The Brain Is Not Made of DNA

A new paper claims to have found A novel functional brain imaging endophenotype of autism.
They used fMRI to show that the brains of teenagers with autism showed no activation differences to looking at smiling happy faces, or afraid faces, compared to unemotional ones. In teens without autism, there was strong activation in many emotional and face-related brain regions. The unaffected brothers and sisters of the autistic people showed intermediate effects.

This is a fine study. The finding that siblings of people with autism have weakened neural responses to emotional faces is quite important as it suggests that this finding correlates (to some degree) with your position on the autism "spectrum".

The abstract of the paper actually downplays this, and says "The response in unaffected siblings did not differ significantly from the response in autism". However, there was a significant linear trend of group, and looking at the graphs, it's clear the siblings were In The Middle, like Malcolm.


There's plenty more nice things you could do with these results, which is an unusally large and rich dataset (120 people - 40 in each group). You could see, for example, whether siblings tend to be similar in terms of neural response. You could see whether the siblings who are most alike in brain response, are closest in symptoms. Or just look a the structural data on brain size and shape to see if there are characteristic differences between siblings that make one of the autistic and the other not.

There are a few problems. Most of the analyses are subject to the non-independence problem, because they defined their regions of interest based on the areas that showed a significant happy vs neutral face effect in the control group. So it's no surprise that when they generated graphs from these areas, the control group showed the strongest effect. However, they also do whole-brain analyses which avoid this problem and I don't think it undermines the main results.

So it's a decent study. But is this a "biomarker", or "endophenotype", as the title of the paper has it?

These are both hot topics in neuroscience at the moment. As the authors put it (emphasis mine):

An endophenotype is a heritable feature associated with a condition, present in affected individuals regardless of whether their condition is manifested, which co-segregates with the condition in families and which is present in unaffected family members at a higher rate than in the general population.

In such family members, endophenotypes represent instances in which genes associated with a particular condition exert measurable effects in individuals in whom they are insufficient to cause the condition itself...

The promise of characterizing endophenotypes lies in their hypothesized intermediate position between genotype and phenotype... the etiology of the endophenotype is likely to be correspondingly simpler: it can be said to be ‘closer to the level of gene action’.

The idea, in other words, is that if we can find a difference in the brains of people with autism, and their unaffected relatives who (presumably) share some of the same genes, we might have found a mechanism by which the genes ultimately cause the symptoms.

It might be easier, then, to find the genes for brain-not-lighting-up-to-happy-faces, than it will be to find genes for autism. Then once we've found those, we can use them to better understand autism.

My concern is that, while in theory endophenotypes seem "closer to the genetics" because they're "biological" rather than "behavioural", this is just a philosophical illusion based on the idea that the mind is not the brain.

We actually have no idea whether brain-not-lighting-up-to-happy-faces is closer to genetics than autistic behaviour. I'd say that our default assumption should be that everything is exactly the same "distance" from DNA, that is to say, everything is the product of complex interactions between genes and environment.

Some things are under the more or less exclusive control of a small number of genes, and these are called "genetic", but it's important not to assume that just because something's "in the brain", it's probably "more genetic" in this sense. The brain is a product of the environment as well.

If you scanned my brain while playing an audio recording of Urda love poetry, not much would happen. I don't know Urdu. In someone who did speak Urdu, all kinds of language and emotional areas would light up. That doesn't mean Urdu-brain-response is genetic. It's exactly as genetic as speaking-Urdu, which isn't genetic.

Spencer, M., Holt, R., Chura, L., Suckling, J., Calder, A., Bullmore, E., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2011). A novel functional brain imaging endophenotype of autism: the neural response to facial expression of emotion Translational Psychiatry, 1 (7) DOI: 10.1038/tp.2011.18