Neural Entrainment and its Role in the Organization of Unified Perception – Exploring Perceptions of NVAs and the Role of the CRP
This articles’ purpose is to investigate and expand the understanding of the role of the Communication and Regulation Partner (CRP) in facilitating communication through spelling for Non-Verbal Autistics (NVAs or “Spellers”). It is the authors believe that the only way to evolve our understanding of any given phenomenon is to explore it openly without preconception or intention, to allow our curiosity to guide us to investigate, and to share data openly and freely with all parties interested in the phenomenon regardless of their viewpoint and of what viewpoint the data supports. This open platform and cooperation through the mutual interest of exploring any given phenomenon lends itself to the potential of new discoveries which can evolve our understanding of our experience and ourselves.
There are many things we do not understand about NVAs and about our communication with them. One of the least understood aspects of this communication is the requirement for a CRP. While we can partially explain this requirement, no single theory has fully and adequately addressed all unanswered questions.
While the “training” of the speller ensures a gradual reduction in sensory prompts, even spellers who are typing on keyboards independently still require a CRP to at least sit with them and attend to the communication they are typing. This begs us to ask some questions. Why does an experienced speller still need a CRP? How does this relationship aid in the verbal communication of the speller?
Other questions also remain unanswered in regard to the content of a spellers communication. Giving precise details and accounts of activities which occurred in the past in which the facilitator was not present is at times difficult and would not be reliable enough to stand up to experimental scrutiny. As a community, do we dare ask these questions? If we truly believe NVAs are communicating, not only should ask these questions openly, but we must. If we do not, we are in fact hindering the development and evolution of a communication which we all know to be legitimate. Do spellers and CRP share a special bond in which at times the CRP becomes aware of aspects of the communication before it is verbalized by the NVA? Why does an experienced CRP and an experienced speller need to first develop a relationship before being able to communicate as openly as with their “primary” CRP? Why is it that a speller can more effectively communicate when the CRP is focused and without distraction? We can dismiss these questions as having to do with anxiety and its effect on motor function, but if really sink into these questions, these explanations don’t hold weight.
We must understand that phenomenon holding up to scientific scrutiny means that the phenomenon is measured against old and established preconceptions/ assumptions. When new phenomenon are explored, they do not fit neatly into existing established scientific paradigms, but rather, they open the opportunity for scientific advancement and understanding beyond existing baselines. This is what grows our understanding of the world and launches new trajectories of scientific exploration. All who explore phenomena openly support each others research which in turn creates new baselines from which we scrutinize phenomena. This is the evolution of science and understanding.
As a community, we must begin to ask these questions openly so that we may explore them. This will not minimize the legitimacy of spelling as a means of communication for NVAs but will evolve and grow this method of communication. By making the communication better understood, it will become more accessible and gain validity based on its own merit. But first, we must freely admit that this communication is in some ways different than our typical speech communications. If we explore the phenomenon further, we will likely find it is an evolution in interhuman communications/ relations. It is this author’s belief that the study of neural entrainment can begin to answer questions in relation to NVAs expanded perception and the requirement for a CRP in NVAs verbal communications. Before we get directly to the relevance of neural entrainment to NVAs communication, we need to understand some key concept.
What is neural entrainment?
“Brainwave entrainment, also referred to as brainwave synchronization or neural entrainment, refers to the observation that brainwaves (large-scale electrical oscillations in the brain) will naturally synchronize to the rhythm of periodic external stimuli, such as flickering lights,[1] speech,[2] music,[3] or tactile stimuli.” (reference 1)
This means that our brainwaves act in direct relation how we perceive our sensory environment. Neuroscientists have studied the neural entrainment effect in relation to many varied sensory stimuli. Neural entrainment to auditory stimuli has been a focus of study, as has the relationship between auditory isolation in relation to speech comprehension and neural entrainment.
