The Brains of Autistic Children create more information while at rest

Quinn, an autistic boy, and the line of toys he made before falling asleep. 

Repeatedly stacking or lining up objects is a behaviour commonly associated with autism. 

Credit: Wikipedia.

New research from Case Western Reserve University and University of Toronto neuroscientists finds that the brains of autistic children generate more information at rest – a 42% increase on average.

The study offers a scientific explanation for the most typical characteristic of autism – withdrawal into one's own inner world.

The excess production of information may explain a child's detachment from their environment.

Published at the end of December in Frontiers in Neuroinformatics, this study is a follow-up to the authors' prior finding that brain connections are different in autistic children.

This paper determined that the differences account for the increased complexity within their brains.

Roberto Fernández Galán

"Our results suggest that autistic children are not interested in social interactions because their brains generate more information at rest, which we interpret as more introspection in line with early descriptions of the disorder," said Roberto Fernández Galán, PhD, senior author and associate professor of neurosciences at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine.

The authors quantified information as engineers normally do but instead of applying it to signals in electronic devices, they applied it to brain activity recorded with magnetoencephalography (MEG).

They showed that autistic children's brains at rest generate more information than non-autistic children.

This may explain their lack of interest in external stimuli, including interactions with other people.

The researchers also quantified interactions between brain regions, i.e., the brain's functional connectivity, and determined the inputs to the brain in the resting state allowing them to interpret the children's introspection level.

José L. Pérez Velázquez

"This is a novel interpretation because it is a different attempt to understand the children's cognition by analyzing their brain activity," said José L. Pérez Velázquez, PhD, first author and professor of neuroscience at University of Toronto Institute of Medical Science and Department of Pediatrics, Brain and Behavior Center.

"Measuring cognitive processes is not trivial; yet, our findings indicate that this can be done to some extent with well-established mathematical tools from physics and engineering."

Henry and Kamila Markram

This study provides quantitative support for the relatively new "Intense World Theory" of autism proposed by neuroscientists Henry and Kamila Markram of the Brain Mind Institute in Switzerland, which describes the disorder as the result of hyper-functioning neural circuitry, leading to a state of over-arousal.

More generally, the work of Galán and Pérez Velázquez is an initial step in the investigation of how information generation in the brain relates to cognitive/psychological traits and will begin to frame neurophysiological data into psychological aspects.

The team now aims to apply a similar approach to patients with schizophrenia.

More Information: José Luis Pérez Velázquez and Roberto Fernández Galán published this Original Research article.'Information Gain in the Brain’s Resting State: A New Perspective on Autism'

Learning Disabilities: Fiber-optic pen helps see inside brains of children

Todd Richards demonstrates the pen and pad device while inside the fMRI. 

Credit: Center on (for) Human Development and Disability

For less than $100, University of Washington researchers have designed a computer-interfaced drawing pad that helps scientists see inside the brains of children with learning disabilities while they read and write.

The device and research using it to study the brain patterns of children will be presented June 18 at the Organization for Human Brain Mapping meeting in Seattle.

A paper describing the tool, developed by the UW's Center on (for) Human Development and Disability, was published this spring in Sensors, an online open-access journal.

Thomas Lewis

"Scientists needed a tool that allows them to see in real time what a person is writing while the scanning is going on in the brain," said Thomas Lewis, director of the center's Instrument Development Laboratory.

"We knew that fiber optics were an appropriate tool. The question was, how can you use a fiber-optic device to track handwriting?"

To create the system, Lewis and fellow engineers Frederick Reitz and Kelvin Wu hollowed out a ballpoint pen and inserted two optical fibers that connect to a light-tight box in an adjacent control room where the pen's movement is recorded.

They also created a simple wooden square pad to hold a piece of paper printed with continuously varying colour gradients.

The custom pen and pad allow researchers to record handwriting during functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to assess behaviour and brain function at the same time.

Other researchers have developed fMRI-compatible writing devices, but "I think it does something similar for a tenth of the cost," Reitz said of the UW system.

By using supplies already found in most labs (such as a computer), the rest of the supplies – pen, fiber optics, wooden pad and printed paper – cost less than $100.

The device connects to a computer with software that records every aspect of the handwriting, from stroke order to speed, hesitations and liftoffs.

Understanding how these physical patterns correlate with a child's brain patterns can help scientists understand the neural connections involved.

Researchers studied 11- and 14-year-olds with either dyslexia or dysgraphia, a handwriting and letter-processing disorder, as well as children without learning disabilities.

Subjects looked at printed directions on a screen while their heads were inside the fMRI scanner. The pen and pad were on a foam pad on their laps.

Subjects were given four-minute blocks of reading and writing tasks. Then they were asked to simply think about writing an essay (they later wrote the essay when not using the fMRI).

Just thinking about writing caused many of the same brain responses as actual writing would.

"If you picture yourself writing a letter, there's a part of the brain that lights up as if you're writing the letter," said Todd Richards, professor of radiology and principal investigator of the UW Integrated Brain Imaging Center.

"When you imagine yourself writing, it's almost as if you're actually writing, minus the motion problems."

Richards and his staff are just starting to analyze the data they've collected from about three dozen subjects, but they have already found some surprising results.

"There are certain centers and neural pathways that we didn't necessarily expect" to be activated, Richards said. "There are language pathways that are very well known. Then there are other motor pathways that allow you to move your hands. But how it all connects to the hand and motion is still being understood."

Besides learning disorders, the inexpensive pen and pad also could help researchers study diseases in adults, especially conditions that cause motor control problems, such as stroke, multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's disease.

"There are several diseases where you cannot move your hand in a smooth way or you're completely paralyzed," Richards said.

"The beauty is it's all getting recorded with every stroke, and this device would help us to study these neurological diseases."

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