Neurobiologists from Duke University have found that, in birds who are able to learn songs—parrots, songbirds and hummingbirds—the brain structures involved in singing are connected to those that control movement. Further the brain areas that control movement “share many functional similarities with the brain areas for singing. This suggests that the brain pathways used for vocal learning evolved out of the brain pathways used for motor control,” according to Science Daily. That is, the ability to control movement is linked to vocal learning; the researchers also suggest that the same holds for humans:

Human brain structures for speech also lie adjacent to, and even within, areas that control movement. “We can make a plausible argument that in humans, our spoken language areas also evolved out of pre-existing motor pathways,” he said. These pathways, he believes, date back to the common ancestor of reptiles, birds and mammals, creatures called stem amniotes that lived about 300 million years ago.

The results from birds are consistent with the hypothesis that spoken language was preceded by gestural language, or communication based on movements (one of several competing explanations for the origin of spoken language), [associate professor of neurobiology Erich] Jarvis adds. Both humans and chimps gesture with the limbs while communicating, and young children gesture even before they begin talking. “Gesturing is something that goes along naturally with speech. The brain areas used for gesturing may have been co-opted and used for speech,” Jarvis said.

My son Charlie first learned to communicate—to “talk”—via sign language taught to him by a speech therapy graduate student who first taught him to imitate simple gestures and then linked those to specific things (”cracker” and “chip”; I’ve written about this in a post entitled What If My Child Never Talks?). Somehow having to do some physical action (shaking his elbow, tapping the back of his hand—these aren’t the signs for “cracker” or “chip,” but modified signs the therapist made up for Charlie) helped Charlie to start communicating and expressing himself on his own, at a time when he was not able to say most of the sounds of English (at that time, the only sound Charlie said was “duh”). Just learning those few signs seemed to give Charlie a kind of confidence and peace and he slowly moved on to saying sounds and learning to link those to specific objects and things he wanted, like being carried.

And the experience taught me that, when it comes to communicating, there’s more than one way to do it (our then ABA consultant was against teaching Charlie sign language)—that words don’t say it all. Charlie talks in short sentences and phrases now; I still rely on his non-verbal sounds (like his warbling and humming and on his singing to communicate and “converse,” and to get a sense of how Charlie is feeling. Perhaps there’s more to being “bird brained” than ’tis thought.

Genetic and environmental factors are frequently cited as causes for autism (and, just to be upfront about it, the genetic studies best explain why my son is autistic). Three recent studies suggest that immunological factors ought also to be considered.

Earlier this month, two studies conducted by researchers at the University of California-Davis M.I.N.D. Institute suggested links between autism and mothers’ immune systems. According to one study, some cases of “regressive autism” (in which a child seems to be developing normally and then loses skills and becomes autistic, in contrast to “early onset autism”) may be connected to the immune systems of mothers during pregnancy; researchers hope to further study IgG antibodies as a potential factor for autism (IgG antibodies are responsible for long-term immune system responses to infection and can also contribute to autoimmune diseases such as arthritis, multiple sclerosis and lupus). Another study found that an interaction between fetal brain cells and antibodies in mothers’ blood could be linked to “stereotypies” such as flapping, toe-walking, spinning, and other repetitive behaviors often noted in autistic children.

A third study reported in the February 25th Science Daily has found that mothers of some autistic children may have produced antibodies during pregnancy that affected their fetus’ brain tissue. The antibodies crossed the placenta and may have caused changes that led to autism:

Mostly anecdotal past evidence of immune system involvement has emerged from unusual antibody levels in some autistic children and from postmortem brain tissue studies showing immune abnormalities in areas of the brain. Antibodies are proteins the body makes in response to viruses and bacteria or sometimes mistakenly against its own tissues. Yet, the majority of children with autism have no clinical evidence of autoimmune diseases, which prompted researchers to wonder whether the antibodies transferred from mother to child during pregnancy could interfere with the fetal brain directly.

