Autistic Brain Has Difficulty Coordinating

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I fully subscribe to this thesis. Having examined myself for the last few years, I have realized that the running mind problem and the meltdown is a result of some neural miscue. That is, some part of the brain, and it does appear that the hypothalamus is a prime suspect, causes the links between different parts of the brain to go down. As a result, the finely balanced symphony called the mind fails.

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Autistic Brain Has Difficulty Coordinating
by Jon Hamilton

All Things Considered, October 17, 2006 • A growing number of scientists believe autism may be caused by a lack of coordination in the brain.

"Some people think that autism is a disruption of social function," says Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "But I think it's much more widespread. It's a disruption of many kinds of behaviors that require good cortical coordination."

For example, a conversation requires some areas of the brain to produce words. At the same time, Just says, other parts need to assess whether the listener understands those words. If those areas don't coordinate, there's no conversation.

Just says important skills require more than one part of the brain to work together.

"It's like the Internet," he says. "It's not one place. It's not Los Angeles. It's not Zurich. It's the network."

And in people with autism, Los Angeles and Zurich don't have a very good connection, Just says.

Researchers discussed the idea as part of the 2006 Society for Neuroscience Meeting in Atlanta.

Michael Murias of the University of Washington presented a study on brain coordination. It compared 18 adults who have autism spectrum disorder with 18 typical adults.

All of them had electrodes attached to their scalps. Murias says the experiment itself was pretty easy: "We just instructed them to close their eyes and relax."

Then Murias and his team measured brain waves called alpha waves to see whether certain areas in the brain were communicating. In people with autism, they weren't -- at least not very well.


"The degree of communication within the brain was diminished," Murias says. "Particularly within the frontal lobes and particularly between the frontal lobes and the rest of the brain."

Murias says that's important because the frontal lobes are involved in so-called "executive functions," which help us recognize another person's intentions and avoid antisocial behavior. But only when the frontal lobes are connected to other parts of the brain.

In autism, the problem appears to be with the brain's connecting cables.

Those cables are contained in what scientists call white matter. Marcel Just, who has been studying white matter using a technique called diffusion-tensor imaging, says he's found that "the quality of the white matter is lower in autism. It's less coherently organized."

So Los Angeles can't talk to Zurich because the long-distance cables aren't very good.

Just says that in autism, certain areas of the brain may adapt by becoming stronger and more independent.


"You do the best you can with what you have," Just says. "It's not a style preference or an aesthetic preference."

That may explain why some people with autism can do complicated math in their head, but have no idea what they should pay for a turkey sandwich.

Just says this line of research might eventually lead to drugs that could treat autism by improving the quality of white matter.

"One can imagine also training or therapies that are designed to teach the various parts of the brain to work together in a more coordinated way, to make them function as a team instead of individual players," he says.

Just says those therapies might help people with autism to develop a more coordinated brain.

Last edited by Zeno on 23 May 2007, 6:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Pretty cool, Zeno. But if you're the guy with that pair a ducks, will you please get them out of my yard?

Another article that makes perfect sense to me. When the symptoms of autism are most pronounced, I experience all sorts of negative emotions that are dug out from a distant past. The meltdown episodes are so terrible mostly because of all the highly negative emotions and memories that run in my head. Even in the absence of stimuli or social interaction, it still feels like I am going through hell.

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Clue to autism revealed

By Crystal Ross O'Hara/Enterprise staff writer
Researchers at the UC Davis MIND Institute have found that the areas of the brain responsible for emotion and memory are abnormally large in boys with autism.

"Our data is consistent with an emerging view in autism that at least in some children with autism, parts of the brain are too big, too early," said David Amaral, research director at the MIND Institute and principal investigator on the study.

In the largest study of its kind, researchers at the MIND Institute teamed with scientists at the Department of Psychiatry at Stanford University to conduct MRI brain analyses of 98 boys between the ages of 7 and 18 diagnosed with autism or Asperger's syndrome. Some of the subjects had mental retardation in addition to autism. Others had normal intelligence and autism. Their MRIs were compared to those of typically developing boys.

The amygdala is the area of the brain involved with processing emotions, particularly negative ones such as fear, Amaral said. In the nonautistic boys, it increased about 40 percent over the age range studied, while the overall volume of the brain decreased slightly.

While researchers found that the amygdala was significantly larger than 40 percent in the autistic boys aged 71/2 to 121/2, there was no significant difference in the groups for the boys aged 121/2 to 18.

