Jump to content
gigaday

Simon Baron Cohen AQ statistics

Recommended Posts

Does anyone know if there are statistics on the percentage of people from the whole population analysed by AQ test scores?

 

Eg xx% of people score = 40 on the test.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Problem is not every website records whose been where or if the same person has accessed the AQ test more than once.

I could have taken the test at University, home, the library or a friends house and be recorded as 4 people when in fact I am

one person.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Trekster

 

True. But if anyone had actually run a study using a properly random selection of people we would know what the distribution in the population at large is. If it's not been done already.

 

I would find this interesting. It could be a student project.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Try looking on your university or college libraries website? There is normally a search function in there, put in "AQ test and distribution".

 

Another option is to try the National Autistic Societies website.Or even looking at their campaigns. "Don't write me off" or "Too much information".

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Trekster

 

Thanks. I had a similar idea and wrote to the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University, which I believe is run by Dr Simon Baron Cohen. If anyone has done this research I would think they would know about it.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Gigaday, that is a very interesting question you have asked.

 

I thought about this issue too, and I do have a couple of observations. The question I asked myself is "What is the probability that a randomly selected member of the population who gains a score s on the AQ test has ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder)?" To answer this, one needs to know the distribution functions for AQ scores among both the population of people with ASD and also for those without (NT, neurotypical). Given those two distributions, it is then a rather straightforward statistical problem to work out the probability that a random person (might be ASD, might be NT) who scores s is in fact ASD. This is purely statistical, of course, and not diagnostic for that particular individual.

 

The original 2001 paper on the AQ test by Baron Cohen et al., is available at the Autism Research Centre website,

 

http://docs.autismresearchcentre.com/papers/2001_BCetal_AQ.pdf

 

(sorry, you probably need to delete after the pdf at the end of the http address) In this paper, one can get a rather rough and ready answer for the two probability distributions, in their figure 1.

 

I took those plots, and tried to estimate distribution functions that essentially modelled those curves. Then using these to perform the statistical analysis, I came out with estimates for the probability that a person scoring s on the AQ test has ASD. The results are significantly different for males and females, because of the substantially different prevalences of ASD in males and females. I think one of the greatest uncertainties in the results I was getting stem from the fact they depend rather crucially on the details of the "tail" in the NT probability distribution at the high-scoring end. The point being that although the probability that an NT gains a high score is rather low, the probability that a random person is NT is high (about 49/50 for males, if one takes the latest CDC estimates for prevalence of ASD in the general population). So even a rather small tail in the high-end of the NT probability distribution can have a quite significant effect in lowering the eventual probability that a score of s for a random person implies that they have ASD.

 

Anyway, after all the caveats about the inaccuracies of the the estimates, here is what I got. For the various AQ scores listed in the first row, my estimates for the percentage probability that that score corresponds to the person having ASD is given for males in the second row, and for females in the third row:

 

AQ score: 28 30 32 34 36 38 40 42 44 46

 

Male: 2 5 11 20 33 46 59 68 75 80

 

Female: 1 1 3 6 10 17 26 34 43 50

 

 

Of course there have been many studies since 2001 in which groups of people have taken the AQ test. Quite a lot of these have been published in the peer-reviewed literature, and so in principle there should now be a lot more reasonably reliable data available, allowing one to make much better estimates for probability distributions for AQ scores of the NT and ASD populations. If I have some spare time in the coming months I may have a go at doing this.

 

One of the reasons I tried making this analysis was for my own personal purposes. As an undiagnosed adult with a very high AQ score, I was curious to try to estimate the a priori probability that I have ASD, since this could influence whether I want to go through the effort and the expense of getting a professional diagnosis. The estimates I got are probably fairly rough and ready. But I haven't seen any other estimates anywhere that attempt to take into account, in a quantiitative way, the important effects of the NT distribution function in the way I have tried to do.

 

Chris

Edited by stringer

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Reading through your stats Chris and found them really interesting. Your data reveals that the current criteria for interpreting the AQ scores is misleading.

I have never been a great believer in statistics as a diagnostic tool.

 

Gigaday are you conducting a study or is it just for your own personal info?

