I watched an autism documentary last night on SBS Australia entitled "The Woman Who Thinks like a Cow". What I found fascinating were her insights into her own narrow breadth of emotions and how she related to animals more easily than humans because of that. At that moment the thought occurred to me that the reduced density of neurons in the amygdala of autism subjects, something I'd just recently read about, could be a likely cause for her limited emotional responses. One can then speculate the likelihood then of that significantly affecting the development of other parts of the brain in the process. This link struck me after seeing and hearing about the reduced connectivity of the overall brain in autistic subjects as they described in the documentary. I've also read recently about conjecture as to whether the reduction in neurons in the amygdala is a cause or a symptom of autism. My hypothesis is that it's a cause, and that as autistic people develop, their brains make fewer neural connections in higher levels of the brain because of the reduced breadth of emotion memory the amygdala is capable of storing. What's interesting for me however is what I believe happens as we develop and the ability of the higher levels in the brain, namely the cortex, to learn to reason with lower level functions of the brain or inhibit parts of it. The example I give is the often wild and uncontrolled emotional outbursts from autistic people when young that in time through development can be reduced in severity as the example shown in the documentary illustrates.

What I loved though was the squeezer used in order to reform old patterned beliefs and associate them with pleasure and calming centres of the brain through pressure stimulus.

I've begun to believe that the weight of the sensory stimulus has a huge bearing on memory and what we remember. I've read of savants with photographic memory whom have been diagnosed with synesthesia, a union of the senses. That has therefore led me to believe that the greater the weight in sensory areas, the more likely we are to recall events. Additionally, associating that sensory weight with emotional events then go hand in hand. The weight of emotion being the driving force in motivation. And think about this; the more anxious you get, the more weight you give to your sensors!

Thinking this thought my framework of how the brain works is slowing beginning to form. It's amazing just how much what I've learnt in the past month has changed the way I view the world.