young people with autism spectrum disorder thought they were just plain a
picture puzzle game while in an MRI scanner in fact the game was rigged by
their own brain activity the more participants spontaneously activated
social brain circuitry known to be under connected in autism the more pieces of
the puzzle filled in to reveal the pictures since the game was controlled
by their own circuit collectivity the participants were unwittingly tuning up
their own brains scans following the in scanner game sessions revealed increased
connectivity between two key networks of the social brain that don't talk with
each other often enough in ASD what's more participants parents noted
improvements in their children's social behavior that correlated with the
increased circuit chatter the National Institute of Mental Health scientists
who conducted the pilot study say such covert neurofeedback may someday help to
treat disorders of circuit under connectivity what we've done is to focus
on a particular disorder in this case autism well we've already know that
certain parts of what's called the social brain are not talking to each
other the way they should and to take advantage of that knowledge to pinpoint
those areas that are communicating poorly and to use a form of positive
reinforcement to try to get them talking to each other more strongly better
sticking they like playing games everyone likes games we put people in
the scanner and then we get real-time activity from the scanner so we know
what's happening in their brain at every given second of time so participants
start out with this blank screen and we tell them that there's a picture hidden
underneath the screen and they somehow to have to reveal the picture and they
don't know how and we don't tell them anything and they ask well how do I do
this and I say just try just try and revealed picture we have these two
target networks we're trying to get to communicate
better that I'm typically developing individuals they do communicate a lot
more than they do patients with ASD find that's part of
the social brain it's involved all kinds of social processing and something about
development causing to wiring the wrong way so it's not a trivial point that we
can change them this way we want to see if changing the networks will change
behavior whenever the networks are configured the
way we want them to be the piece of picture comes up and if they are in the
right configuration then it will show a piece of the puzzle and then they also
get this kind of upbeat sound yes so they know to pay attention they never
quite figure it out but they just have these strategies they come up with they
have to think that they're doing something and they have no idea what's
going on but they know that they're supposed to control it because we tell
them to try it nobody's ever come close to what we're actually doing I think
part of it is they don't necessarily know that it's the brain that's doing it
if they beats their previous high score then they get an extra bonus so they're
motivated to try and beat their score every day and they want to get better
they they get very excited when I get better
everybody likes winning right there's always activation taking place in the
brain even though when even when we don't think it's doing anything there's
an optimal way we think for this organization of spontaneous a theory and
in patients with autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders then this
pattern is disrupted and some brain regions are not talking to each other
the way they should be and what happens when if you have a task with explicit
tasks where like a behavioral training paradigm then you're just reactivating
these bad Network configurations activating the same networks that are
wired and in a suboptimal way so when we do your feedback we go
directly to the networks and it's directly rewarding the networks instead
of going through behavior which would not activate the right networks so we
chose pictures are completely unrelated you're not social they don't have people
in them they don't have text they're just abstract so that way they don't
activate the networks that we're trying to trance it because treatment it's it's
really very unlikely that people are going to be using fMRI and MRI scanner
because it's very expensive it's very time-consuming
eg would be much more practical because it's ubiquitous eg machines are all over
the place it's cheaper it's much easier to implement and so on in that case you
just have to know what the EEG signature was that was associated with what we
already have documented is going onto the brain using MRI so that's like a
long-term goal of how this kind of neurofeedback might be able to be
translated into some kind of clinical application