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Mirror neurons are a type of brain cell that seem to be involved in perceiving the intentions—the mental state—of another person. Mirror neurons are activated or “fire” both when we perform an action and also when we see that action being performed by someone else and it’s been hypothesized that there might be a dysfunction of the mirror neuron system in autistic persons. According to a 2006 article in Scientific American:
If the mirror neuron system is indeed involved in the interpretation of complex intentions, then a breakdown of this neural circuitry could explain the most striking deficit in people with autism, their lack of social skills. The other cardinal signs of the disorder–absence of empathy, language deficits, poor imitation, and so on–are also the kinds of things you would expect to see if mirror neurons were dysfunctional.
The July 1st Scientific American contains an interview with Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California at Los Angeles and who recently published Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others. Prof. Iacoboni notes that deficits in the functioning of mirror neurons can “in principle” also explain the motor and language deficits in autistic individuals:
The motor deficits in autism can be easily explained because mirror neurons are just special types of premotor neurons, brain cells essential for planning and selecting actions. It has been also hypothesized that mirror neurons may be important in language evolution and language acquisition. Indeed, a human brain area that likely contains mirror neurons overlaps with a major language area, the so-called Broca’s area. Thus, a deficit in mirror neurons can in principle account for three major symptoms of autism, the social, motor and language problems.
I’ve looked through the table of contents for Prof. Iacoboni’s book and can’t tell from the table of contents if he writes about how to address mirror neuron dysfunction. Charlie had to be taught to imitate and copy the actions of others; from watching him learn to move his tongue and lips to form sounds and also to learn to move his arms and legs to go down a ladder on a play structure, it’s apparent that he has difficulty planning and executing many motor actions. To teach Charlie to ride a bike and to play cello, we’ve had to consider the different steps involved. It’s not just a matter of teaching Charlie to balance on a bike, but also to understand to put his feet on the pedals; it’s not just a matter of teaching Charlie that the string farthest to the left is A, but how to angle his arm, elbow and shoulder to bow that string.
It’s also the case that as he’s gotten older, Charlie has figured out how to do more and more things (such as putting away the groceries) by his own observation, in imitation of us. And I’m a bit on the fence about to what extent he “lacks” empathy. It’s going into six weeks now since my husband seriously injured his back when he piggy-backed Charlie. Charlie has signaled his understanding of his dad’s needs by doing more for himself: Charlie’s been getting himself up and out of bed (even if he’s still very groggy) and — without any gentle tugs and half-lifts — has been walking himself out for the bus. He’s been waiting at the sidewalk to cross the street together with us; he’s been taking a full load plus of groceries, or books, or whatever. Indeed, Charlie’s imitation skills have grown as he’s gotten older and more alert and aware, as his ability to show that he knows what’s going on, even sometimes in other’s people’s minds.
The November 2007 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience was also devoted to mirror neurons.
Melody, sorry my explanation was too simplistic.
Any thing complex such as emotion requires an equally complex neural structure to generate and an equally complex neural structure to understand. Body language is complex because it requires the entire body to generate. To understand body language, one must emulate that body language in one’s own neural structures. One must emulate (on some level) the entire body motion that generates body language and then impute (or rather back-calculate) the emotional state that produces that body motion.
These are very big and complex neural tasks that require large neural structures to compute. Looking at very simple things isn’t going to be able to capture effects in very large and complex things.
Uta Frith’s work looks at very simple systems. Spell checking a book may tell you that every word is spelled correctly, but if they are arranged randomly the book is meaningless. The amount of data that people process to communicate is very large. We don’t appreciate how much data that is because our brains process it all automatically.
For anyone interested, here’s “Imitation and action understanding in autistic spectrum disorders:
How valid is the hypothesis of a deficit in the mirror neuron system?”
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~antonia/HamiltonBrindleyFrith_NPsy_2007.pdf
Also, I’ve never been in a behavior or social skills training for body language recognition, though I’ve been determined to have poor non-verbal communication comprehension, mainly because I cannot reliably give the signals I perceive and because I have difficulty with naming things, and also confusing similar-sounding or similar-meaning words (while I understand the distinctions in my head, I can say or write the wrong thing and not at all notice it, as evidenced from many a humorous interaction).
“The “lack of empathy” that ASDs have is the inability to sense another’s emotions as accurately as an NT can.”
And even that’s not universal – while not exactly typical of autistics, I perceive the emotions behind body language quickly and accurately compared to my NT friends, though I have major difficulties communicating it, particularly with complex emotional states. That’s because of language, though.
