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.

In autism there is just genes in part more or less of a probability that you will have the disorder, and that is where interactions with the environment are key.

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.

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.

It is not all that common, but there is a phenomenon where autism could get worse at about age two. There are some controversies whether regression is a prominent part of autism, but many people feel that it's very hard to diagnose autism before you can begin really talking in detail with a child.

The brain immediately confronts us with its great complexity. The human brain weighs only three to four pounds but contains about 100 billion neurons.