Psychological Explanations
Much research has been done in order to discover what causes the brain abnormalities and unusual behavior that manifests in individuals diagnosed with autism. Many of the results show that mirror neurons, which are largely involved in the deficits that individuals with autism experience, such as social isolation, lack of eye contact, poor language capacity, the absence of empathy and the inability to construct a “theory of other minds”, do not function properly. According to research, mirror neurons play an important role in social impairment in children with ASD. They are mostly located in the regions of the cerebral cortex and the cingulated and insular cortices. The cerebral cortex is a sheet of neuronal tissue. It is essential to memory, attention, perceptual awareness, thought, language and consciousness. Mirror neurons, or more precisely the networks they are part of initiate a person’s ability to determine the intentions of other individuals by mentally simulating their actions. It is strongly believed that mirror neurons are also involved in a person’s ability to imitate what they see and to learn from live models. Damage to the mirror neurons may also result in the incapacity of the child to see himself through other people’s eyes, which impairs his sense of self-awareness and introspection. Mirror neurons are performing precisely the same functions that seem to be disrupted in autism.
In a different study, it was found that when children with autism were observing another person performing a certain action, there was a lack of mu suppression, a type of brain wave rhythm which has the maximal amplitude of somatosensory cortices in their brain and provides proof that individuals are able to relate to what they see. When the children were observing a person in front of them performing an action, no mu suppression was detected. However, when children with autism were observing themselves performing the action in the mirror, significant mu suppression was detected. This is one of the main reasons why children with autism have difficulty relating to others cognitively and emotionally and imitating their actions. Furthermore, it has been discovered that in some cases of autistic children, the mirror neuron dysfunction may be the result of the fact that the children are unable to socially relate the present stimulus to anything they know, or to identify themselves with the person who performs an action in front of them, for example. In this study, it was also shown that the suppression of the mu wave in children with autism spectrum disorder depends on the level of familiarity that the child experiences. The greatest amount of mu suppression was shown when the child observed his own movement, followed by familiar individuals, such as the child’s parents and then a stranger’s action, to which they reported seeing the least suppression. When the mu wave in children with ASD is suppressed this means that the child was able to identify himself with the person in front of him or was able to establish a connection between them (Oberman, 2005). Hence, autistic children are able to identify with themselves and somewhat with people they are familiar with, but are unable to do so with objects or people that are unfamiliar to them, thus again indicating impairment in the mirror neuron system of the brain.
Another possible way to explain the unusual behaviors in children with autism is that they have distorted salience landscape, which is a map created by the amygdala and is used to determine the emotional significance of everything in the individual’s environment. The amygdala is the part of the brain, which is responsible for the processing and memory of emotional reactions.The researchers hypothesized that the distortion might be caused by altered connections between the cortical areas that process sensory input and the amygdala or between the limbic structures and the frontal lobes that regulate the resulting behavior. It is indeed considered that exactly these connections between the regions of the brain are capable of causing an extreme emotional response, or like the researchers call it- an autonomic storm in the child’s brain. This damage to a child’s salience landscape could be the result of an early in life epileptic seizures, too intense for a little child.