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Member Since: 3/19/2012
Posts: 7,835
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Pentagon report claims Putin may have Asperger's
Quote:
The 2008 report says the Russian leader may have suffered an "insult" to his brain in infancy.
Russian president Vladimir Putin may have a condition known as "Asperger's syndrome", according to a Pentagon report obtained by US broadcaster CBS News. The report, written in 2008, describes the condition as "an autistic disorder which affects all of his decisions".
The research was conducted by the Office of Net Assessment and is based solely on videos of Mr Putin dating back to 2000. According to the report, his "neurological development was significantly interrupted in infancy". The study suggests Mr Putin's mother may have had a stroke while pregnant with him and that he suffered an "insult" to his brain.
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http://news.sky.com/story/1421850/pu...on-report-says
However other people claim these allegations are absolutely false.
"I just read the original Pentagon paper that this article was citing. I'm a psychiatry resident at Washington University in St. Louis, which is a place that's well-known for studying the neuroscience of autism (of which Asperger's is a type). There are so many problems with the paper that I think the person who wrote it should be fired immediately. Here are the first few that come to mind: (1) A significant portion of the science quoted is simply wrong, including many things that are used to make big conclusions. I don't want to point out every single MAJOR scientific problem because there are so many of them. One example is that she refers to the "temporal lobe of the prefrontal cortex" as the source of Putin's movement problems. In fact, there is no such thing as the "temporal lobe of the prefrontal cortex" - the temporal lobe and prefrontal cortex are completely different parts of the brain, and neither of them has any influence on subconscious/involuntary movement. It also says that the findings could only be confirmed by MRI, which is also simply false - MRI has no utility in autism/Aperger's. Also, she repeatedly states that the neurological insult would have happened in childhood and brain plasticity would never have recovered, which is also false - brain plasticity recovers remarkably well in children, and even in an adult, it would have mostly recovered if it was caused by the etiology that she suggested. (2) The author is a political scientist with no medical training. As an aside, there are lots of spelling and grammar mistakes in the paper. (3) The author's qualification as a "certified movement analyst" is something that is only provided by a single school, whose only accreditation is by the National Association of Schools of Dance. The person who started it was an expert on dance movements. (4) Most of the psychological findings described in the study would be much better explained by Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which is very common among world leaders because narcissism leads people to seek leadership roles. Any psychiatrist can tell you that, but because the author of the study has no medical training, she didn't know that this is a more likely diagnosis."
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