There are many reasons that I found this study so fascinating and worthwhile as to deserve its own independent post during Autism Month:
- First, autism runs in my family, so most studies concerning autism interest me. It is clear to me that my mother, sister, nieces, and I are all autistic. La Petite Fille, however, is the only one formally diagnosed.
- Second, I have prosopagnosia or face blindness. I do not have it to the degree that I cannot recognize anyone including my own mother, but I find it difficult to recognize faces and confuse people I find similar in appearance, which is a never ending source of amusement for my students and source of social awkwardness as I dance around trying to sort out who this person is that seems to know me.
- And, third, I have concerns about the attempt to “cure” autism. There are symptoms that would be useful to mitigate their negative impact just from an improvement in quality of life point of view, but there are others that have been and will continue to be useful to human kind. It is a tricky tightrope to walk, and the topic of another post.
Prosopagnosia or Face Blindness
Prosopagnosia is a neurological disorder that interferes with the ability to process facial features. It can range in severity from being unable to recognize any face based solely on the facial features to having only mild impairment so that most faces are distinguishable.
What? How is this even possible? A big nose is a big nose, right? Who can’t recognize that?
This is the deal, there is a place in the brain called the fusiform gyrus. A gyrus is the fold on the surface of the brain. It is what gives it that familiar wrinkled look. Those folds, however, are only on the cerebral cortex or the outermost layer of the brain, that which gives human beings their greatest distinction from other higher order mammals.
The fusiform gyrus is a major fold in the brain — they ain’t random because they occur in the same places and same sizes with minor variations. It spans the occipital and temporal lobes at the bottom. The occipital lobe is where we process visual input. It sits at the back of the brain. The temporal lobes is a kind of grab bag of stuff including auditory, spatial, and memory processing. It sits at the sides of the brain around your temple, thus the name.
The fusiform gyrus in all of its glory is responsible for categorizing visual input, particularly faces, bodies, reading, and objects. It is used when many small details are required to recognize an object such as a familiar face. It is not used to recognize objects that do not require attunement to as many details, like say a fan. Interestingly, the right hemisphere is more often used to recognize faces than the left.
When it is damaged from stroke or other malady or congenitally dysfunctional, individuals will have an array of symptoms: difficulty in recognizing familiar individuals whether in person or in photographs, including themselves, confusing plots and characters in movies or plays, and an inability to differentiate between people wearing uniforms or similar clothing.
Prosopagnosia and Autism
I’m trusting that the reader has more than a passing understanding of autism. If not, please see the links to previous autism posts.
Since autism involves social impairments, it should come as no surprise that many people with autism have difficulties with faces. Alexander Li Cohen is a child neurologist leading the Laboratory of Translational Neuroimaging, which is part of the Autism Spectrum Center at Boston Children’s Hospital who noticed this relationship, too. So, you’re as smart as a PhD or MD who studies this all the time. Congratulations.
Because Cohen can DO something with his insights, he set about testing people with autism for their ability to recognize faces. And, wouldn’t you know it, he found that people with autism did trouble with faces also had more severe symptoms of autism AND worser social abilities. So, which came first the autism or the prosopagnosia?
Well, wouldn’t you know it, Cohen wondered that exact same thing! And again, he could actually DO something about it. He began to study children who had damage to their fusiform gyri due to pathology. He found that a whopping 40% who had damage to their ability to recognize faces went on to develop autism when they hadn’t had autism before.
Well, now ain’t that something.
Treating Autism Symptoms by Using Neural Networks
Cohen has this idea that if social impairments that autistic people have is connected to their inability to recognize faces or process faces, then it might could be mitigated by changing the neural network involved in processing facial information.
Since it is known that facial recognition involves a complex neural network and that people with facial recognition difficulty can experience impairments anywhere along the network, then if those networks could be altered, perhaps they could improve their facial recognition. It makes sense, don’t it?
How can you alter the functioning of neural networks?
Uh, doc, you wanna mess around with the wiring of my brain? Really? We have a long history of messing shit up when we try this. Henry Molaison anyone?