The study indicates that the amygdala becomes "too big, too fast" in the autistic boys, Amaral said.

The hippocampus, the area of the brain associated with memories, also proved to be slightly larger in the autistic boys at all ages of the study.

There have been five previous studies examining these regions of the brain and their relation to autism, Amaral said. However, the studies used relatively small numbers of heterogeneous subjects and ultimately contradicted each other.

"That's the kind of thing that plagues autism studies," he said.

Amaral chose to use only boys for this study in an effort to create a homogenous group of subjects. Autism disorders strike boys in much larger numbers than girls, but it is expected that MRIs of autistic girls would reveal similar findings, he said.

While the study, published in Wednesday's Journal of Neuroscience, may cement the role of the amygdala in autism, it also poses many questions for future research.

For example, it is not known what percentage of autistic children's amygdalas have developed abnormally, how it happens or what specific symptoms it causes.

Amaral said future studies will involve autistic children as young as 2 and he expects MRI images to reveal that the abnormal growth of the amygdala will already be apparent in some of those children.

In the MIND Institute's next large study, which Amaral describes as the "Manhattan Project of autism" because of its size and complexity, researchers will seek to phenotype autism. The disorder could one day be divided into categories based on, for example, whether the autism is genetic, paired with immune disorders, marked by physical deformities or more.

This isn't exactly a new idea, but it as much a symptom as a cause.

As for the turkey sandwich? WHAT COUNTRY? In the US, I used to have the FANTASTIC ability to estimate the cost/price of nearly ANYTHING! TODAY?????? FORGET IT! IMPOSSIBLE! Heck, a CAN of COKE can cost $.50 or perhaps $5.00!(Same brand/size) And don't get me started on WATER! The same size/type suitcase can cost $30 or $1200!

NTs can't do better!

Steve

i think it has to do with signals bouncing back and forth between hemishperes maybe... seem to be a lot of condtions where either one side of the brain or the connections to both sides is messed up and they all seem to have similar things as AS ect...

who knows.... have also hear there's lots of extra connections... so kinda makes sense about the lack of coordination... caue there are way too many pathways to choose from for info to travel along

O.o?

The idea has been around for quite a while, but how is it a symptom? A physical map of autism will go a long way towards understanding the underlying causes of the condition. If we could pin point the actual parts of the autistic brain that are different from neuro-typical brains, it would make the diagnosis of autism a matter of a brain scan versus the uncertain and subjective process of a psychological evaluation. Once there is enough information and certainty regarding whether or not the subjects are in fact autistic, back ground history and the more expensive genetic tests will provide the needed clues on what actually causes autism.

The social aspects of autism is important, but the underlying neural processes must be understood if this condition is ever to be properly managed. Telling the rest of the world to accept diversity is not going to work when an autistic individual falls into autistic withdrawal or worse, autistic rage. What these studies indicate is that autistic rage may be a result of processes that are not entirely controllable by the autistic individual.

The reason I brought these articles up is because the findings map perfectly to my own experiences. Even when I do not work, and I spend my whole day sitting in a quiet library doing my own research (generally into Chinese companies listed in America, China, Hong Kong and Singapore), these meltdown episodes still happen. It impairs my speach and affects what I remember. In particular, the worst memories seem to get played back again and again. And to top it off, it comes and goes with its own cycle. That is, even in the absence of any stimuli, this happens.

think they're startin to do this with MRIs...

but it's not that easy cause the signal pathways for a lot of the brain are a big black box. you can tell where there's activity in a general area... but i dont think we can to a neuron-to-neuron map as of yet... and that's largely cause we dont know how the various populations of neurons and synapses work...

the visual system is probably the most studied simply cause it gives you a concrete platform to work off of... we can definitely take a field of vision and see where it (visual info) maps onto the brain... but like i said, it's not that easy for the rest of the brain...

it's a lot of guessing and walking blindly.

Agreed. I studied neuroanatomy in medical school and even then it seemed a little silly to try and compartmentalize the brain into neat little subdivisions. And the MRI is probably inadequate in trying to map the brain, but it is the state of the art. I am not convinced about the size differences and most such studies are flawed; but I am convinced (based on anecdotal evidence) that they have the right regions of the brain. A Nobel prize awaits the scientist who can describe what goes on and why in the autistic brain.

intresting, that we would have more emotions. i know i do, i just dont show it the way others do

Even when I disagree or "suspect" an article of NT bias,I am still glad when someone post an interesting article(actually one thing that keeps me coming back to WP).