“The streams of sounds we typically attend to abound in acoustic regularities. Neural entrainment is seen as an important mechanism that the listening brain exploits to attune to these regularities and to enhance the representation of attended sounds.” (reference 2)
“Imagine yourself immersed in the babble of multiple talkers around you. In this common situation, your goal will likely be to listen to, and to communicate with, one of these talkers. For normal-hearing individuals, this task can pose a challenge, but it rarely prevents us from communicating. For the hearing-impaired listener, however, as well as for any artificial intelligence system, it can border on being intractable. Over the past decade, cognitive neuroscience has been concerned with one apparent feature (or, more contentiously, a key mechanism) used by the brain to resolve this multiple-talker disarray: ‘neural entrainment’” (reference 3)
What is being said here is that through neural entrainment, we can isolate a specific speaker through modulation and synchronization of our brainwaves to attune with a specific speakers tones and rhythms. We take this for granted, but there are underlying mechanisms which allow us to focus our sensory attention to specific sensory phenomenon on a moment-to-moment basis; it appears that the mechanism utilized to accomplish this is likely neural entrainment. Neural networks which create brain oscillations (which are at this time poorly understood) literally tune us into specific sensory phenomena.
What effect does neural entrainment have on perception?
“The human brain can process 11 million bits of information every second. But our conscious minds can handle only 40 to 50 bits of information a second. So our brains sometimes take cognitive shortcuts that can lead to unconscious or implicit bias, with serious consequences for how we perceive and act toward other people.” (reference 4)
“In other words, the human body sends 11 million bits per second to the brain for processing, yet the conscious mind seems to be able to process only 50 bits per second. … 11 million bits are being reduced to less than 50” (reference 5)
These facts are relevant to our understanding of our perception and its selectiveness of what information becomes conscious. We are only consciously aware of a very small fraction of the sensory information our central nervous system and brain receive every second. The dependency of neural entrainment to experience our sensory environment allows us only to focus our attention on a very small portion of a large bandwidth of information, and what portion of that we perceive is dependent on which information we attune or entrain to. This makes our perceptual experience of reality unique from one person to the next. I theorize that NVAs focus on this bandwidth of information is much more divergent (open) than our convergent (narrow) focus on the ever-steaming bandwidth of sensory information. The ability to move from a convergent to a divergent focus is to find commonalities (unity) in seemingly disparate parts, therefore having the ability to experience a system as a whole, rather than only being able to experience its individual parts.
In this area, exploration of top-down vs bottom-up sensory processing and its relation to neural entrainment could bear fruit in the understanding of how we are selectively manipulating sensory information through preconceived ideas or “schemas” prior to becoming conscious of the stimuli. Very simply put we can explain these different sensory processing types as:
“Bottom-up and top-down processing are two different ways of making sense of stimuli. In bottom-up processing, we allow the stimulus itself to shape our perception, without any preconceived ideas. In top-down processing, we use our background knowledge and expectations to interpret what we see”. (reference 6)
In this way attention is key in the perception of sensory reality and as such, investigation in the relation between attention and neural entrainment is warranted.
“The brain is limited in its capacity to process all sensory stimuli present in the physical world at any point in time and relies instead on the cognitive process of attention to focus neural resources according to the contingencies of the moment. Attention can be categorized into two distinct functions: bottom-up attention, referring to attentional guidance purely by externally driven factors to stimuli that are salient because of their inherent properties relative to the background; and top-down attention, referring to internal guidance of attention based on prior knowledge, willful plans, and current goals. Over the past few years, insights on the neural circuits and mechanisms of bottom-up and top-down attention have been gained through neurophysiological experiments. Attention affects the mean neuronal firing rate as well as its variability and correlation across neurons.” (reference 7)
Anyone with experience with the NVA population understands that they perceive things differently than the rest of the population. NVAs often report living in an experiential reality which is unified and governed less by human concepts and conditions, and more by an expansive experience with their senses and non-determined elements such as energy. They have a knowing of subject matter without academic study, which they attest to their direct connection with experience. They speak of taking in a lot of sensory information which the rest of the population essentially “filters out”.
