection of symptoms that seem to appear together, rather than something with a known mechanism and cause
Notice how the word "syndrome" as in the older term "Asperger's syndrome" describes a group of symptoms, rather than a cause.