Abstract
We return now to I-concept and its disorder in autism. I-concept is an idea and an awareness of self as separate from others. I-concept is connected with what we usually call consciousness and with language. It is a personal center, and things are happening from its vantage point—I see, I think, I feel, I do. The quality of the LH self is nicely expressed in the following metaphor:
Consciousness is interminable yakking, a frantic effort to keep up appearances, make the game seem always to be your game
(Louis Menand, “True Story”, from The New Yorker, Dec., 2003, 108).
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Notes
- 1.
There is no better description showing that experience of personal center is the experience of oneness.
- 2.
Taking a group of modern artists (Marcel Proust, Paul Cezanne, Igor Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and a few others) Jonah Lehrer adheres to the idea that the product of art is the result of the artist’s attempt to represent his own mental representations, and in doing so, the artist intuitively explores the brain’s organization.
- 3.
“Personal identity” would be LH “sense” of self. Note that there are no “objective” signs for the RH self of immediate experience.
- 4.
Note that what Bosch meant by self is in my definition only part of self, namely the LH self.
- 5.
From “Infantile Autism—A Clinical and Phenomenological-Anthropological Investigation Taking Language as the Guide” be Gerhard Bosch, Springer-Verlag, NewYork, 1970. With kind permission from Springer.
- 6.
Naming the action—verbs—is connected with the left prefrontal area. Patients with damage to this area present with so-called telegraphic style, where their speech consists of nouns in initial forms. Here is the example of a patient with frontal lobe damage who was unable to use verbs when asked to explain the meaning of words—gather—“detail”; impede—“the river and rapids, stony” [from Glezerman and Balkoski (1999), p. 229]. This autistic child, Christa, apparently did not have this kind of frontal lobe deficiency.
- 7.
The last two sentences have more complicated grammar than the sentence “I don’t want to come”—another evidence that the left “cognitive” prefrontal cortex, responsible for grammar and sentence formation, is intact in autism.
- 8.
LH sequential processing is explicit. RH experience is not “conscious” in the usual meaning of this word (or at least cannot be directly verbalized) because even complex RH symbolic systems are simultaneous and, thus, implicit. However, we should remember that LH “decoding” is the only way we can understand metaphor, and it is connected with serial unfolding, yet we feel a much broader range of RH content, so, we cannot say that the RH experience is unconscious.
- 9.
The OFC system is what I designate to be the amygdala-OFC-MD network, a “triangle” that fascinates anatomists (Amaral et al., 1992; Jones, 2008) but still awaits a major discovery of its functional significance. I have described this triangle several times in this book, especially in the context of thalamic emotion’s contribution to the RH self. It might be useful to repeat this description shortly here. While the MD projects to the vast territory of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the MD that contains fibers from the amygdala projects to the OFC and, in particular, that part of the OFC which receives direct input from the amygdala. Thus, the same area within the OFC receives “double” input from the amygdala: direct and via the MD. Connections in this triangle are reciprocal, except for the amygdala—MD connection, which is unidirectional, from the amygdala to the MD.
- 10.
Are they the same neurons that participate in cognitive function? We do not know. They may or may not be.
- 11.
From “Infantile Autism—A Clinical and Phenomenological–Anthropological Investigation Taking Language as the Guide” be Gerhard Bosch, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1970. With kind permission from Springer.
- 12.
This brings us to the mystery of natural language where, in contrast to other languages such as computer languages, it is not purely a cognitive phenomenon.
- 13.
Note the evolution from the desired object to the desired-object-for-us. Bosch goes on to conclude that the external world “becomes not only a world of commonly recognized and noted objects, but a world of values, be they possession values, be they aesthetic values, or ethical and moral values of action” (p. 85).
- 14.
The following scheme shows the basic steps of active, goal-directed behavior to “get the desired object” indicating its disordered links in autism.
-
1.
Object is recognized (the left temporal-occipital region, BA37)—preserved in autism.
-
2.
Recognized object is assigned with biological significance (the left amygdala—BA37)—impaired in autism.
-
3.
Recognized and biologically significant object becomes “desired” (the left MPC)—impaired in autism because the object is not biologically significant. The left MPC (medial prefrontal cortex), responsible for motivation per se might not be disordered.
-
4.
“Movement” toward desired object to “get” desired object—programs of goal-directed behavior (the left DLPC)—impaired in autism, because the object is not desired. However, the left DLPC, responsible for creating the programs, is preserved in autism. It is what allows the autistic child to learn useful behavioral patterns.
-
1.
- 15.
Development of different brain regions varies independently from each other, and so, within the general population, individual variability of the brain is such that people may have prevalence of the prefrontal lobe over the parietal lobe and vice versa.
- 16.
This same phenomenon where functional, “acting” parts of the body stand for the self can be seen in autistic children’s fragmentary perception of the other. Hans R. when 10½ year’s old, reacted to his mother’s enquiries about his homework in the following way: “He would…suddenly cover his ears or press his hand against his mother’s mouth and shout, ‘The mouth should be closed’” (Bosch, 1970, p. 94).
- 17.
Recall that wholeness of the self comes from the sensory-kinesthetic feeling of one’s own body-space.
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Glezerman, T.B. (2013). The Left-Hemispheric Self in Autism Revisited. In: Autism and the Brain. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4112-0_9
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