For today's episode, we will cover autism and sensory processing.
We will cover how the sensing organs communicate up to the human brain which gives rise to
perceptions.
In the Autism in Eye Movements episode, we covered the superior colliculus in the mesencephalon.
We will expand on the mesencephalon, also known as the midbrain.
We will introduce the inferior colliculus.
The superior and inferior colliculus of the midbrain are major regions of interest for
extracting sensations from the environment to allow the living organism to learn and
understand their environment.
The mesencephalon, where the central nervous system is developed during embryogenesis
from the neural tube.
This is huge and in my opinion overlooked in the pathophysiology of autism.
The mesencephalon is unlike other regions of embryogenesis and the development of the
living organism.
The mesencephalon does not further evolve or develop into more complex biology.
In addition, we will cover some basics of sensory processing, autism or not.
We will cover how melanin are involved in all sensory organs.
Remember, melanin is semi-conductive properties that allows the transfer of signals, nerve
impulses, action potentials, and so forth.
Melanin is huge here whereby it generates more electricity, more efficiency, more power.
So let's start here with melanin.
It is important to get a foundation on how the sensing organs work.
We will start with my favorite and last week's episode, The Eyes.
We have covered melanopsin, something not discovered in the human biology until 1998
by Iggy Provincio.
Melanopsin is a chromophore.
Everyone should know what chromophores are.
The translation of chromophore is light carrier or carriers of light.
These are proteins that absorb specific wavelengths of light.
The future of medicine will.
It will be centered around quantum physics, quantum biology.
Hopefully, it is closer to hitting the masses 10 years from now instead of 100 years from
now.
It is already happening, just not well-accepted or established.
In large part because of the evolved understanding of mitochondria.
Mitochondria allows us to understand these electrons and protons in more detail and what
powers the powerhouse of the cell.
Remember the question and you need to answer.
You need to ask yourself, what do you think light is?
Melanopsin absorbs blue light wavelength and generates all of our biology attached to wakefulness.
So it has indirect influences on what is anti-correlated with wakefulness.
And that is the dark cycle or sleep.
It is a two-part process in their independent light and arousal or wakefulness and dark or
calming and sleep.
It is a blue light chromophore for this process because blue is the most dominant color on
earth.
Of course, it is the sky.
Now modern humans, since we have moved indoors, might miss that connection.
But evolutionarily, and all other species besides house pets and zoo animals, blue sky
is the dominant color.
Hard stop.
This is all you need to know about modern health.
This is all you need to know about accelerated aging with the dementias and the obesity,
losing energy to the environment and the rates of autism and various other neurodevelopmental
delays and also cancer and CVD problems.
This is all connected to the modern environments.
Anyway, that is another topic.
Look up the contrasting colors in our eyes with short, medium, and long wavelengths.
There is a reason why you will see blue and yellow or paired.
Okay, now melanopsin is non-visual biology.
And for vision, we have another source of melanin in the eye, the retinal pigmentum epithelium
or RPE.
The RPE is connected to the coreroid, the area that provides the nutrients to the eye.
Remember our discussion on DHA as well.
DHA in the central retinal pathway is huge.
Remember all the electrons that the DHA carries.
Based on melanin's role, you can see why the pupil is black as well.
We are taking information from the environment and sending it into our biology to learn the
environment.
Information and energy.
That is what light is.
From the Autism in Eye Movements episode, you know the superior colliculus is a region
that quickly receives the signal to integrate the information and conduct downstream behaviors
by recruiting necessary brain regions.
Same for the thalamus and the subdivision of the thalamus, the lateral, geniculate,
nucleus.
This is where magnocellular and parvocellular are introduced.
And remember the episode on oxytocin.
Parvocellular sees large objects.
Parvocellular sees fine details and color.
Okay, Audition, our auditory biology.
The easy one is the cochlear nucleus.
An audition is where the inferior colliculus of the midbrain comes into play.
Our sensory integration and also the medial geniculate nucleus of the thalamus.
It sits right next to the lateral geniculate.
So the medial geniculate receives auditory information.
The lateral geniculate receives visual information.
Melanin are in the stria vascularis and the spiral ligament regions.
And in the cochlea.
Unlike other areas and cells, the ear, more specifically the cochlea does not have axons
for signaling.
Instead, hair and the melanin are used.
This is wild.
Melanin sheets, which pretty much determines health and lifespan, are melanin sheets throughout
our body.
Melanin sheets in the ear are proximal to auditory nerves.
You can easily connect why vision and hearing decreases with age.
This is why.
With Audition, misophonia is a condition.
In autism, that is the overstimulated, overwhelming of noises.
