"The model appears to rule out anyone suffering from an ASD and a PSD simultaneously, and such co-morbidity does appear to be rare—but is not unknown. However, I know of cases of individuals diagnosed with bipolar disorder who also show unmistakable signs of ASD during their non-manic phases. Indeed, I have research on one individual who suffers from severe gaze-aversion, autistic deficits in a sense of self and social anxiety most of the time, but who becomes comfortable with other people during manic episodes when his sense of self hypertrophies into megalomania with the feeling that he is the returned Jesus Christ! Furthermore, there is evidence of both ASD and PSD in Newton and Beethoven, and incontrovertibly so in the Nobel-prize winning mathematician John Nash. Here the theory predicts that the ASD must come first (typically in childhood) and leave a permanent savant-like basis later built on by hyper-mentalistic tendencies to produce an unusually broadened and dynamically-balanced cognitive configuration: that of true genius."
- Paul Buchheit
from Bookmarklet
I don't know that we understand any of these disorders well enough to actually make these correlations, at least not well enough to perform an actual experiment to prove some of these things. I think we probably have to wait until molecular neuroanatomy and molecular neurophysiology manage to unify neurology with psychiatry. But I think we'll get there eventually.
- Victor Ganata