MITPressLog

Mindreading and Autism

How empathetic are you? Most of us interact with other people─ family, friends, co-workers, strangers─ by an unwritten set of rules based solely on our ability to “mind read” a situation. That is, to be intuitively aware of others around us and respond accordingly. Those who have autism have a difficult time mindreading. What comes naturally or intuitively to people without autism often must be taught like a set of concrete rules to those with autism. Mindblindness by Simon Baron-Cohen, Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the University of Cambridge and Director of the Autism Research Centre in Cambridge, explores this notion of mindreading. In his book, Baron-Cohen challenges his readers to see the world differently:

“Imagine what your world would be like if you were aware of physical things but were blind to the existence of mental things…blind to things like thoughts, beliefs, knowledge, desires, and intentions, which for most of us self-evidently underlie behavior. Stretch your imagination to consider what sense you could make of human action (or, for that matter, any animate action whatsoever) if, as for a behaviorist, a mentalistic explanation was forever beyond your limits.”

Baron-Cohen’s research in the difficulties that people with autism face in interpreting the actions and intentions of others has helped lay the foundation of autism research today.

If you’re interested in testing your “mindreading” skills and discovering how empathetic you truly are, check out the Empathy Quotient Test developed by Baron-Cohen.

Want to learn more about autism? Autism Speaks is a great place to find information about the basics of autism, read personal stories, and get involved in autism awareness.

 

Brain Awareness Week: A Q&A with Daniel C. Dennett

A Q&A with Daniel C. Dennett, whose most recent MIT Press book (with Matthew M. Hurley and Reginald B. Adams, Jr.) is Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind, to round out our Brain Awareness Week Q&A series:

 

 

 

 

What sparked your interest in philosophy and cognitive studies?

As a philosophy student, I was always interested in how the mind worked, and by that I meant how the brain worked. When I started looking at the attempts by scientists to address these questions, back in the mid 60s, I discovered that they were, with a few notable exceptions, baffled. The pioneers who had some hunches fascinated me, and I began to try to follow in their footsteps and even help with the exploration.

 

How have your research interests and methods changed over the course of your career?

I've learned--and had to learn--a lot of empirical science and scientific techniques. The philosophical imagination unhindered by facts is actually a very unreliable organ of discovery. My work has always depended on the constraints I have picked up from the various sciences that deal with the questions I'm interested in.

 

What kinds of changes (if any) do you think we need to make in brain science education?

There have already been huge changes. Even high school students can acquire a vivid, robust, dynamic (if sketchy) model of what the working parts of the brain are, and roughly how they interact. That rough-and-ready roadmap of the brain was something that took years of hard and imaginative work to acquire forty years ago. Since everybody gets to start much better prepared these days, the time is right for bold theorizing. We have the tools and the data to DISconfirm models now. What we need are intrepid model-proposers. They will usually be wrong, but we'll learn a lot. From one perspective most of what we've learned in the last half century is what promising ideas WON'T work. That's progress.

 

Brain Awareness Week: A Q&A with Olaf Sporns

Happy Wednesday! Today's Brain Awareness Week interview is with Olaf Sporns, Head of the Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Indiana University Bloomington and author of Networks of the Brain.

 

 

What sparked your interest in researching brain connectivity?

My undergraduate major was in Biochemistry, a field that was attractive to me for several reasons. Above my desk, I had pinned a large chart of "Biochemical Pathways" and I often marveled at the intertwined chains of chemical reactions that govern cellular metabolism, tightly controlled by complex biomolecules that catalyze specific reactions and regulate the flow of material. I wanted to understand the principles that organized this mess of molecules (at least that's what it looked like at first glance) into a coherent biochemical system. I began modeling some simple examples of molecular kinetics, and thus became familiar with mathematical tools like differential equations and coupling structures, also called a connectivity matrix. Later, when my attention shifted to the brain, I naturally brought along these tools and started modeling networks of neurons and brain regions. It seemed natural to me to look for principles of neural organization in the brain's connection matrix, and that got me into reading about graph theory and networks. I haven't stopped since.

How have your research topics and/or methods changed over the course of your career?

I started as a student of biochemistry, running long series of experiments in "wet labs". At the same time I pursued what was then called "mathematical biology", with an interest in "systems theory" and models of pattern formation. During my PhD, I switched to neuroscience, modeling neural networks (a novelty item in the 1980's!) and even interfacing such neural models with robots. Robotics really brought taught me an important lesson about how the brain is fundamentally embodied, especially how important it is to engage in bodily movement to sample and select inputs in an environment. My first forays into graph theory and studies of brain connectivity were difficult to "sell" for many years --hardly anyone cared! Luckily I persisted: suddenly, just a few years ago, in parallel with the general expansion of network science across many disciplines and driven by the availability of new brain connectivity data sets, network approaches to the understanding the brain really took off. Now I find myself reading papers, working with colleagues and attending conferences across a very wide range of topics -- from statistical physics and computational intelligence, to brain imaging and complex systems. I can't wait to find out where this journey will take me next.

