Probably Tic Disorder or a tic.
The muscles of the mouth are connected to the nervus vagus.
This nerve is interesting as it according to the Polyvagal Theory is affected in autism, as it is connected to the musles of the eye-lashes, the mouth and the middle ear muscles.
In the middle ear there are little bones which need to be tensed in order to be able to distinguish noises from a.k.a. auditive processing disorder, which is a common feature in autism.
This nerve can also impair the language ability and to engage socially.
The vagus is actually a circuit of three different nerves responsible for well-feeling and being able to engage socially, or fight and flight reaction or freeze reactions.
the latter two are general states of hyper-arousal or shutdown.
One study with a group of autistics were done calming down the nervus vagus using an intervention of modified vocal music, which seems to have a calming effect and in 60% of the individuals the auditive hypersensibility lessened and the individuals were able to engage better in reciprocity.
This effect kept consistent after the three-month-follow-up.
So a twitch can be a tic from an hyper-aroused nervous system and as a hyper-aroused nervous system is quite common in ASD it can result from having ASD, but can also occur not having ASD, as a non-autistic nervous system can also be hyper-aroused to a certain state.
With "certain state" I mean, that a non-autistic nervous system in general has, except if the individual is severely traumatized or non-neurotypical because of having another disorder as schizophrenia etc., in contradiction to an autistic nervous system the ability to regulate itself.
_________________
English is not my native language, so I will very likely do mistakes in writing or understanding. My edits are due to corrections of mistakes, which I sometimes recognize just after submitting a text.
22 Aug 2012, 6:48 pm
