more plastic brains!

It’s a matter of long debate whether we’re born with a blank slate, a tabula rasa. Do we arrive in this world with our character predetermined, or does our nurture matter more than our nature?

Eh.

Like most such dichotomies – mind vs matter, yin vs yang, dogs vs cats – as a practical matter the resolution is in some combination of the opposites. The slate may not be blank but it’s got a lifetime of free space upon it. The capacity of our brains and minds is staggering. What matters is what we fill it with. But the ways that people’s minds operate – the schemes we use to fill our slates – vary widely. We have different learning styles, differing amounts of plasticity: you’ve heard that our brains can reorganize, remap, reshape like plastic.

It’s a useful ability when you’re a child, this plasticity. Plasticity’s also involved during recovery from brain injuries; even losing an entire hemisphere to surgery can be overcome as the brain rewires its pathways. It lets you learn how to talk, to walk, to read, to play musical instruments, to play sports, all sorts of complex, difficult activities. Then as you age, you lose this plasticity. It’s hard when you’re an adult to learn a new language, to pick up the violin or golf, to read if you never learned how.

Some folks seem to have more plastic brains, or to retain their plasticity longer into adulthood. This might have some correlation with Asperger syndrome and autistic spectrum disorders. John Elder Robison, the Aspie author of Look Me In The Eye, wrote a great blog post about plasticity and the autistic brain.

Autistic people, young and old, have a well-known difficulty recognizing and attending to faces: problems with discerning emotions, subtle cues, and looking others in the eye. There’s research showing that these problems “about face” are the result of a combination of nature and nurture. There’s a system in the brain, normally located in the right hemisphere, that soon after birth is able to recognize faces. This is why babies can tell mommy’s face from their scary uncle’s. This system is less active in autistic kids, and fails to “jump-start” the face recognition skill. Developing social abilities depends also on a second step: feeding that face system with a lot of input. Looking at lots of faces. But autistic kids don’t want to look at faces, so they don’t get this input and don’t feed the system. End result: adults with limited social skills.

Limited social skills can be more debilitating than you might imagine if you’ve got social skills. Consider work. Landing a job, even the sit-in-a-cube-typing-code-or-calculating-orbital-elements kind, is really a social endeavor. Make phone calls and talk to people appropriately. Return phone calls within the right time frame. Answer the phone professionally. Interview one-on-one, scary. Interview in a large group, overwhelming. Email helps Aspies, that’s for sure, but it’s still a social act and you can’t escape the face-to-face.   The Columbus Dispatch has a remarkable article on the difficulties they encounter in finding jobs.

That’s a tragedy both for the prospects and the employers.

The prospects, already socially isolated, fall deeper into isolation, and are out of work to boot. The employers are missing out on highly productive employees: in the article, a summa cum laude graduate computer whiz, for example. One man in the article has a Master’s degree and works as a janitor: an arrangement that serves neither party well. Economically speaking, matching candidates with Asperger’s to employers is a remarkably inefficient process. These are the employees that will do better at jobs that require higher intellectual abilities and the ability to learn complex things quickly: the very prototype of the “knowledge worker” on which 21st-century American success (not to mention humanity’s future) must be based. Yet another dichotomy – social vs. informational / personal vs. algorithmic – is of concern here.

I don’t have the answer. We’re doing good at identifying children on the spectrum younger and younger. We need to do better at intensive therapies that take advantage of their brains’ plasticity and target improvement of facial processing, social skills, and communications. We need better secondary and postsecondary educational opportunities for Aspies  - early intervention is critical but continued intervention can mean the difference between janitor and scientist. (I have great respect for janitors. I just think that some people are better suited for this work than others.) Finally we need to figure out how to better match people with limited social skills to employers who need people with intellectual skills. Maybe it’s just wrong-headed to try to select people for intellectual jobs by subjecting them to the non-intellectual socially-oriented tests that we call “interviews”.

Eh. The answer always lies somewhere in between. All I know is there’re some fantastic plastic brains, and we need more of them.

Posted by mark beadles in Uncategorized | No Comments »
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