A Regular Person Like Everybody Else

NPR’s Morning Edition presented a program last week about differences between the brains of people with autism and those of ordinary people.   (http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/06/04/154175007/whats-different-about-the-brains-of-people-with-autism).  

With the help of MRI and PET scans, which make images of the brain when a subject is reading, viewing, or thinking about something, an intriguing hypothesis has recently emerged.  It’s now suspected that the fiber tracks that connect different parts of the brain are less robust in people with autism, so that there’s a lack of synchrony between the front and rear areas of the brain.  In the ordinary brain, there’s “this sort of beautiful rhythmic dance together” between the activity in the front of the brain with that in the back, said Marcel Just, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, but in autistic brains, the “beautiful rhythm wasn’t always there.”

To arrive at this conclusion, researchers needed lots of volunteers, both autistic and ordinary, to submit to scans while performing various mental operations.  One of these volunteers is Jeff Hudale, a 40-year-old with autism.  Like many people with autism, he has an exceptional ability, an unusual aptitude for computations, which, for example, enables him to do triple-digit multiplication in his head.   He graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a degree in engineering.  “I like working with things that are rather concrete and structured,” he says.  “Yeah, I like things with some logic and some rules to it.”  This enables him to do well in his job at a bank.  But he doesn’t do so well in social interactions, where whatever rules apply are not so obvious.  “Most people my age are nowadays married,” he says.  “But me, not only am I totally single, I’ve never even had a date.”

Mr. Hudale has served as a research subject since the mid-1980s.  At first his motivation was to help solve the problem of his own brain but he now realizes that his participation in these studies will help many more people than himself.  “I don’t want to quit until they finally can get this set right and get this thing eradicated,” he says.  “I’d like to have some semblance of, just be a regular person like everybody else.”

Of course one has to ask if he could have done as much good as “a regular person” as he has done as, so to speak, an irregular one, who without doubt has suffered because of his disability.  His story suggests that each of us has the potential to help others, even if we’re damaged in some way, even if we’re very old.  



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