'Copying' nerves broken in autism

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4491538.stm

Abnormal activity in neurons that help individuals imitate others may underlie some of the social deficits found in autism, US researchers believe.
A Nature Neuroscience study found autistic children had less brain activation in an area involved in understanding others' state of mind.

The degree of activation of the 'mirror neurons' housed in this area correlated with measures of social impairment.

The lower the activation, the stronger the impairment the children had.

Mirror neurons

Autism affects a person's ability to communicate with others and to respond appropriately to environmental cues.

In animals, mirror neurons have been shown to fire both when the animal observes another performing an act and when they perform the same act themselves.

Dr Mirella Dapretto and colleagues studied the brain activity patterns of 10 children with autism as the children either imitated facial gestures or passively watched facial gestures.

The facial gestures reflected emotions including fear, anger, sadness and happiness.

The general notion of linking mirror neurons with the social deficit in autism is quite reasonable

Professor Michael Rutter from the Institute of Psychiatry

The researchers compared these outcomes with those of 10 children of the same age and IQ but who did not have autism.

Although the autistic children were able to perform the task, they had lower activation in a brain area containing mirror neurons - the inferior frontal gyrus pars opercularis - both when watching and imitating facial gestures, compared to the other children.

The children with autism also had reduced activity in emotion centres of the brain - the insula and the amygdala.

Dr Dapretto, of University California, Los Angeles, said: "Our findings suggest that a dysfunctional mirror neuron system may underlie the social deficits observed in autism.

"Together with other recent data, our results provide strong support for a mirror neuron theory of autism. This is exciting because we finally have an account that can explain all core symptoms of this disorder."

Caution

The researchers believe that children with autism must use other parts of the brain in order to be able to perform the task that they tested.

For example, the autistic children might pay more attention to visual and motor clues without experiencing the internally felt emotional significance of the imitated facial expression.

Professor Michael Rutter from the Institute of Psychiatry, London, said: "The mirror neurons are interesting and there is some good research in animals looking at how they function.

"The general notion of linking mirror neurons with the social deficit in autism is quite reasonable.

"But we need more research into the brain systems that might be involved. These might involve mirror neurons, but we need more studies."

The National Autistic Society said: "There is strong evidence to suggest that autism can be caused by a variety of physical factors, all of which affect brain development - it is not due to emotional deprivation or the way a person has been brought up.

"We welcome research into all areas which may throw light on the causes behind autism."

Dr Bernard Rimland, of the Autism Research Institute, said it would be wrong to think the abnormalities were necessarily hard-wired.

He said research had shown that dietary intervention, for instance, could have an effect on symptoms.

So basically we dont act like everyone else because we cant act like everyone else... cool .

That's odd. I've always found I am hypersensitive to atmosphere and mood in others. I can see when someone's unhappy and when they're happy, and feel tension or its absence.

I went to the last two Conservative Party conferences (ie party conventions of the main opposition party in the UK) and both times on the first day the atmosphere was incredibly bad, just a load of people milling around moping. I could almost touch the sadness there. The difference between 04 and 05 was that by day 2 (of 4) in 04 people were much happier and you could feel the excitement, whereas by day 2 in 05 I was on a train home because I couldn't cope with the misery and was remembering the previous year with particular sadness.

So I'm surprised when people say aspies can't react to environmental clues - but then again, everyone's different.

From what posts I've seen from you you sound a lot like myself in some ways. I too feel other people's emotions almost too intensely, have empathy test scores above most NT's, and my own AS issues seem far more to be strictly overload or some kind of brainchemical in overdose paralysing certain parts of my brain and pretty much locking down my ability to use my social skills right (the more I think about it I'm really starting to believe more that the AS/autistic spectrum label is still a slush fund for possibly 4 or 5 different conditions with similar external appearances).

