Autistic brains create more information at rest, study show

New research from Case Western Reserve University and University of Toronto neuroscientists finds that the brains of autistic children generate more information at rest -- a 42% increase on average. The study offers a scientific explanation for the most typical characteristic of autism -- withdrawal into one's own inner world. The excess production of information may explain a child's detachment from their environment.

It's from 2014. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140131130630.htm

 

This has all the tropes of bad 2010s era autism reporting.

Autistic people aren't withdrawn into their own inner world, they just have a different way of interacting with it that many non-autistic people don't understand, and have thus mislabeled as withdrawal.

Granted, this article is about a study on children, but much material from era seems to have forgotten that autistic adults exist.

Sure, we need more alone time and can have social challenges, but it's rather obtuse to word it like this.

The core finding that autistic children's brains create more information at rest is rather interesting though. Including the idea that autistic people may have a different mode of introspection.

I wonder if autistic pwME might thus have more trouble with cognitive PEM.

 

Thank you it’s really helpful to have a guide cutting through interpretation that might be loaded by old assumptions

and also to remind/flag where these old ideas get snuck through in disguise or as seemingly innocuous one-liners

 

It's not exactly unique to autism, either!