Throughout her volume, Brothers provides evidence suggesting that malfunctioning occurring during infancy in the amygdala produces autistic behavior. According to current research, autism begins earlier than this, but Brothers attempted to charac- terize autistic behavior because to her it was a failure to construct other persons and that was her interest – how do we cognitively construct the person behind the rela- tively empirically given face. Autism, however, comes in many varieties and inten- sities which is why it is now known as ASD, namely autistic spectrum disorders.
Nonetheless, with caution about generalizations, it can be said that many autistic children pay scant attention to faces. This was dramatized in a study that gave autis- tic and non-autistic children the task of sorting pictures of different facial expres- sions with some of the faces wearing hats. The basis for sorting the pictures was left to the children. The autistic children sorted according to hats, but the normal chil- dren sorted according to the different facial indications of emotions. Emotional expressions just did not attract their interests. I assume there was no “social editor”
to grab it for attention.
As we mentioned earlier, the facial region around the eyes is a particularly expressive part of the face and autistic children give this scant attention. A social editor that did not pay attention to the eye region in order to attribute mental states to others and to participate in the role taking needed for normal conversations would not be sufficient for producing constructive social interaction. This is indicated by the fact that such children have difficulty with first person pronouns like “I,” “me,”
and “myself.” Autistic individuals tend to refer to themselves in the third person.
Children cannot learn the proper use of the word “I” by rote imitation because everyone refers to the child as “you.” While human beings are the most capable of all primates in mimicking others of their kind, autistic people lack this ability.
Ironically, the most gifted primates in “aping” others are not apes, but humans.
Other symptoms of autism include an absence of empathy and difficulty with language comprehension even though autistic people can be highly intelligent in other areas. They are also extremely literal. When asked on the phone “is your mother or your father in?” the child might say “they both are” and hang up. In sum, autistics central liability is a lack of social skills needed to comprehend other peo- ple’s meanings. If told “to get a grip” on themselves, they may start gripping their hands or bodies.
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Another recent scholar reminiscent of Brothers’ early concern with seeing empirically derived faces, but not the symbolic persons beyond them is Lieberman.
Lieberman (2013) sums this up by saying that autism leaves the individual unable to understand the minds of others easily and thus, less able to form and maintain social bonds. He has a similar concern with autistic children’s inability to even con- ceive of, much less understand, other people’s minds. Brothers pointed out that it was natural and thus effortless for others to conceive of persons who have faces that give us tips to what they may be like. Whatever the case, the person is first and prior.
Part and parcel of this of this natural, but most cognitive achievement is the estab- lishment of intersubjectivity.
Lieberman’s novel take on all this is what he refers to as the intense and chaotic social world of autistic persons. As we know, the amygdala is especially sensitive to fear or anger in others. This super-sensitive amygdala makes it uncomfortable for autistic persons to be around other children. This plus their simple lack of interest in others more than dampens their social tendencies. Understandably looking at others in the eyes under such conditions is not their preferred behavior.
We must consider the utter contrast in intensity between the pain of rejection wherein research subjects are playing cyberball and the pain experienced by a lover or spouse who discovers that his or her lover whom they trusted more than anyone on earth was having a long-lasting affair. A common expression of this intensity, applicable also in the death of a loved one, is “I just can’t get my head around this.”
Late findings on autism have, in an important sense, turned full circle from the emphasis on its varieties. Dr. Rich Stoner who directs the Autism Center Excellence at the University of California, San Diego (2014), says that reports from his staff show that autism develops in the womb, and perhaps diverging even more from past understandings, it seems to have a common cause. His researchers compared the brain tissue of autistic children who died with normal children and found that the autistic children had suffered before birth from disorganization in their brains hav- ing to do with social functioning, emotions, and communication. This disorganiza- tion was found in the frontal cortex and the temporal lobes both allowing just the social functions above. Each gray cell in the six layers of the 2-mm thick cortex covering the brain is supposed to do a specific job in early prenatal development and each cell has to interact with each other. This is a complex process and things can easily go wrong. All of this happens before the second trimester of development.
Breaking with the past emphasis on the varieties of autism, this means that there is a common biology, a common beginning, and one underlying neuropathology that begins this disorder. In this case there are too many brain cells in the prefrontal and temporal cortexes. There are also patches in the layers of the cortex that are missing which causes a disorganization of the layers. Thus, the usual pruning of good and bad cells is not accomplished. The brain, however, is plastic and keeps developing for several decades. This means it can correct itself by pruning bad cells; thus, autis- tic persons can, and frequently do, get better. Stoner places great stress on this for- tunate plasticity.
I offer the passage below for those who want a further explanation of the genetic processes relevant to autism, but I only present the gist of the very complex story
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that builds on biological molecules called enzymes. Like all parts of the body, an enzyme consists of protein molecules which are the building part of the body and thus the brain. Enzymes transport all molecules into and out of cells. If a protein can cause or accelerate a biochemical reaction, it is an enzyme. How does this fit into autism? Certain enzymes help disentangle DNA that gives “instructions” for the development of each cell. DNA is responsible for the fact that animals create ani- mals like themselves. This makes it a basic factor in inheritance and this includes autism. Over one’s lifetime genes are characteristically given to mutations. It so happens that many genes that cause autism are unusually long (four times longer than average) according to Zylka (2013) they mutate to larger genes because the latter make good targets.
Many sociologists today still think that all human behavior is culturally deter- mined and that talk about any particular human nature is an error. As implied by the title, this chapter contends that humans do have nature and ironically neurosociol- ogy has shown, as does our evolution, that we indeed do have a nature and that it is social. It is ironic because many sociologists contend otherwise despite the fact that we should be the first to know. This is a good example of why neurosociology is important to all sociology.
To go back to our recent conversation, autism is an example of failing to develop our nature by a lack of the capacity to fully construct an intangible mental person from the purely empirical observation of tangible bodies. If the thoroughly social can be viewed as the capacity to incorporate the other person’s anticipated response into our own lines of action, this capacity seems just what is lacking in these chil- dren. Frequently, the idea of person-construction and self-construction is left out of discussions of the intersubjective. But such processes depend clearly on the ability to think in objective terms. Self and society are created together by individuals interacting with each other conversationally. Brothers’ approach as well as Lieberman’s more current efforts could help balance that omission on part of some sociologists.
While intersubjectivity makes people and society possible, it also fails with amazing regularity in everyday life even between lovers. That – most decidedly – needs our research attention.
We would be wise to reconsider our individualism in light of Lieberman’s (2013:
245) empirically based contentions that it actually works against our social natures.
Granted individualism can mean different things like a positive form of self-reliance and thinking beyond the group to the extent that we can do that. But culturally it has taken the form of a self-oriented quest for profit that works against our social natures and even our quality of life as economic studies show regardless of our culturally shared beliefs otherwise. To us the rewards of helping others may even seem naïve and self-righteous regardless of Lieberman’s evidence to the contrary. To Lieberman, our modern cultural version of individualism is only leading us away from Aristotle’s wisdom of the ages over 2000 years ago when he insisted that person-kind had a social nature.
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