I happened across this Finnish study, and it kind of blew me away. Thought others might be interested. Been out for a couple of months, but doesn't seem to have garnered any attention in the popular press.
I imagine we've all seen enough MRI studies of autism to make our eyes glaze over, but here are some things about this one that make it stand out:
1. The autistic subjects were "high-functioning" adults (as opposed to children or those with atypically severe conditions -- not that those aren't important, but their findings can be hard to generalize).
2. Instead of imaging the brain in resting state or while performing simple tasks, the researchers imaged the subjects' brains while the subjects were watching a dramatic film, thus capturing something much closer to real-world brain activity than previous studies.
3. The researchers identified a specific subnetwork in the brain where divergence from the NT configuration had a consistent significant correlation with AQ score: the greater the divergence, the higher the subject's AQ.
4. The correlation between subnetwork configuration and AQ score held even in the NT subjects -- which suggests all sorts of fun things.
If you're a fan of this sort of thing, I highly recommend reading the whole paper (freely accessible in PDF format).
If this is replicated in other studies, it seems pretty mind-blowing in terms of finally giving us a picture of what the autism spectrum "is" within our brains -- with the potential for being able to ask whole new kinds of questions about the relationship between specific features of the lived autistic experience and specific features of the autistic brain.
07 Apr 2015, 11:33 pm