Arlene

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

It's just for personal info that I am interested. I am 71 years old and always thought I was "weird" and had a lot of "difficulties", but I have had a fairly successful life and raised a family etc. My middle son has always had problems and a grandson is definitely odd and my other sons and my father could be said to have traits. The middle son is 47 and has just been assessed - he scored on the spectrum on AQ tests but they decided he was just outside the "limit" on interviews. He also has a job, family, house, son and most to the time he copes, but he does have severe difficulties.

 

On the on-line tests I scored AQ=32 and EQ=20, which if you believe tests puts me on the AS spectrum. There would be little point in getting a full diagnosis now as neither result would be helpful to me, but I do feel that if I am on the spectrum it would answer a lot.

 

Chris, yes thanks for your good work, you are more capable than I and more patient. The document you quoted is interesting in that it set out to prove or disprove the validity of the tests and in fact did show that they have a lot of validity even if not an absolute marker. Of course, there will be people whose scores are wildly at variance with the rest of their characteristics. But Fig 1 does show a high correlation between diagnosis and the test.

 

My interest was sparked by wondering if _everyone_ isn't "on the spectrum" somewhere and whether I am rubbing shoulders with lots of people who are, but I just think they are weird. Maybe not everyone but am _I_ really weird or just a different normal amongst my peers - and what proportion of the population do we comprise. Do most people really not feel depressed and useless? Do they not have dark thoughts? Do they not have secrets they would never reveal? etc etc etc I know that most people can socialise, which I find difficult to the point of sometimes having to duck out because of anxiety feelings.

 

I just want to know where I fit in by not fitting in - if you see what I mean.

 

Tony

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Yes, Arlene, I think indeed there is sometimes a tendency in the popular discussions to overestimate somewhat the significance of a given AQ score, for the reason I described. By contrast, I think the research articles by Simon Baron Cohen and others are rather measured and accurate in what they are saying. And I agree absolutely with you that statistical analyses of data from a screening tool like the AQ test cannot in any way be taken as a diagnosis. But a useful guide, and something perhaps to spur someone into further research and reading about ASD, and to see whether they have the other traits too. Perhaps also as a stimulus for pursuing the possibility of a formal diagnosis.

 

Bearing in mind that the CDC estimates that about 1 child in 68 has ASD, and that this fraction has probably not changed over the years, that means there must be very many undiagnosed adults out there. So yes indeed, Tony, it is quite likely that we are rubbing shoulders frequently with other undiagnosed adults. For most, it is probably not realistic to hope that they will ever receive an evaluation and formal diagnosis. But for many people, like me and, by the sound of it you too, the realisation that we quite possibly do have some form of ASD can be quite liberating, I think. Finally, one sees a pattern to some of the difficulties one has had over the years, and some level of understanding of why some things like socialising and forming friendships and relationships can be quite challenging. Being of a scientific background myself, I find it quite interesting to try to extract as much information from the available data as possible.

 

Chris

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Just to clarify my understanding; my maths isn't what it used to be which wasn't so great anyway:

Looking at Fig 1 in the ARC document:

  1. If I want to determine what proportion of the population is lower than I am on the AS scale according to the AQ test, I need to look at only the dotted line ie the control group.

    If I draw a vertical line at AQ=32 (my score), the area under the dotted line to the left measures the proportion of people less autistic than I and the area to the right of the line those that are more autistic than I. Am I right? This would make me in about the top 5% of the population considered to by on the AS spectrum? In other words in any random gathering of 20 people I would be the AS one?

  2. Using the same vertical line at 32, the area under the solid line to the left measures the proportion of people who are diagnosed to be on the spectrum that are less autistic that I and the area on the right those that are more autistic than I. Am I right? This would make me in about the bottom 5% of people considered to be on the AS spectrum? Likewise in any gathering of 20 diagnosed AS people I would be the most “normal” one?

  3. This means that the only way I can fit in (I am joking here) is to get everyone I meet to test their AQ scores and only select those with scores of, say, 27 to 37 to socialise with.

Tony

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Well, there is the additional issue, which is not addressed purely by looking at the two distributions in figure 1, of what proportion of the population has ASD. For this one needs further data.

 

Suppose we take an absurdly extreme example just for the sake of illustrating the point: Suppose that it were the case that just one person in a million in the general population had ASD. That would then mean that a random person with an AQ score of 32 would be overwhelmingly more likely to be an NT at the high end of the NT scale rather than being a person with ASD at the low end of the ASD scale.

