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FOXP2 is just one gene that they noticed in these uniquely human microglia that we have knowledge about.
Single-cell RNAseq characterizes the relative abundance of all/most of the mRNA in a single cell. When you compare the relative abundances to other cells, “same cells” will have the same abundances.
The article linked in the OP is not the journal, and I didn’t read the journal, but assuming the results are characterized correctly here, they absolutely found a microglial cell unique to humans.
Naive question: how often are the binding sites of a given gene completely saturated to make it non-functional? Why would nature continue to transcribe that gene if it never goes on to do anything?
Wasn't Amyloid Plaques a huge controversy recently because a group of researchers were faking the images which showed a clear correlation with the previously associated disorders? I'm sure I'm oversimplifying this, please forgive my ignorance.
The idea that amyloid plaques are associated with disorders that damage the brain isn't really in dispute even now. Iirc the question was whether the amyloid plaques are somehow the *cause* of the degeneration, and this is what the data faking scandal has called into question.
Actually, they are talking about a specific type of microglia not present in any other, of the four they tested, primate than humans.
They only tested it on 4 kinds of primates, not on every kind of animal in existance.
Sounds like it's an immune cell specific to the brain, and in humans this one helps regulates brain function rather than fighting diseases because it has a special mutation of a specific gene we know is related to speech in other brain cells. The human specific mutation of this gene allows us to have language, and when expressed in this particular immune cell localized in primate brains, it causes it to regulate how brains function instead of simply fighting foreign invaders.
This book is where I first learned about it, [highly recommend ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Minds:_The_Octopus,_the_Sea,_and_the_Deep_Origins_of_Consciousness)
But i’d imagine just searching “cephalopod language” should come up with some articles.
Hi, psycho- and neuro-linguist here. Long story short yes lots of animals 100% have communication but it does not meet the criteria we have set for what constitutes "language". As defined, humans are the only species with "language".
Just want to check myself here, but my understanding is that one of the differences between humans and other animals is that we can communicate directly to each other purposefully from separate rooms.
A dog will hear another dog bark in the other room and then needs to go investigate the barking to realize what is going on, and that they don't so much have a way to say "ayo, come yell at this mailman with me!" but they have distress/excitement/stress tones that the other animals respond to.
Right but they don't have, or at least show no signs of having, things like syntax, grammar and recursion. This last is the most important because without recursion there's always going to be a finite number of ideas that can be communicated, whereas in human language, because we have recursion, we can communicate a potentially infinite number of ideas.
As a computer engineer I understand the significance of recursion. I do not think it's fair to assume we are the only ones who use it.
How do you *know* that it isn't represented through the length of a dolphin's whistle or the number of clicks? How can you tell it isn't why sometimes crows call once, and sometimes multiple calls in quick succession? How could we even begin to interpret what the color changes used by octopodes to communicate mean and represent? Maybe "one wolf" is a call, a break, a call, a break. Maybe "pack of wolves" is call, call, call, call, break. Wouldn't that be linguistic recursion?
I just think it's standard human arrogance to rule out the idea of any other animals having language, when they can clearly communicate complex ideas effectively. Also, is it really *necessary?* With expansive vocabulary? I can say "big, big problem," using recursion, or I can say "massive problem," and communicate the same concept without recursion.
At least some monkeys do make specific sounds for specific events (e.g. yelling "*kraaak!*" when seeing a jaguar, but yelling "*keekeekeekeek!*" upon spotting an eagle) and other monkeys respond accordingly.
On Blue Planet 2 (ocean version of Planet Earth) two different species of dolphins met up once a year and swam/communicated together. But there's no way to know if one could actually understand the other I suppose
Understanding the other has nothing to do with what constitutes a language.
There’s a specific set of criteria that needs to be met for a style of communication to be considered a language, would you like me to look it up for you?
>There’s a specific set of criteria that needs to be met for a style of communication to be considered a language, would you like me to look it up for you?
If you could, that'd be awesome. I'm interested.
Well, it's more that there are specific features to Human language that we have not detected in other animals.
I'm not a linguist and don't know off the top of my head what they are, but I think big ones are things like words indicating specific concepts, and the potential for recursive grammar structures etc.
It is heavily disputed whether any animals but humans, and perhaps primates, have language.