If we are to speak of spelling as a legitimate form of communication for NVAs, we must openly speak of all our communications with them. Many parents speak of conversations which they have had with their NVA counterparts which defy our common understanding of perceptual reality. I have witnessed many conversations between NVAs speaking of experiences in which an alternate perception of reality is discussed openly. If we are to explore this fascinating phenomenon of autism fully, we need to be open to sharing all available data on the subject, especially that which comes directly from NVAs. NVAs consciously processing a “fuller” bandwidth of sensory information also begs us to redefine purposeful vs not-purposeful motor movements. If I have the sun in my eyes and am squinting, it is deemed purposeful. If another party could not see the sun, they would deem it as not a purposeful action. This is beyond the scope of this article; however, I did want to interject this point as it is another aspect of autism which we need to explore openly so that we may better understand autistics’ perception of their experience.
There are also studies which are endeavoring to understand the correlation between neural entrainment and speech.
“Our brains continuously track the temporal structure of incoming information to anticipate upcoming events (Haegens and Zion Golumbic, 2018). Temporal expectations allow us to efficiently distribute attention over time (Haegens and Zion Golumbic, 2018), and they play an important role in the perception of speech (ten Oever and Martin, 2021) and music (Haegens and Zion Golumbic, 2018). At the neural level, the processing of temporal structure in the environment is thought to be implemented through entrainment: aligning the phase of low-frequency neural oscillations to temporal regularities in the external input (Obleser and Kayser, 2019). Such phase alignment induces heightened neural excitability precisely when external events are most expected, thereby optimizing neural processing. For natural auditory stimuli, such as music and speech, regularities in the delta range (0.5–4 Hz) have been argued to be most informative for neural processing (Ding et al., 2017; Haegens and Zion Golumbic, 2018). Indeed, better behavioral performance is observed when neural oscillations in this frequency range are aligned with an external target stimulus (Henry and Obleser, 2012).
Whether auditory cortex passively entrains to sensory input as a self-sustaining oscillator, or whether its entrainment is under active, top-down control remains a topic of active debate (Rimmele et al., 2018; Obleser and Kayser, 2019; Meyer et al., 2020). “ (reference 8)
Studies are also underway which are exploring the link between neural entrainment and sensory motor function. One such study concludes:
“The major methodological contribution of our work consisted of a paradigm and a measure for investigating neural entrainment in human participants, optimized for non-invasive electrophysiological recordings. By perturbing isochronous auditory metronomes in tempo and phase during a finger-tapping task, we induced behavioral synchronization errors and showed that oscillatory neural components dynamically adjusted their frequency to stimulus changes during error correction responses. By means of spatial filters design, we were able to disentangle perceptual and sensorimotor oscillatory components from the multivariate EEG signal, revealing that active engagement of the motor system enhanced neural entrainment. This evidence, along with clues of intrinsic brain dynamics not explicable by bottom-up processing of the stimuli, strongly suggests that actual neural entrainment underlies tracking and sensorimotor synchronization to dynamic auditory rhythms. In addition to these fundamental findings, ERFA proved to be a sensitive measure of neural entrainment, reflecting an oscillatory model of brain functioning while mitigating the influence of bottom-up evoked responses.” (reference 9)
Human to human neural entrainment
Let us begin to investigate human to human brain interactions and synchronizations.
“People synchronize in various ways when we interact with one another. We subconsciously match our footsteps when we walk. During conversations, we mirror each other’s postures and gestures.
To that end, studies have shown that people synchronize heart rates and breathing when watching emotional films together. The same happens when romantic partners share a bed. Some scientists think we do this to build trust and perceive people as similar to ourselves, which encourages us to behave compassionately.”