To test their hypothesis, the research team used a technique called immunoblotting (or Western blot technology), in which antibodies derived from blood samples are exposed to adult and fetal brain tissue to check whether the antibodies recognize and react against specific brain proteins.

Comparing the antibody-brain interaction in samples obtained from 100 mothers of autistic children and 100 mothers of children without autism, researchers found either stronger reactivity or more areas of reactivity between antibodies and brain proteins in about 40 percent of the samples obtained from the mothers of autistic children. Further, the presence of maternal antibodies was associated with so-called developmental regression in children, increasingly immature behaviors that are a hallmark of autism.

While the findings suggest an association between autism and the presence of fetal brain antibodies, the investigators say further studies are needed to confirm that particular antibodies do indeed cross the placenta and cause damage to the fetal brain.

“The mere fact that a pregnant woman has antibodies against the fetal brain doesn’t mean she will have an autistic child,” [Harvey] Singer [M.D., director of pediatric neurology at Johns Hopkins Children's Center] says.

The new study will be published in the February issue of the Journal of Neuroimmunology.

Since these studies connecting maternal antibodies to autism are focused on the immune system of mothers, it will be interesting to see if there is a greater focus on how a mother’s health might affect her fetus and its development, and what this might have to do with autism.

Science fiction blog io9 considers what it would be like to have a Google brain implant:

In John Varley’s upcoming scifi novel Rolling Thunder, everyone has a brain implant that lets them google information constantly. And many futurists are saying this technology will become a reality long before we colonize Mars. The question isn’t whether we’ll have google brain implants (or the futuristic search engine equivalent), but how we’ll handle them. What exactly would be the plusses and minuses of being able to google information instantaneously in your head, without anybody knowing you’re doing it?

A google brain implant could work in lots of ways. With technology we have right now, people could wear a brain-computer interface helmet like the one sold by Emotiv, and use that to control the cursor on a wearable computer with a tiny monitor that’s attached to your classes. So the thing wouldn’t be implanted in your brain, but it would be responding to electrical signals from your brain. More sophisticated wearables like those described in Vernor Vinge’s novel Rainbow’s End might allow you to google via subtle movements of your body, and then display results in special contact lenses.

Animal science professor Temple Grandin has often described how she “thinks in pictures” and compared her thought processes to using Google to search the Internet the images. So perhaps the Googled, or Googling, mind already exists……

While I’m no graduate of Google U—and Google has been a helpful gateway to find information, for sure—I think there’s much to be said for the good old-fashioned skill of memorization. I do often find myself “Googling” some term or other to find out a date or some facts, but knowing that something is “stored in your brain”—”written on the soul,” as the Greek philosopher Plato puts it in the Phaedrus—-is as important as ever. I teach Latin and ancient Greek and learning both of these involves a fair amount of memorization of declensions and conjugations and grammatical rules: Surely there’s a reason we wonder at  Steven Wilshire who has a photographic memory of cityscapes, and Daniel Tammet reciting 22,514 digits of pi?

And there’s a reason I wonder about how Charlie has never forget the name or face of a teacher or therapist, and has been directing us “this way, this way” from the back seat of the car: He knows where he’s going.

Cogito ergo googlo……or maybe one ought to say, googlo ergo sum?

Are animals autistic savants? ask researchers Giorgio Vallortigara et al. in the February 19th PLoS Biology. Yes, indeed says Temple Grandin in her 2005 book, Animals in Translation: Animals and autistic savants—who have extraordinary skills in certain areas, and especially in mathematics, music and drawing—both have “extreme cognitive skills” and also “think in detail” based on their processing of sensory-based data. Vallortigara et al consider these claims from the perspective of specialists in animal cognition and critique what Grandin says:

We argue that animals, like nonautistic humans, process sensory information according to rules, and that this manner of processing is a specialised feature of the left hemisphere of the brain in both humans and nonhuman animals. Hence, we disagree with the claim that animals are similar to autistic savants. However, we discuss the possibility that manipulations that suppress activity of the left hemisphere and enhance control by the right hemisphere shift attention to the details of individual stimuli, as opposed to categories and higher-level concepts, and can thereby make performance more savant-like in both humans and animals.