Cohen and his lab are interested in the possibilities that CBT, fMRI-neurofeedback, or TMS. Well, that doesn’t seem so bad, I guess.
This is a watch-this-space kinda situation. This research is ongoing. In fact, it is so much so that Cohen et al. are recruiting people with and without autism 15 – 18 years of age to participate in their facial recognition impairment research. If interested in participating, visit their website… and let us know in the comments, okay?
The idea that you can map the neural networks responsible for specific behaviors onto the brain and then alter those behaviors by altering those networks is an exciting and scary one. Having lived through the very violent meltdowns of my sister, especially as the focal point of most of them when we were growing up, and having witnessed a number of kids meltdown during the course of a regular school day, I kinda would like to know if we could manage that kind of violent aggressive behavior better… or even with mass shooters, you know? But, given the growing fascist movement of the country, it is entirely possible that this style of research could be used to commit depraved acts of evil on par with those of Nazi Germany.
Let us know what you think in the comments, okay?
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The Psy of Life 
This is very interesting, but I don’t like the idea of trying to change the neural networks of people with autism. It’s one thing if the people want that, but I worry that this sort of thing will be taken too far. I also have concerns about people trying to “cure” autism, and I worry about a future where parents can make those kinds of decisions for their autistic children, particularly if it’s done before the children are old enough to have a say. Research is good, but I think we as a society need to be cautious about what we do to people as a result of it.
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Howdy Shannon!
Thank you for taking the time to comment. It is greatly appreciated.
As an autie and the parent of an autie, I share your concerns. Autism is a lot more than its symptoms. There is an argument to be made that autism contributes enormously to our society, especially through innovation where numerous repeated trials are necessary before success occurs. It is that obsessive singular focus of autism that maybe its biggest contributor to society as a whole.
But, autistic people look at the world differently and see it in different ways. One thing nature has taught us is the necessity of diversity in coping with the changes that occur in the world. We should not casually throw away one of the significant and maintained (evolutionarily speaking) differences in human kind.
And given what is happening to the LGBTQ+ community in general and the trans community in specific, we would have to be concerned with any meaningful claim to be able to identify the neurological substrates involved in a particular behavior and then to alter those neural networks. Luckily, right now, none of the techniques for altering those neural networks are permanent.
The brain is plastic, it is malleable and reacts to its environment. The ways of changing the neural networks that have been suggested, CBT, TMS, biofeedback rely on that plasticity to be effective. So, there’s that. In the wrong hands, though, this could be worse than pray the gay away and the Native American boarding schools and just about anything else people had dreamed up to abuse one another en masse. The idea of performing an fMRI to determine whether someone is “really” a fill-in the blank is frightening.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Reblogged this on cabbagesandkings524 and commented:
Calico Jack continues to explain Autism and review current research.
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There may be no factor, other than or equal to language, in human social interaction more central than our faces, both in recognition of others, and interpretation of relational context and intentions. So, it makes sense that severe Prosopagnosia would be intensely frustrating, even frightening in complex or novel social situations, leading to meltdowns or withdrawal. It also occurs to me that the inability to recognize one’s own face could be a factor in depersonalization.
Any effective means to alter cognition at the neural network level would only need an authoritarian regime to declare “woke” a pathology rather than a crime to become a nightmare darker than either 1984 or Brave New World.
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Howdy Bob!
Facial recognition and interpretation is probably the only function that has such a large amount of cortical real estate devoted to it. Sight has the entire occipital lobe and parts of the surrounding parietal and temporal lobes. The fusiform gyrus processes detailed spatial relationships. And, the spot in the right hemisphere, approximately the size of a quarter, is devoted to faces. That’s how important it is. It is also the reasons coulrophobia exists.
I’ve often described autism as having a big hole where the highway of social interpretation ends. You get so far and then there is just nothing. When autistic people watch movies, they are often attending to other details than the characters’ faces, so, of course, they have a much harder time understanding the social dynamic in the movie.
