9

Last Chance

After months of failure, Tania stood there,
her heart beating in her throat.

Was this the breakthrough?

Where were you when the terrorists flew into the Twin Towers? At home? On vacation? In the office? Who were you with? Almost everyone remembers those details. On the other hand, hardly anyone remembers where they were on September 7 or October 23. That has to do with the way our brains work, with the amygdala—really there are two of them, two amygdalas—two small areas in the cerebral cortex that steer our feelings. The amygdala is where our fears come from. It’s where dangers are evaluated. When you’re in shock, experiencing fear or grief, your amygdala starts overperforming, sending alarm signals to your memory. You never forget that feeling of alarm. It protects you from getting into that situation again, reminds you to avoid that danger in the future.

The amygdala was Kamila’s field of expertise. The molecular biologist/behaviorist was writing her doctoral thesis about it. Her work had nothing to do with autism, but now Kai was there, and again, he didn’t step into your life without changing it. Soon, Kamila was reading more about autism than any other topic and following Tania’s work as if it were her own.

She and Henry discussed it frequently, and they were on the brink of aborting the test series. “Let’s give up,” Henry said on more than one occasion, but then he wavered, sensing that the solution was right under their noses, staring them impudently in the face. “It was almost like it was hidden behind a Venetian mirror,” Henry recalls.

And then the day came when he really wanted to give up. “Let’s leave it at that and try to find another way,” he said to Tania.

“No,” she responded. Her dissertation would be doomed. “Let me try something else,” she begged. Henry agreed.

Tania proceeded to do something crazy, and she did it for no reason she could explain, a wild stab in the dark. After spending two years probing inhibitory cells in vain, she decided to try their opposite number, the excitatory cells, the ones that remind you to move your hand off the hot stove, the ones that agitate the brain rather than calm it down. She stood there, alone in her lab. She stabbed the micropipette into the patch, stimulated it, and could hardly believe what she was seeing through her microscope. The excitatory cells perceived the stimuli as twice as strong—they talked more to each other; they were really blabbering. And, to keep it in colloquial terms, they had a lot more followers too, many more cells receiving their messages. The excitatory cell of a normal rat connects to ten other cells. The excitatory cell of an autistic rat has twenty such connections: a firework of signals, doubly as fast, visible from twice as far away. Miracle cells.

After so many months of perceived failure, Tania stood there, her heart in her throat. She went straight home. She didn’t mention anything to Henry and Kamila. She might have made a mistake. But the next day she achieved the same results and the following day too. Finally, on the third day, she approached Henry.

Everything is amplified? Henry was baffled. They redid the experiment, patching and clamping like crazy, and got the same result: it wasn’t a fluke. How on earth could that be? Everyone spoke about a deficit, but they had found an excess, a strength not a weakness. These high-performance cells weren’t connected to each other by the usual streets but by veritable signal highways. Impressions and perceptions sped through them. Everything the rats saw, heard, or smelled was amplified: their brain amplified it. They didn’t have a deficit of feelings; they had a surplus.

Henry, the traditional scientist, would probably have aborted the series of experiments right there. He would have reviewed the past research, the insights of the past decades, and concluded that, for whatever reason, they were on the wrong path. He would have started again from square one. If it hadn’t been for Kai, that is. The results clashed with the consensus but fit Kai perfectly.

Henry and Kamila couldn’t contain their excitement. If, contrary to expectations, the cerebral cortex was disproportionally active, the impressions were amplified, and the autistic world was faster, louder, more colorful, how did it look in Kamila’s area of expertise, the amygdala, where memory and feelings are located? Would those areas be amplified too? “Imagine that,” Kamila said. “Then everything in the books would be wrong.”

