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Oxytocin nasal spray apparently makes an autistic guy not autistic

43 points| nhoven | 4 years ago |twitter.com

17 comments

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more_corn|4 years ago

This sounds super exciting. I can’t help but wonder though... The language sounds weird. Maybe that’s because the person writing has Asperger’s, but it almost sounds like how a NT person would think someone with Asperger’s would talk. We probably need to move into the mode of requiring extraordinary evidence before we get to excited.

One thought that might explain mixed study results, aren’t there like half a dozen kinds of autism? I would imagine that if the study failed to account for the difference the results could be inconsistent.

It seems like a promising area of research though.

StrictDabbler|4 years ago

The Twitter commenter who described this as "neurotypicality fan-fiction" pretty much nailed it.

aaroninsf|4 years ago

Expand on this?

What I mean is: do you believe this is a fictional account, written by an NT, asserting an altered personal experience which conforms to NT received value structures?

or,

that this Redditor's account may be honest in the sense of describing their own self experience, but, compromised in the sense that it adopts NT language and value structures?

sergiomattei|4 years ago

X for Doubt, but interesting nonetheless.

Not so sure about spraying psychoactive chemicals up my brain without more trip reports though…

Edit: apparently a study found it ineffective https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/intranasal-oxytocin-ineffe...

aaroninsf|4 years ago

Hung out with a guy at BM for a week who swore by it.

His baseline was different than the Redditor presents as theirs, but he had comparable if scaled down versions of the same claims and experience.

He had brought cases of his go-to spray and was giving them out to anyone interested for self experimentation. AFAIK modulo source control there is not much risk from these nasal sprays.

Tried some myself. Would not claim to be able to differentiate any affective difference from placebo and set/setting effects. Which at BM are considerable. But at the time I thought I might have gotten a peasant if mild social-anxiety and general equanimity bump.

kadoban|4 years ago

Very interesting, but it's also a twitter summary of a random reddit post, so I'm thinking this is unlikely to be true.

kylebenzle|4 years ago

Read the post, not the Tweet lol.

LazyMans|4 years ago

The effects described are pretty much precisely what MDMA feels like. Weird.

netizen-936824|4 years ago

The R isomer of MDMA has a decent affinity for releasing oxytocin.