Myomancy ADHD, Dyslexia and Autism

With apologies to Philip K. Dick, New Scientist has a brief report of a new study on daydreaming and autism.

PEOPLE with autism seem not to daydream in the way that other people do.

When the minds of non-autistic people are “idle”, a network within the brain involved in social and emotional thought is, in fact, active. People often drift into daydreams at these times, but when we have to concentrate on a task, we suppress daydreaming.

A team from the University of California at San Diego used functional MRI to show that while this network is more active in non-autistic people when their brains are resting than carrying out a cognitive test, there is no difference between the active and resting brains of people with autism (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0600674103).

‘The absence of this activity in autism might mean that they have a different sort of internal thought,’ says co-author Daniel Kennedy.

Daydreams are different in autistic minds

The study the report is based on isn’t available online yet.