“The more successful way would be to say “What a great exhibit we saw!” ”
Unfortunately, there are so many ways to interpret alternative meanings behind comments like that, it’s impossible for me to tell if someone making such a comment wants me to respond or is simply giving their opinion. The confusion of trying to decide on one interpretation over many others in terms of response can lead to a sort of silent overload in my head, and it’s WAY worse with things like test questions at school (in eighth grade I calculated it out that I averaged missing 10% of test questions because of this).
It just would never occur to me unless prompted in some way, whether through words or body language or gesture, that a response is wanted. Usually the most I would respond is with a slight nod as an intermediary solution, though often my body language gets completely missed by others, so I either am not noticed or I must learn to almost painfully exaggerate my expressions, because my natural inclination is to be either subtle or explosive, but rarely in between.
Automatic responses are indeed very good friends of mine. :) Echolalia too.
I haven’t read the Uta Frith study, it does sound interesting.
I understand the argument about prompting, and subtle set ups, but it is very important not to prompt with infomation that a person with autism knows you already know. For instance, if I tell my son to “tell his grandmother about our visit to a museum” it is setting him up for an automatic response. The more successful way would be to say “What a great exhibit we saw!” Hopefully, in time he would volunteer independent information.
xRobin
“Empathy” is a very large and very complex concept. It has a lot of baggage when used to describe people. The definition can include the ability to sense another’s emotions and also the ability to sense another’s emotions and then reciprocate appropriately. A lack of “empathy” could be used to denote someone who doesn’t notice another’s pain but would care if they did noticed and also someone who does notice but doesn’t care, or someone who notices and deliberately makes that pain worse.
The “lack of empathy” that ASDs have is the inability to sense another’s emotions as accurately as an NT can. That is a neutral type of lack of empathy. Many NTs exhibit the behavior of sensing another’s emotions and then using that information to hurt them, as in bullying. That is an evil type of lack of empathy. That is the lack of empathy that John Best exhibits.
These are completely different types of lack of empathy.
1411 days ago
[...] seeming to move eight paces back for every seven forward, continues. I’ve noted his evolving emotional awareness; it’s not only in the pool that he can walk by himself, but also on the sidewalk and even in [...]
I agree with Melody. Though it seems like there are some very good thing about RDI, making subtle suggestions to speak wouldn’t have worked. Someone had to explicitly tell me, as an adult, that I was not responding to people. I try to keep that it mind, but that doesn’t mean I can come up with a response.
Ironically, on (non-autistic) e-mail lists, I have trouble getting people to respond to me because I “comment” instead of asking questions.
It seems to me like their are certain basic assumptions (about autism) and that the theories (such as this) are built on those assumptions. But no one bothers to questions the assumptions (at least not the researchers), like the idea that autistics lack empathy. If your interested, I managed to take the whole thing apart in my own revamping It’s unfortunate that it came out as long as it did, but I had a lot of info:
http://www.autism-society.org/site/DocServer/Interpretations_of_the_Mind.pdf?docID=9343
I think the fundamental property of mirror neurons is that they let someone emulate the thinking of another. Perfect mirror neurons would let you emulate another’s thinking exactly, and to the last detail.
The problem is that activation of mirror neurons amounts to pattern recognition. You see someone else, observe their body language, eye movements, speech, subtle movements, integrate it all together with what you already know of that person and activate mirror neurons so you emulate what the person is thinking for them to produce that body language, speech, eye movements and other subtle movements.
It is very easy to practice psychological projection and impute your own mental state from what you observe and to be wrong. You can then see things that are not there. Uta Frith did a famous study where subjects were to impute the “emotions” and “motivations” of triangles that were being moved according to a script. NTs did much “better”, in that they got the scripted emotions and motivations correct much better than did the ASDs.
http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/125/8/1839
They say “This finding suggests a physiological cause for the mentalizing dysfunction in autism”. But triangles don’t have emotions or motivations. There is no intrinsically correct representation of the mental state of a triangle. The NTs were seeing something (a triangle with an emotional state) that isn’t there.
I think the compulsion induced by the NT motor neurons to observe emotional motivation is so strong that it is observed even when it is not there. I think this is the same difficulty that people have looking at words without reading them. Of hearing speech as sounds and not as words. Of seeing bodies moving and not observing body language
“They would go to the table and she would say, “This table is soooo sticky”. No response. She might wait a few beats and repeat the same declarative sentence. The object would be for him to independently get a sponge, or in a perfect world say “I’ll clean it”, or “You clean it”, just interactive language.”
