Shanker – brain development trajectory

At the beginning of the therapy, what we see is, we get the standard measures using various psychometric tools that tell us exactly where that child is compared to their peers in terms of their ability to process information, solve problems, use symbols. And then we begin about 35 hours a week of therapy in which we work very closely with the parents. And then at regular intervals we study their brain. And what we want to see is, is there a progression in the activation of the anterior cingulate. In other words, are we actually, beginning to bring that part of the brain that wasn’t active, that wasn’t processing this social information, can we bring it online? 

So, the children in our study range in age from two until four. And they are all at roughly the same kind of a developmental level; it’s a level at which these kids are having a lot of trouble managing social interactions, processing social information and they have problems with language and problems solving. They also have numerous biological problems that we work on for example, using occupational therapists.  

One of the questions we are most interested in is, is it possible to enable a child who for biological reasons has had this kind of a skewed neurobiological trajectory. And what we mean by that is, that the course of how their brain develops has been disrupted because of their inability to process social interaction, to engage in typical social relationships which according to all the work we’ve done, are the sort of driving mechanism in the development of the brain in the first couple of years of life.  

We know, that if we take an older child, a child of say five or six, who has not had the  social relationships and give them very intensive therapy that what we can do is, we can train them to, let’s say, memorize certain kinds of social scripts. In extreme cases the child might memorize something like “when someone raises the corners of their mouth and their eyes crinkle at the edges that means they’re smiling and happy. Happy means that they like what you are saying.  And this is all a very kind of rote memorized task for them and we try to give them lots of tasks.  

When we study the brains of this sort of a child what we see is that those parts of the brain that regulate memory are very, very active. So what we’ve done is we’ve capitalized on those centres, those systems, that regulate memory but we haven’t really touched those systems that regulate social information, social interaction. What we want to know is, if we start to work with a child much younger than this, when the brain is still fairly plastic, when the brain is still capable of forming substantial new connections, and if we adopt a therapy which is designed to mobilize the child’s awareness of, and understanding of social information, can we get those parts of the brain active, developing? So that instead of it being the memory systems that regulate their social interactions, it’s, as in with most of us, the parts of the brain such as the anterior cingulate and the orbital frontal which unconsciously regulate our social interactions.  

And so far what we’re seeing is, that if we can get the child at a young age, while we still have a window of plasticity, that there are very encouraging signs that it is indeed possible to return a child to this sort of healthy neurobiological trajectory.