Originally when we talked about language disorder it was a catastrophic language disorder. It's substantial, and from a treatment standpoint it's okay to keep diluting that term, but from a research standpoint we need to be much more precise. I wish somebody would take up the mantle of just that particular task.

The narrower we define autism, and the more strictly we control for particular behaviors, the more likely we are to find what I think are the subgroups of autism.

There does seem to be a higher educational level in parents of autistic youngsters, and I guess that's something that we need to look into.

When we come to research, if we want to find out the cause of autism, we're going to have to be much more specific, and that's why when it comes to research, I'm fairly strict with respect to criteria. When it comes to treatment, I'm much more open to not making that differentiation.

Savant syndrome, characteristically, consists of left hemisphere dysfunction coupled with right hemisphere emergence, and what you see in the savant are basically right brain skills.

There are people at the extremes who aren't able to do anything musically, and then others sort of fall in the middle. And the same thing with math, and the same thing with art. You'll find people who are geniuses, or prodigies at the far end of the bell shaped curve, and I think you will find some of the acquired savants in that category who happened to have been endowed with that kind of talent, which explains why not everyone becomes an acquired savant.

I think one of the problems with the definition of autism is we keep expanding it. It started as "early infantile autism", and then it became "autism", and now it's "autism spectrum disorder". I'm not opposed to that from the standpoint of trying to broaden our vistas, and so forth. But from a research point of view, the term autism is lost in specificity.