A specific type of interactive language, yes. Certainly not the kind of thing I’m prone to.Really, it would not in the slightest occur to me that a response might be wanted, unless it were said like “This table is sooo sticky. What do you think we should do to make it not sticky?”
What about all those kids who do such good imitation of others? Uta Frith did an experiment specifically to show that autistic kids were just as good (and in one case better) at imitation of hand movement (hand movements being the primary movement that cases the “mirror neurons” to fire).
What Melody describes sounds to me like a perfectly normal (i.e. normal if you’re autistic) description of the split between emotion and intellect. You can get the emotion context or you can get the literal speech but not both at the same time.
Kristina,
What I did find interesting about the RDI is that it elicits independent (not rote) thinking. An example would be when the therapist did a cooking segment with our son. They would go to the table and she would say, “This table is soooo sticky”. No response. She might wait a few beats and repeat the same declarative sentence. The object would be for him to independently get a sponge, or in a perfect world say “I’ll clean it”, or “You clean it”, just interactive language.
As far as empathy goes. I remember saying to my son “I am soooo tired”. He did not respond. I repeated the phrase. Again, no response. Finally, after several attempts, he said “Go lie down”. Music to my ears, to be sure, but that is the simple jist.
xRobin
Melody said: I wonder if part of the mirror neuron thing is that for autistics the neurons get applied to other areas – such as echolalia or echopraxia or probably a lot of things -
I was wondering about that myself, as I’ve always been terrible at certain kinds of imitation (e.g., dancing, learning how to throw/catch a ball by watching people do it, etc.), but very prone to other kinds of imitation (lots of “quoting”, esp. from favorite movies and books while growing up, some echolalia, etc.).
It definitely seems too simplistic and even contradictory to say that “autistics have deficits in imitation”, as the popularity of echolalia in our lot definitely speaks to some pretty extensive imitation abilities there, despite difficulties imitating in other contexts.
Hmm. Maybe this is why both my dad and I (who are both autistic) have a lot of trouble learning to do something just by having someone tell us or show us, but we have to actually do it a few times in order to learn it.
Also, another interesting factor, is that I actually do perceive emotional states from facial expressions and “hidden” intentions pretty quickly and accurately, though this has been difficult to measure, as I can rarely come up with the right word to describe the emotion when called to it on the spot. However, while I can imitate these expressions for the “appropriate” occasions, I usually don’t have enough mental energy to do both that and use/process language, so generally I stick with unconventional body language so that people yell at me less. I wonder if part of the mirror neuron thing is that for autistics the neurons get applied to other areas – such as echolalia or echopraxia or probably a lot of things – and so they can’t stretch enough to do the other things either most of the time or at all, or require a lot of mental energy, depending on the individual.
@Robin,
Interesting about the RDI—I’ve studied it but not done it formally. Have to say that any therapist who has worked long enough with Charlie has become quite aware of how he tries to distract them about something and then go for the reinforcer….
I’ve wondered about empathy and think it is something that has developed over time in Charlie, as part of his growth and maturity. Some of it is just being more aware of those around him, plus lately I have started to explain things more to him—even like “Dad’s back is really hurting him, so he can’t pick you up.”
Andy is a pretty good imitator, especially of sounds. And he is doing much better with tasks around the house.
Eleanor needed a lot of imitation instruction and I would not call her fluent, although she is much, much improved. Certainly it was what they call one of those “pivotal cusp skills”.
That said, I am not sure that fluent imitation is a completely necessary prerequisite to empathy. For quite a while now Eleanor has demonstrated more subtlety, anticipation, and diplomacy that tells me that there is empathy, although not always sympathy :-). I suspect it has as much to do with our demonstration of empathy with her as anything.
We also did the “do this” routine, and it certainly paid off. What do you think about this as a segue to RDI? I wonder if imitating gives birth to the next phase, as “checking in” to see what the other person is doing. Given that we didn’t start RDI until our son was in his late teens, it was tough to teach an old kid new tricks, but it is worthy of consideration.
xRobin
The mirror neuron theory has focused on something that has been a particular concern in Charlie’s learning—imitation. I didn’t realize it in those early days of him doing ABA in 1999, but teaching him to “do this” was a skill that really got his learning started—after that, we could start to teach him to do certain actions and also to imitate sounds, and to talk.