From several Ideas programs on CBC Radio, I’ve learned a lot about myself
that makes sense I’m autistic with life-long anxiety and depression
disorders. According to current research and theory relating to neural
networks in the brain, many mental disorders may be related.
Autism
and epilepsy seem to result from a fault in the pruning process of
extra connection in the brain. All babies are born with extra neural
connections. This is believed to provide redundant connections in case
of dame as well as allowing the rapid learning of many complex skills
such as talking and walking. As we age, these connections are pruned to
prevent problems like overload and crossing signals. Epilepsy seems to
be a failure to prune the connections between brain hemispheres causing
overloads experienced as seizures. Autism seems to be a general failure
in pruning throughout the brain, or at least in areas such as those
involved in fine movement, speaking, sensory input, and emotions,
particularly anxiety and frustration.
I have been told that I
overthink things. That is literally true. I overthink everything, all
the time.
We all have one major nerve feeding
information from each eye to the brain, which combines the information
into an image with depth and detail. Imagine having five nerves for each
eye, all sending the exact same information at the same time. Imagine
every sense working this way. Autistics seem to have good attention to
detail, a talent for pattern recognition, and good memories. You would
too if every image came in five copies with the force of a freight
train. This also happens on the way out, making our speech and movements
tangled and awkward. We withdraw from the overload or explode in
frustration.
In addition, it seems that the brain has around
seventeen neural networks with various functions. One works as a central
node and processor, the salience network, coordinating and connecting
the other networks with delicate timing and assigning importance and
relevance to everything flowing through. Many mental disorders,
particularly those involving some form of obsession, seem to involve a
disorder of the salience network. This turns random thoughts into
irresistible commanding voices, daydreams into hallucinations, dark
thoughts and moods into spiraling depression, worries into unrelenting
anxiety, fears into paranoia, and desires and habits into addictions.
The brain assigns false associations and importance that it clings to as
if life depends on them. The thought, emotion, or memory gets stuck and
repeated without end. You can’t shake it off, get over it, use will
power, or forget it.
Autism seems to include both disorders,
possible solely due to pruning. In effect, we are in permanent crisis
mode, like in combat or an accident. Every second has vital clarity and
the body is primed for survival. Fight, flight, or freeze, unable to
pick, we meltdown attempting to do all three. I've heard experts say
that trauma, especially in childhood, changes the brain to resemble that
of an autistic. Once traumatized, the brain becomes vulnerable to more.
We seem to be born traumatized.
My brain is like the
Internet, overloaded and cluttered with redundant information with
little way to tell what is relevant or true and memes and videos that
refuse to go away. Sometimes the synthesis produces something amazing.
Savants may have connections between normally unconnected areas. Most of
the time, it’s just frustrating.
From:
People with autism have unusually symmetrical brains, new scans reveal
Brain connections in people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD)
show more symmetry across the right and left hemispheres, suggesting
that tasks are being divvied up in the brain in a very different manner
from those without autism.
The find, which is based on new brain
scans of young people with autism, could explain why one of the
hallmarks of the condition is an innate skill for identifying specific
details in something, but a failure to put them into a wider context.
As researchers from the San Diego State University explain, the
left and right hemispheres of the brain process information in very
different ways, and how the brain as a whole mitigates this could help
us better understand how people with autism spectrum disorder see the
world.
While that old myth that the right hemisphere of the brain is more 'creative' and the left is more 'analytical' has been well and truly debunked - and despite what Oprah says,
there’s zero evidence that a person can be more 'right-brained' or
'left-brained' - we do know that certain functions are performed by
certain hemispheres.
Researchers also suspect
that the left hemisphere is more involved in analysing the specific
details of a situation, while the right hemisphere is tasked with
integrating these details and various other stimuli into a more cohesive
whole.
The way these two hemispheres work together to combine
their various functions explains how we perceive and respond to the
world, and a new experiment has revealed that this occurs very
differently in young people with and without autism spectrum disorder.
The San Diego State University team used a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique known as diffusion tensor imaging
to visualise the brains of 41 children and adolescents with autism
spectrum disorder and 44 without (referred to as "typically developing",
or TD, participants).
They were particularly interested in
analysing how dense the connections were within different regions of
white matter across the two hemispheres.
They found that the
"typically developing" participants had much more densely packed
connections in the right hemisphere than in the left.
"This fits
with the idea that the right hemisphere has a more integrative function,
bringing together many kinds of information," the researchers explain.
But
the scans revealed that the brain connections in participants with
autism spectrum disorder were more symmetrically organised across both
hemispheres.
"The idea behind asymmetry in the brain is that there is a division of labour between the two hemispheres," says one of the team, Ralph-Axel Müller. "It appears this division of labour is reduced in people with autism spectrum disorder."
To
be clear, the experiment only looked at a very small sample size, so
until the results are replicated in a much larger group, we can't read
too much into them.
But they do correspond with results of a separate experiment from earlier this year, which found that mice with autism also had unusually symmetrical brains.
At
this stage, the San Diego State team isn't clear on how this symmetry
plays into the cognitive differences between young people with and
without autism spectrum disorder, and they can't say for sure if the
symmetry leads to autism, or autism leads to the symmetry.
But
they do suspect that the lack of specialisation they've observed in the
brains of kids with autism could contribute to the "weak central
coherence" that characterises the condition - what Müller sums up as "not seeing the forest for the trees".
