Oxford University Press / Brain A Journal of Neurology
Study title: Autism, Asperger syndrome and brain mechanisms for the attribution of mental states to animated shapes
What’s wrong with this statement? If you’re an Asperger, it’s obvious: Triangles, animated or static, DO NOT POSSESS MENTAL STATES.
The well-known inability of modern social typicals to distinguish fantasy from physical reality is the core of the problem: ANIMATED SHAPES DO NOT POSSESS MENTAL STATES. TO SEE INTENTION BEHIND “ANIMATED” TRIANGLES IS THE SAME DEFICIT IN MAGICAL THINKING THAT CAUSES SOCIAL TYPICALS TO IDENTIFY DISTANT LIGHTS, PLANETS, STARS and the neighbor’s porch light as UFOS; to see the Virgin Mary on a piece of toast; to believe that God works through online dating services; to assert that coincidences are miracles; to be trapped in that mental stage of childhood in which the universe is a grand puppet show, conjured by supernatural beings to baffle infantile human narcissists. In this cartoon universe, even inanimate objects create critical distortions in perception; distortions that are the product of the self-obsessed human brain.
(My head is about to explode.)
Fulvia Castelli , Chris Frith , Francesca Happé , Uta Frith
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/brain/awf189 August 2002
Ten able adults with autism or Asperger syndrome and 10 normal volunteers (normal is a default condition meaning “not diagnosed ASD”) were PET scanned while watching animated sequences. The animations depicted two triangles moving about on a screen in three different conditions: (1.) moving randomly, (2.) moving in a goal‐directed fashion (chasing, fighting), and (3.) moving interactively with implied intentions (coaxing, tricking). The last condition frequently elicited descriptions in terms of mental states that viewers attributed to the triangles (mentalizing).
The researchers have pre-designated the “illusion” labeled as mentalizing as normal, without questioning their own bias against (vastly more adaptive) accurate perception of reality. Instead, certain humans are pre-judged as pathological for “perceptions” that go beyond typical abilities. Do we label people who can run faster than “normal” as pathological? No; they simply represent the positive tail on the bell curve of human physical ability.
The autism group gave fewer and less accurate descriptions (accuracy = defective perception of reality in modern present-day Homo sapiens) of these latter animations, but equally accurate descriptions of the other animations compared with controls. While viewing animations that elicited mentalizing, in contrast to randomly moving shapes, the normal group showed increased activation in a previously identified mentalizing network (medial prefrontal cortex, superior temporal sulcus at the temporo‐parietal junction and temporal poles). The autism group showed less activation than the normal group in all these regions. However, one additional region, extrastriate cortex, which was highly active when watching animations that elicited mentalizing, showed the same amount of increased activation in both groups. In the autism group this extrastriate region showed reduced functional connectivity with the superior temporal sulcus at the temporo‐parietal junction, an area associated with the processing of biological motion as well as with mentalizing.
This finding suggests a physiological cause for the mentalizing dysfunction in autism: a bottleneck in the interaction between higher order and lower order perceptual processes.
Problem 1: Increased activity is assumed to automatically indicate “better” function, which is an amateur mistake in interpretation. It’s possible (and logical) that increased activity is a neutral state of interest and observation. “Reduced connectivity” could serve to block or dampen immediate irrational interpretation of activity in the environment and allow for analysis of what is actually happening (cause and effect), thus improving outcomes.
Problem 2: The misconceptions due to processing the environment as a supernatural domain that “works” not by natural law, but by magic: “we” are superior beings compared to any living creature, past or present. Possible “modern defects” are automatically considered to be assets…
…Maybe if one is going hunting with Elmer Fudd!
These “researchers” would have us believe that evolution has been working overtime to produce a “superior brain” that can be fooled into mistaking non-living objects as living beings. This is irrational; being fooled is NOT an advantage in activities such as hunting, which require that the hunter is able to discern animals as different to rocks, plants, shadows and imaginary threats caused by sensory distractions. The individual who can “spot” the living creature – and control his or her reactive response (emotion), and ANALYZE whether or not the animal presents a danger or a food opportunity, has a huge advantage. This is especially true given the wildly popular evolutionary strategy of camouflage, mimicry and “copy cat” species in plants and animals.
The inversion of values in mental processing promoted in this (totally unscientific) study is astounding and insulting. To label people who excel at accurate and detailed perception of the environment as “developmentally deficient” is outrageous.