This article should have been published a month ago — April 2, on World Autism Awareness Day. At KDPV - the building of the Sydney Opera House, illuminated blue in support of this day. Due to the rather large volume, I broke the translation into 3 parts. The article by Maya Salavits describes the theory of the intense world of Henry Markram.
Part 2Part 3Autism changed the family of Henry Markram. Now his theory of the intense world can change our understanding of this state.
There was something wrong with Kai Markram. Five days old, he was an unusually restless child, he began to raise his head and look at everything around him much earlier than his sister. When he started going after him, he needed an eye and an eye.
“He was just an energizer,” recalls his sister Kali. Not like all boys - when they tried to calm him down, he not only kicked and screamed, but bit and spat with uncontrollable rage. Not only in two years, but in three, four, five and so on. His behavior was also strange: he could go into himself, and he could run up to the stranger and embrace him.
Over time, everything became even stranger. No one from the Markrams family will forget the trip to India in 1999. They approached the snake charmer when the five-year-old Kai suddenly took the lead and slammed a cobra on the head.
Coping with such a child is not easy for any parent, but especially for Kai's father. Henry Markram is the founder of the $ 1.3 billion Human Brain project, a study aimed at creating a supercomputer brain model. Markram, knowing the inner workings of our brain like no other, could not cope with the problems of Kai.
“As a father and as a neuroscientist, you simply have no idea what to do,” he says. Kai's behavior — he was eventually diagnosed with autism — changed his father's career and helped build a completely new theory of autism that reverses traditional ideas. And this project can pay off long before the completion of the core model of the brain.
Imagine being born in a world that confuses inevitable sensory overload, like an alien from a much darker, quieter, and quiet planet. Your mother's eyes are a strobe; father’s voice is a growling jackhammer. Pajamas that everyone thinks so soft? Sandpaper with diamond grain. What about all this cooing and affection? A flurry of chaos, a cacophony of raw, unfiltered data.
To survive, you need to be able to perfectly find any order that can be found in this terrible and depressing noise. To stay sane, you need to control as much as possible, with emphasis on detail, planning and repetition. Systems in which concrete inputs produce predictable results are much more attractive than humans, with their cryptic and inconsistent requirements and random behavior.
According to Markram and his wife Camila, this means being autistic.
They called it the "intensive world" syndrome.
Behavior that arises not because of a cognitive deficit — the prevailing view of autism today — but because of an excess. Instead of forgetting, autistic people learn too much and learn too fast. While they may seem to be devoid of emotions, the Markrams insist that they are in fact overwhelmed not only by their emotions, but also by the emotions of others.
Therefore, the brain architecture of autism is determined not only by its weaknesses, but also by its inherent strengths. The developmental disorder, which is thought to affect about 1 percent of the population, is not characterized by a lack of empathy, says Markram. Social difficulties and strange behavior stem from attempts to cope with a world that is too much.
After several years of research, the couple came up with their name for the theory during a trip to a remote area of the South African part of the Kalahari desert, where Henry Markram was born. He says that the “intense world” is Camila’s phrase; she says she can't remember who first came up with it. Markram recalls sitting in the dunes, observing unusual swinging yellow grasses, thinking about what it looks like - being inevitably flooded with sensation and emotion.
That's what he thought Kai was going through. The more he looked at autism, not as a deficiency of memory, emotions and sensations, but an excess, the more he understood how much he had in common with his alien-like son.
* * *
Henry Markram with bright blue eyes, sand-colored hair and an aura of unquestioned authority that appears when working on a large, ambitious and well-funded project. It is difficult to say what can be in common with their son. He gets up at 4 am and works for several hours at his home in Lausanne, before going to the institute where the Human Brain project is located. “He sleeps for about 4-5 hours,” says Kamila, “this is ideal for him.”
As a child, says Markram, "I wanted to know everything." But the first years in high school, he was one of the worst students in the class. The Latin teacher inspired him to devote more time to his studies, but when his uncle died at the age of just over 30, “he just rolled down on an incline and gave up” - Markram changed. Shortly before this, he was assigned a task in brain chemistry, which made him think: “If the chemistry and structure of the brain changes, then I change too. Then who am I? Complex issue. So I entered the medical college as a psychiatrist. ”
Markram studied at the University of Cape Town, but in the fourth year he received a scholarship in Israel. "I was like in paradise," recalls Markram - there was everything necessary for the study of the brain. " He did not return to the university, married Anat at the age of 26, and their daughters Lena, now 24, and Kali, 23., appeared. Four years later, Kai was born.
During his postgraduate studies at the Weizmann Institute, Markram made his first important discovery, finding out the key relationship between the two neurotransmitters involved in training, acetylcholine and glutamate. This is an important and impressive work - especially for a young scientist, but his name has glorified further work.
During an internship with Nobel Prize winner Bert Sackman at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, Markram showed that “the neurons are hired together and the signal is carried out together” (fire together wire together). This has been the basic principle of neuroscience since the 1940s, but no one could understand how this really works.
Having studied the exact synchronization of the exchange of signals between neurons, Markram demonstrated that the excitation according to a certain pattern increases the synaptic connections between cells, while skipping the signal weakens them. This simple mechanism allows the brain to learn by establishing connections both directly and figuratively between different experiences and sensations - and between cause and effect.
Accurate measurement of these time differences was also a technical triumph. Sackmann won the 1991 Nobel Prize for developing the necessary patch clamping
technique (
local potential fixation method ), which measures tiny changes in electrical activity inside nerve cells. To capture only one neuron, you need to take part of the brain of a recently killed rat about 1/3 millimeter thick, containing about 6 million neurons.
