According to a recent paper in Nature Neuroscience, children with autism have virtually no activity in their brain’s mirror neuron system, the apparatus that facilitates imitation and empathy. The researchers believe this malfunction may be the primary cause of autism. Link.
Reflections on Mirror Neurons
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This sounds a bit optimistic to me. There are task for on autists are superior to normals, e.g. in matching embedded figures. How does that mesh with any story about mirror neurons?
Cf. this free Brain article:
https://brain.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/122/7/1305
This makes sense, wrote about it in my post here:
https://computingbrain.wordpress.com/2006/12/15/mirror-neurons-and-autism/
I do read a lot of research on supposed causes of autism. This is just another piece of a very big puzzle. To say this is THE cause is nonsense. There is a very large body of evidence to suggest that the main cause is due to toxic overload. MMR, exitotoxins, environmental rubbish…you name it…our children are being bombarded by it.
The latest research that I believe is starting to really get to the cause, is coming from Dr. Amy Yasko in the states. We are going over some dvds of a presentation she gave, and it makes startling sense, showing that children are almost certainly affected on many different fronts, all curable with bio-medical intervention.
I will look into the mirror neurons and see if it is something that can we can work with.
Many thanks.
This kind of issue was a big puzzle on my mind before. I was wondering why there are some children born with abnormal activity until I’ve found this post.
It helps me a lot. Thanks for sharing this.