Daily Archive for January 24th, 2007

In December of 2005 EBD Blog covered some developments in research about neuro-pscyhological aspects of Autism indicating growing evidence of the influence of mirror neurons on imitation and emotion. In November 2006 Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Lindsay M. Oberman at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD; CA, US) provided an excellent summary of their research on this topic. In their paper for Scientific American that is accessible to non-scientists, they recount their work.

In the late 1990s our group at U.C.S.D. noted that mirror neurons appear to be performing precisely the same functions that seem to be disrupted in autism. If the mirror neuron system is indeed involved in the interpretation of complex intentions, then a breakdown of this neural circuitry could explain the most striking defi cit in people with autism, their lack of social skills. The other cardinal signs of the disorder—absence of empathy, language defi cits, poor imitation, and so on—are also the kinds of things you would expect to see if mirror neurons were dysfunctional.

This is a rapidly developing and very compelling area of research. The theory that dysfunctions in the mirror neuron system has and will continue to receive a lot of research attention, I bet; had I the right collaborators, I’d be interested in getting into it, at least. And, in conjunction with another theory (what Professors Ramachandran and Oberman call the “distorted salience landscape theory”: disrupted connections between the sensory areas of the brain and the amygdala, where sensory data are matched to stored knowledge, cause extreme responses to minor events), dysfunctions in mirror neuron systems may point toward a broad explanation of the seemingly diverse symptoms of Autism.

Link to the free preview of the article or to a page where one can buy a PDF of the full article in Scientific American by Professors Ramachandran and Oberman. Flash of the electrons to Professor Henry Schlinger of California State University at Los Angeles (US) for reminding me about this article.