Migrations & Education, Art & Bioethics: All about autism
April 30, 2007 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
One more day to go for Autism Awareness Month 2007 which has seen more than its share of stories on autism—let us hope that, once the “official” month for autism is past, we will still be hearing regularly about autism in the news. One hopes.
An article in the Kent County News today notes that as the incidence in autism grows, so have calls for educational initiatives nationwide. The Stamford Advocate (CT) reports on a family who has moved from California to the New York metro area in the search for the best for their autistic child; they are part of of the autism migration. Still out on the West Coast, 5-year old Elliot James Sylvester lives in California and expresses himself through art (greeting cards with his paintings—I’ve been curious about his choices of color—are viewable on Autissey).
In bioethics: What defines “personhood” in regard to neurology? Is there some innate system in our brains that enables us to detect personhood? Pure Pedantry has an entry on Neurological ‘Personhood’; summarized is an article by Martha Farah and Andrea Heberlein in the American Journal of Bioethics in which it is said that the authors
“argue that while an innate system for the detection of personhood exists in the human brain, it is so prone to being fooled by clearly non-person objects that it suggests that no reasonable standard for personhood can exist.”
Not being a philosopher, the arguments on this topic are best read in the original post and wish to highlight the part in which autism is mentioned.
Some individuals do not show normal development in the system of identifying personhood described. For example, individuals with autism sometimes show deficits in this area. What does the fact that this system is not universal say about ethical behavior? Clearly, many autistic people are still getting there, but they must be getting to ethical behavior by some other route.
My question from reading this is: What might be this “other route” by which it is suggested autistic people are “still getting” to personhood—–what are “other routes” to ethical behavior? And do those statements I just typed open up some misleading questions about autistic persons and ethics?
We all wish for the best our autistic children. I hope we can keep asking good questions in our search for new answers.
The bioethical and utilitarian “debate” about what does and does not constitute “personhood” should be as taboo as denying the holocaust. The fact that one human being is passing judgement on another human being and defining personhood is so offensive to me I don’t really know how to express my own outrage.
I don’t think I was being very precise in what I meant in that post, so let me clarify.
We know from imaging experiments that some individuals with autism do not activation in the area of the brain associated with faces. This part of the brain is called the fusiform face gyrus. We know that faces — as a special class of objects — are represented different in the human brain than other things.
This observation in individuals with autism led some researchers to speculate that it might explain some of the social difficulties that they have. If you have trouble recognizing faces as a special class of objects — that faces are fundamentally special — it is very difficult to interact with others in the way that they expect.
Now the article I cited was arguing that the system of recognizing personhood — of which the fusiform face gyrus is a part — is critical to ethical behavior. In essence they are saying that representing persons as special in the brain and being ethical towards them are inextricably linked.
But that argument does not quite work for me. I know people with autism. I have never found them to be more or less ethical than everyone else, and if the argument presented in the article is correct we wouldn’t expect that to be the case.
The point of my comment was to highlight a consequence of their argument. If we assume that ethical behavior is contingent on some brain system and autistic people show deficits in this system, then autistic people cannot be ethical in the same way as other people are.
As I think you and I would agree that this statement is patently false, then the argument in the article must be somehow fundamentally flawed.
I’m sorry I was so roundabout in my post, but I hope this clarifies where I was going with that.
Jake, Thanks so much for the clarification—-I was very interested to know your further thoughts about—and objections to—Farah’s and Heberlein’s article. My questions that you cited above were not meant to be provocative, but to consider the (troubling) implications of their article. I more tha appreciate your commenting here.
Some fMRI face studies in which autistics display typical fusiform gyrus or fusiform face area activation: Pierce et al. (2004), Hadjikhani et al. (2004), Piggot et al. (2004), Wang et al. (2004), Dapretto et al. (2006), Bird et al. (2006). And if you count conference posters, you have to add Pelphrey et al. (2005). And there was an IMFAR presentation (no time to look it up) last year which found typical FG activation in autistics performing a 1-back task using face images.
The earlier fMRI face studies (most famously, Schultz et al., 2000) had important methodological issues. I owe my involvement in autism research at least in part to successfully predicting that controlling for attention in autistics in fMRI face studies would produce typical FG activation.
For a comprehensive (rather than selective) look at the autism face studies (behavioural, neurophysiological, and functional imaging studies), see Jemel et al. (2006).
Most of what is popularly said to be “known” about how autistics look at and process face images is based on cliché rather than on the published data.
The real problem is when some non-autistics deny the personhood and/or humanity of autistics. That is, non-autistics look at autistics and fail to detect that there is a person there, or anything human. This common phenomenon can be seen, among many other places, in the writing of a lot of famous scientists, including Thomas Insel, Ivar Lovaas, Michael Tomasello, Steven Pinker, V.S. Ramachandran, etc. (sorry, again, no time to go fetch all the sources, but they’re out there…).