Imagine living your life with no real emotions of any kind. Your mind is analytical and immune to mysticism or emotional attachment to the sensory environment. Now imagine undergoing a treatment that alters your brain, suddenly opening the floodgates of emotion. It would be like having your world transformed from black and white to full color or moving from a 2-dimensional world view, to a 3-dimensional worldview. Apparently researchers using rapid transcranial magnetic stimulation rTMS to affect the brain in patients with Asperger's syndrome have been able to alter consciousness in that way.Asperger syndrome is a developmental brain disorder. People with disorder often have a poor understanding of nonverbal communication, stereotyped interests and deficits in empathy, Asperger syndrome shares symptoms with negative schizophrenia. Symptoms in both disorders include unchanging facial expression, decreased spontaneous movement, paucity of expressive gesture, poor eye contact, affective nonresponsivity, inappropriate affect and lack of vocal inflections. These two disorders may share functional deficits in common brain regions.
You can read an interesting first hand account of a person with aspergers undergoing an rTMS treatment to stimulate a specific area of the brain. This is the first time I have heard about it being used for this disorder. It looks like it may potentially improve specific symptoms for this syndrome and can have a large impact on a person's perceptual consciousness.
"As we went through the different phases of simulation, I became aware that my reading had been rote initially, and I wasn't getting the full meaning out of what I had been reading. After the brain was stimulated, I started getting more meaning from the sentences. At one point, I was also able to understand the emotional content of sentences, which I had not been aware of previously. It really felt like I had been seeing in two dimensions, and could now see in three dimensions."
People with asperger's syndrome often fail to integrate details in the sensory environment correctly. They lack the emotional coloring of the world that highlights the salient details that are necessary for normal functioning. So they tend to take things literally and don't understand nuances in speech such as sarcasm. They often fail to grasp the larger picture and can get bogged down in the details.
"I also noticed a difference in the way I saw the woman who was reading sentences. Initially, I focused in on the content of her words, and didn't see the larger picture. As I went through the stimulation sessions, I started noticing more of the larger picture, and noticed what was going on besides the exact content of her words. I also started to be able to pick out sentences which I had taken literally when I first read them, and was able to understand meanings of the sentences other than a literal interpretation."I always find it amazing how rTMS is able to shape consciousness in such profound ways. rTMS may certainly become a treatment modality for those with asperger's who wish to find symptomatic improvement.
4 comments:
This is exciting news. I plan on forwarding it to a friend of mine who is the parent of a child with Aspergers!
Excellent. In my experience, people with AS are often skeptical of any treatment partly because the usually offered biological interventions almost never work on many of them.
I can see different brain stimulation protocols changing this.
If I had done an account when I started infrared brain stimulation, I could have said as much as John Elder. It really opened the social world to me and if I stop doing it, I regress quite a lot. One thing I can say, that people used to be able to recognize my difficulties (though not being able to label it as AS), it was that obvious, but these days I just have bonding problems and learning difficulties, but no problems with theory of mind stuff, if that makes sense.
I have to set you straight.
Aspergers do have emotions.
As long as we don't know the mechanisms, we can only interfere at random. Sometimes one has a lucky shot.
I will not be the first to complain, for example, that even the DMSO entry on Aspergers is just the most flagrantly vague bullshit. I have never read two descriptions of Aspergers that agree, or one that makes any sense. Yours, at least seems intelligible though I cannot vouch for accuracy. Moreover, comparison with psychosis has fallen out of favor, perhaps because that was too coherent!
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