Autism

A Unique Sensory, Emotional, and Social Development

The Amygdala’s Role in Autism

The amygdala is a tiny portion of the limbic system. It is directly connected to the hypothalamus, the hippocampus, the cyngulate gyrus and the septum. It is known that the amygdala plays an important role in the production and control of emotions. I theorize that the amygdala acts as a relay between the sensory organs, the cerebral cortex, and the endocrine system. So, it works as a connection between the sensory system and the body organs which respond automatically to sensory information (the heart, the digestive apparatus, the kidneys, the adrenal gland, and others). This is why the amygdala is so relevant to emotional development.

As a result of my intense research and extensive work with special children, I have come to the conclusion that the main relationship between the amygdala and emotions is in how it synchronizes sensory information and responses.

I think that autism is the result of un-synchronized stimuli and internal responses.

This lack of synchronization can express itself in multiple ways--auditory, tactile, and muscular. Slight delays between stimuli reception and conduction to different parts of the neural and endocrin systems cause two important differences in regards to "normal" sensory response. The most obvious difference is a delay response. This delay is cumulative. So, when there is one single stimulus, there is no noticeable delay. When there are two stimuli, the delay time to process each stimulus affects the processing of the other, causing a prolonged delay and greater difficulty in processing the information. As the amount of sensory information increases, delays increase and processing becomes more effortful and inefficient. This deteriorates into sensory overload as more stimuli continue coming before the prior stimuli are cleared. Clearing the stimuli happens in different ways. Most stimuli are simply ignored. For instance, things that don't change in the environment are learned and afterwards, ignored, unless they change. Some stimuli are meaningless or uninteresting. These stimuli are simply abandoned, and as soon as the sensory stimulation they produce stops, the emotional response is dropped. But some stimuli linger through emotions that can produce frustration.

For instance, imagine you were asked if you wanted two airplane tickets to Hawaii. But there was so much noise in the room that you misunderstood and turned them down. So, some one else got them. At this point, you realize what you were asked. But it is too late. Therefore, you are missing on a holiday trip to Hawaii because you were trying to process so much noise that you couldn't understand what you were asked. This would probably make you feel bad for a while. Equivalent feelings arise when an autistic child misses out on ice cream, a hug, drawing with the red pen, or any other activity that is VERY important to the child.

The second difference is that the actual quality of the sensory information received by autistic children seems to be unique and different to what most of us sense. So, what is painful for us may be pleasurable to them, and vicaversa. Even more, repetition of sensory input tends to desensitize and make stimuli pleasurable. So, self injurious behaviors are not painful to the autistic child. In effect, they are pleasurable. Further, as desensitization  takes place, the behavior becomes more intense and frequent.

The brain has to wait for all processes to be completed in both the neural and the endocrine systems to integrate them.

    Luckily for most of us, experience is the result of approximate repetition. So, after a few instances of an experience, the brain starts putting the information together using prior experience. This accelerates the process, making it very fast. Therefore, integration of processes in normal cases is fast due to its base in experience. Normal sensory integration is literally automatic after it is learned. But if your sensory integration happens in variable ways, your central nervous system can not learn to automatize it. This causes all information to be effortfully processed.

    Further, but perhaps less obvious is that the environment responds differently to the autistic person's response uniqueness than the environment responses to us. Since different environments will respond differently, there is less control or predictability over it. Placing the autistic children in very controlled environments makes it easier to understand how they will respond in those environments. But in the moment the environment is changed, the control is lost. And even returning to the controlled environment will not result in an immediate return to predictable behaviors. Most controlled environments for special children are non-conducive to development. In those environments, anti-social behaviors,  repetitive behaviors, aimless behaviors, and all sorts of wasteful behaviors are allowed. Wasteful behaviors are those behaviors that do not achieve any thing. They are behaviors for their own sake. These include using meaningless expressions, pacing around, waving the hands, and innumerable arrays of erratic behaviors.

Further, by placing many children who produce un-normal behaviors together, the children model each others’ patterns.

The adults quickly learn to accept the children’s unproductive behavior patterns.

Consequently, in the special children’s setting abnormal behaviors become the norm. This is a warranty that the children will develop as abnormally as possible.