To keep the tissue alive, you need to supply it with oxygen, immerse a piece of brain in the composition that replaces the cerebrospinal fluid. Under the microscope, using a small glass pipette, you need to gently poke one cell. This technique is similar to the injection of sperm into the egg, except that neurons are hundreds of times smaller than the egg.
It requires firm hands and attention to detail. Markram's innovation was in creating a machine that could simultaneously examine 12 prepared cells, measuring their electrical and chemical interactions. Researchers who conducted such experiments say that you can spend a whole day without getting a result, but Markkram became a master.
However, there was a problem. It seemed that he was going from one career peak to another - a Fulbright scholarship at the National Institute of Health, a position in Weizmann, publications in the most prestigious journals - but at the same time it became clear that something was wrong in the head of his younger child. He studied the brain, but could not figure out how to help Kai learn and cope with difficulties. As he told the New York Times earlier this year, “You feel you are powerless. Your child has autism, and you, a neuroscientist, don’t know what to do. ”
* * *
At first, Markram believed that Kai had hyperactivity and attention deficit disorder (ADHD). As soon as Kai began to walk, he did not sit quietly. “He was running around, out of control,” says Markkram. With age, Kai began to have nervous breakdowns. “It has become less hyperactive, but more difficult to control. The situations were unpredictable. Tantrums. He could be very stubborn, ”recalls Markkram.
Keeping Kai from injuring herself on the street or as a result of arbitrary impulses was a constant problem. Going to the movies is a real challenge. Kai refused to go to the cinema or covered his ears with his hands.
But he liked to hug people, even strangers. Because of this, many experts ruled out autism. Only after many examinations he was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, characterized by difficulties in social interaction and repetitive behavior, but without impairment of speech and cognitive functions.
“We underwent examinations - and we made different diagnoses everywhere,” says Markkram. As a pedantic scientist, he was annoyed by this. He left medical school to do neuroscience because he did not like the uncertainty of psychiatry. “I was disappointed in psychiatry,” he says.
Over time, attempts to understand Kai have become an obsessive idea of Markram.
This led to what he calls “impatience” in brain modeling: for him, neurobiology was too fragmented and could not develop without combining data. “I was not satisfied with the understanding of how the brain fragments work; you need to understand everything completely, ”says Markkram. “Every molecule, every cell, every gene. Nothing can be left without attention. ”
Because of this impatience, he decided to study autism, reading every book that only fell into his hands. In the 90s there was an increased attention to this state. The diagnosis appeared in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM 3) in the 80th year. In 1988, Dustin Hoffman's Rain Man, a film about the
savante , was
released , popularizing the idea that autism is both a disorder and a source of a bizarre mind.
The dark era of the mid-20th century, when autism was considered a consequence of the "coldness of the mother" was in the past. However, although experts recognize autism as a neurological disorder, the reasons remain unknown.
The most famous theory suggests a disorder in the parts of the brain that are responsible for social interaction, which leads to a lack of empathy. This "theory of reason" was developed by Uta Fret, Alan Leslie, Simon Baron-Cohen in the 1980s. They found that autistic children later understand the difference between what they know and what the other knows.
In the experiment, the children watched Sally and Anna dolls. Sally had a ball that she hid in a basket and left. Anna was putting the ball in the box. By the age of four or five, the child can say that Sally will search for the ball in the basket, because she does not know that Anna has shifted it. But most autistic children assume that Sally will search for the ball in the box, because they themselves know that he is there. Ordinary children immediately take the view of Sally, whereas autistic children have difficulty with this.
Researchers associate this "blindness of consciousness" - the failure of the perception of perspective - with their observations that autistic children do not participate in the game. Instead of playing together, autistic children focus on objects or systems — the top, the dice, memorize symbols, or become obsessed with mechanical objects, such as trains and computers.
This apparent social indifference was considered key to this condition. Unfortunately, the theory considered autistic people selfish, as it was difficult for them to understand that other people could be loved, upset or hurt. While the Sally-Anne experiment shows that autistic people have difficulty understanding that other people have their own views — what researchers call cognitive empathy or “theory of mind” —he does not prove that they don’t care when someone is experiencing emotional or physical pain. From the point of view of care - affective empathy - autistic people do not necessarily have a violation.
Sadly, in English these two types of empathy are combined in one word. Thus, from the 1980s, the idea of “lack of empathy” among autists arose.
“When we became acquainted with theories about autism, we could not believe it,” says Markkram. “Everyone thought they lacked empathy. And as for Kai, so he saw through you. His understanding of your true intentions was much deeper. ” And he needed social contacts.
The obvious thought: maybe Kai is not autistic? By the time Markram was immersed in autism literature, he was convinced that Kai was correctly diagnosed. He learned enough to consider his son’s behavior classic for autistic people, and that there is no other condition explaining his behavior.
People who are undoubtedly considered autistic, such as Temple Grandin, the author of popular books and animal behavior consultant in animal husbandry, faced similar difficulties when autistic people are considered to be selfish.
Markram began work on autism as a visiting professor in San Francisco in 1999. His colleague, neurobiologist Michael Mertsnikh, suggested that the cause of autism is an imbalance between the neurons responsible for inhibition and arousal. Braking errors explain Kai's behavior when he touches the cobra. Markram began research on this topic.
List of articles on autism and the project "Human brain project" on Habré
KDPV,
source .