Thanks to everyone who participated or voted in the Mysteries Contest! The winners are:
FIRST PLACE:
What’s the Deal With Airplane Food Iodine and Longevity? by Kevin Shea, writing as Lee S. Pubb.
SECOND PLACE:
Why is autism rare among the Amish? by TripleTaco.
THIRD PLACE:
Have Attention Spans Been Declining? by niplav, writing as Cennfaeladh, who also blogs at niplav.site. Also, honorable mention to niplav for getting by far the most (30,000+) pageviews.
We’ve been in contact with all three winners and will be sending them their awards shortly. Congratulations!
In addition, TripleTaco gave us this proposed explanation to the list of Amish mysteries. For your consideration:
After I formed my own theory of what caused Autism, I looked hard to see if anybody else had come to the same conclusion. After a long time of looking, I finally found one researcher, Max McDowell, who explains what he (and I) believe likely causes autism in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHhAnCTVLG4
If I were naming this, I’d call it “face starvation”. Babies have a crucial window in which they need a certain amount of eye contact and starving them of that causes autism for many children. He goes on in that video to describe many of the same mysteries I described in my mystery post. The theory lines up with the mysteries perfectly.
The video has been out for over 2 years and at this moment it has 114 views. His idea was first published all the way back in 2004, so it’s not new at all. It’s just being utterly ignored, and for very strong reasons:
First of all, he calls himself a “Jungian Psychoanalyst”, which frankly makes him sound kind of woo-woo and makes it harder to take him seriously. Secondly, he’s well outside of the academic circles that have earned the right to talk about autism and its causes. He’s an outsider. Thirdly, it’s a shocking, awful idea, and anybody championing it will be pilloried from all sides. The idea is threatening to the neurodiversity camp who don’t want autism treated like a disorder at all. The idea is threatening to parents who aren’t eager to hear that their own technology habits may have contributed to severe lifelong difficulty in their child. The idea is threatening to existing researchers who are far along other research paths and stand to gain little from such a simple tidy explanation, especially when championing it would get them in all kinds of hot water from every direction. Frankly, this idea is way too controversial to put my own name on, which is why this is an anonymous contribution.
Even if we’re right, I’m not hopeful that people are going to start taking this idea seriously. There are some ideas that are just too controversial to be taken seriously.
SLIME MOLD TIME MOLD 
Is autism particularly common among people blind from birth?
If this theory is correct then the majority of such people should be autistic.
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> A child born with congenital blindness is 30 times more likely to meet the diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
Source: https://www.henshaws.org.uk/diagnosing-autism-in-a-child-with-a-visual-impairment/#:~:text=A%20child%20born%20with%20congenital,autism%20spectrum%20disorder%20(ASD).
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These researchers attribute a decrease in autistic behaviours in babies to consuming breast milk. Would be interesting to repeat the experiment using a prosthetic breast and formula to see whether it’s the breast milk or other aspects of breastfeeding that had the beneficial effect…
“Among infants at greater risk of developing autism—the CCs—breastfeeding increased their preference for looking at happy eyes and reduced their preference for looking at angry eyes. In other words, the longer that the at-risk infants consumed only breast milk, the more similar their behavioral development was at seven months of age to infants with AC and AA genotypes.”
https://www.milkgenomics.org/?splash=breastfeeding-molds-eye-contact-infants-risk-autism
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Interesting. I imagine that breastfeeding might result in increased eye contact, indeed.
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Told my mom about this. Her reply:
“So if that theory is correct, I’ll bet one reason autism is more common in modern times is that people are having fewer kids. I’ll bet back in the day, babies got eye contact from siblings even if their parents were too busy.
(At least, babies who weren’t the firstborn.)
I just googled it, and firstborn children are statistically more likely to be autistic.”
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Very interesting! 🙂
Up until this point, my theory of autism was that it was probably related to smart people having babies together, as I’ve heard that autism is more prevalent in Silicon Valley.
The theory in this article makes a lot of sense, though, and also explains why autism would be higher in Silicon Valley.
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The autism theory seems a little implausible to me—the differences between autists and allists include e.g. a pronounced tendency among the allistic to hallucinate humanlike agents behind any event they don’t fully understand, which sort of thing (I’ve chosen a fairly stark example but there are a number of differences I’d consider clearly-cut) doesn’t seem all that likely to be a result of too much eye contact, IMO.
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