 

Of course, my example was deliberately absurdly exaggerated, just to make the point that the knowledge of the proportion of the population that has ASD must be factored into the calculation. In actuality, if we take the latest CDC figures for the prevalence of ASD among children, it is 1 in 68 overall. It is also said to be about 4.5 times as common in boys as in girls, and hence they arrive at the statistics that 1 in 42 boys has ASD and 1 in 189 girls. Presumably, there is no reason to think that these figures would have been significantly different in the past, and so that would mean that in any age group about 1 in 42 males would have ASD, and 1 in 189 females.

 

If one knew the probability distributions for AQ scores in the NT and the ASD populations with precision, it would then be a simple matter, with Bayesian statistics, to calculate the probability that a given AQ score s corresponded to a person having ASD. The problem in practice is that the probability distributions that can be found in that paper are rather approximate, being based on quite small sample sizes. Especially, that all-important "tail" at the right-hand side of the NT distribution in figure 1 is actually based on the AQ scores of a tiny number of individuals. But knowledge of the details of that tail are rather important for determining what proportion of people scoring, say, 32 in the AQ test are going to be high-scoring NTs in the relatively large NT population, versus lowish-scoring ASDs in the much smaller ASD population.

 

It is possible that in my estimate of the probability distributions, which I was trying to determine from the plot in figure 1, I may have somewhat over-weighted the high end of the NT scale. I'll try to take another look in the next few days.

 

Chris

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Chris

 

I think I see what you mean. The two curves in Fig 1 really have nothing to do with each other and they should not really be on the same diagram, except that they illustrate that a hand picked sample of AS/HFA people score higher than the general population.

 

It would have been interesting to take the random sample _and_then_ diagnose which of them would have been in the AS/HFA group without knowing what they had actually scored.

 

However, I think that my points 1 and 2 are valid nevertheless, but not precise, because they each relate to only one of the curves. I'm an IT person who graduated as a mechanical engineer so I understand graphs better than I do mathematical statistics. Bayesian? Degrees of belief??

 

Tony

Edited by gigaday

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Yes, one could say that it is a little misleading displaying those two plots on the same diagram, in the sense that a random person is much more likely to be on the dotted NT distribution curve rather than the solid ASD distribution curve. Of course there is nothing actually wrong with plotting the two probability distributions on the same diagram. It's just that one is then tempted to make a direct comparison of the areas under the two in the way you were describing, whereas in fact the area under the NT curve should be scaled up by the large factor (like 42) relative to the area under the ASD curve.

 

So I would question your final statement in your item 1 up above. Without the additional knowledge of the proportion of the population that has ASD, you wouldn't know how likely it was that there might be any ASD people among those random 20 people in the room. In my extreme example I discussed above, where we temporarily pretend that the occurrence of ASD was at the level of one in a million, the 20 people would almost for sure all be NT, and all that you could say is that you were probably among the top 5% of high-scoring NTs.

 

In fact, with the ASD occurrence being more like 1 in 42 (for males), of course things are less black and white, and scores like 32 are in a rather murky region where details of the tails in the probability distributions matter a lot.

 

I can imagine that a tricky point if one did want to determine the NT probability distribution more precisely, by using a much larger sample size, is that one would want to be sure that the high-scoring tail in the "NT distribution" really was due to genuinely high-scoring NTs, as opposed to people with undiagnosed ASD who were being mis-classified as NT when they were not.

 

Bayesian statistics are all about refining one's estimate of probabilities, based on prior knowledge of related conditions.

 

Chris

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Chris

 

I suspect that we are looking at this from different points of view. Yours being more scientific whereas I am accepting that the results of the AQ test are a good indication of what a full diagnosis would be - albeit approximate.

 

If the line is drawn at 32, it doesn't have to be but that seems to be the figure that has been chosen, and I take the dotted curve, import it into GIMP and set up grid lines and then count the squares, I get 357 to the left of 32 and 8 to the right. (I didn't actually "count" them but that's about the numbers.) So, 357 divided by 8 = 44.62, which is very close to the 42 figure for the ratio you quote. This is quite satisfying because it indicates that the graph corresponds with the 1 in 42 figure.

 

In other words, aren't the ones to the right of 32 going to be all ASD as predicted by the test? No-one ever said they were all NTs, just a random sample. In fact, I have probably just reverse engineered the 32 figure and this was how they came up with it in the first place. This would mean that my guess at 20 people in the room was wrong - I didn't count squares, just guessed. So I could be in a roomful of about 45 people not 20 and still be the odd man out - roughly speaking.

