The brain of an autistic person

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Is there any research on this? What are the significant differences? The various parts of the brain ... are they diff. from NT? For instance, lesions on frontal lobe etc.

I think there are differences in the limbic system,hippocampus and amygdala.You can find out a lot on line.

I've only done casual research, so don't treat this as gospel. Also, Autism is a whole spectrum of disorders (not just in severity, but also in how it manfests)

My understanding is that in some severe cases of Autism, there is a clear overgrowth of white matter (the "connections"), often to the point of expanding the cranium. This is less pronounced the later in development that onset occurs. However, in most cases, white matter structure and development were atypical. (based on MRI data. They don't tend to do a lot of brain dissections on living subjects

In fMRI studies, activity appears to be a general shift from the frontal cortex towards other areas of the brain. Though I don't think that there are any glaring physical differences, the differences in activity are fairly pronounced.

Some speculate that it's some defect or failing in the frontal cortex, but I personally beleive that we just have better driect connections to the "co-processors" like the visual cortex, fusiform gyrus, etc. and instead of relying primarily on correlation like NTs do, we send the unfiltered data back for analysis. It's a bit of a b***h for "holistic" analysis, but it's pretty useful for attention to detail. That's just my own flaky opinion, though.

If you want to read up on the functional differences, check out the University of Montreal. I think that it was Laurent Mottron's team that published a paper about 2 years ago that had a meta-analysis of a ton of fMRIs from other studies. They seem to be ahead of the curve as other researchers are just starting to acknowledge the structural differences as a path to early detection of Autism. But the UoM guys have been on this path for awhile now.

In autistic people there is a larger cerebral cortex, smaller cerebellum, and amygdala?(also read larger, but to our detriment), lager size of overall brain, over growth of white matter for " local connections"- connections with nearby regions (good for analysis of details) but fewer "long distance connections" , i.e. connections between regions far away from one another than an average person- therefore poor coordination of information/cognitive processes.

I'm sure there are a lot of other things too........and the research is basically just beginning.