From a non-autistic point of view, people with autism can seem somewhat disconnected in social and emotional terms. It’d be tempting to attribute this to differences in brain connectivity—wiring that never quite got connected—and in fact, this has been the prevailing hypothesis. But this week, researchers report that the brains of autistic children are actually more connected than the brains of non-autistic children are.
For years, studies have appeared to show that the brains of autistic people are underconnected in comparison with the brains of non-autistic people—both in terms of structure (physical connections between brain cells) and of function (information exchanged among brain areas). In a way, this seemed to make sense on an intuitive level: People with autism might be task-focused and socially withdrawn because their brains couldn’t connect some of their experiences with others—or so the thinking went.
But as other investigators examined this research more closely, they ...
