Defining the Autistic Phenotypes is not difficult.
Understanding it and bringing real life data and experiences can bring these Autistic Phenotypes into power.
For today's episode, we will cover Autism and Speech and Language.
Imagine how much speech allows our species to sustain and evolve.
The amount of conveying information, teaching and learning.
But first, song and dance predates speech and language.
This lack of ability to convey meaning to the Autistic Phenotype prevents people from truly understanding the Autistic Phenotype.
Imagine how much human understanding and our ability to evolve and sustain our species hinges on speech and language.
On that theme, and before we begin, recently a paper was published and highlighted by a popular neuroscience distributor.
As I will call them, a distributor. They highlight and promote new neuroscience studies.
This study published bilingual benefits for Autistics.
Hard stop here. Let's investigate and spend some time and money on Autistics and One Language.
An ability to perform speech and language using One Language.
This is a problem that I have with Autism research. What is the purpose here?
Okay, to begin the Autism and Relationships episode previously released, we began with a brief explanation of the speaker, receiver, dynamic.
And I will play a short clip of that now.
Before we begin, I think it's important that we discuss social communication and interaction.
Between the speaker and receiver, or speaker and receivers plural.
We will discuss it from both points of view, meaning the speaker and receiver, and the potential implications from an Autistic.
The speaker is generating abstract ideas based off of a couple of components. There are a couple of inputs here.
Their knowledge, their ability to formulate speech and language, and their idea of the information.
And then they process this through speech and language to the receiver.
Additionally, the speaker will use different gestures, body gestures, and eye contact, and eye gaze.
This is all to kind of help the attention of the receiver.
This all helps with the conveyance of that message, turning ideas, turning information over to the others, inviting them to understand and participate.
And the receiver, or receivers, they have to follow along with the spoken language, the gestures, the eye contact, and eye gaze, and make sense of everything happening.
Now we've discussed visual thinking, listening, and hearing that information, and then transposing that into visual thinking.
Keeping pace with this, keeping pace with the speech and language that is coming, and making sense of the gestures, all the social norms, the eye contact, eye gaze, autistics.
Remember, autistics see things and imagine things from detail to general.
So it's maybe a different process, processing speed.
We see the details and then work our way out as we're building the details up to make a concrete image, a conceptualized, concrete understanding of the spoken language being received.
Now I know that's a lot. That's a lot to keep up with and try to understand. But there's a lot going on in socialness and human interaction.
Remember, it's very unpredictable too. Remember, B2. Remember, we need structure.
We don't like the abstraction as much as concrete ideas. And consider how each environment or each interaction is kind of context dependent.
There are different rule sets based off of the environment or the setting.
And remember one of the overall goals of the prefrontal cortex is being a flexible rule setting machine as far as giving us ideas or instructions, I should say, about what to do in certain environments.
The healthy versus unhealthy adaptive responses.
And also imagine the back and forth with the processing challenges or differences and then exchanging the information or communication.
Of course, with speech and language, Broca and Varanaki's area are two go-to areas for the brain.
Broca for speech and the basal ganglia will be involved and Varanaki for language.
Neither of course are exhaustive. A white matter tract called arcuate fasciculus connects the two regions.
Now it is interesting why the two brain regions for speech and language are distal from each other.
Broca is in the inferior frontal gyrus of the left hemisphere.
Varanaki is in the posterior superior temporal gyrus of the left hemisphere.
So essentially just right above the ear, right behind or above the ear.
Interestingly, Broca is speech production and orchestrating the articulation of speech.
With me, it can be choppy or disruptive and these occur on a spectrum for humans.
In the 1990s as a teenager, I became fascinated and hitched on hip-hop music, especially from New York,
and especially the so-called freestyle ability, which will incorporate both Broca and Varanaki.
So Varanaki is more language comprehension, fluency, and semantic processing.
Both areas conduct our speech and language.
Speech and language are very dynamic in the human ability, therefore it is dynamic in the brain.
We will cover lots of the interaction of the basal ganglia.
We will stick to the theme of the basal ganglia.
First, the arcuate fasciculus.
This consists of nerve fibers, so axons, how communications connect, and this has many connections.
Three functions include language processing, repetition and verbal, working memory and reading.
Okay, so we've covered how reading works. When reading, we activate the muscles used for speaking, for speech,
and we silently speak the words, the language we are reading up to the brain,
and this is how we are processing the written words by silently speaking to ourselves.
We are teaching ourselves.
So this includes speech and language.
If you think about the multiple complications with autism and speech and language, there are massive implications here.
The amount of dysfunctions, because how dynamic this process is,
the amount of brain real estate involved in the actual skill,
the choppy speech, the understanding of language and context,
the attempts to make sense of what the written words are conveying.
If you think about back and forth in real time, it is similar.
Of course, a major difference is the human interaction and the components involved with that.
However, in both cases, we are processing information.
Cognition, remember the clip with the speaker and receiver.
Remember how autistics have rigid thinking, literal thinking,
and delays and troubles with sensory processing.
All of those are involved.
Those delays are, in my experience, one source of ecolalia.
The ecolalia is allowing me to see the repeated word,
and it's allowing me to catch up to the processing of this dynamic phenomenon.
