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Anne Dalke's picture

Seeing from the Outside In

Also of interest to this week's discussion might be last week's NYTimes article by Benedict Carey: In a Novel Theory About Mental Disorders, Parents' Genes Are in Competition. Identifying autism and schizophrenia as "opposite ends of a spectrum that includes most psychiatric and developmental brain disorders," a biologist and a sociologist--both outsiders in the field of genetics--noticed that "problems associated with autism, like a failure to meet another’s gaze, are direct contrasts to those found in people with schizophrenia, who often believe they are being watched." Autistics don't attend to others' intentions, while schizophrenics see intention everywhere. The possibility being explored here is that these two disorders stem from disruptions of the same genetic region on a single chromosome.


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