Published on 12, July, 2020
I find this so hilariously annoying and wonder if anyone else suffers this:
I have trouble putting small food into my mouth with my hands. I've taken up eating dry fruit and nuts lately and I miss my mouth a lot.
Would this be a trait at all? I'm clumsy as hell anyway.
These difficulties may be explained by what lies at the heart of the autistic experience. Atypical sensorimotor feedback loops that produce difficulties coordinating sensory input into effective planning and execution of movement.
These sensorimotor difficulties can account for reduced social attention in early development, which in turn has a cascading effect on the subsequent development of social and communicative skills.
Large parts of the cerebral cortex in the parietal and frontal lobes are involved in transforming sensory information into action.
Movement is performed to both execute a physical task and to collect sensory information. Without precise control of movement, sensory input will prove atypical. For an example, refer to the voluminous literature on the role of eye gaze in autistic individuals, and the generative repercussions for social cognition.
Other parts of the brain, such as the posterior parietal association areas, process visual and somatosensory input and also issue commands to motor areas. In fact many areas, including it has recently been discovered, the cerebellum, participate in sensory and cognitive tasks.
It is also not possible to ascribe top-levels of the Central Nervous System with particular tasks - motor, sensory or cognitive - it is a process of interaction that allows us to perform complex functions.
A similar interaction between interoceptive, exteroceptive, proprioceptive mechanisms and the environment is necessary to perform fine motor movements.
Information taken from:
The role of Sensorimotor Difficulties in Autism Spectrum Conditions. Online here.
The Central Nervous System : Structure and Function / Per Brodal. — 4th ed.
The Prefrontal Cortex 4th Ed., Joaquín M. Fuster
Thankyou, Graham.
For all my earlier goofing and making light of things, over the past few years I've been becoming more and more aware of how tightly bound the social and emotional effects of autism are with its deeper sensory and perceptual aspects.
I realise now, for example, that my attempts to mimic typical body language are far less successful than I once believed, because the problems with mirroring which I mentioned in my earlier post give me a false perception of how I look from the outside. And when I was receiving therapy for my alexithymia, I was surprised at first that there was so much emphasis on actively directing attention to my interoception; but I now know that my body is part of the reporting and regulatory systems of emotion. For cognitive empathy to work effectively, it might be said that "theory of body" is required in addition to "theory of mind".
I am interested in the neuroscience of sensorimotor processing as I experience visual, somatic, olfactory and proprioceptive hallucinations to varying degrees.
I find the classic Theory of Mind model lacking in plausibility, from both an experiential and theoretical viewpoint. Indeed, it is increasingly being challenged. I suspect that it, along with theories of excess testosterone and extreme male theory, are part of the reason that female diagnosis is so haphazard and seems so arbitrary.
Given the diverse global range of cultures, and the fact that cultural environments evolve far more quickly than biological evolution is able to, it would be prudent to consider social cognition as a process of ontogenesis rather than phylogenesis. More acquired than innate. Biological evolution supplies us with a toolkit to acquire social cognition in the ecological niche into which we are born. I think that social cognition - and to some extent executive function - is developed via sensorimotor interaction of body, brain and environment. In other words an embodied or enactive approach.
That's really interesting!
I remember that video - can't remember whether I spotted the gorilla or not.
In a sense we're all constantly hallucinating. The most detail sensitive part of the eye, the macula, is only a tiny part of our field of vision, so the scene before us has to be scanned in order to see all of the details. Yet our perception is usually that we can see detail throughout the visual field. We're not seeing the image from the eyes, we're seeing the "model" constructed in our minds.
The inverse of your experience would be inattention blindness, where we don't see something that is there because we're not expecting to see it. The classic experimental example is being asked to watch a video of people passing a ball around while counting the passes. Most people don't notice the man dressed in a gorilla suit who comes into the frame in the middle of the video, beats his chest, and then walks off again!
Glad it didn't last long.
It's so sad the way some children are treated. I don't understand parents who can't accept their children for who they are.