 

Tony

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

That is a very good point that you make; the "controls" in the reported study were not verified not to include individuals with ASD. I had not read the paper carefully enough. I suppose the presumption would have to be that the controls would include people with ASD, perhaps with the standard prevalence in the population at large. This could have a very large impact on the nature of the high-scoring tail in the NT distribution function. One would need to subtract out the effect of the ASD individuals from the "control" distribution, in order to get a true NT distribution. Much of the present high-scoring tail in the control distribution may go away in the true NT distribution. In turn, this will greatly increase the probability that a score s in the range from around 30 and upwards corresponds to a person having ASD.

 

In principle, given enough data from a very large number of "controls," one should be able to quantify this correction, and come up with a true NT probability distribution. But the numbers of individuals in the control group in that 2001 study was much too small to make that possible. In that set of 174 controls in their study, there might on average be expected to be two or three with ASD, but the uncertainties in such small numbers are too big for this to be reliable. But it could well be consistent with removing the tail on the right-hand side of the dashed curve, giving something looking much closer to a bell curve.

 

Chris

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Chris

 

The fact that people with ASD are included in the control is actually the way that I want it for my own personal quest. It may well distort the distribution curve if you want to look at NTs only but that doesn't bother me. The statistic of 1 in 42/49 males being on the spectrum is of the most interest. Did you say how the CDC arrived at this number? Also, pardon my ignorance, what is CDC?

 

The next interesting thing to look at, for me, is the solid line curve in Fig 1. What accounts for the strange bit hanging out to the left? Is it people who are just weird but not ASD? Is it older subjects who have learned to behave in such a way that they can change their AQ score? Other reasons?

 

Another question would be, at about what AQ score would we expect to stop seeing people who were HFA? The peak of the curve is at about AQ=38; we could imagine that this is the place where we would no longer expect to see HFAs – it's just a what if. Or maybe HFA doesn't relate to AQ score at all. I have just search the ARC document for “functioning” which has raised another interesting point: if a person is not “high-functioning” how did they get them to do the AQ test at all? Maybe it says somewhere.

The real question that I am interested in finding an answer to is: “just how weird am I compared to the population at large?”. The “population at large” would include, say, only HFA people as other autistic people might not be generally “at large”. The 1 in 42/49 figure would include all the people under the solid curve not just those “at large” - greatly reducing my chances of meeting one in the street.

 

Tony

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Tony,

 

CDC is the Centers for Disease Control. They are the leading authority in the USA, I suppose, on all things related to diseases and conditions, prevention, data on prevalence, etc., etc. (Although British by origin, I've lived mostly in the US for many years now.) By the way, if the 1/49 you were alluding to is related to a number I mentioned earlier, that was a mistake on my part; I had misremembered the CDC figure, and I would have said 1/42 if I had rechecked their figures at the time I may have said 49.

 

Yes, that little hump over to the left on the solid curve does look curious. But with a total ASD sample size of only 58, it's really down in the noise, I suppose; just two or three people, perhaps. It wouldn't be hard, indeed, for someone to distort their AQ scores if they wanted to. Who knows?

 

It would have been very interesting if in that 2001 study they had gone back and tested (with a full diagnostic test) the two or three individuals in the "controls" who were skewing things at the high-scoring end, to find out whether they in fact had ASD.

 

About whether there is some upper limit to the AQ scores for those who qualify as HFA, I'd like to think the answer is no; my AQ score is 44, and I think I manage OK! I think HFA can span the whole range right up to the highest score, probably. I don't know, though, what proportion of the people with ASD would count as having HFA. My guess, though, would be that the vast majority of the 1/42 fraction of the male population that would now be classified as having ASD would fall into the category of HFA. I say that simply on the basis that the latest estimate of 1/42 is so very much larger than the fraction that would have been recognised in the not-too-distant past. I would assume, therefore, that the bulk of the extra people in the new classification would have passed for just being "a bit weird" or eccentric, in earlier days. So I think you have plenty of chance to meet some in the street!

 

Chris

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Chris

 

All very interesting. Now one might ask: what separates the HFAs from the others? At one time they were thought of separately. I wonder if there is any test or definition to differentiate, any line to cross? Autistic savants seem to straddle the line if there is one, with remarkable abilities in something specific but otherwise unable to cope.