I do wonder a few things about the last research that sounded very "unscientific" to me.One is the inclusion of people with mental retardation.....?That is not the same thing as autism and may have it's own brain restructuring...why did they include them?The "assumption" that they make that they would find the same results in females with As is fricen laughable and makes me beyond irritated.Has science not learned enough by now to know that that is an incorrect assumption and females are sick of being excluded from research models.aaaarrrrgggggg(minni-meltdown effects by spelling and typing).

I have also seen research that autistics are both MORE and LESS emotional.....Hyper and Hypo sensitive to fear response.It would be great to have some consistency here.I am not a neurologist but I have some questions (chicken and the egg variety)about equating size and function.I have been with partners who had less and more in the area of phallic anatomy and one was not more or less effective based merely on it's size.Would it not be just as easy to say that the NT's have a smaller then effective emotion/fear center which impedes there ability to see danger or to feel the depth of emotion of someone with AS.

I just generally have an issue with the slant of many research projects looking for "defects".I have no problem with finding statistical differences but why do they have to attach such emotionally loaded(defective,shrunken,etc)labels?

As far as having an excuse for "meltdowns",which would imply that the individual is some how left off the hook because they cant help it...there brain is just designed that way....believe me.....that's not the way such information would be used.It would simply be used against ALL people with AS.....You have AS....You will have to much fear/anger to function normally ,so will can deny you this job,medical insurence,right to raise children......these are not the kind of "scientific justifications" I want to see resulting in further prejudice against ASers.......I dont have angry meltdowns that would result in my damaging property...I may have an urge to throw something or hit something....but I dont(I dont want to clean up the mess,destroy my material possessions that I like,scare the cat or my boyfriend and hate the resulting loud noises)....I may have to leave an overload situation,or cry out of frustration or used to cut myself....but even those are less as I have gotten older)


The point I am trying to make,is I hope that psudo-scientist,dont use reseaarch like this to justify making assumptions and generilizations(I have seen this often).I would love a brain scan to detect AS,but not by researchers who include people(developmentally delayed),yet exclude females,and make value judgements on brain structure....as if "majority" some how meant "best functioning"......this isnt science to me,it's voodo.

NTs have this kind of "emothinking". I understood it better when I read things about seduction. It was said that girls think of what you are talking about; there is a subliminal kind of seduction that make girls thinking of doing naughty things with someone (which in turn makes them wanting to do them). In a NT words are not just words, there feelings, actions, smells and all the like associated with them. And then there is the social result of the words.

You know what Aristotle said: "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it". I've tried and failed to find someone with that attitude. I think that if you attach emotions to words, then you can just know what to do intuitively following your own emotions.

There is no real danger that anything definite will be discovered on autism in the near future. But the autistic rage issue is real and I do believe that it has an organic rather than a behavioral etiology. Of course anger or even rage does not imply physical violence; although I have to admit that before I understood this aspect of myself more clearly, I used to punch my bed or pound the table as a sort of stimming effort. It should definitely not be construed that people with autism are somehow morally impaired menaces to society and must be kept locked up safely away. But it would help many autistic people, particularly those who are highly intelligent, and who may hold or have held jobs due to their cerebral abilities, to understand this aspect of autism. It would certainly help caregivers or even those who simply interact with autistics to appreciate that the trigger may have nothing to do with the environment. For me, there is like a circadian rhythm of helpless rage, a running mind and meltdowns. It is periodic and comes and goes on its own accord. And even when I have isolated myself to the extent of only meeting and talking to people when I have to buy my lunch (I spoke less than 10 words today for instance), it still happens

This is where I see the "positives" of the disorder reside...'cause we use certain parts to a greater extent than "normal" people.

im terrible at footaball and basketball and things like that, but i have good hand-to-eye coordination and can play squash and badminton to high standards.

That's me; my mind is "mad" with rage and anger when it's not "mad" with fear, I'm either constantly afraid or constantly angry. I punch trees until my hands bleed to help alleviate this anger...much like how people cut themselves.

Whilst I don't harbour thoughts of thinking that I'll ever be different (I haven't been so far); I'd like to experience a moment of inner peace, or better equilibrium of all my emotions rather than fear and hate....