Autism is not a snapshot. It's a life.

Autism is not a snapshot. It's a life.

Autism is a developmental disorder characterized by two main components: an inability to interact socially with other people with joint attention to understand other people's thoughts.

There is no question there are differences between male and female brains. They are called sexual dimorphisms and you can point to different anatomical structures.

As the diagnosis of autism is increasing the diagnosis of mental retardation is decreasing. And more and more on the other end, the high end, more children who are just a little bit off, who ordinarily you would not single out now are being described as perhaps Asperger’s syndrome or on the high end of the autism spectrum, so I don’t believe there is an epidemic.

The brain immediately confronts us with its great complexity. The human brain weighs only three to four pounds but contains about 100 billion neurons. Although that extraordinary number is of the same order of magnitude as the number of stars in the Milky Way, it cannot account for the complexity of the brain. The liver probably contains 100 million cells, but 1,000 livers do not add up to a rich inner life.

I think the gold standard is a clinical diagnosis, that an astute clinician interacting with a child, interviewing the parents, talking with teachers makes the diagnosis based on some standard tests and also on clinical impression and skill.