http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome
Pursuit of specific and narrow areas of interest is one of the most striking features of AS.
Individuals with AS may collect volumes of detailed information on a relatively narrow topic...without necessarily having genuine understanding of the broader topic.
Although these special interests may change from time to time, they typically become more unusual and narrowly focused, and often dominate social interaction so much that the entire family may become immersed.
Although individuals with Asperger syndrome acquire language skills without significant general delay and their speech typically lacks significant abnormalities,
language acquisition and use is often atypical. Abnormalities include
verbosity, abrupt transitions, literal interpretations and miscomprehension of
nuance, use of
metaphor meaningful only to the speaker,
auditory perception deficits, unusually
pedantic,
formal or
idiosyncratic speech, and oddities in
loudness,
pitch,
intonation,
prosody, and
rhythm.
Three aspects of communication patterns are of clinical interest: poor
prosody, tangential and circumstantial speech, and marked verbosity. Although
inflection and intonation may be less rigid or monotonic than in autism, people with AS often have a limited range of intonation: speech may be unusually fast, jerky or loud. Speech may convey a sense of
incoherence; the conversational style often includes monologues about topics that bore the listener, fails to provide
context for comments, or fails to suppress internal thoughts. Individuals with AS may fail to monitor whether the listener is interested or engaged in the conversation. The speaker's conclusion or point may never be made, and attempts by the listener to elaborate on the speech's content or logic, or to shift to related topics, are often unsuccessful.
Children with AS may have an unusually sophisticated vocabulary at a young age and have been colloquially called "little professors", but have difficulty understanding
figurative language and tend to use language literally.
Children with AS appear to have particular weaknesses in areas of nonliteral language that include humor, irony, and teasing. Although individuals with AS usually understand the cognitive basis of
humor they seem to lack understanding of the intent of humor to share enjoyment with others.
Despite strong evidence of impaired humor appreciation, anecdotal reports of humor in individuals with AS seem to challenge some psychological theories of AS and autism.
AS is also associated with high levels of
alexithymia, which is difficulty in identifying and describing one's emotions.
...people with AS are not usually withdrawn around others; they approach others, even if awkwardly. For example, a person with AS may engage in a one-sided, long-winded speech about a favorite topic, while misunderstanding or not recognizing the listener's feelings or reactions, such as a need for privacy or haste to leave.
Some of them may even display
selective mutism, speaking not at all to most people and excessively to specific people. Some may choose to talk only to people they like.
Asperger passionately defended the value of autistic individuals, writing "We are convinced, then, that autistic people have their place in the organism of the social community. They fullfil their role well, perhaps better than anyone else could, and we are talking of people who as children had the greatest difficulties and caused untold worries to their care-givers."
Asperger also called his young patients "little professors",
and believed some would be capable of exceptional achievement and original thought later in life.
Autistic people have advocated a shift in perception of autism spectrum disorders as complex
syndromes rather than diseases that must be cured. Proponents of this view reject the notion that there is an "ideal" brain configuration and that any deviation from the norm is
pathological; they promote tolerance for what they call
neurodiversity.
Some researchers have argued that AS can be viewed as a different cognitive style, not a disorder or a disability...
In a 2002 paper,
Simon Baron-Cohen wrote of those with AS, "In the social world there is no great benefit to a precise eye for detail, but in the worlds of maths, computing, cataloguing, music, linguistics, engineering, and science, such an eye for detail can lead to success rather than failure." Baron-Cohen cited two reasons why it might still be useful to consider AS to be a disability: to ensure provision for legally required special support, and to recognize emotional difficulties from reduced empathy.
It has been argued that the genes for Asperger's combination of abilities have operated throughout recent
human evolution and have made remarkable contributions to human history.
The exact
cause is unknown, although research supports the likelihood of a
genetic basis
The underconnectivity theory hypothesizes underfunctioning high-level neural connections and synchronization, along with an excess of low-level processes.
It maps well to general-processing theories such as
weak central coherence theory, which hypothesizes that a limited ability to see...
Water container used on SJ trains before the glass carafes used with paper mugs were introduced.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11011118?print=true
Magnetars are a special type of neutron star with a powerful magnetic field.
They are formed by gravitational collapse after the original, or progenitor star, dies and forms a catastrophic supernova.
The new magnetar was found in an extraordinary star cluster known as Westerlund 1, located 16,000 light years away in the southern constellation of Ara (the Altar). This region contains numerous massive stars.
Stars that are more than 25 times more massive than our Sun normally collapse to form black holes.
Dr Negueruela of the University of Alicante in Spain, a co-author on the study, said that the mystery of the missing black hole might be explained if the progenitor star got rid "of nine tenths of its mass before exploding as a supernova".
Dr Ritchie remarked that if the Earth was "located at the heart of this remarkable cluster, our night sky would be full of hundreds of stars as bright as the full Moon".
Professor Mike Cruise, an astrophysicist at the UK's University of Birmingham, who was not involved in the study, told BBC News that the new research was "a brilliant piece of detective work".