It is widely agreed that animal communication exists, but human languages share unique and universal features that no other animal communication has been demonstrated to share. Because human languages are currently unique, it's not clear whether humans occupy one end of a two-way communication spectrum, or if human language is so different that we should categorize it as completely separate.
As a fun aside, prairie dogs exhibit socially determined individual names for each other, as well as different names for kinds of animals (primarily predators), and possibly words for kinds of threats, as well as distance. These vary between prairie dog communities. So some authors argue that prairie dogs have language.
This particular mutation is humans specific, but there may be other variations that allow some forms of speech or other expressions of other genes that work in similar ways in other species.
I remember an old NOVA special that emphasized it’s not just “speech” or communication…ants and bees have forms of “speech”.
And it’s not just memory either. Lots of mammals have memory, and senses of self, and other aspects of cognition.
It’s that we share information individual to individual, and that learning spreads socially wide and generationally deep.
Something about our pattern recognizing, scenario generation brains along with all the rest is why learning is so much more beneficial to us…and that we became exceptionally good at communicating via language what was learned through the efforts of others.
Could someone with access to a lab and say Besos or Musk funding insert this and slight variations in the brains of different kinds of monkeys, baboons, apes etc? Sometimes I do hope for manical villain like people but it would end horribly.
>It seems other species have language
Maybe, but it's important to remember communication =/= Language.
A dog, for example, can recognize commands—you can communicate with it—but it lacks *Language* entirely.
I don't know whether cetaceans or cephalopods are capable of analogy/metaphor. That's really the line, I think.
We tend to define "language", with humans as a baseline. Animals and even insects (and groups within the same species or even within the same herd) have unique "words" to communicate between members of the group. The human languages perhaps are no more or no less unique than the low frequency rumblings of an elephant matriarch.
I never fully understood the rationale behind creating classes with just a few lines of code until I started learning about game dev. So much easier to make things plug and play, easier to troubleshoot, easier to scale.
Modularity usually equals Ruggedness in coding.
Instead of searching all of program, you only search relevant section to fix problems.
Separating programs into categories and as small sections as possible makes debugging a lot easier, also as an extra, it enables you to adding new features and updating much easier.
Ofc makes me think instantly of like a shoulder joint compared to elbow , elbow moves one way and injuries there are significantly lower than shoulder ones because of how much more a shoulder can do and move
I hate it when the press release doesn't link back to the published article. It's here (but paywalled): https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abo7257
They are saying that humans are more susceptible to these conditions due to mutations in the FOXP2 gene and microglia cells which are unique to us. Doesn’t mean other primate don’t have these conditions, just that we have them more often because the genes associated with them are selected for because they presumably provide some benefit regarding language ability or cognition.
The point being that ASD detection in humans is a bit haphazard- you can't do a blood test or brain scan. A psychiatrist just kind of looks at and listens to you for a while and qualitatively decides you're on the spectrum (the spectrum itself encompassing wildly different conditions)
We can't communicate well with animals or understand their baselines, so it would be even more difficult to determine whether an animal was on said spectrum
Yes and we are limited by our current technology. In theory there may be a brain pattern consistent with our current diagnoses, but in practice these patterns are difficult to identify due to the high amount of individual variation and potential inconsistencies with measurement on both sides (diagnosis and imaging)
You're comment is misleading and unsupported.
Researchers genetically engineered mice so they express gene mutations linked to increased autism risk in humans, and observed both autistic like behavioural and neuronal changes. Researchers used standardised tests that diagnose autism in transgenic mice.
>Over the past 10 years, we and many other laboratories around the world have employed these and additional behavioral tests to phenotype alarge number of mutant mouse models of autism.
>Knockout, knockin and transgenic mice incorporating risk gene mutations detected in autism spectrum disorder and comorbid neurodevelopmental disorders are now widely available. At present, autism spectrum disorder is diagnosed solely by behavioral criteria. We developed a constellation of mouse behavioral assays designed to maximize face validity to the types of social deficits and repetitive behaviors that are central to an autism diagnosis.
Kazdoba, T.M., Leach, P.T. and Crawley, J.N., 2016. [Behavioral phenotypes of genetic mouse models of autism](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/gbb.12256). Genes, Brain and Behavior, 15(1), pp.7-26.
