child laying down on MRI scanning table with physician looking over her
Dr. Ralph-Axel Müller and his collaborators have a new study (“‘Underconnected’, but not broken? Dynamic fcMRI shows underconnectivity in autism is linked to increased intra-individual variability across time) published in the journal Brain Connectivity. It was also featured in Spectrum Newsletter. This study may explain why there appears to be a discrepancy in research regarding brain connectivity in people with autism and whether the brain is too strongly or too weakly connected. In analyzing brain scans of 152 children and adults his research team noticed, “There are more frequent changes in functional connectivity across a scan of 5 or 10 minutes in autism, and that’s why overall it seems to be reduced.”  According to Müller functional connectivity “reaches very high levels at some points, and then goes down.”  [Read Spectrum Newsletter Article].