Ecolalia has many reasons behind it, and this is one of them.
For the processing, the cognition, and understanding, so I can keep up.
I suspect that is unknown or underrated by those from the outside,
research or others involved and around people that do ecolalia.
I don't know, maybe that is known, but I would love to know if others consider this from the outside,
and if others do this.
Often I say, if this is not you, you have no idea.
This is one reason for ecolalia.
Okay, with the arcu- fasciculus and autism,
diffusion, tensor, imaging, or DTI,
shows less coherence and organization within these tracks.
So think language delays and language processing difficulties.
I call it choppy.
This area contributes to fluent speech and the flow from comprehension to output,
the spoken words.
In addition, and connecting the basal ganglia, the abnormal speech production involves
broca, two-dorsal striata.
Remember the ecodetniculus and putamen, the input areas which begin downstream behaviors,
the living organism produces, including speech.
We can zoom into these regions and define objectives or functions.
Forget the dorsal striatum has the codetniculus and the putamen.
Zooming in, we define the dorsal striatum into the dorsal medial striatum and the dorsal lateral striatum.
The dorsal medial, more in the middle of the brain, the dorsal lateral striatum,
more on the side.
It is more lateral, so the side.
The dorsal medial is more deliberate actions and learning, goal-directed and intentional.
Dorsal lateral is habits, automated skills where we like to store things we don't have to think about.
Remember this is a goal of the nervous system, so it does not have to work.
It can just respond.
It can conserve energy.
Speech is an action, a behavior.
If you think about the environment of communication and communicating with others.
So undisputed, most, nearly all environments.
Think about the process of speaker-receiver.
So two things I want to cover.
One, it's rehearsing what you are going to say in real time.
Okay, I want to once again caution you.
This is in real time and I assure you, you do this.
When you are listening, you are preparing what you will reciprocate.
And remember what we just covered, speech at times is reflexive.
So this explains people not waiting, interrupting.
And if you remember the basal ganglia, the goal or direct pathway and no-go or indirect pathway, you can see that here.
At times, people can suppress and urge and wait.
And sometimes people cannot suppress it.
Likely, everyone fits into this in both categories.
And they are many variables in play.
Context, social context is huge.
If you suppress and wait, this is taking energy and ability away from listening.
Sensation perceptions are competing.
Soon, we will have an episode on sensory processing.
At least one episode on sensory processing.
So as you are rehearsing this, planning a language to speak, it ought to be called language and speech.
Because that is the process, it's language and then speech.
It's backwards.
This involves language formation.
This is a problem for autism in planning and in real time.
And remember the dozens of mentions of neuroplasticity.
So an additional two things here based on the first of the two items.
I want to cover neuroplasticity and the internal calculators and making predictions.
With years and years of poor social skills, that includes being cut off, being made fun of, messing up, messing up the speech and language and so forth.
Now remember the autism and anxiety episode.
Okay, I hope this is making sense.
However, with neuroplasticity, it is very common, autistics or in speech therapy.
The arcuate fasciculus is plastic and changes with practice.
Those repetitions are crucial.
And the second thing I want to cover, a reflex that inhibits our audition, our listening during speech.
We have GABA-ergic neurons inactivating hearing during speaking.
There is not much more.
I want to cover on that.
But when speaking, we reflexively shut off our ability to listen.
Here, you might think about tone, loudness, porosity, because the known EI, excitation, inhibition, imbalance with autism.
GABA is inhibition and is abnormal.
Remember Dr. Ben Ari, one of the foremost research scientists on GABA.
The rows of excitation for activation and inhibition for inactivation are to keep the living organism balanced.
So homeostasis is involved.
Remember the seesaw analogy.
Typically, it is better if one side does not stay elevated.
And it is better if the opposing sides are not in constant and rapid up and down.
With autism, it is an imbalance of over excitation.
Glutamate is excitation.
GABA is inhibition.
These are sensation, perception, and regulating actions.
Remember the inputs of the basal ganglia are a lot of cortex regions.
Specifically, some prefrontal for the top-down thinking, the top-down processing and control.
Please see the episodes, the previous episodes on the basal ganglia, for more detail.
The episode on autism and basal ganglia, motivations, movements, and autism in Parkinson's.
And towards the end of that episode, the last six minutes or so, we spend time on the direct pathway and the indirect pathway.
And autism and the basal ganglia, sameness, repetitions, and habits.
Okay, for speech and language, remember speech is a behavior and action.
So the basal ganglia has a role in initiating and sequencing motor activities, including speech production.
The basal ganglia's role is bringing this into life, articulating words and sentences, and back and forth.
The speech fluency.
And back to ecolalia, there are many variables in play for the causes of this phenomena.
And one consideration is the basal ganglia.
These cyclical loops running through the basal ganglia. And remember, this is where motivations meets movements.
And here we're talking about speech movement with the ecolalia.
And it's on repeat.
And remember, whenever it comes to our central nervous system and these basal ganglia circuits, these loops in play here, we don't define motivation.
You might want to define motivation here as something that you go directed and things that you want and you're providing effort for, trying to reach.