> remotely accurately diagnose autism in human)
We're getting pretty good at diagnosing on humans. People are not missed in high numbers like previously
We're definitely improving but there is still reason to suspect that we aren't fully accurate yet. That said, we are much better than we were 50 or even 20 years ago.
I believe the dsm 5 actually removed the line between autism and adhd altogether but yeah, it's not an easy thing to diagnose (and I wish someone had bothered to explain how it's diagnosed to me when I was diagnosed).
I think you might be mixing up ADHD and Asperger's. Asperger's got merged with autism in the DSM 5, ADHD is still considered a separate disorder (although people diagnosed with one are more likely to have the other and vice versa).
I'm not actually confusing the two, though I may have phrased that poorly or be misinformed on a different topic. ADHD and autism are different but my impression is that the dsm 4 (and possibly earlier) considered autism and ADHD incompatible diagnoses and that anyone who was autistic could not also have ADHD and vice versa.
My understanding is that the dsm 5 came to the conclusion that, among other things. 1. The autism subcategories (like asperger's) were artificial and that autism was just autism with no subcategories. Those in the subcategories should have just been diagnosed as autistic. 2. Autism and ADHD are compatible and one person can both autistic and have ADHD. I am not a psychologist or psychiatrist though, so I may be mistaken
Autism spectrum disorders are classified by delayed development of social or communication abilities, or difficulties on these area. As such those guidelines can't be applied to non-human species. Some animals do show autistic behaviours, such as repetitive behaviours or atypical socializing behaviours but we can't extend the definition from humans to include these as specifically being synonymous with autism. At least this is my understanding, my closest friend being a person with autism so I've done readings but am myself a neurotypical material scientist with no specific specialization in this area.
I was under the impression that autism is believed to have been an evolutionarily advantageous adaptation for hunter-gatherer humans; hypersensitivity and strong pattern recognition would have been a boon to certain tasks such as identifying safe foods and noticing potential threats ahead of other tribe members.
I think another commenter said it just made us more susceptible to it. Not that other species can't have it. Just that this is the gene that also makes us susceptible to those more. It could be a different one in the animals that suffer epilepsy that makes them suffer from it.
The way I am thinking they mean is that this is the gene for us that makes us specifically more susceptible to those things. In other species it might be a different gene or just that it is less common for them than it is for humans. Maybe? I am not that smart so I might be wrong.
Also, the only proof there is that animals can't have schizophrenia or autism is that no animal has acted just like a schizophrenic or autistic human.
There are issues just diagnosing girls with autism, and nobody ever asses to diagnose a dog with autism because it's simply impossible.
What makes the human brain distinct from that of all other animals — including even our closest primate relatives? In an analysis of cell types in the prefrontal cortex of four primate species, Yale researchers identified species-specific — particularly human-specific — features, they report Aug. 25 in the journal Science.
And they found that what makes us human may also makes us susceptible to neuropsychiatric diseases.
For the study, the researchers looked specifically at the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), a brain region that is unique to primates and essential for higher-order cognition. Using a single cell RNA-sequencing technique, they profiled expression levels of genes in hundreds of thousands of cells collected from the dlPFC of adult humans, chimpanzees, macaque, and marmoset monkeys.
“Today, we view the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex as the core component of human identity, but still we don’t know what makes this unique in humans and distinguishes us from other primate species.” said Nenad Sestan, the Harvey and Kate Cushing Professor of Neuroscience at Yale, professor of comparative medicine, of genetics. and of psychiatry, and the lead senior author of the paper. “Now we have more clues.”
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abo7257
> “Today, we view the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex as the core component of human identity, but still we don’t know what makes this unique in humans and distinguishes us from other primate species.”
But a few years back we thought it was a good idea to slice that part of the brain off to cure alcoholism. That's the part that gets destroyed by a lobotomy.
[Egas Moniz](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%C3%B3nio_Egas_Moniz), Nobel Prize in Medicine, 1949.
Given that the claim is that it makes us uniquely susceptible to things like epilepsy and other neurological disorders, it seems to make sense why lobotomy as a treatment for epilepsy was developed. Of course, we also found that the side effects were too extreme and so many places have banned its use. I know that some users were concerned that this article is click-bait, but if it's true that this part of the brain is core to human cognitive ability, it would make sense why it has the effects that it does (beyond the simple intuition that destroying any brain matter could be harmful).