 

In my search for answers to my own dilemmas I looked into Neuro Linguistic Programming. Quite a bit of it is fraudulent mumbo-jumbo but there is also a lot of good stuff buried in it if one digs around a bit. One of the ideas that came out (long before it became mainstream and fashionable) was thinking of the brain (animal or human) in terms of computers. Instinct = firmware, memory = data storage, learning = programs, consciousness = central processing - etc. An interesting thing in NLP was that it raised the possibility of changing or implanting "programs"; again these days this isn't so ground breaking but the early 70s it was quite new. One of the most revolutionary ideas was that a person could be made to change their beliefs in just a few minutes by using external or internal persuasion techniques. I have some experience of doing this myself, but I digress.

 

From a young age I held the idea that my brain had been “wired up wrong” or at least differently from other people's – this is reflected by the fact that I am quite good at a few things and totally inept at many things that most people can do fairly easily. Bringing this back to ASD, I have not yet done much reading but I wonder of anyone has any idea what is actually different in these people's brains – it has to come down to brains in the end. And how there might be a continuum of brain structures that results sometimes in specialisms and sometimes in non-functioning.

 

Please pardon me if this is all common knowledge. I would like to know where to start looking for more information.

 

Tony

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I don't have much that is concrete to add. I have enjoyed reading various books in this general area, which I could recommend. John Elder Robison has written several. One of his, called "Look Me in the Eye," is about his own experiences growing up as an undiagnosed aspie. I found it quite gripping, because it felt in many ways as if I were reading my own autobiography.

 

More recently, he has written an account, "Switched On," where he describes his experiences undergoing an experimental treatment called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), where areas of the brain are targeted with intense magnetic fields. I'm only part way through the book at the moment, but it seems to be quite interesting cutting-edge research that he participated in. A little like re-programming the brain, though at this stage with a bit of a blunderbuss approach.

 

For other general reading on Asperger's, Tony Attwood has some interesting writings, which I found quite informative.

 

Chris

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Thanks, Chris, for giving us some pointers on reading matter.

 

Just one last thing: if the 1/42 number relates to people who are mainly if not all HFA, the number of people who have debilitating autism must be quite small. Do we have any idea what this number might be?

 

Tony

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

This is an interesting question, and I've not found any very clear answers in the searches that I've carried out. I would suppose that one way to estimate the fraction of people with ASD who are what one might call "low functioning" would be to compare the figures for the prevalence of autism in the past with the figures for the prevalence of ASD now. Thus, in the past it might well have been that almost exclusively those who were what would now be called "low-functioning" would have been included in the tally.

 

According to figures I was able to find, autism was once thought to have a prevalence of somewhere between 1 in 10000 and 1 in 1000. Now, by contrast, ASD is thought to have a prevalence of about 15 in 1000. I suppose the majority of those extra cases in the recent studies would therefore be at the high-functioning end of the spectrum; that is to say, people who would, in the past, have slipped under the radar and would just have been thought of as eccentric or a a bit weird. I'm sure that is an oversimplification, but maybe not too far off the mark.

 

I am assuming, in what I am saying, that there has been no actual secular change in the incidence of autism over the years, and that the changing statistics are entirely due to changing diagnostic standards and measurement.

 

By the way, on the subject of books, I forgot to mention that Neurotribes, by Steve Silberman, is, I think well worth reading. He has some very interesting historical details about the roles that Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger played in the early research into autism.

 

Chris

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Yes, there will be a lot more diagnosis going on and really no way of knowing if there is actually any increase in incidence.

 

How does the 15 in 1000 figure (which is about 1 in 67) relate to the 1 in 42?

 

Anyway, I guess that there is something that could be measured. Take a fully diagnosed sample and then give them all the tests - those not capable of doing the tests are likely the non-HFAs.

 

Thanks Chris for the extra reading material.

 

Tony

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

The 15 in 1000 figure is for persons of unspecified gender; it corresponds to the CDC estimate of 1 in 68 overall. Their estimate for boys (1/42) and girls (1/189) would then correspond to about 24 per 1000 for males, and about 5 per 1000 for females.

 

Chris

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Chris

 

Thanks for your recommendation on the John Elder Robison book. I finished it a few weeks back and have been meaning to say something.

