The “Hyper” of Autism?
A new theory from the first issue of the Frontiers in Neuroscience attempts to explain what autism is: Autism is an “intense world syndrome” in which a person has “hyper-perception, hyper-attention, and hyper-memory” and has “hyper-functionality” rather than “hypo-functionality”—-has an excessive amount of ability in some areas, rather than being simply lacking skills and abilities. The full abstract:
While significant advances have been made in identifying the neuronal structures and cells affected, a unifying theory that could explain the manifold autistic symptoms has still not emerged. Based on recent synaptic, cellular, molecular, microcircuit, and behavioral results obtained with the valproic acid (VPA) rat model of autism, we propose here a unifying hypothesis where the core pathology of the autistic brain is hyper-reactivity and hyper-plasticity of local neuronal circuits. Such excessive neuronal processing in circumscribed circuits is suggested to lead to hyper-perception, hyper-attention, and hyper-memory,which may lie at the heart of most autistic symptoms. In this view, the autistic spectrum are disorders of hyper-functionality, which turns debilitating, as opposed to disorders of hypo-functionality, as is often assumed. We discuss how excessive neuronal processing may render the world painfully intense when the neocortex is affected and even aversive when the amygdala is affected, leading to social and environmental withdrawal. Excessive neuronal learning is also hypothesized to rapidly lock down the individual into a small repertoire of secure behavioral routines that are obsessively repeated. [my emphasis added]
This theory does seem to apply to my son Charlie, whose abilities swing between excessiveness in some regards (he can swim, it seems, in the roughest ocean waves for long periods of time; he may have perfect pitch, and is very musically inclined) and a complete lack in other areas (reading, to name one—-interestingly, both Jim and I taught ourselves to read at the age of 4: it might be said that our hyper-ability to read is the exact inverse of Charlie’s challenges to do so).
Thanks to Frontal Cortex for posting about this theory.
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POSTED IN: Neuroscience, Science
15 opinions for The “Hyper” of Autism?
m
Oct 26, 2007 at 12:35 am
My gift is that I make excessively perfect toast. My deficits seem to encompass every aspect of everything else…but toast? I will take that to new levels.
Susan Etlinger
Oct 26, 2007 at 2:28 am
Hi Kristina, very intriguing. It does sound intuitively true, doesn’t it? But we’ll see. Thanks as always for being the best autism news source around.
Cliff
Oct 26, 2007 at 6:47 am
To me, part of it seems subjective, at least from the perspective of an autistic.
Take, for example, auditory recognition. I probably can hear different noises and sounds than most. Now, that can be said to be be hypersensitive, except that it seems to be much from a more direct sense of sound, or to some degree that I don’t have a filter. Is that hypersensitive, really, or just the reverse? Wouldn’t arguably a world without a filter, the one as directly correlated, be the default as it samples most directly the surrounding world, where the NT experience would be hyposensitive? Or should it be a more technical “hypersensitive compared to NT perception”?
But, the subjectivity of the comparison aside, it’s been something that I’ve recognized as true for a while. It seems intuitive, and in practice the recognition seems to hold true. Perhaps noteworthy in this regard is the tendency of gifted kids to have some autistic traits…
Cliff
Marcie
Oct 26, 2007 at 9:11 am
This is better than many other theories, but I still think it has to do more with mono-processing, which would indeed emphasis some things and cause deficits in others. I can sometimes be biased regarding nts, but I don’t think it’s my talents that cause my issues with people.
Bink
Oct 26, 2007 at 12:05 pm
Thanks for writing about this, Kristina. It rings true to me. (BTW a few days ago my child’s music teacher called to tell me that she was pretty sure my child, like Charlie, had perfect pitch. She said this is a rare talent for a seven year old. Neither my husband nor I can sing worth a damn or plays an intrument so we are tickled by this.)
Patrick
Oct 26, 2007 at 4:44 pm
They seem to have done quite a lot of work on this.
Too bad they didn’t even hit on depression symptomology, a search through the pdf for ‘depress’ yeilded only one reference.
So I am left wondering how they could have a unifying theory and ignore depression, hmmm?
It’s easily noted by more than one set of other providers:
http://aut.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/10/1/103
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/jadd/1998/00000028/00000002/00425080
Regan
Oct 26, 2007 at 6:19 pm
(How well can one study depression is a valproic acid mouse model?)
Admittedly, I’m not going to read this closely until tonight, and the paper seems to cover alot of bases as a review of the neurology and cognitive theories, but I think that to some extent this unified theory hypothesis may hinge on the accuracy of the experimental model to autistic spectrum disorders in humans. Maybe it’ll be more clear how closely it fits after I read the article.
Kristina, thanks for giving us more food for thought!
Kristina Chew, PhD
Oct 26, 2007 at 8:16 pm
Cliff, I like the perspective shifting you suggest—rather perhaps like the change in harmonies that occurs when one plays different scales on a piano. Charlie has been working on the C scale for the past year and we just started D major—sharps and flats change things significantly.
larry
Oct 27, 2007 at 3:00 am
The problem would be in diagnosing autism. It’s a spectrum disorder, so I wonder if people who are just slightly autistic are hypersensitive–or people who are severly autistic. I know a woman who was a foster mother for a six-year-old autistic boy who had chewed his hand off at the wrist. I knew also knew an autistic girl who would eat big chunks of flesh off her arm. She told me that she remembered the pain was excrutiating, but that’s really hard to imagine. I just have to believe she was hypo-sensitive.
The AS Man
Oct 27, 2007 at 9:43 am
Gee, I always knew I was too smart for my own good.
Joe Mele
Oct 27, 2007 at 11:50 am
I am thinking this could explain the reason whymany autistics seem to improve with age. Basically they are getting old and therefore have less of an overload due to the neural processing becoming more inefficient ie breaking down with age.
Savantism could be explained as well.
I think this is a very promising viewpoint. “Autism every day” film should go down in history as a portrayal of autistics that is as ignorant as the portrayal of black people in the film The Birth of a Nation in 1915.
larry
Oct 27, 2007 at 12:24 pm
Hi Joe Mele:
I think savantism is a bogus idea. I think that the so-called autistic savants are geniuses across the board. They’re just covert about most of it and have as rich an inner life any anyone else. Maybe even more so.
Marcie
Oct 27, 2007 at 6:39 pm
Larry, it’s been my experience that hypo- and hyper-sensitivies go together, but this may be getting off the subject.
Joe Mele, I beleive the reason autistics “improve” over time is that same reason virtually all people progress over time - they learn. Just because someone is autistic does not mean that they are stuck in tiem. But they do have to learn social rules by rote, whereas in neurotypicals have more of the circuitry for automatically learning social rules, that is, their intellect gets signals from their emotions. Damasio in “Decartes Error” and Goleman in “Social Intelligence” has more about this (though Goleman separately discusses autism and get into the same ol’ stuff about lack of theory of mind and doesn’t connect his earlier discussion on the orbito-frontal cortex, though there’s no reason why he should because he hasn’t particularly studied autism and is not autistic. Neither is Damasio but he doesn’t even get into autism at all.)
Kristina Chew, PhD
Oct 27, 2007 at 9:35 pm
Just from experience—-Charlie seems to be in some sort of “growth spurt” or “development burst” (neither are exactly the right words) at this moment. Whereas, at 6-8, he seemed to have and be stalling. His awareness and understanding are vastly greater and growing every day, just in small ways and large.
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Oct 28, 2007 at 5:10 pm
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