In Musicophilia Dr. Oliver Sacks talks about the work of Llina's, a neuroscientist at New York University. With the reference comes the thought that the basal ganglia are crucial to the production of "action patterns" for "...walking, shaving, playing the violin, and so on". The neural embodiments of these action patterns are referred to as "motor tapes" - mental activities like perceiving, remembering, and imagining are all considered motor.
"...if we look at how the brain generates creativity, we will see that it is not a rational process at all, creativity is not born of reasoning." (Dr. Sacks)
For my, at first autistic but then something else, daughter it seems like her life long memories or action patterns have formed motor tapes that are a hodgepodge without clear distinction between that which is rational and that which is creative. For those more typical, how is the hodgepodge provided with defined distinction? It is clear that my daughter has quite the motor tape library; one that becomes entirely creative (lacking reason) due to the way the tapes are utilized by her.
During my daughter's most profound psychotic states the motor tapes from her basal ganglia lacked any defined brain etiquette. The motor tapes hardly waited to be called up by her thalamocortical system (aka the self) and they seemed more like they were always on -- in a fast forward fashion.
Dr. Sacks points out that "...the activity in the basal ganglia is running all the time, playing motor patterns and snippets of motor patterns amongst and between these nuclei (aka motor tapes), they seem to act as a continuous, random, motor pattern noise generator. Here and there, a pattern or portion of a pattern escapes, without its apparent emotional counterpart, into the content of the thalamocortical system (aka self)."
During her worsening my daughter's life long memories took her over and manifested as schizophrenic tendencies. While the typical person's response to an occasional memory being called to the thalamocortical system would be to many times fleetingly consider the memory and then release it - without a lot of emotion or response being involved - my daughter lacked resilience against an overly abundant and frequent supply of her memories' intrusions. Such happened for unrelenting and prolonged periods.
I became aware of the fact that my daughter turned out of the ordinary experiences into ritualistic events. That is to say, she re-enacted them to perfection thinking that she must do so as part of an ongoing repertoire.
I kept track of school reports of her more explosive experiences (behavioral outbursts) and identified that if she had a highly charged behavioral experience during Art on Thursday for whatever reason - she would repeat with a pretty exact reenactment the outburst on the very next Thursday; during Art again. Such would happen even with the initial reason (trigger) for the very first event absent. She engaged with similar behavior in her earliest years and I just dealt with it by coaching her.
The first time that I recall being witness to her penchant for doing so, we had been rollerblading. She was perhaps six years old. She had a gnarly wreck at a certain spot on the park path. She cried for a while, but then we continued to skate. The next day when we went rollerblading I watched as she deliberately made herself have the same wreck in the same spot. It was a re-enactment done to absolute perfection. I looked at her and was so surprised. I said something like, "Oh! Sarah, you do not have to do that. You don't have to wreck every time we take this turn."
The next time that we went rollerblading I made sure to be right beside her when we got to that spot, so that I might coach her with continuing to skate. She never wrecked there again. The fact that she utilized her memories in this fashion was, and continues to be, fascinating to me.
During her worse times, she had a tremendous amount of episodic experiences of repetitive body movements with chanting, followed by laughter, or more predominantly anger and violent outburst. She also had a lot of the internal conflict related to auditory hallucination. Certain words, when spoken by us, triggered episodes. One day while we were riding a tandem bike together by the school a PE teacher said "hurry" to some of the kids who were running. My daughter heard him say "hurry" and she engaged in an episodic experience while on the bike; hard but doable for her. The phrase "there you are" also triggered the episodes.
Considerations about my daughter's memory function are difficult to express, except to say that for portions of her life the basal ganglia have been the bullies, and this is because her thalamocortical system (self) was hard pressed to know how to categorize all of the motor tapes that were sent along.
About our journey with autism... At the very beginning I figured, no big deal, we'll get our daughter normalized in no time and pretty soon she would be asking for the car keys. It didn't quite work out that way and as my entire family and I continued to work through the ebb and flow of her unique walk, we fell madly in love with her in all her glory. For a real life look at one case of severe autism, just Google "Hello, Dr. Wells". It is a sixteen year account of autism that turned to schizophrenic like psychosis.
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