Shanker – studying autism therapy and brain changes

And when you think about it, that means that these kids are kids that have a lot of trouble with social interactions because also, social interactions revolve around what Stanley Greenspan and I call emotional signals. For example, facial expressions: with your facial expressions you’re sending all sort of messages to whoever you’re talking to that you’re angry, happy, interested, bored. But the kids that we work with have a lot of trouble picking up this information; they have a lot of trouble attending to those parts of the face, the hands, the head that we use to send these messages to each other. 

So when we look at a typically developing child, we see certain parts of the brain lighting up as the child processes this information. And we are particularly interested, in our lab, in what’s going on in the anterior singular cortex. When we look at our children with autism, what we see is relatively little activity in those parts of the anterior cingulate that should be processing that information. Well for us, this was a tremendously exciting discovery because it gave us a sort of neurobiological benchmark that we could use, in addition to all of our behavioural measures, to see how effective the therapy is. So, we begin very intensive therapy, and we use a form of therapy developed by Greenspan called DIR and this is particularly useful for our purposes for two reasons: one is it is a therapy you can perform on very young children, preverbal children; and the second is, it’s a therapy which focuses on the child’s social/emotional capacities which are precisely the elements that we are interested in.