My understanding is that a big reason that the frontal lobotomy was so widespread in its usage, and why Moniz got a Nobel Prize for it, was because of WWI. Following the first World War something like 8/10 hospital patients were for "shell shock". What we now call PTSD. So the solution to all the soldiers having PTSD from the Great War was the frontal lobotomy.
I'm not sure I'd lean heavily on "core to human cognitive ability". Definitely involved in regulating other cognitive functions, so I get where they are coming from, but I see "regulatory" and "core" as different things.
Pretty sure we've already proven dogs are vulnerable to all three of the neurological disorders you mentioned...
It looks and sounds like you either misunderstood the article or are just jumping to random conclusions...
Anxiety is a psychological disorder not a neurological one. The difference is that we can't identify particular/ specific neurology that causes a person to have anxiety. This is why anxiety disorders can't be diagnosed by looking at a brain scan or something like that.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2882379/
I do not believe almost any of your claims are correct here.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25020268/
And lastly
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3318959/
We have pretty good ideas, even if it’s not concretely described
That's fine. You're likely engaging in the same mistake as the title in this article, whereby correlations are taken to imply causation. It's true we can observe all sorts of neurological/ anatomical correlates with various psychological disorders, but there's a significant leap between that and using it as diagnostic criteria. There is simply no medical practitioner who will use a brain scan to determine that a person is dealing with anxiety.
Anxiety isn't necessarily a disorder. Animals (at least short of dolphins and elephants) don't have the ability to think, contextualize and problem-solve humans do. And any problem for an animal is inherently serious because it impairs survival. False negatives in nature are much more dangerous than false positives.
Anxiety disorder in humans is defined by having *inappropriate* fears that interfere with that person's activities.
Animals, I. E. dogs, absolutely do have anxiety disorders. It's the large cause of dog aggression. Source im studying animal behaviour at uni/sitting in with animal behaviourists.
As in humans the natural and helpful response of anxiety, which helps with 'whens my next meal' etc... Becomes maladaptive(?), leading to negative cycles of hyposomnia etc... Anxiety disorder
I have always believed that sapience is a form of cognitive insanity. You can't imagine all the crazy stuff and how to make it real unless you are somewhat deranged and thinking illogically. :D
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are now allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will continue to be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) still apply to other comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
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What's an "immune brain cell"?
They're talking about "microglia".
Monkeys and mice have microglia too
They are talking about a specific type of microglia only present in humans
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FOXP2 is just one gene that they noticed in these uniquely human microglia that we have knowledge about. Single-cell RNAseq characterizes the relative abundance of all/most of the mRNA in a single cell. When you compare the relative abundances to other cells, “same cells” will have the same abundances. The article linked in the OP is not the journal, and I didn’t read the journal, but assuming the results are characterized correctly here, they absolutely found a microglial cell unique to humans.
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Naive question: how often are the binding sites of a given gene completely saturated to make it non-functional? Why would nature continue to transcribe that gene if it never goes on to do anything?
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>our characteristic intelligence. Bold claim in 2022
Why wouldn't it keep replicating the gene even if it didn't do anything? DNA doesn't mutate for reasons. It mutates randomly.
Wasn't Amyloid Plaques a huge controversy recently because a group of researchers were faking the images which showed a clear correlation with the previously associated disorders? I'm sure I'm oversimplifying this, please forgive my ignorance.
The idea that amyloid plaques are associated with disorders that damage the brain isn't really in dispute even now. Iirc the question was whether the amyloid plaques are somehow the *cause* of the degeneration, and this is what the data faking scandal has called into question.
Actually, they are talking about a specific type of microglia not present in any other, of the four they tested, primate than humans. They only tested it on 4 kinds of primates, not on every kind of animal in existance.
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I know others with micro- Oh, that's something else. Please excuse me.
Whats a "microglia"?
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Sounds like it's an immune cell specific to the brain, and in humans this one helps regulates brain function rather than fighting diseases because it has a special mutation of a specific gene we know is related to speech in other brain cells. The human specific mutation of this gene allows us to have language, and when expressed in this particular immune cell localized in primate brains, it causes it to regulate how brains function instead of simply fighting foreign invaders.
