Immature Headlines

A five-minute brain scan can help diagnose developmental disorders in young children, headlines blared last week.Based on a paper published on Friday in Science, the media reports speculated on the study’s implications for autism. That may be true several years down the line, but I'd say it’s a pretty big exaggeration of the actual findings.Don't get me wrong, the study is very cool: by scanning the resting brain activity in 238 people aged 7 to 30, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis mapped how a healthy brain matures over time. It turns out that, with age, certain long-range connections become stronger and some short-range connections weaken. Based on these patterns, the model can predict the age within about two years of any random sample.Read more at...SFARI, September 2010.