Disorders of the Nervous System
Author: Clara Nicole Castañares | email: ccastanares@immf.uncor.edu
Clara Nicole Castañares 1°, Pablo Helguera 1°, Guillermo Folguera 2°
1° Instituto Ferreyra (IMMF-CONICET-UNC)
2° Instituto de Filosofía Dr. Alejandro Korn, FFyL y FCEN, UBA
Research on the relationship between environment and autism has increased substantially in recent years. Here we inquire about the regimes of perceptibility that arise from defining autism as a highly inherited, heterogeneous, multifactorial neurodevelopmental disorder and how this viewpoint shapes the way the environment is considered in the neuroscientific approach to autism. Regardless of the level of organization studied, it becomes evident that mainly unidirectional (environment affects the individual) and unidimensional (only biological aspects of the environment) notions of environment are reproduced. Based on Canguilhem’s work, we propose that this occurs as a consequence of three operations of conceptualization on the environment: simplification of the notion of environment, hierarchization of the genetic over the environmental, and disqualification of the individual-environment relationship. On the other hand, domains of imperceptibility, which arise from contrasting a certain viewpoint with other perspectives, allow us to understand what environment is not from a neuroscientific perspective and what environment could be if neuroscience could consider more holistic approaches generally excluded in the research on a phenomenon as complex as autism.