Shanker – studying the brain

There was a dramatic breakthrough in the kind of research that developmentalists are doing a couple of years ago when Don Tucker created dense ray EEG which is a system that allows us to get a fairly in depth look at the cortex of fairly quite young children, in fact we can look at newborns.  And the way you do this is, you have what is in essence a bathing cap that is dipped in a saline solution that you put on the child and you have either 128 or 256 electrodes that enable us through something called Source Modeling to get a fairly good picture at the way those parts of the brain that regulate emotion …  

What we can look at is those parts of the brain that regulate emotion and see how these are interacting with the more cognitive parts of the brain. In our own research we are particularly interested, right now, in young children that have been diagnosed with Autism or Autistic Spectrum Disorders. And we give these kids a very intensive form of therapy and we want to discover two things. First of all we want to know is the therapy actually effective and the second thing we want to know is does the therapy produce measurable changes in brain functioning. 

So, to do this, the very first thing we have to do is to get the kid used to wearing the bathing cap and with young children with autism this is certainly challenging but we’ve been, our head researcher Jim Steven, has been remarkably successful in getting these kids to wear the bathing cap. And then we want to see is there something distinctive about how they are processing certain kinds of information at the very beginning of the program, before treatment has begun. And we do see some striking patterns emerging now. One of these is that the children have a lot of difficulty processing emotional information.