Kamila dropped in on her thesis advisor, Carmen Sandi: “Could we perhaps expand my postdoc? I know of a project, one related to autism. Tania, over in the lab, has discovered something that calls everything we have been taught on the subject into question.” Once she had told Carmen more about Kai and Tania’s breakthrough, her advisor said, “Now, doesn’t that sound exciting? Yes, gladly.” Kamila recruited Tania into her team. Together they would take a close scientific look at the rats’ amygdalas, monitoring their fears, feelings, and memory. It was a complete break with tradition.

Autism research has always relied on experiments with animals, often monkeys. These experiments often involved removing the amygdala from a monkey’s brain, whereupon it would lose its drive and position in society and be left cowering in a corner, no longer interacting. The monkey has autism, the scientists concluded—they interact less. The trials began, inevitably leading to treatments that were geared toward stimulating the brain, awakening feelings, animating them, bringing them back to life.

Kamila and Tania did the opposite. Their thesis: If these impressions were racing through the cerebral cortex, it had to have an impact on the rats’ amygdala, creating an excess of emotions, feelings, and memories. Tania would study the cells; Kamila, the biopsychologist, would monitor how the feelings moved through the brain, how their pain and fears traveled between the amygdala and the cerebral cortex, and how it affected the animal’s behavior.

They first devoted themselves to the cells. They patched them, stimulated them, and watched as the cells responded. In the amygdala, where everything was supposed to be dead or weakened, the needle went up. They were on the right path.

They now inspected the animals: What are they learning? How do their memories work? How do they process fear? They appropriated a famous experiment known as the water maze.

Kamila explains: “You sit a rat down in a pool of water. Rats can swim. There is a small island in the basin where the rat can rest, but it doesn’t know where it is at first. The rat swims, it’s under stress—it takes time to find the island. You record how long the rat takes to find it. You take the rat out, put it in a second time, and track how long it takes to find the pedestal again.”

Kamila placed “normal” rats and autistic rats in the basin. The result was surprising: the autistic rats found the pedestal more quickly. They learned faster and had a better memory. In the next iteration, she injected fear into the experiment, the rats’ personal 9/11, so to speak. She wanted to find out how fear got lodged in the animal’s memory and how it affected their behavior. The rat sat in a box, on a grate, and a shrill sound rang. After twenty seconds, Kamila gave the animal a small electric shock through the grate, less than a millivolt but still unpleasant. She repeated the test, and the rats learned that the alarm predicted the electric shock. They ran around, sniffing, until the sound rang, at which point they froze.

Then Kamila changed the setup of the experiment. It seemed the same: the animal ran around, sniffing, the sound rang, and it froze in fear. Only, this time, the shock didn’t come. If the rats froze quickly and remained that way for a long time, it indicated they had good memories. Again, the autistic rats defied expectation: not only did they learn more quickly, they also had greater fear and were better at remembering it.

After further attempts when the alarm sounded but no shock followed, the normal rats learned that there was no danger anymore. They didn’t get worked up. The autistic rats were scared for longer. They often sat frozen for the entire eight minutes of the experiment. Their fear was greater and didn’t go away!

Wow. Kamila could hardly believe it. Simply everything was amplified: The eruption in the cells that Tania was monitoring. Its effect on the rats, their learning, their fear, their memory. This contradicted the mind-blindness theory of autism, contradicted the research they had found in old scientific articles and books. It corresponded exactly, however, with what they witnessed in Kai, who seemed to recall every minor trouble he’d experienced, who could remember years later what chair he was sitting on when they forced him to eat that disgusting piece of lettuce. He couldn’t erase a minor hiccup from his memory.

Suddenly, everything made sense. Kai had no deficit whatsoever. He didn’t feel too little. He felt too much. His withdrawal was not the disorder—it was a reaction to it, to his personal 9/11 reoccurring on a daily basis. If you want to help him, you have to act on his strengths, not his weaknesses. Suddenly, a common footnote they had seen in many studies appeared in a new light. The sensitivity of autistic people was well-known. However, it was consistently treated as a marginal aspect, a moving parenthetical, like the high-functioning savantism popularized by the film Rain Man. But this sensitivity was not trivial; it was the key.