Comment by s-shellfish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by s-shellfish | Hacker News Reader

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> All of this ignores, of course, the entire neuroscience literature on this topic, which identified e.g. differences in synaptic density in people with ASD; though perhaps the increased value of non-social things comes from more circuits doing epistemic computation, but I'm just shooting in the dark really…

Do you have any links to any articles?

From the research I've read, PhD students in the field (was lucky to meet and talk to a few at other mental health care centers), a lot of the research on mental health care is focused on GABA.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1471-4159....

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/343/6171/675

https://academic.oup.com/ijnp/article/16/6/1309/753308

This seems relevant, but likewise, shooting in the dark:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fendo.2013.0005...

https://www.google.com/search?btnG=Search&q=synaptic+overcon...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2001237/

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2007.10.016

The overall picture seems to be local overgrowth/overconnectivity and global/cortico-co-cortical underconnectivity (especially to the frontal lobe). Cortex tissue appears to implement universal epistemic circuits, since they are known to learn arbitrary functions e.g. one can rewire visual input to the auditory cortex in animals and they learn to see. So, too much of those circuits might both imply heightened focus on the details and more intrinsic reward (=reward from pattern prediction/completion for information gain/exploration) which might as well explain the overall difference in value function, deemphasizing reward from social and normative things by relative magnitude. Norms and social stuff is rather processed frontally and subcortically in the insula and amygdala, AFAIK, but there is no reason to believe this is not also partly wired into the cortex too. Evolution has likely encoded most functions all over the place as it likes to do with the genome itself.

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