In Over My Head

Am I gravitating to more difficult subjects - a patently foolish idea after age 70 - or am I just less supple in my thinking? You saw the Indo-European and Hittite genetics paper and my attempt at explanation, and now I will pass this along.  In my Aspie/Autism research and contemplation I am interested specifically in Theory of Mind at the moment. In looking for a unifying principle in my random notes on the subject that refuses to become a coherent essay, I thought it might be good to check up on the research of what brain areas and structures were implicated in Theory of Mind, and if there wasn't enough of that, of autism in general. I still remember that the amygdala was considered the main candidate years ago, and the anterior cingulate gyrus was thought to be an important center of comparing one narrative with another, so that if it was underperforming, it was hard to replace an old idea with a new one. That seemed like it might fit with questions like "How would you feel if someone said that to you?" or "Did you interpret the tone correctly on this one?" or "Would this sound different coming from another woman?" 

Well, plenty is being done in terms of looking at what brain areas and structures are involved.  Every paper leads to six other papers that has an intriguing title.

Unfortunately, you can get off to an understandble start that we now think that the amygdala is only secondarily involved, except in face perception, where it is very important.  Overall brain connectivity is now considered more promising, and then you are suddenly into speculations that it's the Right temporal parietal junction,  Possibly the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), or the adjacent rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC), and medial posterior parietal cortices (MPPC) including posterior cingulate and precuneus.  All in the same paper.

There are two additional reasons for seeing posterior cingulate as a transitional zone and subiculum* as more the final stage of the SHS (AVI: that's the septo-hippocampal system) . First, the posterior cingulate represents a reversal of the architectonic trend which progresses from the perirhinal and parahippocampal cortex, via entorhinal cortex to subiculum. On architectonic grounds the lateral septal area and hypothalamus would be better candidates for a “next stage” of the SHS. Second, the posterior cingulate cortex has return projections to the pre-subiculum, some parts of the subiculum, entorhinal, perirhinal, and parahippocampal cortices. Transmission within the rest of the SHS  is more strictly unidirectional.

*involved, somehow, in suppressing the incorrect alternatives to new memories. Therefore, when it's not working, incorrect alternatives are still in play, preventing the correct memory from being encoded and set down.  Or something.  One sees that if you learned this maze of brain structures, you could make just about any claim you liked and the number of people who could refute you would be very small. All the people who knew the field might agree you were talking nothing but gibberish, but that would still be a small number.

I used to have a few brain researchers I could run into and ask questions about these things, and they were good at bringing it down to my level, or pointing out which sections were just required fill in order to not offend powers-that-be who were determined to show that this or that structure was deeply involved, despite the complete lack of evidence.  So that was Very Helpful, Piglet.

Or you get sections where you are pretty sure what is being said, but have little idea how this fits into anything else, as with Harvard Medical School re theory of mind:  

The investigators found that some neurons are specialized and respond only when assessing another’s belief as false, for example. Other neurons encode information to distinguish one person’s beliefs from another’s. Still other neurons create a representation of a specific item, such as a cup or food item, mentioned in the story. Some neurons may multitask and aren’t dedicated solely to social reasoning.

“Each neuron is encoding different bits of information,” Jamali said. “By combining the computations of all the neurons, you get a very detailed representation of the contents of another’s beliefs and an accurate prediction of whether they are true or false.”

 I'm getting to my random fun stuff on the topic, I swear.