The most conspicuous feature of the disorder known as Autism is "a withdrawal from social interaction." Often, there is a total lack of empathy for other people as social cues which are effortlessly picked up by normal children are missed by the autistic. Conversation is often impossible. There may be no attempt at eye contact. Autistic children often sit by themselves rocking their bodies to and fro or, like Skippy, banging their heads against walls. The word comes from the Greek word for "self" - Autos. It is estimated that 0.5% of American children have some form or some degree of autism. In their Scientific American article "Broken Mirrors," Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Lindsay M. Oberman advance the theory that Autism may be tied to the Mirror Neuron System. Or more specifically, that Autism may be caused by failures within the functioning of the human Mirror Neuron System.

"While studying the anterior cinculate cortex of awake human subjects, investigators found that certain neurons that typically fire in response to pain also fired when the person saw someone else in pain. Mirror neurons may also be involved in imitation, an ability that appears to exist in rudimentary form in the great apes but is most pronounced in humans. The propensity to imitate must be at least partly innate: Andrew Meltzoff of the University of Washington has shown that if you stick your tongue out at a newborn baby, the infant will do the same. Because the baby cannot see its own tongue, it cannot use visual feedback and error correction to learn the skill. Instead there must be a hardwired mechanism in the child's brain for mapping the mother's visual appearance - whether it be a tongue sticking out or a smile - onto the motor command neurons."

Let's take the Bouba/Kiki test Kids! Look at the two abstract figures A and B to the left. One of them is called Bouba and the other is called Kiki. Which is which? That's right - "no matter what languages the respondents speak, 98% will pick" A = Bouba and B = Kiki. "Understanding metaphors requires the ability to extract a common denominator from superficially dissimilar entities." The results show that "the human brain is somehow able to extract abstract properties from the shapes and sounds - for example, the property of jaggedness embodied in both the pointy drawing [B] and the harsh sound of Kiki. Ramachandran comments: "We conjectured that this type of cross-domain mapping is analogous to metaphors and must surely involve neural circuits similar to those in the mirror neuron system. Consistent with this speculation, we discovered that children with autism perform poorly at the bouba/kiki test, pairing the shapes and sounds incorrectly." The Angular Gyrus area of the brain handles Bouba/Kiki stuff and non-autistics with damage to that area also fail the test. Fuckin' TPO Junction.

It is postulated that cross-domain mapping "may have originally developed to aid primates in complex motor tasks such as grasping tree branches (which requires the rapid assimilation of visual, auditory, and touch information) but eventually evolved into an ability to create metaphors. Mirror neurons allowed humans to reach for the stars, instead of mere peanuts." Or stealing raisins from Italians. But what about the secondary symptoms of Autism? The repetitive motions, the rocking, the head banging and the inappropriate emotional responses which autistics often show to insignificant inputs. Why are Autistics Hypersensitive to little shit? Why the overemphasis on insignificant details? Why does the Rainman get so pissed off when he misses the Wheel of Fortune. To answer this the authors suggest the Salience Landscape Theory.

Anyone who tries to grok mundus/cosmos, anyone who simply looks out the window, is overwhelmed by sensory info: sights, sounds, smells and the like. The sensory areas of the brain process all this and then hand this info over to the amygdala, "which acts as a portal to the emotion-regulating limbic system." The Amygdala then goes Bayesian - it compares the input with stored memories and gnosis to determine how one SHOULD react to the input. Hooknosed Blackbeaked Birds should = fear. If you're a straight guy then soft creamy tits Should = Lust and you should feel your package tighten. Trivial stuff SHOULD trigger little or no reaction. "Over time, the amygdala creates a salience landscape, a map that details the emotional significance of everything in the individual's environment." Mirror Neuron Theory predicts that autistics will have a "distorted salience landscape." But what mechanism will distort the neural connections between the higher cortical areas which process the sensory input and the amygdala, or between the limbic and the frontal lobes which regulate our reactions and behavior? It has been found that 1/3 of autistics - and probably as many as 1/2 - have suffered Temporal Lobe Epilepsy in infancy. A brain storm like this fries and scrambles neural connections. The authors say that it is "possible that the same event that distorts a childs salience landscape [scrambled & fried connections] also damages the mirror neurons."

"If a child's mirror neuron functions are dormant rather than lost, it may be possible to revive this ability."

Because when the Etics find out that Human Morals/Values & even the concept of Evil and of Sin are tied to a physiological mechanism like Mirror Neurons then the Last Judgment could be nothing but a measurement of the Evoked Potential Quotient between Neurons in the Brain. Maybe you can Sin only in a direct proportionality to this Evoked Potential. Maybe this is why the "sensitive" think everything's a sin? Broken Mirrors. Or too many Mirrors. Bouncing between the input from the real world and its Transfiguration by Mirror Neurons may be the tightrope we call Sanity.

Does the Ligne between the Sacred and the Profane run thru the TPO Junction in the Angular Gyrus?

"We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, . . . "

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