“Surprisingly, people synchronize their neural rhythms, too. Researchers like Tom Froese, a cognitive scientist from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, think that these findings could upend our current models of consciousness.
You may have experienced this while playing music with someone and falling into rhythmic and melodic harmony. Or you may collectively solved a problem with a team. Perhaps it felt like you were operating at the same frequency — in reality, this might have not been far from the truth.
Such inter-brain neural synchronization has been observed in people engaging in meaningful interactions. … Our brains are made up of billions of neurons. When they fire — sending information to nearby neurons — they give off electrical signals. Billions of neurons fire to carry out specific cognitive tasks, like producing thoughts or controlling the body’s movement.
These collective electrical signals can be aligned to certain frequencies, much like a wave where the peak represents a spike in neural activity and a dip represents low neural activity.
Cognitive tasks often require different regions of the brain to ‘speak’ to one another, allowing information to be transferred and integrated. Some scientists claim that this information transfer occurs when neural frequencies from different brain regions align. This is known as phase synchronization.
Researchers have observed people’s neural activity while they complete cognitive tasks with techniques like EEG, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which is a machine that detects where oxygenated blood is flowing in the brain. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) also detects blood flow in the brain. With these techniques, scientists have peered into people’s minds as they complete tasks in pairs and groups.
They noticed something unexpected: Functional links appeared across people’s brains when they cooperated during certain tasks. In other words, different people’s neural oscillations aligned when they cooperated.
In a different study from 2018, greater neural synchronization occurred between subjects when they were told to complete a puzzle together. Synchronization levels dropped when the same subjects had to complete identical puzzles individually, or when both watched other people finish one.
As for the subjective experience of individuals in such studies, higher feelings of cooperativeness were aligned with higher levels of neural synchronization. Additionally, study participants’ level of inter-brain synchrony could predict subjective feelings of engagement, affinity, empathy and social connection. ” (reference 10)
So, the evidence is telling us that when we are in states of focused cooperation, our brainwaves literally sync up. Through neural entrainment we begin to perceive our experience as unified and enjoy the resulting nonverbal communication. There is much to be explored here with group mind or mob mentalities, however, suffice it to say that when we are in a high level of cooperation on a focused goal our brainwaves become united so that two brains act as one in the same way different parts of a single brain communicate with each other.
CRPs, NVAs, and Neural Entrainment
It is the belief of this author that NVAs have a much more expansive sensory experience because they do not pattern their neural entrainment to sensory stimuli, therefore experiencing directly sensory phenomena with a full bandwidth of information. It is also my supposition that NVAs natural form of communication with other humans is through human-to-human neural entrainment. I believe that NVAs are highly adept at neural synchronization with other sentient beings; that it is second nature for them to do so. The result is the ability to evoke a unified perceptual platform in which the NVA and subject are in such coherence that language communication is not necessary as the truths of the shared perception are obvious.
It is my belief that what is being developed in the training of a CRP is neural entrainment. It may be more apt to call this process what it is: the neural entrainment coherence program. Because neural entrainment bridges the gap between the perception of individuals when in a high level of cooperation and focus, the NVA can begin to communicate through spelling by virtue of this entrainment. The native perceptual and sensory experience of the NVA does not make communication through language easy as it does not adequately describe the experience of unity the NVA embodies within their experience.
Language, in its very makeup, is divisive and is used to share information which is defined and separate from a unified experience. By virtue of perceptual neural entrainment, NVA can express their experiences through the limitations of our deterministic experiences and the form of communication we have chosen to be most valuable: language. Entrainment works both ways. The CRP experiences a glimpse of the unified experience of the NVA through a non-verbal communication which can at times processes far more information from the NVA than is being spelled. CRPs need to be more open with their experiences in facilitation for NVAs. Again, discussions about all aspects of facilitation will not discredit the communication, but instead honor it in its entirety and give our community a platform to discuss and evolve this beautiful and intimate connection/ communication.