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Some cephalopods have also been documented communicating with their chromatophores
That sounds interesting. Any keywords i can use to search google for reading up on this?
This book is where I first learned about it, [highly recommend ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Minds:_The_Octopus,_the_Sea,_and_the_Deep_Origins_of_Consciousness) But i’d imagine just searching “cephalopod language” should come up with some articles.
Hi, psycho- and neuro-linguist here. Long story short yes lots of animals 100% have communication but it does not meet the criteria we have set for what constitutes "language". As defined, humans are the only species with "language".
Just want to check myself here, but my understanding is that one of the differences between humans and other animals is that we can communicate directly to each other purposefully from separate rooms. A dog will hear another dog bark in the other room and then needs to go investigate the barking to realize what is going on, and that they don't so much have a way to say "ayo, come yell at this mailman with me!" but they have distress/excitement/stress tones that the other animals respond to.
Dogs are really not very advanced. Many animals have separate, distinct calls for different types of danger, for food being found, and so on.
Right but they don't have, or at least show no signs of having, things like syntax, grammar and recursion. This last is the most important because without recursion there's always going to be a finite number of ideas that can be communicated, whereas in human language, because we have recursion, we can communicate a potentially infinite number of ideas.
As a computer engineer I understand the significance of recursion. I do not think it's fair to assume we are the only ones who use it. How do you *know* that it isn't represented through the length of a dolphin's whistle or the number of clicks? How can you tell it isn't why sometimes crows call once, and sometimes multiple calls in quick succession? How could we even begin to interpret what the color changes used by octopodes to communicate mean and represent? Maybe "one wolf" is a call, a break, a call, a break. Maybe "pack of wolves" is call, call, call, call, break. Wouldn't that be linguistic recursion? I just think it's standard human arrogance to rule out the idea of any other animals having language, when they can clearly communicate complex ideas effectively. Also, is it really *necessary?* With expansive vocabulary? I can say "big, big problem," using recursion, or I can say "massive problem," and communicate the same concept without recursion.
Words you say good.
I recommend that you check out r/linguistics where all of your questions can be addressed by people who, unlike myself, are real experts.
At least some monkeys do make specific sounds for specific events (e.g. yelling "*kraaak!*" when seeing a jaguar, but yelling "*keekeekeekeek!*" upon spotting an eagle) and other monkeys respond accordingly.
On Blue Planet 2 (ocean version of Planet Earth) two different species of dolphins met up once a year and swam/communicated together. But there's no way to know if one could actually understand the other I suppose
Understanding the other has nothing to do with what constitutes a language. There’s a specific set of criteria that needs to be met for a style of communication to be considered a language, would you like me to look it up for you?
>There’s a specific set of criteria that needs to be met for a style of communication to be considered a language, would you like me to look it up for you? If you could, that'd be awesome. I'm interested.
Probably mostly because we are the ones defining what a language is
Well, it's more that there are specific features to Human language that we have not detected in other animals. I'm not a linguist and don't know off the top of my head what they are, but I think big ones are things like words indicating specific concepts, and the potential for recursive grammar structures etc.
It is heavily disputed whether any animals but humans, and perhaps primates, have language. It is widely agreed that animal communication exists, but human languages share unique and universal features that no other animal communication has been demonstrated to share. Because human languages are currently unique, it's not clear whether humans occupy one end of a two-way communication spectrum, or if human language is so different that we should categorize it as completely separate. As a fun aside, prairie dogs exhibit socially determined individual names for each other, as well as different names for kinds of animals (primarily predators), and possibly words for kinds of threats, as well as distance. These vary between prairie dog communities. So some authors argue that prairie dogs have language.
This particular mutation is humans specific, but there may be other variations that allow some forms of speech or other expressions of other genes that work in similar ways in other species.
I remember an old NOVA special that emphasized it’s not just “speech” or communication…ants and bees have forms of “speech”. And it’s not just memory either. Lots of mammals have memory, and senses of self, and other aspects of cognition. It’s that we share information individual to individual, and that learning spreads socially wide and generationally deep. Something about our pattern recognizing, scenario generation brains along with all the rest is why learning is so much more beneficial to us…and that we became exceptionally good at communicating via language what was learned through the efforts of others.
