American Idol contestant has Tourette’s and Asperger’s

The latest sensation on American Idol is a young man with Tourette’s Syndrome and Asperger’s.  If you watch the clip below, you can see some of his tics.  You can also see how the tics disappear when he’s totally focused when he’s performing and how they re-emerge afterwards. And of course you can see and hear his amazing talent:

Thanks to A Sweet Girl for pointing me to the video clip.

Hospital accommodated resident with Asperger’s – Court

Amy Lynn Sorrel reports on an ADA complaint where the employee, a medical resident with Asperger’s Disorder, did not prevail in his claims:

A federal appeals court has found that a hospital did not fail to accommodate a disabled medical resident who could not do essential functions of his job before firing him.

Experts say the decision is a reminder that, although federal law provides protections for employees with disabilities, accommodating such disabilities requires both parties — the worker and the employer — to
collaborate in finding a reasonable solution.

Martin Jakubowski, who has Asperger’s syndrome, sued Christ Hospital after he was fired in 2007, claiming that the Cincinnati facility failed to accommodate his disability in violation of the federal Americans with Disabilities Act, court records said.

Jakubowski had difficulty with communication and organizational skills.

Although Jakubowski proposed certain accommodations to help him overcome his deficiencies, a panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that they did not address what the hospital identified as core functions a medical resident must be able to perform — in this case, communicating with colleagues and patients.

Moreover, the hospital acted in good faith in trying to assist Jakubowski, including offering alternatives, the Dec. 8, 2010, opinion stated.

Read more about the case on American Medical News.

People with Asperger’s less likely to see purpose behind the events in their lives

Karen Schrock reports on some intriguing research:

Why do we often attribute events in our lives to a higher power or supernatural force? Some psychologists believe this kind of thinking, called teleological thinking, is a byproduct of social cognition. As our ancestors evolved, we developed the ability to understand one anothers’ ideas and intentions. As a result of this “theory of mind,” some experts believe, we also tend to see intention or purpose—a conscious mind—behind random or naturally occurring events. A new study presented in a poster at the 22nd annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science supports this idea, showing that people who may have an impaired theory of mind are less likely to think in a teleological way.

Read about the research studies on Scientific American.

Teen with Asperger’s convicted of murder

As a follow-up to a case I mentioned in a previous blog entry,  the Massachusetts teenager with Asperger’s has been convicted of first degree murder and now faces a mandatory life sentence with no possibility of parole when he is sentenced.

You can read more details of the case and verdict in today’s Boston Globe.  It is an incredibly complex case on so many levels, and my heart goes out to both families. 

Photo credit: Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff

Murder or an Accident? The Brain Knows

Tim Wogan reports on the Science web site about some research investigating the role of the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ) in forming judgments about others’ intentions and actions.  The research has special implications for those with Asperger’s or on the autism spectrum:

…. social neuroscientist Liane Young of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and colleagues decided to turn off the right temporoparietal junction and see whether people would make different judgments of others’ actions. They achieved this using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a technology that uses a tightly focused magnetic field to temporarily disable individual regions of the brain.

The researchers aimed the device either at the RTPJ or at a nearby region of the brain not thought to be involved in cognitive processing. Subjects between the ages of 18 and 30 read stories containing a series of hypothetical scenarios on a computer screen. In some, person A accidentally killed person B; in others, person A intended to kill person B but failed. Subjects were asked to rate from one to seven how excusable they found person A’s conduct from “not at all” to “completely.” The subjects considered some scenarios with their temporoparietal junction turned off and other scenarios with the area functioning as normal.

In both cases, volunteers judged unsuccessful attempts at murder to be more egregious than cases of accidental killing. However, subjects were significantly more forgiving of attempted murder when their right temporoparietal junctions were knocked out by TMS than when they were functioning normally, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The findings imply that activity in the region is required for us to properly judge another person’s motives, say the researchers.

Next Page »