Autism

Mysteriously Missing Melatonin

Well I just discovered something pretty interesting while watching a conference talk from Christian A Stewart-Ferrer. He’s a psychologist that seems to specialize in autism-spectrum disorders, and he spent roughly three hours outlining tendencies and dispositions of people with Asperger Syndrome. At one point, he said something almost out-of-hand about melatonin production and quickly moved on. I’ve known about my Asperger’s for over a decade now, but I never really did much research afterwards, and it turns out that was probably a mistake.

Socially Retarded for Science!

I’ve been feeing irritated again with my inability to interact naturally with people, and of course I wanted metrics quantifying the phenomenon. So I headed over to Wrong Planet and stocked up on tests. The Broad Autism Phenotype Questionnaire gives me 123 aloof, 92 rigid and 97 pragmatic. You scored above the cutoff on all three scales. Clearly, you are either autistic or on the broader autistic phenotype. You probably are not very social, and when you do interact with others, you come off as strange or rude without meaning to.