Autism, the neurodevelopmental
disorder that is characterized by impaired social interaction and
communicational skills, affects 1 out of every 88 children in the United
States. Until recently, there has been much debate among scientists as to what
goes wrong developmentally in children with autism. In August of 2014, a study
published in the journal Neuron found that the problem lies in a disruption of
the brain’s ability to trim synapses.
At a young age, as our brains
develop, there is a surge of connections among neurons, allowing them to send
and receive signals through synapses. As we continue to age, however, the brain
needs to trim those synapses to allow specific areas to develop, as well as
prevent overstimulation. In this study, researchers from Columbia University
Medical Center compared the area of the brain involved in social behavior and
communication between those with and without autism.
These researchers found that at
younger ages, the number of synapses did not differ significantly between the
two groups of children. Adolescents with and without autism, however, differed
tremendously in terms of their number of synaptic connections. This finding
suggests that it is not a problem with overgrowth, but the actual trimming and
pruning that accompanies late childhood and adolescence.
This study may have been a
breakthrough in lending evidence to answer what causes autism, but the
philosophy behind this was not entirely unprecedented. In his 2012 book, The
Ravenous Brain, author Daniel Bor explores how despite the view that autistics
are regularly classified as mentally retarded, autism may be the result of
over-consciousness, and their symptoms may simply be their way of dealing with
this abundance of conscious processing. Bor explains how autistic individuals
score just as high as their non-autistic counterparts if you change the type of
IQ test you use, how a duplication of a gene accelerates brain growth in
autistic children, and how autistics may feel overwhelmed in the social world,
which seems more chaotic and illogical than they prefer.
In essence, this new study ties in
properly with the notion that those with autism display these symptoms because
they deal with a higher abundance of consciousness than the rest of us. This
study paves the way for a greater understanding of the causes behind autism,
and hopefully it is a major step in the process of treating and assisting those
afflicted with this disorder.
Belluck, P. (2014). Study Finds That Brains With Autism Fail
To Trim Synapses as They Develop. The New
York Times.
Bor, D. (2012). The
Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable
Search for Meaning. New York: Basic Books.
Tang, G. (2014) Loss of mTOR-Dependent Macroautophagy Causes
Autistic-like Synaptic Pruning Deficits. Neuron,
83, 5, 1131 – 1143.
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