Empathy, Imitation, and Mirror Neurons

Another post about empathy, which is held to be something that individuals in the spectrum lack. I wrote last week about a study that suggested quite the contrary, that individuals on the autism spectrum are hypersensitive to the feelings and emotional states of those around them. It's posited that, due to feeling things too intensely, some (like my son, I think) might seem to "withdraw" from a situation, overwhelmed (rather than underwhelmed) by what they feel. If this is the case, quite a bit of research about autism might need to be reconsidered.

Sstudies linking mirror neurons to autism adhere to the premise that autistic individuals lack empathy. Mirror neurons are a type of brain cell that are involved in perceiving the intentions—the mental state—of another person. Mirror neurons are activated and “fire” both when one performs an action, and also when one sees someone else performing that same action. It's been hypothesized that there might be a dysfunction of the mirror neuron system in individuals on the autism spectrum.

A new study by Duke University Medical Center researchers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences looks at neurons that mirror attention and "observed gaze" in monkeys (so far, research on mirror neurons has only been carried out in monkeys, not humans; hence the graphic illustrating this post). Previous studies on mirror neurons looked the imitation of actions. From yesterday's Medical News:

The attention-mirroring neurons turned out to be located in the parietal lobe, a part of the brain dedicated to eye movements and attention. This is important because it suggests that reading someone else's attention involves the same brain circuits that control one's own attention, Platt said.

In the experiment, the researchers first established whether a particular neuron responded when the monkey himself gazed to the left or to the right. Then they presented the monkey with photos of monkeys randomly looking left or right, thus matching the preferred direction of the neuron on half of trials.

Images of monkey faces randomly lit up for 100 to 800 milliseconds (about the time it takes a fastball to leave the pitcher's hand and cross home plate) and then a yellow box appeared randomly either on the left or right.

Monkeys had to shift their gaze from the center to the box as quickly as possible and maintain fixation for at least 300 ms to receive a juice reward. Typically, monkeys were faster to shift gaze to the box when they had previously seen a picture of a monkey looking in that direction - presumably because their own attention had shifted in the same direction.

What interests me here is the scientists' focus on the gaze and attention; on looking and attention.

Since he was a baby, Charlie has had trouble focusing his eyes and directing his gaze to whatever we might ask him. He wore prism lenses briefly to help his eyes converge (to get both eyes look at the same thing at the same time); these helped for a time, and then seemed to lose their effectiveness. To have him look at what we're looking at, we have to tell him to do so.

On the other hand, Charlie copies actions that we're doing, and sometimes spontaneously, more and more. One of the first things he was taught when he was 2 1/2 was to imitate the actions of others. At the time, we thought the focus was simply that he do what his therapist was doing---dropping a block in a bucket, for instance---but he was also learning how to attend and to observe; to watch what someone else was doing.

In Poetics, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle said that imitation is natural and "implanted" (physikos) in humans. I've wrestled with this statement a lot in thinking about Charlie and his learning: Without being specifically taught to imitate, perhaps Charlie would not imitate so readily now. And yet there's something that's very sui generis to Charlie that he doesn't seem inclined to "do as others to," and often forges on, doing his own thing.

Indeed, once upon a long time ago, when Charlie was i daycare and about 17 months old, he started to push a toy lawnmower in front of him around the room. Pretty soon, all the other children were pushing toy shopping carts and other plastic items on wheels around the room----imitating Charlie.