Information gain in the brain's resting state: A new perspective on autism


Along with the study of brain activity evoked by external stimuli, an increased interest in the research of background, “noisy” brain activity is fast developing in current neuroscience. It is becoming apparent that this “resting-state” activity is a major factor determining other, more particular, responses to stimuli and hence it can be argued that background activity carries important information used by the nervous systems for adaptive behaviors. In this context, we investigated the generation of information in ongoing brain activity recorded with magnetoencephalography (MEG) in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and non-autistic children. Using a stochastic dynamical model of brain dynamics, we were able to resolve not only the deterministic interactions between brain regions, i.e., the brain's functional connectivity, but also the stochastic inputs to the brain in the resting state; an important component of large-scale neural dynamics that no other method can resolve to date. We then computed the Kullback-Leibler (KLD) divergence, also known as information gain or relative entropy, between the stochastic inputs and the brain activity at different locations (outputs) in children with ASD compared to controls. The divergence between the input noise and the brain's ongoing activity extracted from our stochastic model was significantly higher in autistic relative to non-autistic children. This suggests that brains of subjects with autism create more information at rest. We propose that the excessive production of information in the absence of relevant sensory stimuli or attention to external cues underlies the cognitive differences between individuals with and without autism. We conclude that the information gain in the brain's resting state provides quantitative evidence for perhaps the most typical characteristic in autism: withdrawal into one's inner world.

The boy whose brain could unlock autism

Autism changed Henry Markram’s family. Now his Intense World theory could transform our understanding of the condition.




SOMETHING WAS WRONG with Kai Markram. At five days old, he seemed like an unusually alert baby, picking his head up and looking around long before his sisters had done. By the time he could walk, he was always in motion and required constant attention just to ensure his safety.
“He was super active, batteries running nonstop,” says his sister, Kali. And it wasn’t just boyish energy: When his parents tried to set limits, there were tantrums—not just the usual kicking and screaming, but biting and spitting, with a disproportionate and uncontrollable ferocity; and not just at age two, but at three, four, five and beyond. Kai was also socially odd: Sometimes he was withdrawn, but at other times he would dash up to strangers and hug them.
Things only got more bizarre over time. No one in the Markram family can forget the 1999 trip to India, when they joined a crowd gathered around a snake charmer. Without warning, Kai, who was five at the time, darted out and tapped the deadly cobra on its head........

The Intense World Theory – a unifying theory of the neurobiology of autism


Autism covers a wide spectrum of disorders for which there are many views, hypotheses and theories. Here we propose a unifying theory of autism, the Intense World Theory. The proposed neuropathology is hyper-functioning of local neural microcircuits, best characterized by hyper-reactivity and hyper-plasticity. Such hyper-functional microcircuits are speculated to become autonomous and memory trapped leading to the core cognitive consequences of hyper-perception, hyper-attention, hyper-memory and hyper-emotionality. The theory is centered on the neocortex and the amygdala, but could potentially be applied to all brain regions. The severity on each axis depends on the severity of the molecular syndrome expressed in different brain regions, which could uniquely shape the repertoire of symptoms of an autistic child. The progression of the disorder is proposed to be driven by overly strong reactions to experiences that drive the brain to a hyper-preference and overly selective state, which becomes more extreme with each new experience and may be particularly accelerated by emotionally charged experiences and trauma. This may lead to obsessively detailed information processing of fragments of the world and an involuntarily and systematic decoupling of the autist from what becomes a painfully intense world. The autistic is proposed to become trapped in a limited, but highly secure internal world with minimal extremes and surprises. We present the key studies that support this theory of autism, show how this theory can better explain past findings, and how it could resolve apparently conflicting data and interpretations. The theory also makes further predictions from the molecular to the behavioral levels, provides a treatment strategy and presents its own falsifying hypothesis.

In this exclusive talk from the Learning Disability Today 2013 Conference, National Autistic Society director of research Richard Mills explores the concept of autistic thinking and austic intelligence drawing on examples from practice and research, along with some of the implications for support.