“It is proposed that these two types of functionality, face expression-related, and of one’s self and the environment, are important components of the computations involved in theory of mind, whether of oneself or of others, and that reduced connectivity within and between these regions may make a major contribution to the symptoms of autism… This is the first whole-brain voxel pair-wise analysis of the functional connectivity differences between subjects with autism and controls… The voxel-based analysis described here was especially important because it provided evidence about exactly where the altered functional connectivity was different in autistic subjects compared to controls. By using voxel-based analysis we were able to show for example that areas in the MTG implicated in processing face expression (Critchley et al., 2000), and also other MTG areas implicated in theory of mind (Hein and Knight, 2008), are both implicated as having altered functional connectivity in autism… it is not always sufficiently acknowledged that during the resting state in the magnet with the eyes closed or when looking at a fixation point with no other assigned task, one may well be thinking and mentalizing about one’s plans for the day, other pending activities etc, which will almost always involve thinking about oneself, and about other people, i.e. other selves. The ‘default mode network’ may perhaps with this perspective, be thought of as an ‘inner mentalizing’ network. It may be that this mentalizing process is different in people with autism, who may perform this type of thinking much less, or in a different way (Lai et al., 2014). So we point out that resting state functional MRI in autistic people may help to reveal differences in their brains relative to controls”
I’m really interested in the brain circuit that is thought to comprise the sort of resting-state sense-of-self, and the suggestions that this is disrupted in several brain disorders.
No comments:
Post a Comment