Like I've said before, so much of what you describe (and what I experience myself too) is more consistant with what I see or read about from a lot of hardcore auties, and it's often quite different from the findings in these scientific studies. What kind of autistic people are they doing the brain imaging on? I'd be really interested to see the results if they did this study (and others) on a much bigger crossection of the autistic population - high functioning, low functioning, etc. (Assuming they're not already doing it that way.) I imagine brain imaging would show a lot of differences within the autistic spectrum itself, and you'd think it would be fairly easy for them to use those findings to divide us up into a few groups/come up with more accurate labels - according to what's going on inwardly, not just externally. The concept seems pretty simple to me...

Yeah, it would also probably show why they're getting conflicting results - one size doesn't fit all.

I wonder how many sizes there are though? I wonder if they studied enough brains, would a few distinct profiles start to emerge despite our individual uniqueness? With the technology they have, I'm kinda surprised we haven't already seen research in this direction.

My boyfriend described it as a "chemical imbalance" which could be corrected with medication. His mother may have something similar which she controls with drugs. He also said that AS may be something that "if you think you have it, you probably don't", when I broached the subject after working through some issues at the time I first became depressed. He seemed to want to take care of me a lot, which I bridled at. In his household the male/female roles are reversed - his father does all the cooking and is basically a gourmet chef in his spare time. Maybe he saw it in me and because it produced difficult emotions and allegiances in me - including political issues - needed to find a way of controlling it. It was eventually why we split up - my lack of interest in his physical needs was what made me scared to marry him and hurt him later on, while he maintains that he didn't care about that. And another role reversal - it was him that wanted the commitment in our relationship, while I was happier when we were still close friends rather than going out together.

If its inherited, I may get part of it from my father, who is very intense and moody and tends to have a few very close friends than many looser ones. I have a photograph in which I show a striking physical resemblance to him, though it is fairly old now and in others I look nothing like him.

I think mirroring and real emotional empathy are different things. Isn't mirroring without empathy the gift of con-artists, who can seem all nice and attract other people with their charm, and then leave them for suckers without a second thought? An autistic with empathy would be the exact opposite of a con artist, having great acuity in perceiving the emotional states of others but not being able to mimic the superficial displays in a smooth-flowing natural way, so that they end up putting people off even though they really feel for those people.

Well, I started out by being told for sure that I had it back in 1991. Somewhere arround 1999 or 2000 I really started questioning whether I really had absolutely no social common sense and really couldn't rely on my own take on things - my friends were telling me that it just didn't seem true and whenever I pointed certain observations out they told me "if you saw that they couldn't possibly be right". I went on for at least 2 years thinking that way, thinking "you know what, maybe the people who say that I'm just not trying hard enough or that I've been weak willed in the past are right - I'm gonna put every ounce of effort I've got into overcomming my weakness, being a real man, and the odds are everyone else has to try this hard". Well, I believe that and believed it, pushed and pushed, got my head on straighter and straighter, and after a certain point too many things just weren't adding up - not my social knowledge or know-how but the fact that regardless of how much I understood there were certain thing socially that I just couldn't do, certain parts of my behaviour that my brain just clamped down over me no matter how hard I tried to reverse it or how much I knew it wasn't the right way, and no matter how much I drove against these things and felt like it was suicide of honor to let myself be this way none of my efforts corrected it or made it any better. Yeah, I continued to square away more and more inwardly and I kept thinking more and more normally as related to how I saw other people thinking but my exterior still was messed up, I was still this wide-eyed mute half the time who just couldn't talk, my reaction time to things or even my ability to say hi back to people when they said hi to me was still locked-down, and I had to face facts that no matter how hard I road myself and no matter how many Alonzo from Training Day hard lectures I gave myself on it that I just wasn't gonna be able to overcome it on my own.

