It is good
to know that there are some brilliant minds out there, willing to cross
disciplines. A case in point is
Professor Stephen Porges, a neuroscientist with
particular interests in understanding the neurobiology of social behavior.
He is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry
and the Director of the Brain-Body Center in the College of Medicine at the
University of Illinois at Chicago. He
has an equally clever wife who is a world leader in the role of neuropeptides
oxytocin and vasopressin in social cognition.
You would want to think twice before inviting this couple round for dinner, unless you had spent the day before boning up on your science.
He has only written one paper on autism, it is certainly not a light read but it shows a brilliant mind.
This paper is actually a chapter in a book and can be accessed via Google Books.
You would want to think twice before inviting this couple round for dinner, unless you had spent the day before boning up on your science.
Porges is best known for his Polyvagal Theory. The Wikipedia article does not
really do justice to the theory. Here are two highly cited papers:-
He has only written one paper on autism, it is certainly not a light read but it shows a brilliant mind.
This paper is actually a chapter in a book and can be accessed via Google Books.
His
paper explains odd autistic behaviours in terms of the functioning
of the vagus nerve. For example, the
neural mechanism for making eye contact is shared with those needed to listen
to the human voice. So if you struggle
to make eye contact, you will struggle to listen to what somebody is saying to
you. We can infer that if your ABA
program trains you to make eye contact, you will likely become a better
listener in the process. Also, don’t talk
to somebody unless you are facing them.
He comments
on the regulation of the gut, the vagus and the immune system, vagal regulation
of the HPA axis, all with reference to ASD.
Having read
his paper you really will need no more convincing to go tune up your child’s
vagus nerve.
Tuning up the Vagus Nerve
Unlike
Professor Porges, I like to simplify things so you do not read them more than
once. Clearly Kevin Tracey and Porges
are the experts on the vagus nerve, but they do not go as far as telling you
what you really want to know – how to improve its function using today's technology. Fortunately, there is plenty of research on
the Cholinergic System, of which the vagus nerve is part. The following paper is a good example:-
You may
recall from my earlier post Biomarkers in Autism: The Cholinergic system, that there are
two types of cholinergeric receptors, nicotinic and muscarinic. This paper is telling us how in autism
these receptors are fewer in number than normal and the ones that are there, are
not working (binding) as they should.
So this goes
some way to perhaps explain why so many odd behaviours can be tracked back to the autistic vagus
nerve; it is damaged.
In his
paper, Porges is basically telling you to go try a vagus nerve stimulator, of
the kind that already exists for epilepsy (see photo above) and Kevin Tracey is developing for
arthritis (another inflammatory condition).
Right now this is not very feasible, but chemical stimulation of the
vagus nerve does not look beyond the wit of man, using currently available technology.