Aspbergers Conference--The Amygdala and White Matter

The amygdala, in simplified terms, is the part of the brain that scans your body for sensory input (i.e. smell, sight, touch, etc) and then transfers that information to the frontal lobe of the brain that houses your logical thinking abilities. White matter is the substance that helps carry that information to the frontal lobe. So, here's an illustrative example. Let's say you see a tiger (visual sensory input), so your amygdala picks up "tiger, possible danger, go into fight or flight mode". That message is then transferred to the frontal lobe with the help of the white matter in your brain where your frontal lobe can decide if it's a tiger in a zoo that you don't have to be scared of or if it's a tiger in your bedroom that you do have to be scared of.

What does that science lesson have to do with autism? A lot. Kids on the spectrum have been found to have a 10-15% larger amygdala and significantly less white matter. What does that mean? It means that the organ responsible for picking up sensory input is way oversensitive AND that all that information has a hard time reaching the frontal lobe because of the decreased white matter which then causes them to not be able to logically process and put into context all that sensory information. Wow, right? So they have high anxiety. Dr. Atwood (the speaker at the conference) affirmed that he believes most everything kids with ASD do (like running in circles, needing routine, lining things up, etc) is all an effort to manage their high levels of anxiety do to their inability to process so much sensory input. He quoted one woman with Aspberger's as saying that by routinizing everything and organizing things over and over it helps her make order out of the continual chaos that surrounds her.

Understanding things like that help me have so much more sympathy. One more piece of knowledge that heightens my sympathy is this from Wikipedia on the frontal lobe:

The executive functions of the frontal lobes involve the ability to recognize future consequences resulting from current actions, to choose between good and bad actions (or better and best), override and suppress unacceptable social responses, and determine similarities and differences between things or events. Therefore, it is involved in higher mental functions.

So these kids on the spectrum are not trying to act inappropriately. Their brain simply doesn't have the capacity to process like ours does.

Dr. Atwood was quick to point out that this does not mean that kids on the spectrum are dumb. He used the example of a forest and compared it to our brain and the saplings in the brain represented it's different functions. In a typical kid, the sapling that is for social function dominates the whole area as a big tree, sucking resources from other saplings that then don't have enough nutrition to grow (but that's okay because it's what we value so it works for them). In a kid with Aspberger's the social sapling is more like a bush, thus allowing other saplings to grow larger.