We hope that you and your family have been having a wonderful summer.
I am often asked why we need to study the human brain to understand autism. Can’t we just study mice brains and figure out what is different in autism?
There are many answers to this question. At a global level, it is clear that the human brain is not simply a scaled-up mouse brain. There are many parts of the human brain that are absent or very primitive in rodents such as the mouse. As it turns out, regions of the so-called frontal lobe show the most striking differences between mouse and human brains. This is important because the frontal lobe is critically important in social behavior and executive function which are often impaired in autism. So, it may be that the parts of the brain that are altered in autism don’t even exist in the mouse brain!