Using autism as a model for neurological function is great because of the depth of histological and functional research that it enables, however as a model of species level function it still has some pretty significant gaps.
I’ve spent the last day consuming just about everything I can on much more unique constructions and am blown away by craniopagus twinning and polycephalic twinning. I’ve yet to watch video content for cases like those of Lori and George Schappell or Abby and Brittany Hensel but so far I’m taken by just how modular and agnostic brains are about any specific component. This should have been obvious to me based on the amount of lesion work that’s been done, but in these cases we can see the modularity without the assumption of a global requirement.
One of the most fascinating elements is the sense of “identity” in these individuals is so unique and well formed, even when they share sensory information. Looking at the limited ethological information, it seems that as long as there are distinct brain stems we have unique “identities”. Looking at Abby and Brittany, even the thalamus does not serve as a discrete unit of “person-age”.
This brings up a couple of very interesting directions for future exploration. 1) Is there a singular distinct region required for “independent” calculation ability or is this an “organic” result of flowing over discrete circuits? 2) If there is a discrete region, where? I’ve had a “gut feeling” that the Globes and Olives represent our core organizational units, but maybe it’s a cumulative artifact of reticulated formation activity? It seems drugs which produce the most dramatic “psychological” effect do so by acting on units connected directly to the reticulated formation (e.g. SSRI’s acting on the Dorsal Raphe Nuclei), or anticholinergic drugs in general impacting brainstem units.
Another interesting direction is how adaptable are brains to stimuli sharing? One of my side projects is working on automating hydroponic farming, and one fairly interesting observation is that root networks always seek each other out. For same species plants they bundle tightly, and for different species they have a less dense interleaving. Visually this recalls neurons actively seeking out other neurons, and forming networks for information sharing between host organisms. In the future, what level of stimuli information could a BCI inject into this network and still produce discrete calculation? This probably reeks of “the matrix”, but it’s an interesting path of exploration.
We can be reasonably certain based on these more extreme examples that “person” does not equate to cortical or limbic structures and core salience generation exists below the level “emotion”. This is consistent with the salience/valence model, and seems to reaffirm that salience is independent and a lower level process than valence.
Edit: My comparison with root systems in plants should have been more about perspective, it seems like we are defining plants by how their root systems look and interact with each other instead of the overall functionality of the plant. While there are a lot of powerful inferences we can take from root systems about how plants behave, if we only studied roots the plant itself would seem pretty mysterious.