Autism | Brain damage? Or is it something we haven’t thought of yet?

When I was investigating accidents and personal injuries for 40 years or so, I had to read thousands of medical reports. I found those for claimants with brain damage particularly interesting.

One day I was reading a neuropsychological report for a young motorcyclist, who I will call X, and who had suffered a head fracture resulting in brain injury with extensive cognitive impairments.

You don’t need a skull fracture to get brain damage – a concussion will do – but X had one, pretty well guaranteeing brain damage. The psychologist described the impairments allegedly resulting from this one by one.

There was a hearing problem where other sounds present would prevent him from following a conversation (“auditory distraction”) – his “BEA” or Brain Electrocortical Activity, was said to have ‘hypocoherence’, indicating a lower than expected linkage between regions,” suspected to be causing a lot of things- his “ability to relate effectively to others” had been damaged because of difficulty he now had in “decoding facial expressions.” That not only produced problems for him, but his resulting lack of responses “produced a negative response in others.” There were other impairments, but I’ll stop there.

One unpleasant aspect of reading many med reports is that you sometimes can’t help comparing yourself with what you’re reading. Going over a report of a claimant suffering from excruciating back pain, your own dormant back symptoms start acting up, etc.

Reading this report, I remembered how from the earliest grades in school anything involving language slowed me down. I remembered how, later working in any office with background music, especially pop music, I had to wear ear plugs so I could understand people when I was talking on the phone. And all my life I’ve been acutely aware of my difficulty with any kind of social relationship.

So I empathized easily with X. When this psychologist said these symptoms of his were were “autistic like” it caught my attention. It was then that I first began looking into autism.

Soon I was asking myself if the symptoms that X had were not “autistic like”, but autism itself.

There is a school of autism research that attributes much of autism to brain damage, either pre-natal or acquired after, as was the case with X. The assumption of course then is that the brain damage did it, that autism has resulted from the damage to the brain.

But there is an alternative.

As some readers will know, I’ve been promoting for some time the idea that autism is natural. I suspect that the brain of most autistic people is a brain from the deep past, that those who are autistic possess DNA that precedes tribalism, which appears to have begun only about 50,000 years ago, about the same time as complex language is thought to have started.

I’m not alone with this idea. The animal behavior scientist Temple Grandin, diagnosed with autism herself at an early age, has suggested more than once that the basic mind of most non-human animals is autistic. Autism research Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen has proposed that Asperger’s or high-functioning autism, if you insist on the DSM-5’s demotion of Asperger’s, is the basic autistic condition, the more severe autistic people possessing impairments added to autism.

Think of this – the predecessor to homo sapiens, according to current science, was homo erectus, who was around from about 2 million years ago until our arrival about 200,000 years ago. But the little homo floresiensis (the ‘Hobbit’ whose fossils were discovered on the island of Flores in the south Pacific) that was still here 12,000 years ago is believed by some scientists to have been a form of homo erectus. Paleoanthropologist Milford Wolpoff (who claimed for a long time that there had been mixing between us and the neanderthals, was ignored by the scientific establishment as a crank, then, in 2010, was famously proven right) has said repeatedly that homo erectus and homo sapiens are not separate species, that erectus evolved into sapiens, neanderthals and other hominid races several times in different parts of Eurasia. That was his Multi-Regional theory.

In his 2018 book, Who we are and How We Got here, geneticist David Reich confirms that there has been frequent racial mixing for a long time, in all parts of the world.

In his novel The Inheritors, William Golding portrayed a neanderthal family who have little verbal language trying to face up to a large homo sapiens band that has moved into their territory with a weapon they have never seen before, the bow and arrow. The death of each adult member of the family, one by one, and the story ending with two neanderthal children being carried off in a canoe, haunted me for years

We know now that everyone on earth except those whose DNA derives from sub-Saharan Africa has 2-4% neanderthal DNA in their genome. Is it so hard to imagine that some other DNA from farther back in time – from the hunter-gatherer families who preceded tribes – has survived within humanity? In other words, DNA from homo erectus might be responsible for the non-social behavior of some us who are living today.

Yes, that’s who I think most autistic people are. People from the past, but very much alive in the present.

In the case of someone like X, I don’t think his brain injury necessarily created his autism. I suspect the injury may have removed some of the social DNA veneer, which included language, etc, that arose with tribalism, forcing the older, deeper autistic DNA  to come forward and take its place.

What about people who can’t speak at all? Those who seem to think only in more primitive ways? How do you explain them, my opponents sometimes ask. The answer is easy enough– you only have to go farther back in time.

Throughout its 2 million years homo erectus may have never had much verbal language. How do we know that some of our their pre-language DNA isn’t still with us, in some people? Some of those who we diagnose as retarded or developmentally challenged, etc, may have perfectly natural DNA from the even deeper past. If so, if that’s who they are, they should be treated as genetic treasures, not just problems to be removed somehow.

But if we finally get enough DNA from fossils to produce a homo erectus genome, which is likely to happen sooner or later, this is something we’re going to find out. That’s one of the many exciting possibilities coming in the exploding science of genetics.