• Question: I have a friend who is mildly autistic but I don't understand how it works. If you were to look inside her brain, would you be able to see something different? If not, how does it work?

    Asked by Jesschan02 to Susan, Rebecca on 23 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Susan Cartwright

      Susan Cartwright answered on 23 Jun 2015:

      Yes, in fact you would see something different.

      You can watch the brain work using a technique called “functional MRI” (fMRI). In fMRI, you put someone inside an MRI scanner and ask them to do some task, e.g. look at pictures or do mental arithmetic. The MRI scanner is sensitive to water, and blood is mostly water, so it tells you where in the brain the blood supply increases, to power more active cells. This tells you which parts of the brain are engaged in this task.

      This has been done with volunteers who were on the autistic spectrum. Compared to non-autistic volunteers, there were many differences, particularly in the parts of the brain associated with social interaction, language processing and handling repetitive tasks. There are many differences and the literature is very technical, but if you do a Google Images search on “fMRI autistic brain” you will see lots of examples.

    • Photo: Rebecca Dewey

      Rebecca Dewey answered on 23 Jun 2015:

      So if we were just to take a picture of her brain, it probably wouldn’t be any different from any other girl of approximately the same age. The autism doesn’t really affect what the brain *looks like* in that way. However, what is different, is the way her brain works. We can measure which parts of the brain are helping to perform a certain task by seeing where the blood goes, and which parts of the brain suddenly start using up more blood (or rather they’re using the resources that are carried around by the blood) than they were before the person started doing that task.

      Some recent research came out, and was published by a group in Pittsburgh in America, showing that there was a specific area of the brain that people with autism use less than people without autism. The group recruited 17 young adults with high-functioning autism and 17 people without autism. They asked them to lie down in an MRI scanner and took images of their brains while they thought about a range of different social interactions, like “hug,” “humiliate,” “kick” and “adore.” The patterns of areas of the brain that gets used while doing this task is very similar across people without autism. BUT: there was an area associated with the representation of “self” that the people with autism did not use when doing these tasks. When people with autism were told to think about hugging or adoring or persuading or hating, they didn’t think about *doing that to another person*, but just thought about the abstract action, not linked to another person. The researchers could tell that by the fact that in the autistic people, the part of the brain that usually gives us the idea of “self” didn’t start using oxygen and demanding more blood during the task, whereas in the people without autism, it did!

Comments