I hope the effect is only temporary.
After 30 sessions over 10 weeks, Pineda found that the five children's mu brainwaves had changed and they performed better on tasks involving imitation, typically difficult for people with autism. Pineda presented his work at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in San Francisco last week.
From issue 2548 of New Scientist magazine, 25 April 2006, page 17
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19025484.700.html
what is the cost of that though? are we willing to throw away indvulaity so people can be exactly the same? i don't think so. everyone has something nobody else can contribute...
"NEUROFEEDBACK practice may be able to alleviate some of the symptoms of autism, according to a pilot study on eight children with the disorder.
The technique involves hooking people up to electrodes and getting them to try and control their brain waves. In people with autism, the "mu" wave is thought to be dysfunctional. Since this wave is associated with "mirror neurons" - the brain cells that underpin empathy and understanding of others - Jaime Pineda at the University of California, San Diego, wondered if controlling it through neurofeedback could exercise faulty mirror neurons and improve their function.
He attached sensors to the necks and heads of eight children with autism and had them watch a video game of a racing car going round a track. For all of the children, sitting still and concentrating kept the car travelling around the track, but five of them were also able to harness their mu waves and use them to adjust the car's speed.
After 30 sessions over 10 weeks, Pineda found that the five children's mu brainwaves had changed and they performed better on tasks involving imitation, typically difficult for people with autism. Pineda presented his work at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in San Francisco last week.
"This seems to indicate the children improve," Pineda says. How long the effects will last, though, is unknown.
From issue 2548 of New Scientist magazine, 25 April 2006, page 17"
Sounds like stupid science to me. "They performed better on tasks involving imitation, typically difficult for people with autism". What is this? I have never heard that people with autism have trouble imitating. Just what activities does he expect them to do and how does he measure it?
I learned to imitate play as a child: I would rock and kiss the doll and get praised. If I held the doll upside down and shook it - I was scolded for not being a good mother. Some people might think it is pretend play. To me, it was just a system, a group of actions, to be learned. I never really thought I was a "mother" when playing. So this guy is just fooling himself and others to get research money.
I really do not know much about biofeedback.
Sounds brilliant if they can reproduce the results meaningfully. If it's mirror neurones then imitation is the wrong word. They mean reflection. Like, reflecting how someone feels when they are talking to you.
It would be interesting if they mentioned a control group. Their imitation skills must have been tested before the experiment as well as at the end. They may of just have learned to respond better to the tests. Also the experience of interacting with the people at the university may have made them more calm and relaxed after 10 weeks, which may have impacted on the results. It is possible that it has an effect on imitation, from this short article on a pilot study it is impossible say.
I know from other articles I have read that it does have an effect on anxiety and drug resistant Epilepsy.
I think that Neurofeedback is not a bad thing but I don't like the idea of it being used in this way.
I was looking at this website the other day, it has some interesting information about the non-medical uses of EEG:
http://openeeg.sourceforge.net/doc/
That sounds like the sort of video game AS people would excel at. And the more you do it the better you get. Like everything, practice makes perfect. I never had trouble imitating people as a child. And I do it now to "fit in". But it's an act, not the real me. So now it's our mu brainwaves that are at fault, not mercury. Sigh. I wait for the next instalment of snake oil to fix them. :roll:
Alison
It's not just "mu" waves that are different in Autistics. Does anyone remember that other article about other brainwaves that are different?
It's funny, because they're trying to "fix" autistics brain patterns, when the brain patterns all Autistics/Aspies exhibit, is identical to those found in Buddihist monks (Who spends years specially training their brains to exhibit those patterns)
Fructose wrote
Sounds brilliant if they can reproduce the results meaningfully. If it's mirror neurones then imitation is the wrong word. They mean reflection. Like, reflecting how someone feels when they are talking to you.
Don't you mean reflecting how one thinks someone feels? It isn't actually possible to know for sure how or what someone else feels, as feelings occur inside of the brain, not outside of the body. Feelings and thoughts are private events, and body language can be contrived or fake.