That's not motivation from the perspective of the central nervous system.
Motivation here is just responding to what it knows, to how it knows, responding to certain stimuli.
We are who we are because of these connections.
And with ecolalia and these things being on repeat, these circuits are activated and they just keep responding.
The circuits keep going. It's a cyclical loop.
It's similar to OCD, which is also running through these circuits.
Now with ecolalia, this is very fascinating to me.
I cannot hear a song.
The last song that I hear while, let's say, in a car, that song is going to come with me.
And I'm going to repeat that until whatever it is disrupts that circuit.
Now, as I've gotten older, I'm able to deliberately.
Now here we can define motivation like you might define motivation.
I can deliberately try to cut that loop off.
I must provide effort and try to cut it off.
But that song is coming with me once the car ride is over.
And remember the very first episode I described an old man.
I overheard an old man speaking to his wife in this kind of southern slang, southern draw.
And that speech, what he said, stood with me for six, eight months, maybe even longer.
And it got to the point where my kids were like, dad, that's enough.
That ecolalia there was a habit.
I would just kept repeating what I heard this old man say.
It's a phenomenon that didn't even realize it was occurring.
It was just my nervous system here, these circuits from Vernecki and Baroka to the Dorsal Straitum
orchestrating this speech movement, repeating whatever it is that the ecolalia is attached to.
These circuits are motivated to respond, regardless if I want them to.
So here with the ecolalia, I've given you two examples and there ought to be two good takeaways here
that sometimes ecolalia is performed so we can keep up with the discussion, the social interaction
because of that sensory processing phenomena.
And the second one is it gets stuck in this basal ganglia loop and the basal ganglia and motivations and movement,
which includes speech production.
These basal ganglia circuits, they don't need context.
They will just respond.
Now, most people think about the nervous system and the human behavior needing context that matches the environment.
That is not necessarily accurate because it is both goal-directed and habit-formation.
Also in the basal ganglia, it is organizing the rules of the context, the environment.
It toggles through the task for that environment.
Based off of the rules the living organism has learned.
In addition, language acquisition.
So it works within a network that learns speech patterns and rules.
In language, there are many, many rules.
Examples of those include such as subject-verb agreement and proper sentence structure.
So if we zoom back in to the dorsal striatum and use the dorsal medial striatum,
which is more goal-directed, deliberate actions instead of the habit,
since the dorsal medial striatum is more towards the middle, so deeper into the center of the brain,
this likely means it predates the dorsal lateral striatum, that is habit formation.
Evolutionarily, that makes sense.
Learning and goal actions come before habit.
In both the individual living organism and within or even between species.
Some of these things humans have transferred over to offspring, to subsequent generations,
things like reflexes and having innate fears and so forth.
Those are built up over time and conserved by the species.
That shows at some point it was necessary, it was a difficult part of life.
These things passed down throughout generations are important.
So the dorsal medial striatum selects the appropriate rules of the speech and language process.
Already with autism, you can begin to see some implications so far in the episode.
These selected rules and responses in large part are driven by environmental cues.
The dorsal medial striatum is used for learning more speech, improving the speech.
For autistics, the social dynamic and the novel context have major implications for the autistic phenotype.
Already, the biology that gives us autism biases us to our inside, our inner and innate world.
The social interaction is exhausting.
But now, because of what we have covered with learning, habit and the roles of the brain, there are massive factors opposing these skills.
The brain, the prediction machine to conserve and allocate energy and resources
and the differences between energy used during learning versus energy used during habit are significant differences.
There is a significant delta between energy during learning versus energy during habit.
Remember the internal calculator within the locus ceruleus where epinephrine and norepinephrine is released for brain energy, brain adrenaline.
And the astrocyte, a type of glia cell, monitors effort versus outcome.
When effort is not achieving the expected or desired outcome, the astrocytes will shut off the energy source.
This is effort versus outcome or persist versus quit.
And remember what allows us to persist is dopamine.
In addition to the dopamine's roles with drive, wanting, liking, motivation, pursuit, that exploration.
Another factor that can maintain persist is contingency, such as a threat, an undesired outcome.
Back to this outcome factor, isn't it? Outcomes, good or bad, moves the living organism.
Related to the dorsal medial striatum is the goal directed, okay?
A way neuroscience describes this is action, outcome.
This action will give me this outcome.
And you can use various reinforcers, positive or negative.
I want to execute this action to receive this outcome, a treat, a pleasure, whatever this stimulus is.
Or I want to execute this action to avoid this outcome, this punishment, this unwanted stimulus.
With autism and Leo Kanner's paper captured this well.
A fantastic part of the paper, the kids with autism learned to interact with parents and teachers and doctors and so forth.
So they could get that over with and then they can get back to their interest, their pleasure, which was always in isolation.
They, and still modern autistics, will prefer that environment with fewer or no people.
That's contingency based learning.
But ultimately, the desired outcome is the homeostasis and speech provides that for most.
Not so much autistics, but the majority of others interacting with the autistic.
There is a wonderful short from a previous podcast guest, a neuropsychologist, saying,
maybe talking about something going on, using words right now, is not the best option for the autistic.
Maybe something else is needed right now.
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