One key difference between autistic savants and animals according to Vallortigara et al is that the heightened abilities of savants in some areas (being able to recite long streams of prime numbers, having a photographic memory) are accompanied with severe impairments in areas such as social functioning and language use. Animals, though, display extraordinary abilities specific to their species, and are not impaired in other areas. Liza Gross summarizes the article on a PLoS blog.

The extraordinary skills shown by savants are accompanied by deficits in other cognitive domains, which the authors argue is not the case for the remarkable species-specific adaptations seen in some taxa. For example, the Clark’s nutcracker can stash whitebark pine seeds in thousands of different sites and recover them up to eight months later. Yet the bird exhibits no cognitive deficits in other areas.

Accompanying the PLoS Biology essay (which is available in full online) is a response by Temple Grandin herself.

I think the basic disagreement between the authors and me arises from the concept of details—specifically how details are perceived by humans, who think in language, compared with animals, who think in sensory-based data. Since animals do not have verbal language, they have to store memories as pictures, sounds, or other sensory impressions. Sensory-based information by its very nature is more detailed than word-based memories. As a person with autism, all my thoughts are in photo-realistic pictures. I can search my own brain, like using Google, for images. As I read about the cognition experiments, I saw the birds performing in my imagination like a virtual reality computer system. The main similarity between animal thought and my thought is the lack of verbal language.

The exchange between the animal cognition researchers and Grandin herself is itself intriguing. The researchers consider animal behavior in the natural environment; Grandin writes about domestic and farm animals that she has studied, and infuses these observations with how her own thinking works, via images and sensory stimuli. Grandin especially emphasizes the amount of detail that can be contained in one piece of sensory-based data, in one image that, like the oft-quoted saying, “contains a thousand words.”

Jim and I tend to think that Charlie, like Grandin, thinks most of all using something other than words (as Jim and I both do). Charlie often has some very specific images of how things should be in his mind (and attempts to recreate these down to the last details, by insisting that we wear certain-colored shirts or lie on the couch a certain way). He has a strong memory for music and spontaneously sing-hums the melody of various songs, in phrases far longer than the short verbal sentences he produces on his own.

Charlie’s no savant in any area, but rather has some very focused abilities in a few areas. Besides music and swimming in the ocean—-Charlie always knows when another wave is about to rise and crash even when he has back turned to it—-he has a strong memory for how to get to familiar places, or places that he wants to get to (the Whole Foods a couple of towns over that is the only store that sells a certain kind of “bread berries”—raisin bread). Lately Charlie has been calling out “this way, this way!” from the back seat and pointing and there have been a few times when he has led my parents around New York City to get to the Toys ‘R’ Us in Times Square, which has an indoor ferris wheel. I am inclined to wonder if this directional ability is somewhat genetic as Jim has an innate and easy sense of how to get from here to there (and he was once a New York City taxi driver; the PLoS Biology essay notes that, for London taxi drivers, “domain-specific cognitive specialisations” resulting from their “extraordinary ability to navigate using landmarks” come at a price—in their brains, there is an “increase in the volume of the posterior hippocampus” and “a relative decrease in the anterior portion of the same structure”).

Reflecting on Grandin’s statements about the greater associative power of images for her, I have to say that, when I think of a single word, a potentially infinite string of associations follows. Take “chair”: How to say the word in a few other languages comes to mind; and then images of many, many chairs I have seen (a lot of them); the chair I am sitting on right now; words that kind of sound like “chair” (clear; the French chair, “flesh”; Cheer as in the detergent); Plato’s chair in the tenth book of the Republic and then on I go to thinking about the Greek word for “chair,” kline and reclining, clinics, clinical, Freud……

Yes, it’s easy to get stuck in details in our day to day life with Charlie: Always have to keep the big picture in mind.