Our most intimate communications are non-verbal. This is neural entrainment at work. Compassion is also the work of neural entrainment. Consciousness may also be the work of neural entrainment. We experience entrainment all the time, and through this entrainment we communicate beyond words and their associated opinions and ideologies; the very things which divide us. We entrain with others on all levels. Our NVAs are admittedly “sensitive” to others’ emotions whether outwardly apparent or not. This is because they are masters of entrainment, as this is their true and natural means of communication. As parents and CRPs, we become trained to enter a state of cooperation and focus, we then also become adept in entrainment and often develop the same “sensitivities” as our NVA counterparts.
Neurologist understand that our conscious experience is not localized to any one part of the brain but is thought to be a result of interactions of multiple parts of the brain through neural activity. These studies suggest it is likely that conscious experience may be the result of neural activity and entrainment across multiple individuals. When we are together our experience is shared. The more we cooperate and bring our focus to a unified experience the more our brains become entrained, synchronized, and unified in a coherent and shared experience. The more entrained our brain waves, the more our perception becomes one which is shared as opposed to separate. In effect, when we are not cooperating, we each have our own truth. When we are cooperating, through neural entrainment, we begin to share the same truth.
Conclusion
The purpose of this article is not to advocate for a particular explanation of the NVA / CRP relationship, or to imply that neural entrainment is the answer, but rather to implore all who are involved in this field to be open and transparent with all information, so that we may explore this incredible phenomenon without fear, but rather through the awe and curiosity with which it deserves to be investigated. Neural entrainment is one of many possibilities which should be explored in the search to understand this new and expansive form of communication which is being gifted to us by our NVA community. I am not a neurologist and only have a very basic understanding of neurological concepts and I do not believe that there is anywhere near enough scientific data to even begin to support neural entrainment as a legitimate form of communication or as a mechanism to merge conscious perception; however I do believe that the evolution of science will begin to allow us to make rational something which we all already understand quite deeply, albeit without the proper linguistic or scientific framework to explain it. I am demonstrating that there are legitimate scientific pathways we can follow in order to explore this new type of communication in a way which honors all it in its fullness rather than only some of its parts.
Do we want to continue representing our NVA population as having the same perception of reality as we do? Do we want to continue to represent spelling as a form of communication for them as just a mechanism used to overcome sensory-motor deficits? Do we want to continue to define our NVAs strange body movements and reactions as not purposeful and a byproduct of an out-of-control body? I don’t, as it doesn’t add up for me; it hasn’t for a long time. My observation of Jackson has been an obsession for me for 15 years and those parameters do not satisfactorily frame/ explain my observations. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle famously said through his character Sherlock Holmes: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”. Let us together explore the improbable so that we may begin to form a framework which can adequately describe and begin to explain NVAs expansive perception and our communications with them.
We all have a lot invested in ensuring that our NVA populations’ communications are taken seriously. So we invest in concepts which the mainstream can understand in order to facilitate that legitimacy. It is time to let go of that safe haven and allow this communication to grow and become accessible through its own means and merit. This will take courage and we will be asked as a community to let go of our fears and trust in our NVA to carve out their own destiny by being and representing themselves as who they truly are. We can only trust them by allowing them to be 100% who they are. If we misrepresent them, or only share certain information as to who we know them to be, we are hindering their expression and therefore their purpose. Can we discuss openly what we discuss behind closed doors? Do we wish to rob society of an evolution in direct communication which is desperately needed at this time? The time has come. As Jackson said in a poem he wrote recently “Today is the day”.
Other viewpoints
I am not advocating for the tearing down of our existing understanding of autism as a “brain body disconnect”. I am not advocating for the abandonment of organizations which support the NVA population. Truth is not mutually exclusive, two things can be true. By letting each individual or organization do what they do best, we will all collectively bring out observations to the phenomenon of autism and expand its understanding.
