Work in IT? Your kid'll be a twitcher.

16 07 11 - 09:23

Asperger's/autism clusters around technology centers:

Baron-Cohen and Rosa Hoekstra, a Dutch researcher, analysed diagnostic information on 62,500 children in three similar sized regions in the Netherlands: Eindhoven, Utrecht and Haarlem. They found that “autism spectrum conditions” (ASC) were higher in Eindhoven (229 per 10,000 children) than in Haarlem (84 per 10,000) and Utrecht (57 per 10,000).

Eindhoven is the country’s main technology centre; 30 per cent of the region’s jobs are in IT and computing. The comparable proportion in both Haarlem and Utrecht is about 16 per cent.

As a control, the study also analysed diagnoses of two other childhood developmental disorders, dyspraxia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Both showed similar prevalence levels, suggesting there is something special about autism in Eindhoven. The results are published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.

The researchers predicted that autism would be more common in populations geared towards “systemising”, the drive to analyse how systems work and to predict, control and build systems. These skills are required in disciplines such as engineering, physics, computing and mathematics. - Financial Times

Again we see that the bleeding edge of human consciousness produces lots of breakdowns. When do we become more than clever apes? (checks watch)

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