my unified theory of autism

[gusl]

There's a lot of research supporting the idea of 'underconnectivity' in autistic brains. On the cognitive side, there are those who talk about "weak central coherence", supported by the fact that autists seem to be very good at certain local perceptual tasks like formal logic, musical pitch perception¹, and geometrical pattern-finding (there's no interference from the other brain parts!)... but bad at putting them together in a productive way.

Another very broad idea, which I think is one of the essential things about autism is executive dysfunction: a difficulty of revising plans, changing one's mind, multi-tasking, etc. This is also what gives them the literal-mindedness: they find it hard to disconnect from the initial, salient interpretation (which is almost always the literal one), and it also explains motor awkwardness (poor planning, coordination), and maybe their tendency to get overwhelmed (inability to multi-task). As far as I know, the only neurological evidence for this idea are studies that show lower frontal activation.

It's not clear how these two pictures of autism are related. Maybe the "central coherence" is necessary for executive function to work well: when the manager is weak, the specialists will work independently from each other.

Symptoms not explained by the above pictures:
* stimming

---

^{1 Pamela Heaton - Pitch memory, labelling and disembedding in autism}