And should this technique and technology play out the way they think it will, then the concept of a reeducation camp gets gets very scary indeed. If we thought pray the gay away was awful enough to outlaw, the cover this will give the atrocities done in the name of improving social order will be lightyears worse.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Again, we come to one of those Liberal v. Conservative mind differences, tolerance for diversity. When it come to neurodivergance, is the goal of an intervention to make living with their difference easier for the individual, or making the difference disappear for other people’s comfort and convenience? And, then thee is the use of definitions of mental illness to pathologise dissent.
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Howdy Bob!
We are all made uncomfortable to a degree by people or behaviors that are “different.” It is hard not to be. We can habituate to the difference and be comfortable with it. I teach middle school and high school. I see a lot of kids go from “ew gross” to the idea of homosexuality to “meh, what difference does it make” in a few short years of maturation and experience.
It’s funny how LGBTQ+ issues can be acceptable — marriage equality is still wildly popular, even if the conservatives have managed to split of trans issues — but racism and misogyny are still widely held views. I think it is because most gay people don’t look significantly different from straight people. That looks like me factor is really important in accepting people who are different.
While we’re on the subject, homophobia is still fairly widespread in CoC. It has often been observed that Blacks and Hispanics are very aligned with Republicans on many social issues and would make natural constituencies if Republicans could get past their racism.
When it comes to autism, auties, especially the so-called high functioning auties, look like neurotypical people, but stimming looks pretty weird and different and puts people off. The loud, nasal, brash, flat voice that many auties have, also, sets them apart. Until behaviors begin to appear, auties are fairly well accepted, but when they act weird, they can be ostracized.
That looks like or acts like me thing is really important for feeling understood and like you belong.
Huzzah!
Jack
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In that regard, this study is interesting because what is true of attraction is also true of repulsion. https://neurosciencenews.com/self-essentialism-attraction-23007/
Another factor in it all is the effect of the label, “disease”. A disease demands a cure, in fact, presupposes the possibility of a cure, or if not, prevention. Part of the social acceptance of homosexuality is certainly it having been officially declared not a disease. The label of something as a “sin” is more difficult to overcome.
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Howdy Bob!
I just read the first bit of the article, but it put me of the mind of the halo effect and fundamental attribution error. The things we need in order to feel understood by, or, in essence, similar to, someone is an interesting thing. I’m reminded that our brains are easy to fool.
The nineteenth century obsession with aping medical science and doctors. I doubt we’ll ever completely shake that one.
Huzzah!
Jack
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It definitely falls under the heading of attribution errors.
As for the aping issue, this piece runs through how a bunch of studies on our unconscious process that announced definitive results haven’t panned out so well. https://neurosciencenews.com/subconscious-neural-mechanisms-23023/
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Howdy Bob!
That was an interesting article. It matches up with the Hidden Brain episodes on the IAT that you recommended.
While the IAT may not be a strong predictor of individual behavior, it turns out that aggregated IAT data predicts regional behavior or aggregated behavior.
This paragraph struck me for another reason:
For example, we would rather claim conscious control and agency over our political voting than over what breakfast cereal we are purchasing. So we may argue that our poor breakfast choice was down to subliminal advertising.
That seems to be FAE. My mistakes and errors are not my fault.
Her findings also support Kahneman’s thoughts on how we make decisions. We do not process probability well and we look for shortcuts. When you ask someone how they decided, they don’t know because they used a shortcut, a heuristic or bias. It may have occurred outside of their conscious awareness –that’s part of the problem she’s describing, what exactly are we talking about when we talk about the unconscious and decisions — but with a little effort we can bring it into conscious awareness. Kinda like the grammar rules of our native language. Few of us know why we use the grammar we do, but if we think about it, we can identify the rule pretty clearly.
However, it does get to the fundamental question: who are we and how do we make decisions. It is almost like there is a homunculus in our brain that is trying to keep the curtain from being pulled revealing the Wizard. Of course, it could be that there is nothing there, and we just keep spinning stories to fill the space because we think there should be something there.
Huzzah!