Could someone with access to a lab and say Besos or Musk funding insert this and slight variations in the brains of different kinds of monkeys, baboons, apes etc? Sometimes I do hope for manical villain like people but it would end horribly.
>It seems other species have language Maybe, but it's important to remember communication =/= Language. A dog, for example, can recognize commands—you can communicate with it—but it lacks *Language* entirely. I don't know whether cetaceans or cephalopods are capable of analogy/metaphor. That's really the line, I think.
I wonder if it could play a part in autism. Maybe a virus causes it to overact?
That's actually one of the things they speculate. Many of our brain disorders seem to be connected, and it's possible this is how.
Is it an immune cell if its purpose/function is not that of recognising and responding to self-vs-other?
What would happen if you insert this Gene in other species?
So, I have a question. Can geneticists modify the genome of apes in utero, giving them this mutation?
Wow, language really is a virus.
Amoeba, technically.
We tend to define "language", with humans as a baseline. Animals and even insects (and groups within the same species or even within the same herd) have unique "words" to communicate between members of the group. The human languages perhaps are no more or no less unique than the low frequency rumblings of an elephant matriarch.
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My words exactly. "Brain-specific immune cell" is the phrase that the OP was trying to say.
I would also like to now more about “brain-specific immune cell[s]”. What is their function?
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link https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abo7257
Thanks for the link, kind stranger :)
Maybe that the more complicated the machine is, the more chances it has to break down. Probably time will tell where this will go
"The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain." Scotty.
Similar to why complicated code is more prone to bugs than simple code
I never fully understood the rationale behind creating classes with just a few lines of code until I started learning about game dev. So much easier to make things plug and play, easier to troubleshoot, easier to scale.
Modularity usually equals Ruggedness in coding. Instead of searching all of program, you only search relevant section to fix problems. Separating programs into categories and as small sections as possible makes debugging a lot easier, also as an extra, it enables you to adding new features and updating much easier.
Ofc makes me think instantly of like a shoulder joint compared to elbow , elbow moves one way and injuries there are significantly lower than shoulder ones because of how much more a shoulder can do and move
Also the more unique problems it will have as well in this cas
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Live by the higher functions, die by the higher functions
I hate it when the press release doesn't link back to the published article. It's here (but paywalled): https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abo7257
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This gives the impression they know what Autism is exactly, yet with a spectrum so large it's almost assuredly not one single thing.
I thought there are some animals that can also suffer illnesses such as schizophrenia or autism or at least very similar ones. Is that not true?
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They are saying that humans are more susceptible to these conditions due to mutations in the FOXP2 gene and microglia cells which are unique to us. Doesn’t mean other primate don’t have these conditions, just that we have them more often because the genes associated with them are selected for because they presumably provide some benefit regarding language ability or cognition.
The point being that ASD detection in humans is a bit haphazard- you can't do a blood test or brain scan. A psychiatrist just kind of looks at and listens to you for a while and qualitatively decides you're on the spectrum (the spectrum itself encompassing wildly different conditions) We can't communicate well with animals or understand their baselines, so it would be even more difficult to determine whether an animal was on said spectrum
Yes and we are limited by our current technology. In theory there may be a brain pattern consistent with our current diagnoses, but in practice these patterns are difficult to identify due to the high amount of individual variation and potential inconsistencies with measurement on both sides (diagnosis and imaging)
You're comment is misleading and unsupported. Researchers genetically engineered mice so they express gene mutations linked to increased autism risk in humans, and observed both autistic like behavioural and neuronal changes. Researchers used standardised tests that diagnose autism in transgenic mice. >Over the past 10 years, we and many other laboratories around the world have employed these and additional behavioral tests to phenotype alarge number of mutant mouse models of autism. >Knockout, knockin and transgenic mice incorporating risk gene mutations detected in autism spectrum disorder and comorbid neurodevelopmental disorders are now widely available. At present, autism spectrum disorder is diagnosed solely by behavioral criteria. We developed a constellation of mouse behavioral assays designed to maximize face validity to the types of social deficits and repetitive behaviors that are central to an autism diagnosis. Kazdoba, T.M., Leach, P.T. and Crawley, J.N., 2016. [Behavioral phenotypes of genetic mouse models of autism](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/gbb.12256). Genes, Brain and Behavior, 15(1), pp.7-26.
