Lukecash12 wrote:
Marybird wrote:
I saw a documentary on TV almost 20 years ago about how the mind of an infant develops and it talked a lot about how synapses are formed and then pruned during infancy and the toddler years.
This current study seems to imply that the pruning happens later.
Maybe it's an ongoing thing throughout childhood.
Synapses are pruned throughout a person's life, the rate of pruning merely changes. Information is streamlined and unused neural associations are cut off in favor of more regular patterns and associations.
That makes sense.
This theory could explain a lot of the features of autism, such as savant syndrome, special interests, sensory processing, etc.
I think the study is fascinating, but I find it disappointing that the main goal of the study is to find a cure in the form of finding a way to return pruning of synapses to normal in autistic people, instead of using the study as a way of understanding and helping people without messing with the way their brains work.
When I saw that documentary years ago about how synapses were pruned in infant brains, I wondered if that was what was wrong with my brain, that maybe my synapses didn't get pruned properly.
I also wondered if that was the cause of autism, though I didn't know much about autism at the time.