Autism is a pervasive developmental disorder characterized by profound social and verbal communication deficits, stereotypical motor behaviors, restricted interests, and cognitive abnormalities. Autism affects approximately 1% of children in developing countries. Given this prevalence, identifying risk factors and therapeutic interventions are pressing objectives – objectives that rest on neurobiologically grounded and psychologically informed theories about the underlying pathophysiology. In this article, we review the evidence that autism could result from a dysfunctional oxytocin system early in life. As a mediator of successful procreation, not only in the reproductive system, but also in the brain, oxytocin plays a crucial role in sculpting socio-sexual behavior. Formulated within a (Bayesian) predictive coding framework, we propose that oxytocin encodes the saliency or precision of interoceptive signals and enables the neuronal plasticity necessary for acquiring a generative model of the emotional and social ‘self.’ An aberrant oxytocin system in infancy could therefore help explain the marked deficits in language and social communication – as well as the sensory, autonomic, motor, behavioral, and cognitive abnormalities – seen in autism.

Key words: autism, oxytocin, interoception, bayesian predictive coding, neuromodulation, active inference, emotional affordance, sensory attenuation, self-awareness

Open peer commentary on the target article “How and Why the Brain Lays the Foundations for a Conscious Self” by Martin V. Butz. Excerpt: There are circumstances when anticipation can be maladaptive. In the following paragraphs, the occurrence of maladaptive anticipation will be illustrated in reference to psychological disorders (depression, generalised anxiety disorder, social phobia). It will be shown that anticipation does not always lead to improved control of oneself and the environment and that anticipation is not always beneficial. Finally, the question is raised of whether it is the strength of the anticipatory drive or the content of the anticipations that is the important factor in the development and construction of the self.

Excerpt: A perusal of the research and literature on the cognitive neuroscience of emotion bears this out: there is a sudden interest in the phenomenology of emotion, and this is because some cognitive neuroscientists are finally beginning to get the picture; one cannot explain the consciousness of emotion as a content of experience without necessarily presupposing the ontological primacy of the experience being explained. Let me put this another way: what neuroscientists are charged with doing is taking the experience of emotion and then explaining it in terms of cognitive processes and physiological events in the nervous system. These efforts from the beginning have always had as their goal to reduce the meaning of conscious experience to biomechanical explanations. But this approach has proved fatal for the project of a reductive cognitive neuroscience, because as soon as you explain something, you are presupposing the existence of whatever it is you set out to explain. If I say, “emotion is triggered, in part, by neuromechanisms in the amygdala of the brain’s limbic system,” this means that the amygdala’s activity explains how emotion gets triggered, but what the explanation presupposes is an experience of emotion that is in need of explanation. But what is this experience of emotion? Clearly, from the first-person perspective of the person undergoing the emotional experience, this is not remotely experienced as an event in the brain. As the phenomenologist understands it, the first-person experience of emotion is the transformation of a world. Neuroscientists who ascribe to phenomenology are beginning to come to terms with the fact that their neuromechanisms are tied to a world of experience that cannot be accessed with their instruments, but require careful experiential description.

Transient periods of synchronization of oscillating neuronal discharges in the frequency range 30–80 Hz (gamma oscillations) have been proposed to act as an integrative mechanism that may bring a widely distributed set of neurons together into a coherent ensemble that underlies a cognitive act. Results of several experiments in animals provide support for this idea. In humans, gamma oscillations have been described both on the scalp (measured by electroencephalography and magnetoencephalography) and in intracortical recordings, but no direct participation of synchrony in a cognitive task has been demonstrated so far. Here we record electrical brain activity from subjects who are viewing ambiguous visual stimuli (perceived either as faces or as meaningless shapes). We show for the first time, to our knowledge, that only face perception induces a long-distance pattern of synchronization, corresponding to the moment of perception itself and to the ensuing motor response. A period of strong desynchronization marks the transition between the moment of perception and the motor response. We suggest that this desynchronization reflects a process of active uncoupling of the underlying neural ensembles that is necessary to proceed from one cognitive state to another.

Excerpt: An attempt is made to describe the relationship between the world and the knowing subject, which is fundamental for epistemology, on the basis of the more recent results of neurobiology and especially of brain research. The current epistemological theories usually show a strange and, for their own development, disastrous abstinence with regard to these results. This also applies to the so-called evolutionary theory of knowledge. On the other hand, with all the occasional philosophical dilettantism, the more fruitful epistemological approaches can be found in neurobiology itself – a situation which, as is well known, is not untypical for the relationship between philosophy and individual sciences. (Curator’s translation)

Excerpt: Roth – director at the Institute of Brain Research at the University of Bremen – calls cognitive neurobiology, with reference to the German terminological tradition, a geisteswissenschaft, “of a special kind.” It investigates how perceptions and mental states take place. It attempts to tackle the key question of the relation between res extensa (matter) and res cogitans (mind; spirit; consciousness) that has remained virulent since Rene Descartes first formulated it in the 17th century. It describes how a human brain produces the image of an external world with all its riches of sounds, smells, colours and shapes. The link between this research programme as designed by Roth and the cognitive quest of constructivism is immediately apparent: the purpose of cognitive neurobiology is to discover the rules of reality construction as they operate in an organism’s brain.

Open peer commentary on the target article “How and Why the Brain Lays the Foundations for a Conscious Self” by Martin V. Butz. Excerpt: Surprisingly, the paper entirely neglects the issue of the dynamic properties of our environment. Focusing on (static, inanimate) objects only, it fails to acknowledge that anticipation becomes especially relevant when things around us change without being under our control: this is when we are forced to adapt quickly to new circumstances. To estimate as precisely as necessary what will when be where is of vital meaning. Surprisingly though, this issue is not addressed at all. Although it is acknowledged that the environment contains dynamics that are to be predicted somehow (§3) and that have to be represented in the brain somehow (§28), concepts about and empirical data on the prediction of external events are not dealt with further.

Der Autor geht in seinem Beitrag der Frage nach, wie Wissen über die Welt in das menschliche Gehirn gelangt, wie es dort verankert wird und wie es bei der Wahrnehmung der Welt genutzt wird, um diese zu ordnen. Er betrachtet dabei sowohl die kognitiven Aspekte der Evolution und der Individualentwicklung als auch die neurobiologischen Grundlagen der Wahrnehmung im Hinblick auf die Frage nach der Repräsentation von Wahrnehmungsobjekten im Gehirn. Er zeigt anhand einer Abbildung, dass kognitive Systeme zunächst relativ elementare Kohärenzkriterien anwenden, um Bildelemente zusammenzufassen, die mit einer gewissen Wahrscheinlichkeit konstitutiv für Wahrnehmungsobjekte sind. In Bezug auf die Frage, wie nun das Wissen über diese in hohem Maße zweckmäßigen Kriterien ins Gehirn gelangt, um Ordnung in die Welt zu bringen, diskutiert der Autor verschiedene konkurrierende Hypothesen zur Struktur von Repräsentationen. Er untersucht ferner anhand von neurobiologischen Beispielen die Frage, auf welche Weise das in den Verbindungsarchitekturen der Großhirnrinde schlummernde Wissen aktiviert werden kann, um Wahrnehmungsprozesse zu strukturieren.