I took a look at Dr. Ramachandran's site, and i checked out the publications section. There was an article about a study he worked on involving mirror neurons and autism, I thought it would be interesting because it applied to what we covered in the past two classes. The full text is available as a pdf download from his site, http://cbc.ucsd.edu/pdf/eeg_evidence_asd.pdf .
First off, I had no idea what mirror neurons were so I had to define that to start off with. I searched the APA site because I figured it would have some kind of explanation. It turns out they published an article on mirror neurons, http://www.apa.org/monitor/oct05/mirror.html, which explains it pretty well. Mirror neurons have been proven to exist in some types of monkeys, but their existence in humans is assumed but not completely proven, because the kinds of testing it requires they are unable to do in humans so far. The theory is that certain neurons in your brain will "fire" electrical signals when you make an action, move your hand, for example. And that when you view this action in someone else, the same neurons will fire signals just viewing the action. This then alerts the body in a way that it feels as if it just did the same thing that it saw. This mirroring is supposed to help you feel or understand what you see, so in a way your body is sending the signals of something that you didn't do, but you viewed, so you can understand or empathize with what someone else is doing. The APA article says that:
"This neural mechanism is involuntary and automatic, with it we don't have to think about what other people are doing or feeling, we simply know. "
It makes it easy for us to perceive other people in the world around us without having to consciously think about it, which would slow us down and make social interaction more difficult.
This is where the connection to autism comes in. Dr. Ramachandran and his coworkers theorized that problems with how people with ASDs mirror neurons worked could contribute to their problems with understanding visual cues, connecting emotionally, and interacting in social situations. This connection could be a big step forwards in understanding how ASDs work, and in the long run helping to find out what causes it in the first place.
Their experiment showed that ASD patients showed a certain type of brain activity that they correlated with mirror neuron activity when they did things themselves (one example was moving their hand) but that they did not show activity when watching someone else move their hand, implying that they did not have an automatic physical understanding of what they saw. The control group, however, showed activity both when moving their hand and when watching someone else move their hand, as they were supposed to. This suggests that the ASD patients had dysfunctioning mirror neurons.
Problems with this are 1) Scientists have yet to narrow down mirror neuron activity to specific neurons in humans. They need to find a noninvasive way of testing for mirror neuron activity in humans that can be as reliable and accurate as the results found from monkeys.
2) Until they can do this, they can only theorize on connections between mirror neurons and ASDs. They have to prove their theories before they can put the knowledge to use in ASD research and possible treatments, preventions etc.
2 comments:
Yes, this was an interesting article and it seems like this could possibly be one of the causes for some autistic behavior. If there are indeed these mirror neurons that allow us to relate to other people's physical reactions and movements, someone that didn't have them or had damaged neurons wouldn't be able to react in the same way.
It seems like this would just be one reason that Autistic people think and behave like they do. There is also an article from Science Daily that talks about a study researchers did of the brain of Autistic children. They looked at how tightly bound or mobile water in the brain was and the maturation of the brains of Autistic children and children with typical development. They found that there was more of an accelerated brain growth early on with Autistic children.
Anyway, this is the link to the article.:http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/08/060826171847.htm
Neuroscience is very beneficial to the studies in science and psychology. Neuropsychologists study the brain and its nervous system to better understand and gain knowledge about our conscience, disorders, and emotions. The discovery of the "mirror neurons" demonstrated that a translation mechanism is present in the primate brain and automatically elicited when viewing others doin actions. I found an article that focuses on talking about the concept of mirror nearons: "the Neuroeconomics of Mind Reading and Empathy by Tani Singer and Ernest Fehr. Just look up the article in Jstor of the ereferences on the pratt library website.
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