That sensitivity.
Now with autism, there is both hyper and hypo sensitivity.
And this is true.
There is a lack of environmental influence and an overstimulation of sensory and environmental
influence.
When we parse out scientific literature later, covering autism and senses, we will go over
this.
The differences.
This is why sensory processing is an important topic.
Most, or more likely all.
All autistics have the sensory processing phenomena.
And this is why.
I think the mesencephalon is important.
The area of the brainstem, the midbrain that integrates sensations and helps recruit brain
and spine connectivity.
It is no surprise, it is undisputed that autistics have problems with integrating sensory signals
and processing it downstream with connectivity, functional connectivity to perceive the environment.
In previous episodes, I described hearing can get like a later Beatles track in the late
60s Beatles, 1967, 1968, 69.
Those Beatles tracks, towards the end of the songs, they started to experiment with various
sources of sound.
Some instruments, and some not instruments, just anything they could find around the recording
studio.
I think I remember one time hearing about they used a broom and swept it across the
rug.
And I know Neil Young and his country band used to do this as well.
But the Beatles songs, they would just find anything to create noise out of.
You can hear Sergeant Pepper's album or the White album.
Albums like that in the late 60s, towards the ends of the tracks, they would implement
this.
It's all about blending sounds.
And sometimes in social settings, my hearing can start to do this.
When people are loud and talking over each other, there's multiple sources of auditory
information coming in.
That's whenever I say, see ya.
I don't need to be there in that gathering.
The gathering will gather without me.
I am not interested in that environment.
Okay, the skin.
Mechanal receptors.
Touch.
Of course, melanin is on the skin.
Alpha melanocyte stimulating hormones.
A. M.S.H.
This melanocyte and the other two, the beta and gamma melanocytes, are all from an area
of the hypothalamus that we have covered.
It's POMC, Proopio Melanocortin.
This is tied to cortisol and tied to leptin.
If the brain is our metabolic bank accountant that allocates and conserves energy based
off of the sensory and perception, leptin is our energy accountant.
These are slightly different.
Leptin is like the scorekeeper.
How is the energy level of the living organism and it sends that information up to the brain?
Mainly, the leptin-melanocortin pathway.
Modern people think about leptin and they might think food as the first thing.
I'm low on energy so I need food.
This is untrue.
This is poor critical thinking.
There are reasons why vitamin D receptors and the red light chromophores are on the
inner membrane of the mitochondria.
We don't need food for energy.
We create endogenous glucose and the electromagnetic fields of light properties can stimulate our
biology for energy.
Remember autism and gastrointestinal episode.
Marlano sites and Carantino sites of the epidermis.
Now connect the neuroepithel cells and the embryonic process.
One Marlano site supplies melanin to 36 Carantino sites.
And remember in that episode on the epidermis with the Carantino sites, remember TPH1, tryptophan,
hydroxylase, 1.
This is huge in the gut process.
So let's go to the enteric nervous system and the gastrointestinal tract.
Melanin are involved in all of those enterochromathin cells.
The gut makes a lot of light in this biological conduction.
Pocaryotic and eukaryotic cells.
Prokaryotic cells have the cytochrome c-oxidase.
And eukaryotic cells on the inner mitochondria membrane.
This is the fourth cytochrome, the fourth complex, the last process before ATPase.
Cytochrome c-oxidase is the last part of the oxidative phosphorylation.
This is where energy is really happening.
And bacteria in these enterochromathin cells and prokaryotic cells, bacteria emits, probably
or it is, bacteria emits the most light in all of our biology, these bio photons.
Remember we absorb light and our mitochondria make light.
We create light.
This is the transduction, this is the semiconductor properties.
Again, this is taking information from the environment so the living organism can learn
and can perceive the environment.
If you think about autism and the lack of environmental influences to learn the environment,
to build these connections downstream across the central nervous system and even across
these other nervous systems, the peripheral and the enteric, all of these are communicating.
All of these are connected via neuroectoderm, also called neuroepithelial cells.
This is neuralation.
We will cover this more in detail.
This is embryogenesis.
This is where, in my opinion, autism research must go.
We must go this far upstream and then work in this direction.
This will allow us to reveal when autism is occurring and the true pathophysiology of
autism.
Instead of the way we approach it now, which is too far downstream, there are way too many
variables.
How are we continuing from this direction?
If everything that is known about autism and GI problems, these items are huge.
These items are connected.
Likely, the two most common comorbid conditions in all of these autism and XYZ comorbid conditions.
The most common are GI, sensory processing, and another one from a recent episode, autism
and speech and language.
Migration and the embryogenesis are regions of interest for all of these.
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