What kinds of changes (if any) do you think we need to make in brain science education?

I think that modern brain science should deserves to occupy a central role in the general curriculum -- perhaps more central than it is now. As I like to tell my students on the first day of class: There's nothing boring about the brain! A wide range of issues that have immediate personal or societal impact, from an individual's memory, emotions, consciousness, and decision making all the way to behavioral economics, social communication, and brain and mental disorders, all revolve around the nexus of brain and behavior. Learning about the brain and its relation to body and environment is learning about ourselves and our place in the social and biological world. Brain science education should give students the tools to explore how our mental life depends on the functioning of the brain, and how our behavior is shaped by how brain and body interact. Some of the most exciting research in these areas is carried out by bridging traditional disciplines, combining evolution and development, physiology and anatomy, computation and networks, psychology and cognitive science. All these disciplines contribute to our modern understanding of the brain, and all of them should have a place in modern brain science education.

 

Brain Awareness Week: A Q&A with Paul H. Patterson

It's Brain Awareness Week! To celebrate, we'll post a series of mini-Q&As with MIT Press authors throughout the week. Paul H. Patterson, neurobiologist and author of Infectious Behavior: Brain-Immune Connections in Autism, Schizophrenia, and Depression, kicks us off.

 

 

What sparked your interest in developmental neurobiology?

I did my PhD in membrane biochemistry and then wanted to "figure out how the brain works". I chose dissociated neuronal cell culture as an informative and feasible approach to biochemical questions. These neurons growing in vitro presented an attractive preparation for studying neuronal development, and one could add other types of cells at will and see how that affected development. It turned out that adding certain non-neuronal cells to cultured neurons radically altered the type of neurons that eventually developed. We pursued the active factor that drove these changes and eventually found it to be a cytokine, later termed LIF. Over the years, we found that LIF is critically important in the brain's response to injury and disease. In this way, we accidentally stumbled on interactions between the brain and immune systems. In fact, we just published on a gene therapy approach, delivering LIF to a multiple sclerosis mouse model and achieved remarkable remyelination. 

How have your research interests and methods changed over the course of your career?

Starting at Harvard and then at Caltech, I gave lectures on mental illness and became dissatisfied with the mouse models available at the time. I thought we should try to make a contribution in this area. We made use of the epidemiology showing that infection during pregnancy can increase the risk of schizophrenia in the offspring. Making a mouse model of this risk factor has proven a productive approach, allowing us to examine how the maternal response to infection alters fetal brain development. The model is also useful for exploring potential therapeutic approaches. It is now being used in at least 35 laboratories around the world.

What kinds of changes (if any) do you think we need to make in brain science education?

I'd like to see more information on the brain introduced early on in school--by 4th grade, for instance. I've given such lectures and demos to young kids and they are really intrigued. It's a natural inroad to getting kids interested in science, as everyone wants to know how we think, remember, communicate etc. 

August Fools' Day

It may not be official, but National Tell a Joke Day has been celebrated for years. Prepare your one-liners with help from a few MIT Press books:

 

Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind
By Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett, and Reginald B. Adams, Jr.

 “You can tell a joke in one crowd and be rewarded with laughs, yet in another group be repaid with anger. Here’s a joke that some find funny, though others might not agree and some may even be offended:

Q: What has two legs and bleeds?

A: Half a dog.”

 

 

Laughter: Notes on a Passion
By Anca Parvulescu

Uncovering an archive of laughter, from the forbidden giggle to the explosive guffaw.

“Laughter is a motion, forceful, sudden and repetitive; and it is the sound of a bursting, inarticulate voice… As for the passional chemistry needed to produce laughter: it always involves a dose of wonder, sometimes joy, sometimes hatred, sometimes both joy and hatred.”

 

 

The Odd One In: On Comedy
By Alenka Zupančič

Zupančič examines the mechanisms and processes by which comedy lets the odd one in.

Comedy by its nature is difficult to pin down with concepts and definitions, but as artistic form and social practice it is a mode of tarrying with a foreign object—of including the exception. Philosophy's relationship to comedy, Zupančič writes, is not exactly a simple story (and indeed includes some elements of comedy).

 

 

The Artist’s Joke
Edited by Jennifer Higgie

Jokes and humor in avant-garde and contemporary art, as discussed by writers and artists ranging from Freud and Picasso to Andrea Fraser, Guerilla Girls, and Slavoj Zizek.

Ever since Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious appeared in 1905, humor both light and dark has frequently surfaced as a subversive, troubling, or liberating element in art. The Artist's Joke surveys the rich and diverse uses of humor by avant-garde and contemporary artists.

Cognet Adds New Content, Revamps Site

Cognet - the Press's online destination for the cognitive science and neuroscience communities - has expanded its online library, adding 38 new books from the neuroscience and cognitive science collections. In addition, the look and navigability of the site has been improved, with cleaner, more accessible features and a new logo.