Fructose wrote
Sounds brilliant if they can reproduce the results meaningfully. If it's mirror neurones then imitation is the wrong word. They mean reflection. Like, reflecting how someone feels when they are talking to you.
Don't you mean reflecting how one thinks someone feels? It isn't actually possible to know for sure how or what someone else feels, as feelings occur inside of the brain, not outside of the body. Feelings and thoughts are private events, and body language can be contrived or fake or misinterpreted.
The function of mirror neurons is not neccesarily dependant on body launguage. They are responsible for helping people "put themselves in someone else's shoes"(i.e. if someone you know's parent dies, mirror neurons kick in and simulate what it would feel like if your own parent died.)
Yes, mirror neurones do that, and also they reflect the instantaneous feelings emanating from a person in their microexpressions (body language which cannot be faked). I suppose you could fool them, Lili Marlene, with rehearsed body language. They work subconsciously and automatically, like so much of the brain, and aren't privy to higher reasoning.
Wouldn't it be cool if this theory held water and someone invented mu-reading computer joysticks for home consumption?
nathanww wrote
The function of mirror neurons is not neccesarily dependant on body launguage. They are responsible for helping people "put themselves in someone else's shoes"(i.e. if someone you know's parent dies, mirror neurons kick in and simulate what it would feel like if your own parent died.)
Yes, but when I was told that one of my parents died, I just accepted it and got on with my own life. It's what my parent would have wanted. I'm sure this isn't the "correct" NT way of feeling about this situation, at least some pointless blubbing is considered to be compulsory. This is why the whole idea of "mirror neurons" as the explanation of autism is rubbish - we don't mirror NT emotions because our way of thinking is so different to the NT way of thinking that there is no easy, quick way of transfering some sentiment from between the neurotypes. We just don't see things the way they do. A while ago I went to a very trying funeral in an NT/AS family. An aspie observed an NT getting all upset, as they do, and told the NT to cheer up as the departed one was now in a better place. Of course the NT was so so offended and put out ... :roll: It's not as though the aspie didn't know the situation, they did, they just had a completely different interpretation of the meaning of the situation, and nothing is going to change that.
Fructuse wrote
Yes, mirror neurones do that, and also they reflect the instantaneous feelings emanating from a person in their microexpressions (body language which cannot be faked). I suppose you could fool them, Lili Marlene, with rehearsed body language. They work subconsciously and automatically, like so much of the brain, and aren't privy to higher reasoning.
I think I read somewhere that most people can't read microexpressions, that most people need training to read them.
You should read David Buller's book "Adapting minds". A quote from this book "Finally, Gangestad and Simpson also argue that individual differences in the ability to control facial expressions of emotion are a product of genetic differences, and that the alternative genotypes are probably a stable ploymorphism resulting from frequency-dependent selection for strategies of deception and honesty in social interactions." I'll bet my hat that autism is one of these alternative genotypes. You'd have to be a complete simpleton not to realise the possible evolutionary advantage to having body language that is unexpressive or so odd as to be hard to interpret, and you'd have to be an idiot to assume that spending time reading body language doesn't have a cost if that body language can be deceptive. In the language of game theory, autists are the "defectors" from the potentially deceptive game of body language.
In a 1978 seminal scientific paper Richard Dawkind and John Krebs proposed to replace the idea that communication between animals is cooperative with the idea that communication should be assumed to be manipulative. Here is a quote from that paper "If information is shared at all it is likely to be false information, but it is probably better to abandon the concept of information altogether." And you think humans are less deceptive than animals?
Good point. Unless you trust, all the instincts and honest friends in the world won't help you.
Only "insiders" have the luxury of being in the position to trust others. Every economy runs on the exploitation of some members of society. By popular vote it is the "outsiders" who are elected to do the dirty jobs and be targeted as the suckers. There isn't room on the "gravy train" for everyone. That's why migrant workers clean toilets for a living and autistics get lied to by salespeople at an astonishing rate.