Brain Scans, Good Enough for the Dalai Lama, good enough for me
There was an interesting article in the last “Weekend Journal” (Jan 19-21) The question put forward by the Dalai Lama -could a person change the physical nature of the brain through mediation? Most doctors said no at first but then tests soon began. Researchers were able to give credence to the idea that the physical of the brain could be changed through meditation. They used a brain scan to show that a person who meditated was able to relax their thought producing frontal lobes and in fact medications such as Paxil taken for anxiety actually increased brain activity in the frontal lobes of the brain and decreased activity in the feel good rear of our brains.
(I will get this link and update this post) I thought, the same procedure could be used to look at how an Autistic brain functioned, surely we have tried this? After a few minutes of meditation , I was able to relax. Then I find this article.
By Mark Roth, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07024/756147-114.stm
People with autism have been described as being cut off from the world around them. But a series of studies done at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh have now shown that in a very real way, autistic people are also cut off from themselves.
Scans done by Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging show that various regions in the brains of high-functioning autistics don’t communicate with each other as well as they do in typical people’s brains.
This basic breakdown could help explain everything from why people with autism often lack common-sense reasoning to why they don’t understand emotions and have trouble recognizing faces. In a breakthrough study three years ago, researchers at Carnegie Mellon and Pitt found that more advanced autistics were good at knowing words and their definitions, but poor at understanding the meaning of complex sentences.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, which measures blood flow to different parts of the brain in real time, they showed that the language-processing areas of autistics’ brains were poorly synchronized compared with nonautistic subjects. Since then, the two research centers have shown the same poor connectivity in autistics’ brains when they were playing a geometric game, and when they were at rest.
A study publicized by Carnegie Mellon last fall offers an explanation for why this might be happening. After examining how water flowed through the connective white matter that makes up about half the brain, researchers discovered that those brain cells were much more poorly organized in people with autism. The white matter sends electrical signals from one part of the brain to another, said Marcel Just, director of Carnegie Mellon’s brain imaging center.
“So why are autistics’ brain poorly synchronized?” he said. “Maybe because the cables are not quite right.” Other types of brain tests have shown the same kind of connectivity problems. At the University of Washington, researcher Michael Murias used EEGs to measure the brain waves of 18 people with autism and 18 without it. The readings from 124 electrodes on each person’s scalp showed the brain waves in people with autism were much less coordinated, particularly between the frontal lobes, where rational analysis takes place, and the rest of the brain, Dr. Murias said.
The imaging done during language tests a few years ago helped explain a phenomenon that autism researchers have long known about, said Nancy Minshew, director of Pitt’s Collaborative Programs of Excellence in Autism.
“What we see in our verbal [autistic] people across a lot of areas is that they have trouble with higher-level interpretations or understandings. They can read stories and have incredible vocabularies, but they don’t understand the real meaning of stories.” They can be especially confused if the stories don’t follow certain axioms they’ve learned, Dr. Minshew said.
She knows one young autistic man, for instance, who has read Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” more than once, “but he says, ‘I still don’t understand why Romeo and Juliet got married; it’s against the rules.’” They also have trouble with metaphors and other symbolic meanings of words, she said. She recalled sitting with a 9-year-old autistic patient one day when she told him, “We’d better get busy or we’ll be in the doghouse with your mom, and he started looking around for the doghouse.” In autistics’ brain images, the centers that recognize words and remember their definitions are often brightly lit up, Dr. Just said, but the areas of the cortex that discern the meaning of whole sentences are underactive.
People with autism have the same kind of processing problems when they try to recognize people or objects, said Mark Strauss, a research psychologist at Pitt. During normal development, babies learn at a young age to identify the differences in men’s and women’s faces, and that ability improves as they get older. Autistic children can do the same thing, Dr. Strauss said, but rather than looking at the whole face, they tend to use certain details, such as the thickness of the eyebrows or the size of the nose.
Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07024/756147-114.stm
A Link to the actual study Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon University
