“It would be really nice if all those parents that yearn for some acknowledgement of affection from their autistic children could be shown an fMRI scan of their child’s fusiform gyrus lighting up when they walk in the room.”

I’ve enjoyed the entire post but something about this last sentence just grabs me and holds me.

Have you tried the rest of the Autism Hub?

/Fredrik > a norwegian guy with aspergers syndrome

And thank you Ms Clark for the information about additional research into Broca’s area. Science never stands still and even the best ideas are open to challenge and modification. So refreshingly different from the doctrinaire approach of the quacks and the merchants of woo.

The lead author of the paper is a stroke expert who works in the Veterans Administration Hospital in San Francisco. Her name is Dr. Nina Dronkers. She went to France and MRI’d the brains that Broca had saved from his two famous patients. According to one of my professors, who is also a stroke-outcome researcher, basically the French were not happy that she was saying, essentially, that Broca was mistaken and “Broca’s area” is not really responsible for “Broca’s aphasia.”

There’s a strange thing in the way non-brain experts see the brain. It’s easy to think of the brain as having modules, like lego brick that snap together. They might say “this unit is for sight and that unit is for planning movements”. And so they might think that the brain sort of passes a task between discrete units like they might describe picking up a glass of water:
first the person sees a glass of water with the sight unit
and then he thinks about picking up the glass with the thinking unit and the motor planning unit,
and then the muslce moving unit orders the muscles to pick up the glass.

And in some ways that’s almost correct, but the way the different parts of the brain interact means that there really aren’t any discrete units.

As an example people thought they knew where Broca’s area was, that is they thought they knew which area was in control of spech production.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca’s_area
And the French are very proud of Paul Broca and Broca’s area.

“We were noticing that what people were calling Broca’s area encompassed large areas of the frontal lobe,” says Dronkers. The scans show that neither of the old brains had damage that affected the whole region now known as Broca’s area. But damage also stretched far into other regions beyond this spot.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v446/n7139/full/446956b.html
“…Broca realized this at the time, says Dronkers, and noted that the areas of damage were different in the two patients. But his conception of the area involved in speech processing has become simplified by others over time, the authors argue. They published their findings online earlier this month in the journal Brain (N. F. Dronkers, O. Plaisant, M. T. Iba-Zizen and E. A. Cabanis Brain doi:10.1093/brain/awm042; 2007).

This misplaced focus could lead to problems when diagnosing people with language impairments, says Dronkers. By assuming that only one small area of the brain is responsible for language, clinicians might overlook other regions involved in speech production. In other words, focusing too heavily on Broca’s area could be missing the point, Dronkers argues.

Others agree. “There’s a tendency for researchers to see activation in somewhere like Broca’s area and to say ‘oh well, we’re tapping into a language area’,” says Joseph Devlin, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, UK, who images language networks in the brain.”

The way one of my professors put it is that you could damage an area and another area might cease to work normally because that other area is so dependent on the now damaged area for some kind of input. So… you could conceivably have something like “Broca’s aphasia” without damage to “Broca’s area” because whatever the Broca’s area needed in the way of input, it’s not getting it.

Also, fMRI studies are notoriously hard to do correctly, and very few people who are doing them, do do them correctly. They use the wrong stimulus and they use the wrong “subraction condition.” etc. You almost have to be an fMRI super-expert to spot what any particular study did wrong. From what I have seen Michelle Dawson knows what is wrong and what is right with particular fMRI studies in autism, she knows a whole lot of the technical details about fMRI that I don’t.