Cognet now offers over 480 titles from leading figures in the field, providing a superior resource for the brain and cognitive research community. Some of Cognet’s newly acquired titles include:

Introduction to Cognitive Science by Paul Thagard

Seeing and Visualizing: It’s not What You Think by Zenon W. Pylyshyn

Neither Brain nor Ghost: A Nondualist Alternative to the Mind-Brain Identity Theory by W. Teed Rockwell

How the Body Shapes the Way We Think: A New View of Intelligence by Rolf Pfeifer and Josh C. Bongard

Visit Cognet at http://cognet.mit.edu/.

Still Good Advice

MIT Press Senior Editor Tom Stone reflects on a surprising example of the timeliness of scholarly pubishing:

During the late 1980's I was a young Acquisition Editor publishing scholarly and professional titles and journals for a scientific, technical and medical publisher.  My main fear was how I would keep up on the latest trends in science and engineering, trends that would be the topic of books 2 to 3 years later.  Lamenting this to a research scientist at the Whitehead Institute at MIT, he suggested I do what he did, read either the New York Times or Wall Street Journal every day.  Follow the money and you will know what will be big in the next few years.  I still follow that suggestion and check out the WSJ everyday just to be on top of trends.  While I am generally looking for the next important topic I do often note when an article references one of my recently published titles.  That, sadly, is a rare event as I now publish cognitive science, philosophy and linguistics and these tend to get less coverage than the next great nanotechnology discovery. 

This past week, my reading of the WSJ and my publishing program found a surprising connection. Next week I am publishing Standard Basque: A Progressive Grammar by Rudolph P.G. de Rijk, A 1000+ page definition of the Basque language intended to be the reference for official Basque. Certainly, an important work for the scholarly community but I did not have great expectation for press coverage of this publishing event.  Imagine my surprise when, on Tuesday November 6, I noticed a front page article in the Wall Street Journal with the title,  Basque Inquisition:  How Do You Say Shepherd in Euskera (subscription) by Keith Johnson.  The article introduces the new standard Basque  language, Euskera, which is formally defined in our soon to be published Standard Basque.  The article notes that anyone expecting to do business in the Basque region of Northern Spain and Western France will need to produce all contract and documents in the official Basque language.  Sadly, the author of the article was unaware of the pending publication of Standard Basque and I'm sure he would have pointed all his WSJ readers to MIT Press if he had known but in this case, MIT Press is way ahead of the curve!  I'm sure we will send the WSJ a copy of our new book.  And now, we know, that many corporations hoping to do business in the Basque region will be interested in our new publication. 

And, me, I'll keep reading the WSJ trying to track trends for the future and also looking for connections to my current publishing program.

Wednesday Blog Watch - CogNet

The CogNet website recently received a makeover, and now has a sleek new interface.
If you're not familiar with Cognet, it was developed in 2000 as an online resource of scientific research and interchange for anyone in the brain and cognitive science community. From the Cognet website:

Individual and institutional subscribers to MIT CogNet have access to a comprehensive platform which includes pre-eminent resources from several fields, such as artificial intelligence, linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy and education. The platform provides an ever-growing electronic collection of relevant books, journals, conference proceedings, calls for papers and grey literature, and provides searchable access to ten major reference works published by the MIT Press; 450 MIT Press books in full-text PDF; the full text of six MIT Press journals; and abstracts from more than 30 journals from other publishers like Cambridge University Press, the British Psychological Society, Kingston Press, Ltd., and Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Yes, those pants make you look fat...

What would it be like to always tell the truth and assume that everyone else is doing the same? Autistic minds have difficulty lying and detecting deceit, according to an article by Simon Baron-Cohen, author of the MIT Press books, Prenatal Testosterone in Mind and Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind. Here is a small excerpt from the article that appears in the Spring 2007 issue of In Character:

In moral terms, honesty is without doubt a virtue, and dishonesty is a vice. But in social terms, absolute honesty can lead to trouble, risking causing offense to others who may not want or need to hear the complete truth. White lies may be desirable. And in biological terms, dishonesty is a sign of typical brain development, whereas someone who is incapable of dishonesty may be neurologically atypical. Dishonesty is one defining characteristic of what it is to be human. It is not the only defining characteristic, but it does separate us from other animals. Some nonhuman species may have a limited capacity for deception, but humans have a flexible, unlimited capacity for deception. And since anything that is uniquely human is likely to be part of our genetic makeup, it stands to reason that we are, in a sense, built for dishonesty — and those incapable of dishonesty, like people with autism, have a uniquely human disability. Beyond having deficits in social interaction, they live with a different relationship to morality. Their experience is a unique window into the typical human mind.

Read the full article here.

Barn cum Museum Takes Budding Cognitive Scientists by Storm

Harvard Medical School researcher and MIT Press author Dr. J. Allan Hobson (Dreaming as Delirium and The Dream Drugstore) has converted part of his barn into an "interactive sleep museum," reports Katie Zezima in today's New York Times. The Caledonia County farm owner envisions the museum--which features a "sleep chamber," a preserved brain, and multimedia presentations about the brain and dreams--as a pedagogical tool in a nationwide "sleep curriculum" that examines the encephalon and its activities in the land of Nod.