a piece in Nature today
, a major line of research about autism might be seriously flawed:
One of the most popular and widely accepted theories on the cause of autism spectrum disorders attributes the condition to disrupted connectivity between different regions of the brain.
This 'connectivity hypothesis' claims that the social and cognitive abnormalities in people with autism can be explained by a dearth of connections between distant regions of the brain. Some flavours of this theory also predict more connections between nearby brain regions.
Recent studies, however, have found that when a person moves their head while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) - a method that maps how different neuroanatomical structures of the brain interact in real time, its functional connectivity - it looks like the neural activity observed in autism. That's a sobering discovery...
So the characteristic pattern of "abnormal connectivity" in autism might ...