A lot of my friends, at least who don't see me much or knew me from back in the day, still refuse to believe anything is wrong with me, they're NT's but they can't see it themselves while it seems like all the people I work with can see it plain as day no matter how well I think I'm hiding it (and regardless of whether or not they feel I'm the best worker or most on-point out of my part of the service team), and while one side is trying to argue with me that I'm completely normal and that I should just blow off what people think of me if they can't understand me, it seems like everyone else is either riding this precarious edge where they seem to have all kinds of respect for me but teeder on this edge like they really don't properly have me figured out (which makes me avoid talking to em too much) and then lots of other people who I've dealt with for years, who know I'm smart, who know I undrstand what's going on arround me socially, and who still blow me off like I'm someone's kid, still cut me off in mid-sentence many times when I'm talking to em, and really treat me like an invalid. Just like back when I was 20 or 21 I'm not gonna buy up what those other friends are telling me because I *know* better and I know there's a good reason why AS is regarded as a 'hidden' disability. On the other hand though, a lot of the friends I've been close over the years who used to give me that same run-arround and used to tell me its all in my head have finally seen enough of the societal roadblocks that while they accept me, they take me at my word on it and know I'm not getting it twisted off of something some doctor told me back in 1991 that they just didn't see in me.

True.

Matthew Parris once wrote an article on one of our major politicians echoing this kind of thought: that he was hampered in his quest for a seat in Parliament not because he was "a diamond in the rough" (ie brusque, rough or unpolished exterior but kind at heart) but rather that his warm, empathic private nature didn't come across in a rather cold, ruthless and slick exterior. Whereas his main rival - Tony Blair - is the exact opposite, he comes across as a nice, personable man but has become the arch-swindler of my political generation.

Which is why I always identified with the first one than the second.

I would suspect Schizophrenics have damage/malfunction in the same area. Psychosis aside, they have social problems like we do and often need social skills training.

For me the amount of empathy I feel varies quite a bit depending on the situation. If, for instance, I've experienced a certain mental state before and I can tell (or assume) based on visual/auditory cues that another person is experiencing the same thing, I can have a great degree of empathy with them. Sometimes if I'm in a group of people with a prevailing mood I can sympathize with I also pick up a vague sense of it, but if their gestures, and words tell me that their mood is something that I can understand but disagree with (say exuberance at the declaration of war), it gives me a great sense of unease and alienation. I think the difference between this form of empathy and that which most people experience, however, is the way in which it is experienced. I can get the same feelings of empathy for characters in a book, even though they only consist of words, which leads me to believe these feelings are constructed by my mind in a more conscious manner than "experienced" as I would perhaps experience sadness after dissappointment in myself (vs. say, sadness as a response to the sadness of another).

OK, devil's advocate time.

Have these wonderfully intelligent researchers considered for a moment that what they have actually discovered is the hyperactive brain area which accounts for lynch mobs, riots, binge drinking hordes and football hooligans?

(The "Monkey see, monkey do" syndrome results in the suppression of higher faculties generally considered to lie in the frontal lobe... )


Should they find a treatment, we will all be assimilated.
Good grief, the Borg with an emotional agenda!

They seem to have pinpointed an area of the brain that some humans have the good sense to suppress. If all your friends decided to jump off a cliff would you automatically follow them or would you use your best judgment? Racial bigotry is a good example of mirror behavior, isn't it? Mirror behavior sounds like the kind of handicap that a rational person should do without. Should I think that I am strange for refusing to go along with behavior that is paranoid and destructive?

Nature may have found a cure for the mob mentality. Now to serve the goal of making us "socially acceptable, our doctors seem ready to develop ways to "cure" this "defect." It's one of the most welcome defects I've ever heard of. The mob mentality should not be imitated.

Statistically, yes, ethically, no. There's part of the problem. It's you, me and a few others against the world. And "God is on the side of the big battalions".

A study where people were exposed to images of moving triangles noted, quite correctly, that people with Asperger's were less likely to assign anthropomorphic features and intention to the images, compared to "normal" people. i.e. they see triangles where there are triangles, whreas other people more are wired to see relationships and personality, even between triangles.

Scientist on BBC interview: "The Asperger's people get it wrong..."

What, for not seeing people where there aren't any?

Yes, apparently.