Daydream Believer
Research by scientists at the Center for Autism Research at the Children’s Hospital Research Center in La Jolla, California, has found that “autistic individuals do not daydream about themselves and other people whenever their minds have the opportunity to wander off.” According to Medical News Today (May 13, 2006), reseacher Daniel Kennedy says that
the function of daydreaming is a high metabolism one which uses up lots of oxygen and glucose - and the neurons are really firing. He says daydreaming is facilitated through a distributed set of brain regions, which scientists call a resting network. The resting network probably has a lot to do with the building up of self and self-awareness.
This resting network focuses on the self, and how the self interacts with other selves (other people).
I have been puzzling over this research since reading about it this weekend. Charlie–especially when his pupils slide into the corner of his eyes and he tilts his head a certain way, and he does not respond to language or visual/auditory stimuli until after repeated requests (and sometimes not until after a gentle tap on the arm)–seems to be thinking about something quite unrelated to his immediate surroundings. In other words, Charlie seems, I would say, to be daydreaming.
Noting that “the frontal cortex in the brain or a person with autism grows too fast and too big,” Kennedy and his colleagues did MRI scans to measure the levels of activity in 15 individuals at varying levels on the autism spectrum, and in 14 individuals without autism. It was found that
the resting network of autistic people does not fire up or switch off - it just keeps ticking over.
The researchers conclude that autistic people, whose resting network is not fired up while resting, do not daydream in the same way non-autistic people do.
They also found that those whose resting network activity levels differed the most from the control group’s were precisely the ones with the most abnormal [my emphasis] levels of social behaviours. There was a clear correlation between low levels of activity in the resting network during rest with difficulties in social behaviours.
Kennedy said it is very hard to know what autistic people are thinking when resting, when the mind is allowed to wander. The higher the severity of an individual’s autism is, the more repetitive his/her thoughts tend to be while resting - they are drawn by stereotyped thoughts, such as calendars, schedules, maps, computers - fixed, rigid things.
Who exactly are these control-group “people without autism”? Did researcher Kennedy’s thinking that the “resting network” has something to do with the self and self-awareness lead him to investigate brain activity in ASD persons? What does he mean by “abnormal levels of social behaviors?”
Isn’t daydreaming thought of as “abnormal social behavior” when a student is in a classroom and not paying attention? Or when a person is in a social situation (being introduced to a visitor, for example) and that person does not respond?
The numerous responses to Ballastexistenz’s post, Never Daydream? Ummm… suggest that the researcher Kennedy and his colleagues may have a few daydreams of their own about autism and the “autistic brain.”
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POSTED IN: Health, Neuroscience, Psychology, Science
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