Another hallmark of someone with autism is that they are taciturn. Sound like a man or a woman?

A sad and fortunately rare affliction most commonly exhibited on blogs such as Broadsheet. Typical symptoms are an extreme amount of emotion processing and language abilities coupled with deficient logical skills and consequent inability to discuss issues on their merits. Fortunately such people find ready made sheltered workshops at paces such as the aforementioned Broadsheet, pandagon etc.

But I have very long index fingers (ultra female) and aced the spacial parts of the brain sex test that was posted a while ago. So whatever the correlation, it's far from 100%.

Thanks for the link to the article on Tourette's. I have a close friend with Tourette's who is also the smartest man I've ever met. I wonder if the two are connected.

I don't know how it works with other folks, but my husband's an artist (therefore, actual paying work is sporadic) and I'm a doctor (therefore, work for me will be pretty stable with enough money to provide for us both if all goes well.) This situation will not change. My career is not a "fad" or something to occupy my time until I get tired of it. Even if I wanted to "chicken out" and stay at home (which I don't) it wouldn't be possible, financially. I'm sure I'm not the only woman in this type of situation.

my brother is a stay at home dad raising twins and he loves it. He gets to play with the kids, take them to the pool or the mall, or for a walk while wifey brings home the bacon.

I think this will be a fad though as more women chicken out of full time work and get back into the house from jealousy of seeing the dads loving staying at home.

Love it while it lasts.

Geneticists have a tendency to think of autism as "extreme scientist brain". Largely because the incidence of autistic spectrum disorders among the kids of very highly educated people in the "hard" sciences (physics, math, biology, chemistry) is much higher than in the general population. We're not sure why, yet, but it's intriging. Even more interesting is that it's even higher if BOTH parents are science-brained.

Part of it could be the known paternal age effect in autism - older fathers have more autistic children - and since people that are getting highly educated in the sciences tend to reproduce later, that could contribute to the effect. Doesn't seem to account for all of it, though.

Nevertheless, it's not our imagination - autism does seem to be somewhat an extension of the stereotyped tendency to be very good at math and/or science and deficient in social skills.

As for "extreme male brain"? Well, there are clear differences between the average male brain and the average female brain, but the data saying that boys/men are innately better at math and science than girls/women just aren't there. The variance is bigger than the difference between the averages - meaning that the two groups overlap so much that there's no significant difference. Plus, we still can't completely remove socialization from the calculations, no matter how hard we try.

What I do know is that the stereotypical male brain seems to have more in common with the stereotypical autistic brain than does the stereotypical female brain. And also that this was unfortunate and somewhat irresponsible phrasing. It sounds to me like he chose the phrasing as an attempt to "dumb down" the results and make an easy soundbite. We scientists as a whole need more practice communicating their science to the non-science world, starting with not assuming the audience is stupid.

I am kind of amused that this is supposedly a new thing. The same thing happens whenever there's a fluff piece about stay-at-home dads in the news.

My husband is a stay-at-home dad and he is awesome at it. He gets suprisingly little guff about it when he's out with my son (people asking him if he's babysitting and the like.) My grandfather often complains about him getting to "sit around the house" while he "makes" me go to work all day, but what can you do--that's just grandpa.

It's no suprise to me that men are good at taking care of kids. It would be nice if more people were aware of that.

You're not the only one - I have the autoimmune thing going on, too. Just another anecdotal piece of data, but data nonetheless.

People are indeed looking at autoimmune diseases and autism:

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/432692

http://www.nitrf.org/inftautism.html

http://www.grc.nia.nih.gov/branches/rrb/dna/pubs/cgoatad.pdf

I'm just googling, I don't have the expertise to evaluate the data. The link in the last paper to Tourette's is particularly interesting, as Tourette's apparently helps make connections between objects and the words for them, the whole area of the brain just moves faster:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/07/070713131417.htm

Also ADHD and autism are different:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/07/070730111646.htm

ADHD and NT kids have better motor skills with increased white matter, while Spectrum kids have worse ones.

Many of the women physicists I know who are as socially weird as I am also have autoimmune illnesses similar to mine.

I think that's kind of interesting. Someone smart should look into that, to see if there's a real correlation there.

Highly gifted kids share many traits of Asperger's, but they are not autistic. It takes someone familiar with both conditions to make an accurate diagnosis.

I took a test for Asperger's and I scored well within the range.

Maybe the autism researchers need to take a closer look at highly gifted kids.

And maybe you need to have a talk with Larry Summers.

I know a physicist whose son has severe autism. The physicist himself is highly gifted and shows even more traits of Asperger's than I show.

So it's very tempting to see autism as a continuum with some genetic relationship to extreme intellectual skills combined with a marked deficit of social skills.