The research has been published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.
By Bec Crew /
Managing Editor
Bec Crew is an award-winning science blogger with the Scientific American Blog Network, Australian Geographic, and World's Best Ever. She is the author of Zombie Tits, Astronaut Fish and Other Weird Animals (NewSouth Press) and the former online editor of Cosmos science magazine. @BecCrew
“A ground-breaking theory suggests people with autism-spectrum disorders such as Asperger’s do not lack empathy – rather, they feel others’ emotions too intensely to cope.”
“People with Asperger’s syndrome,
a high functioning form of autism, are often stereotyped as distant
loners or robotic geeks. But what if what looks like coldness to the
outside world is a response to being overwhelmed by emotion – an excess
of empathy, not a lack of it?
This
idea resonates with many people suffering from autism-spectrum
disorders and their families. It also jibes with the “intense world”
theory, a new way of thinking about the nature of autism.
As posited by Henry and Kamila Markram of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne,
the theory suggests that the fundamental problem in autism-spectrum
disorders is not a social deficiency but, rather, a hypersensitivity to
experience, which includes an overwhelming fear response.
“I
can walk into a room and feel what everyone is feeling,” Kamila Markram
says. “The problem is that it all comes in faster than I can process
it. There are those who say autistic people don’t feel enough. We’re saying exactly the opposite: They feel too much.”
Virtually all people with autism spectrum disorder, or ASD,
report various types of over-sensitivity and intense fear. The Markrams
argue that social difficulties of those with autism spectrum disorders
stem from trying to cope with a world where someone has turned the
volume on all the senses and feelings up past 10.
If hearing your parents’ voices while sitting in your crib felt like listening to Lou Reed‘s Metal Machine Music on acid, you, too, might prefer to curl in a corner and rock.
But,
of course, this sort of withdrawal and self-soothing behaviour –
repetitive movements; echoing words or actions; failing to make eye
contact – interferes with social development. Without the experience
other kids get through ordinary social interactions, children on the
spectrum never learn to understand subtle signals.
Phil Schwarz, vice-president of the Asperger’s Association of New England adds, “I think most people with ASD feel emotional empathy and care about the welfare of others very deeply.”
So, why do so many people see a lack of empathy as a defining characteristic of autism spectrum disorder?
The
problem starts with the complexity of empathy itself. One aspect is
simply the ability to see the world from the perspective of another.
Another is more emotional – the ability to imagine what the other is
feeling and care about their pain as a result.
Autistic
children tend to develop the first part of empathy – which is called
“theory of mind” – later than other kids. This was established in a
classic experiment. Children are asked to watch two puppets, Sally and
Anne. Sally takes a marble
and places it in a basket, then leaves the stage. While she’s gone,
Anne takes the marble out and puts it in a box. The children are then
asked: Where will Sally look first for her marble when she returns?
Most
4-year-olds know Sally didn’t see Anne move the marble, so they get it
right. By 10 or 11, children with developmental disabilities who have
verbal IQs equivalent to 3-year-olds also get it right. But 80 per cent of autistic children
age 10 to 11 guess that Sally will look in the box, because they know
that’s where the marble is and they don’t realize other people don’t
share all of their knowledge.
Of course, if you don’t realize others are seeing and feeling different things, you might well act less caring toward them.
It
takes autistic children far longer than children without autism to
realize other people have different experiences and perspectives – and
the timing of this development varies greatly. But that doesn’t mean,
once people with autism spectrum disorder do become aware of other people’s experience, that they don’t care or want to connect.
Schwarz,
of the New England Asperger’s association, says all the autistic adults
he knows over the age of 18 have a better sense of what others know
than the Sally/Anne test suggests.
When
it comes to not understanding the inner state of minds too different
from our own, most people also do a lousy job, Schwarz says. “But the
non-autistic majority gets a free pass because, if they assume that the
other person’s mind works like their own, they have a much better chance
of being right.”
Thus,
when, for example, a child with Asperger’s talks incessantly about his
intense interests, he isn’t deliberately dominating the conversation so
much as simply failing to consider that there may be a difference
between his interests and those of his peers.
In
terms of the caring aspect of empathy, a lively discussion that would
seem to support Markrams’ theory appeared on the website for people
with autism spectrum disorder called WrongPlanet.net, after a mother wrote to ask whether her empathetic but socially immature daughter could possibly have Asperger’s.
“If
anything, I struggle with having too much empathy,” one person says.
“If someone else is upset, I am upset. There were times during school
when other people were misbehaving and, if the teacher scolded them, I
felt like they were scolding me.”
Said another, “I am clueless when it comes to reading subtle cues but I am very
empathic. I can walk into a room and feel what everyone is feeling and I
think this is actually quite common in AS/autism. The problem is that
it all comes in faster than I can process it.”
Studies
have found that when people are overwhelmed by empathetic feelings,
they tend to pull back. When someone else’s pain affects you deeply, it
can be hard to reach out rather than turn away.
For
people with autism spectrum disorder, these empathetic feelings might
be so intense that they withdraw in a way that appears cold or uncaring.
“These
children are really not unemotional. They do want to interact – it’s
just difficult for them,” Markram says. “It’s quite sad, because these
are quite capable people. But the world is just too intense, so they
have to withdraw.”
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