Autism and Mirror-Neurons. Connections to Lobal Over/Under Activity and Gray or White Matter Under-Development
Maybe the insufficient mirror neuron function is why high-function potential autistic toddlers have language delay? My mother said she seeded my initial language in me by creating a control-panel type interface. Associative conditioning of ’stop and go’ and starting and stopping a knee ride, which supports the motor-neuron article. Until age 4 and early intervention the shrink-reports that my mom has given me said that I said only ‘ma’ and ‘pa’ (I was also developmentally delayed in motor skills like sitting up, crawling, and walking). I think 2/3 of the effectiveness of my early intervention was mother’s homework, which was probably extensive but not explicitly given out, but assisted (like a college professor who gives no homework other than possibly reading chapters, but goes out of his way to help students who show initiative in getting help). In “the salience landscape theory sidebar”, it appears that the “amygdala” is a part of the limbic system (the animal brain). I think a lot inter-connectivity between the cerebral cortex and the limbic system is impaired in autism, far worse than the inter-connectivity between regions in the cerebral cortex itself.
The cerebral cortex probably then tries to develop patchwork to work around it, probably in the temporal lobes, depending on how effective parenting and early intervention is. The prefrontal lobes probably end up more isolated because they learn to favor internal memories over live sensory data, which have limited bandwidth and sometimes prone to errors and stalling (like having to deal with a major lagger when playing an older real-time strategy games like StarCraft). That is my guess on linking mirror-neuron dysfunction and frontal lobe alpha-underactivity and temporal lob delta/theta overactivity.
I don’t know how I would link it to the gray-matter-only deficiency theory. That study found autism to be retardation in only gray-matter development - the neuron cores. White matter was either unaffected (likely in AS and HFA) or affected less (LFA). Idiopathic retardation had retardation in both gray and white matter (neuron inter-connections) development. If that was true, then you’d need to find people who have plenty of gray matter (raw CPU power) but deficient white matter (ram, hard drive, bus topology) and give them a label. These would probably be gifted athletes or talented fighters that can’t learn a damn thing in a classroom. The dumb blond socialite bimbos that sometimes show up on the Howard Stern Show may be white-matter-only retarded also.
