MRI Sheds Light On Autism

Autism as lack of neu­ro­log­i­cal coordination

In explain­ing the the­o­ry, Mar­cel Just, one of the study’s lead authors and direc­tor of Carnegie Mel­lon’s Cen­ter for Cog­ni­tive Brain Imag­ing, com­pared the brain of a nor­mal per­son to a sports team in which the mem­bers coop­er­ate and coor­di­nate their efforts. In an autis­tic per­son, though some “play­ers” may be high­ly skilled, they do not work effec­tive­ly as a team, thus impair­ing an autis­tic’s abil­i­ty to com­plete broad intel­lec­tu­al tasks. Because this type of coor­di­na­tion is crit­i­cal to com­plex think­ing and social inter­ac­tion, a wide range of behav­iors are affect­ed in autism.

The full text of the arti­cle is only avail­able to sub­scribers, but the next entry in the same blog gives fur­ther information.

I don’t know if that hap­pens to be a pub­li­ca­tion that I can access through my school’s library, but I’ll give it a try.