Asbergers Syndrome

Symptoms

• Not picking up on social cues and they may lack inborn social skills.
• Dislike in any change of routines.
• Appear to lack empathy.
• Having unusual facial expressions or postures
• Talking a lot, often about their favorite subject.

Prevalence

• 3 in 1000 get it worldwide
• 1 in 110 get it in the US.
• Asbergers is almost five times more common for boys.
• Usually diagnosed in the ages between 2-6

Prognosis

• People with Asbergers are likely to live a normal or close to normal life.
• Children with Asbergers may need special attention and/or have troubles with social interactions.
• Adults with Asbergers are usually employed in jobs where little or non human interaction is needed, like: Computer Science, Mathematics, Art, Music sciences etc.

Problems

• Most children with Asbergers have no friends because of their lack of social skills.
• They get annoyed to a point where they get angry and they can even take it out on other people or objects through violence.
• People with Asbergers have obsessive interests in some areas, but then they have got no interest at all in other areas. These obsessions take up a lot of their time.

Turnbull's study on the BaMbuti

Collin Macmillan Turnbull was born on the 23rd of November 1924. He was a British-American                                Anthropologist. In 1959 Turnbull traveled to integrate himself in the BaMbuti tribe in the republic of              Congo. Turnbull went to Congo as a curator for the Museum of Natural History’s African                            Ethnological collection.The tribe Turnbull went to was the BaMbuti pygmies. They are one of                        several indigenous pygmy groups in the Congo. The BaMbuti tribe is located in the Ituri forest in                    Congo. Tha BaMbuti people are relatively small in size.  

The Mbuti’s live in the forest, where the visibility for the pygmies is around 100 yards. That means that they do not ever really see anything far away and therefore are not accustomed to distance. Turnbull took his friend Kenge to the plains of Congo. Some miles from them there were a herd of buffalos. Kenge first thought the buffalos were insects since they were far away they looked small, and when Turnbull told him that the ”insects” in reality was buffalos, Kenge did not believe him. Turnbull found that the Mbuti’s don’t really have a perception for distance and size, and that they don’t understand that when objects move away from you they become smaller as the distance increases.

Turnbull’s discoveries show us that perception is something that is learned over time through exposure to distance and objects. It shows us that perception is not something we are born with a sense of perception. It is learned over time and experience. But the method used making this discovery has its limitations. The “study” is limited to the BaMbuti’s in the Ituri Forest; it was not performed on other isolated tribes in other parts of the world.