The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human

by V.S. Ramachandran

A third possibility—one that I suggested in an article for Scientific American that I coauthored with my graduate student Lindsay Oberman—would be to try certain drugs. There is a great deal of anecdotal evidence that MDMA (the party drug ecstasy) enhances empathy, which it may do by increasing the abundance of neurotransmitters called empathogens, which naturally occur in the brains of highly social creatures such as primates. Could a deficiency in such transmitters contribute to the symptoms of autism? If so, could MDMA (with its molecule suitably modified) ameliorate some of the most troubling symptoms of the disorder? It is also known that prolactin and oxytocin—so-called affiliation hormones—promote social bonding. Perhaps this connection, too, could be exploited therapeutically. If administered sufficiently early, cocktails of such drugs might help tide over some early symptom manifestations enough to minimize the subsequent cascade of events that lead to the full spectrum of autistic symptoms.