Slide 17

In order to understand autism in terms of neurobiology, we need to remember that autism is a developmental disorder, as distinct from an acquired lesion in a fully developed brain. Time and again developmental studies show us that proper tuning of neural and cognitive systems depends on properly structured input. There is therefore likely to be a wide fan-out effect from dysfunction at the neural level to disorders of behaviour, with a developmental endpoint featuring both compensatory strategies that normalise behaviour, and secondary effects that disrupt behaviour in new ways.