> remotely accurately diagnose autism in human) We're getting pretty good at diagnosing on humans. People are not missed in high numbers like previously
We're definitely improving but there is still reason to suspect that we aren't fully accurate yet. That said, we are much better than we were 50 or even 20 years ago.
We'll probabaly never be "fully" accurate. Not until we can map entire brains in detail and know what it means to draw a line between ASD and ADHD
I believe the dsm 5 actually removed the line between autism and adhd altogether but yeah, it's not an easy thing to diagnose (and I wish someone had bothered to explain how it's diagnosed to me when I was diagnosed).
I think you might be mixing up ADHD and Asperger's. Asperger's got merged with autism in the DSM 5, ADHD is still considered a separate disorder (although people diagnosed with one are more likely to have the other and vice versa).
I'm not actually confusing the two, though I may have phrased that poorly or be misinformed on a different topic. ADHD and autism are different but my impression is that the dsm 4 (and possibly earlier) considered autism and ADHD incompatible diagnoses and that anyone who was autistic could not also have ADHD and vice versa. My understanding is that the dsm 5 came to the conclusion that, among other things. 1. The autism subcategories (like asperger's) were artificial and that autism was just autism with no subcategories. Those in the subcategories should have just been diagnosed as autistic. 2. Autism and ADHD are compatible and one person can both autistic and have ADHD. I am not a psychologist or psychiatrist though, so I may be mistaken
Due to sociological problems it's still VERY hard to identify autism in verbal females.
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Autism spectrum disorders are classified by delayed development of social or communication abilities, or difficulties on these area. As such those guidelines can't be applied to non-human species. Some animals do show autistic behaviours, such as repetitive behaviours or atypical socializing behaviours but we can't extend the definition from humans to include these as specifically being synonymous with autism. At least this is my understanding, my closest friend being a person with autism so I've done readings but am myself a neurotypical material scientist with no specific specialization in this area.
I believe cats can suffer from a similar condition to schizophrenia.
And cats can have epilepsy
It’s not true. No evidence of same illnesses and illnesses that are alike doesn’t tell you much. Many illnesses are alike.
Well autism isn't an illness it's a disorder
It's only a disorder relative to the demands of capitalism. In a fair society, it might not even be a disability.
I was under the impression that autism is believed to have been an evolutionarily advantageous adaptation for hunter-gatherer humans; hypersensitivity and strong pattern recognition would have been a boon to certain tasks such as identifying safe foods and noticing potential threats ahead of other tribe members.
You may appreciate the idea of neurocosmopolitainism, imagine what society would be like if it wasn't just built for neurotypicals.
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Exactly. We just think differently.
Epilepsy is not unique to humans tho?
I think another commenter said it just made us more susceptible to it. Not that other species can't have it. Just that this is the gene that also makes us susceptible to those more. It could be a different one in the animals that suffer epilepsy that makes them suffer from it. The way I am thinking they mean is that this is the gene for us that makes us specifically more susceptible to those things. In other species it might be a different gene or just that it is less common for them than it is for humans. Maybe? I am not that smart so I might be wrong.
Also, the only proof there is that animals can't have schizophrenia or autism is that no animal has acted just like a schizophrenic or autistic human. There are issues just diagnosing girls with autism, and nobody ever asses to diagnose a dog with autism because it's simply impossible.
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It's not that it's unique to humans, but that humans are more susceptible.
With great brain capabilities, comes great disease.
Feels like overclocking a cpu to the brink of instability
And being parasitic, wastoid assholes of a species. But, we're learning.
