New Study on Autism and Aggression Misses the Point
There is a new study in the latest issue of the journal Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders on a correlation between autism, brain volume and aggression. The team of researchers from Brigham Young University studied structural MRI data from the brains of 45 Autistic boys and 18 non-autistic boys to see if the brains did similar things or different things in the presence of “aggressive behavior.” Autistics who had been reported as exhibiting so-called “problematic aggression” had smaller brain stems and did not show the non-autistic tendency of structural differences in the brain structures linked to emotions and behavior.
The brain stem is the part of your brain that keeps you breathing. The most basic functions of life are regulated by the brain stem, leading Stephenson, one of the study’s authors, to extrapolate that the discovered correlation means that, “this is evidence that there’s something core and basic, … Continue Reading ››
