[metamuas]

Proximity to freeways increases autism risk, study finds [0].

Having a mother who lived within 1,000 feet of a freeway while pregnant doubles a child's odds of having autism [1].

Basically, white noise can cause autism. People are screwing up their kids at an exponential rate [2].

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20210609042055/https://www.latim...

[1]: https://www.webmd.com/brain/autism/news/20101217/fast-lane-t...

[2]: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=childre...

[silisili]

I did a -lot- of research on a house about 1500 feet of a freeway.

It seemed to me nearly all of it was correlative. Which is fine, as it may be true.

But very few corrected for the fact freeways often run through the worst areas in town, which could mean nutrition, drugs, alcohol, lead paint, asbestos, heck about anything else bad about living in older, run down areas.

[taeric]

Your point relies on the causative link not being that having a freeway through a section causes it to decline into being the worst part of town.

[silisili]

Well, there's plenty of rural and 'rich suburban' areas close to freeways. In my county in Florida, they're building brand new 500k dollar houses 100 feet from the freeway. For reference, 500k is high end of house prices here.

Would be interested to see if those show the same.

If not, you could rule out white noise completely. That would then seem to point to other factors, including total pollution, or more socioeconomic things.

[taeric]

Apologies, I should have left my point more open. That is, I don't know that there is a link. Would love to see evidence.

[skim_milk]

I could see how living next to a major road or having a noisy environment could disturb a child's sleep at night. Perhaps it is the role of noisy cars that disturb the sleep that triggers these changes?

I was a strange child that could only sleep if mother turned on a hair dryer next to me some nights. This is materially different from highways - I briefly got to experience what it was like living next to a noisy road and I would argue it would be more likely that it is the role of noisy cars, screeching tires, horns, and pollution that is at play in these studies, not the white noise of highways. Would children that lived in windy forests with no sound isolation having to listen to the noise of the trees fare the same?

Most autistic people are sensitive to stimuli - sensitivity being nearly completely genetic determined and little to do with environment. I wonder if it this greater sensitivity being triggered by highways and disturbs sleep that impairs brain development.

[melony]

More likely would be tire particulates.

[sascha_sl]

Don't underestimate noise pollution. It's a very real stressor.

Though, what's more likely is that a child with mild ASD is more obviously autistic under stress, which leads to diagnosis earlier.

[labster]

Don’t underestimate particulate matter and ozone. Kills millions every year.

But the same theory could apply, as health-induced stress instead of distraction stress. Or both.

[sascha_sl]

Both seems plausible. I just wanted to note that noise pullution is often overlooked and much more impactful than people assume.

[taneq]

What else correlates with living within 1000 feet of a freeway? Population density? Pollutants in the atmosphere? Proximity to Starbucks? Lower socioeconomic status?

[seba_dos1]

Uhm... wouldn't that rather be "more noise/television makes you more likely to notice your child's autism"? An overstimulated autistic person has a much harder time masking their autism. Seems likely to me that a child raised in a quiet environment may not get diagnosed until adulthood, while the same child raised in noise may have a hard time fitting in already. Most of "symptoms of autism" that people notice are actually how autistic people react to distress when they can't mask anymore, and overstimulation definitely causes such distress.

Also, I'd say that modern children programming that's optimized for grabbing as much attention as possible isn't exactly autism friendly; I find older cartoons with their slower pacing much more comfortable to watch.

"White noise causes autism" is a pretty weird conclusion to get from all of that and would require extraordinary evidence to support it.

[mrblampo]

[2] does not support the idea that white noise causes autism. It's a pretty big leap from "freeway proximity, even in utero, correlates with autism" to "white noise causes autism."

[scruple]

Isn't the womb a fairly noisy place, anyway? From the perspective of a fetus, that is. I remember when our twins were born, white noise was recommended to us by practically everyone because of the similarity to sounds heard in utero.

[taeric]

Odd, I would expect a steady beat to mimic your heart to be a big part of mimicking sounds of the womb. Along with a colored noise. Though, I would suspect pink is better than white.

[scruple]

They're essentially under water and a pregnant mothers noisy internal processes, other than her breathing and her heart beat, are not really following any sort of pattern. And we can't discount the environment that the pregnant mother finds herself in, either, since that noise will also be present to varying degrees.

edit/ Having said that, the "white noise" machines that I've seen, which are available as sleep aides specifically for young children, are not really white noise. There is white noise there but there is also something that sounds like a tumbling drying machine, or a fan, or a hair dryer... Something that a brain could attach itself to as a pattern.

[taeric]

This makes sense. Probably most is marketed as "white noise" because that was a familiar term.

[dqpb]

Why do you think white noise causes autism?

[metamuas]

Basically, humans are pattern seeking creatures, and children exposed to white noise will try to find patterns in white noise, when there are none, thus leading to the brain maladapting to random patterns. My theory, but I couldn't find a good definition of traffic noise being related to white noise or classified in particular, but who knows.

[blowski]

In argument against your theory - a lot of parents use white noise explicitly to help their babies to sleep. From my own personal experience, most of those kids don’t then suffer from autism.

[spacemanmatt]

In argument against your theory - personal experience is not data.

[scruple]

Yet it's at least as valid to me, as a parent, as some random HN commentors pet theory about white noise causing autism.

[mrblampo]

Is there data showing that white noise _does_ cause autism?

[thinkingemote]

I used to share a room with someone who would fall asleep to TV. In the UK after the last show of the night there would be beep tone for a long time and then it would just be static, no signal.

This lead to me having a recurring nightmare which I also got for a long time into adulthood, seeing the tone as 1/2D line, flowing along nicely, and then the static would screw it up and turn it to knots and I would be unsuccessful in making it turn back to a line.

[ariste]

I have this same reoccurring nightmare and I also grew up in the UK. The line would be smooth, but the violently contort into anxiety inducing sharp triangles. This is the first time I have heard someone echo the same dream.

[thinkingemote]

Nice to hear someone else having the same thing!

In a way perhaps it's kind of an abstract "powerlessness in the face of chaos" nightmare.

Not sure why exactly it went away. But I do remember being conscious of it in my 20s and trying to understand it. I think I tried to understand it consciously and accept some of the powerlessness perhaps. Or maybe later on, it was meaning general confusion and anxiety which was suppressed.

At any rate the nightmare was very scary and awful, as if something evil and wrong was there.

[dqpb]

I think air pollution is a much more likely explanation.