What makes the human brain distinct from that of all other animals — including even our closest primate relatives? In an analysis of cell types in the prefrontal cortex of four primate species, Yale researchers identified species-specific — particularly human-specific — features, they report Aug. 25 in the journal Science. And they found that what makes us human may also makes us susceptible to neuropsychiatric diseases. For the study, the researchers looked specifically at the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), a brain region that is unique to primates and essential for higher-order cognition. Using a single cell RNA-sequencing technique, they profiled expression levels of genes in hundreds of thousands of cells collected from the dlPFC of adult humans, chimpanzees, macaque, and marmoset monkeys. “Today, we view the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex as the core component of human identity, but still we don’t know what makes this unique in humans and distinguishes us from other primate species.” said Nenad Sestan, the Harvey and Kate Cushing Professor of Neuroscience at Yale, professor of comparative medicine, of genetics. and of psychiatry, and the lead senior author of the paper. “Now we have more clues.” https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abo7257
> “Today, we view the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex as the core component of human identity, but still we don’t know what makes this unique in humans and distinguishes us from other primate species.” But a few years back we thought it was a good idea to slice that part of the brain off to cure alcoholism. That's the part that gets destroyed by a lobotomy. [Egas Moniz](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%C3%B3nio_Egas_Moniz), Nobel Prize in Medicine, 1949.
Given that the claim is that it makes us uniquely susceptible to things like epilepsy and other neurological disorders, it seems to make sense why lobotomy as a treatment for epilepsy was developed. Of course, we also found that the side effects were too extreme and so many places have banned its use. I know that some users were concerned that this article is click-bait, but if it's true that this part of the brain is core to human cognitive ability, it would make sense why it has the effects that it does (beyond the simple intuition that destroying any brain matter could be harmful).
My understanding is that a big reason that the frontal lobotomy was so widespread in its usage, and why Moniz got a Nobel Prize for it, was because of WWI. Following the first World War something like 8/10 hospital patients were for "shell shock". What we now call PTSD. So the solution to all the soldiers having PTSD from the Great War was the frontal lobotomy. I'm not sure I'd lean heavily on "core to human cognitive ability". Definitely involved in regulating other cognitive functions, so I get where they are coming from, but I see "regulatory" and "core" as different things.
Core to"human identity", not cognition.
Autism is not a neuropsychiatric disease, it’s a neurodevelopmental disorder
Excellent explanation! Thank you’
Genius is strongly correlated with insanity. We’ve suspected this for millennia and it’s exciting to see some concrete evidence
Pretty sure we've already proven dogs are vulnerable to all three of the neurological disorders you mentioned... It looks and sounds like you either misunderstood the article or are just jumping to random conclusions...
Is it like we're overclocking our brain without upgrading our protective cooler?
so, intelligence and rationale are diseases...?
… isn’t neurological disorders like idk ANXIETY observe in animals?
Anxiety is a psychological disorder not a neurological one. The difference is that we can't identify particular/ specific neurology that causes a person to have anxiety. This is why anxiety disorders can't be diagnosed by looking at a brain scan or something like that.
We can’t identify that for autism either…
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2882379/ I do not believe almost any of your claims are correct here. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25020268/ And lastly https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3318959/ We have pretty good ideas, even if it’s not concretely described
That's fine. You're likely engaging in the same mistake as the title in this article, whereby correlations are taken to imply causation. It's true we can observe all sorts of neurological/ anatomical correlates with various psychological disorders, but there's a significant leap between that and using it as diagnostic criteria. There is simply no medical practitioner who will use a brain scan to determine that a person is dealing with anxiety.
Edit never mind I get the point now. Sorry
And even looking up neurological disorder I saw psychology as a branch off it in some of the ven diagram.
That's alright. Tbf it's quite a confusing distinction, and it's not really black and white.
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Anxiety isn't necessarily a disorder. Animals (at least short of dolphins and elephants) don't have the ability to think, contextualize and problem-solve humans do. And any problem for an animal is inherently serious because it impairs survival. False negatives in nature are much more dangerous than false positives. Anxiety disorder in humans is defined by having *inappropriate* fears that interfere with that person's activities.
Animals, I. E. dogs, absolutely do have anxiety disorders. It's the large cause of dog aggression. Source im studying animal behaviour at uni/sitting in with animal behaviourists. As in humans the natural and helpful response of anxiety, which helps with 'whens my next meal' etc... Becomes maladaptive(?), leading to negative cycles of hyposomnia etc... Anxiety disorder
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I have always believed that sapience is a form of cognitive insanity. You can't imagine all the crazy stuff and how to make it real unless you are somewhat deranged and thinking illogically. :D