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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (800997)	8/12/2014 11:49:26 AM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574309

In the early 1980s I worked in a lab that was trying to characterize how the retina processed information. Their work was an extension of what Dr. Kenishi Naka and Dr. Shoso Usui did at UC Berkeley. The retina takes an image and breaks it down into a set of primitives like bars, rings and other structures. This abstraction is done to reduce the bandwidth required to transmit the info to the visual cortex. A degree of processing is likely done in the optic nerve itself. The visual cortex takes this info and reconstructs the image. At least in higher animals. Something like a frog probably just relies on the primitives, which is why you can fill one up by rolling ball bearings in from of one. It sees an object with a rounded front moving across its field of view, so it must be food... Anyway, the ability to abstract and process information is likely the basis of the other abstractions and processing we make. Evolution tends to reuse things that work. And that ability is at the heart of cognition. And that is the goal. Instead of being just a small part of the whole field, it is the key that opens the drawer that holds the field. No one has more than a clue what causes ASDs although there is a ton of speculation. We have some very significant clues. What we do know is the the brains of those on the spectrum have two different brain anomalies. Their mirror neurons are underdeveloped and fewer in number compared to neurotypicals and their brain mass is larger. Both of these are likely the result of a part of the brain that never organizes into a series of columnar structures. This is noticeable by week 20 or so. Since mirror neurons are important for socialization, the lack of socialization skills is likely caused by this. It is also likely why it is difficult for someone on the spectrum to process emotion. If you can't rely on emotion to help process information, then you are pretty much left with logic and objective analysis. What effect, if any, the excess brain tissue has isn't known. The initial function of that tissue is to form a scaffold for the rest of the brain. At some stage of development, and I don't recall at what week, it gets pruned away. In those on the spectrum it never completes. Hard to imagine brain tissue with no use, but it might be the case. Or it could be related to the visualization abilities that many high functioning autistics demonstrate.