cthulukitty wrote:
At present there is still no known pattern of brain abnormality that is consistent across the autism spectrum, nor are all NT brains the same. Putting a picture of one Aspie's brain next to one NT's brain simply shows you a picture of two individuals. It doesn't do much to tell you about the differences between the two groups. I'm reminded of the brain image advertisements that the US government put out to discourage people from using MDMA, for which they specifically chose two images (one for an MDMA user, one not) that looked as different from each other as possible. Another problem is that on activation images such as fMRI, you're only looking at the brain as it engages in one task at a time. Autistic brains seem to differ from NT brains in a variety of ways, not just one. From what I've read of the scientific literature, it seems like neurologists are constantly proposing yet another area in which activation might be different in autistic brains, and frequently they find that it is. One problem with those studies is that, once again, they only look at one thing at a time. It's wrong to think that one specific area is abnormal in autistic brains; it's more that the entire thing works in a different way.
What is interesting to me is that such differences are being found. I am encouraged since having empirical tools to discover and measure these differences can only serve to improve understanding. But to say any particular finding, especially in such small samples, is diagnostically relevant for autism is reading too much into the conclusion.