 

Some of his behaviour to his brother was alarming, the way he bullied him. And his stunt with the mannequin was extreme. I was intrigued at his hypothesis that he was a savant in the way he could _hear_ what electrical circuits sounded like by looking at the circuit diagrams, but is suppose that is no more amazing than others' savant abilities. He did well to find a channel for his abilities in auto-mobiles and he managed his social skills well.

 

I am not at all a savant but I have some talents in problem solving, mechanical engineer and computing. I had quite a successful career in IT - not too remarkable but adequate to raise 3 sons in comfort. The things that bug me are the things that I can't do or find very hard to do - mainly to do with sport and physical activities. For example I would love to have been able to skate but on the occasions I tried I couldn't even stand up for a second. My family have ridiculed my singing for years and when I had dance lessons aged 18, the teacher told me that I was wasting my money after 3 sessions. Playing a musical instrument has always been an ambition and I still try to do this although I recognise that I do not have what people would call talent or aptitude.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

One of my relatives told me I would be laughed at if I went to an audition. I went anyway and was not laughed at in fact my voice was complimented. "Needs more experience" was the feedback I recieved which was fair enough it was my first audition.

 

Another competition was a local one where I was told "you're voice would suit a choir" which was validating because I told them I was in a choir.

 

I also sang in a competition to raise money for testicular cancer and made some friends even though I didn't win anything.

 

Going back to the relative. I used to record my singing at kareoke in my local bar. One day this relative asked who was singing from one of my recordings. "It's me" was my response. "Didn't realise you were that good" was theirs. They haven't criticised my singing since.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Well done for your singing, trekster. Sadly for me my singing is as bad as everyone told me - I do sing in a choir though. For me singing along with others is a lot easier than on my own, as I can follow along.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Thank you I thought my singing was bad until I met a musical director of a choir at an autism retreat.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Chris

 

Thanks for your recommendation on the John Elder Robison book. I finished it a few weeks back and have been meaning to say something.

 

Some of his behaviour to his brother was alarming, the way he bullied him. And his stunt with the mannequin was extreme. I was intrigued at his hypothesis that he was a savant in the way he could _hear_ what electrical circuits sounded like by looking at the circuit diagrams, but is suppose that is no more amazing than others' savant abilities. He did well to find a channel for his abilities in auto-mobiles and he managed his social skills well.

I suppose some of his exploits were a bit weird. My childhood was a bit odd too, in its own way, and I could recognise a few traits in common. I had only two friends during my childhood and teen years, and almost no "normal" social interactions. I spent almost all my time when I wasn't at school shut away in my bedroom, which I had turned into a sort of laboratory, messing around with chemicals and electronics. There must have been blobs of spilled mercury all over the place, and quite a few other hazardous chemicals lying around. After an accident once when a pipe burst while I was making chlorine for an experiment (which, perhaps fortunately, terminated my plans for producing some highly unstable nitrogen trichloride!), I acquired a cough which still resurfaces sometimes to this day, decades later. These days, the house would probably be condemned until it could be extensively decontaminated!

 

One of the things John Elder Robison wrote about that resonated very much for me was his feeling of being a "fraud" who would one day be "found out." I've had a reasonably successful career in scientific research, but still I have the feeling that I don't behave like a real "grown up," and that some day I will be found out...

 

Chris

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Chris

 

Why on Earth were you trying to manufacture nitrogen trichloride? (Let alone chlorine.) Both are very toxic ... I just read that flour bleached with nitrogen trichloride gave dogs epileptic fits and that was discovered in 1947. Anyway, you obviously had a lot of curiosity as a youngster. I experimented a little with chemistry (nitrogen triiodide) and I was very interested in electronics (largely unsuccessfully due to lack of resources) and carpentry.

 

I started a 10 year stint at boarding school aged 7 years. I had some "mates" at school from age 13 to 18 but holiday times were always spent without social contact besides my mother and brother - father was overseas. I hated all my school days ...

 

Apart from alcoholism and pot smoking - now over 30 years ago; and workaholism, depression and irrational behaviour, I was reasonably "successful". But, I understand what you mean about being a fraud - even in computing there were things that I could do quite well and many others that were beyond me.

 

Tony

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Chris

 

Why on Earth were you trying to manufacture nitrogen trichloride?

Tony

I can't remember now. It seemed a good idea at the time, when I was 14 years old!

 

Chris

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...

×
×
  • Create New...