Jack
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There is this observation from Gregory Bateson:
“No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels. Broadly, we can afford to sink those sorts of knowledge which continue to be true regardless of changes in the environment, but we must maintain in an accessible place all those controls of behavior which must be modified for every instance. The economics of the system, in fact, pushes organisms toward sinking into the unconscious those generalities of relationship which remain permanently true and toward keeping within the conscious the pragmatic of particular instances.”
That may be especially true, alas, for the species with the most metabolically expensive decision organ on the planet.
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Howdy Bob!
I believe in the behavioral economics literature, you’ll either find direct reference to Bateson’s views or people making a similar argument. It makes sense that as a species we would economize on our decision making by creating heuristics that generally work. It is analogous to locating repetitive sequential motor functions to the efficient cerebellum.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Yes, if you are going to walk and chew gum at the same time, you can’t be making all the small motor coordinating consciously. Here’s another interesting articles: https://neurosciencenews.com/subconscious-neural-mechanisms-23023/ and this one for which my reaction to the headline was “DUH!” https://scitechdaily.com/hidden-linkages-scientists-find-mind-body-connection-is-built-into-brain/
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Howdy Bob!
I saw that second article, too. It was significant because there are cells imbedded in the motor cortex that communicate with other parts of the brain in a kind of feedback loop explaining the mind-body connection and the CBT belief that you change the behavior, you change the cognition and the emotion.
There are just too many things going on simultaneously in our bodies for our working memory to be able to process. Of course, things outside of our awareness have to be taking place, but does that make them unconscious? And, how do you categorize all the vital bodily functions that we absolutely cannot control with conscious thought. Are they unconscious? Part of the issue is just nomenclature and we can blame Freud for that even though he didn’t necessarily coin the terms we’re using now, he popularized them and they’ve made it into our unconscious… haha.
Huzzah!
Jack
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It is so easy for us to imagine that our conscious awareness is separate from the body, the ghost in the machine or the non-physical soul, a sort of passenger on the body. Some theological belief systems do everything they can to support that notion to the level of primal belief.
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Howdy Bob!
There is an area of psychology that studies the effects of the fear of death — there’s a name for it that isn’t thanatophobia or based on the Menzies’ book. I’ve posted about it, but I can’t remember the term. Oh well.
Still, trying to cope with the angst of the prospect of dying has driven much of human existence, kinda like the Menzies have said, so it makes sense that the hallmark of every religion has been how to cope with the afterlife and deal with the uncertainty of what happens after we die.
In someways we really need to believe that we exist separately from our bodies, so that after we die, there is something left of us. We’ve all seen rotting carcasses. Nobody wants to end up like that.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Indeed, our own non-existence is nearly impossible to imagine. Unfortunately, the separation of mind from body is the root of the separation of human from nature for which we and nature are currently paying the price.
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Howdy Bob!
All species have their runs, don’t they? I mean the dinosaurs finally found a change in the environment that they couldn’t adapt to. Perhaps we’re finding a characteristic of ourselves that just isn’t well enough matched to our environment. We may not be capable of evolving further. It may be as simple as that.
In that sense, Occam’s Razor applies. Ants are the most successful species on the planet. They are simple biologically. They are efficient socially. It may be that the way to longterm success is through simplicity and that our complexity is doing us in.
Huzzah!
Jack
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It may be so. I’ve long speculated that therein lies the answer to the Fermi paradox, that any species that can develop the industries and technologies needed to get off their planet or communicate over interstellar distance can only do it by becoming fatally addicted to fossil fuels and unable to foresee the consequences in time.
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Howdy Bob!
Fossil fuels are addictingly easy to use and acquire… at least on Earth. I can’t help but think that in the evolution of any species to a planet-dominating and technological-developing capability would be vulnerable to the dangers of altering the environment so significantly by their use of natural resources that they risk their own extinction.
We certainly have evidence of society collapse from groups like the Mayan after environmental changes made their way of life unviable. The survivors of those groups moved on to be adopted by surrounding more viable groups or moved to more promising territory. Our problems are that, currently, there is no place to go to to support ourselves or another group to take us in, and that we cannot convince enough of the key players to make the changes necessary to help ensure our survival of the coming climate catastrophe.
Huzzah!
Jack
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