| A year and a half ago neuroscientist Anila D’Mello scanned the brains of a dozen autistic women who had just entered her study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The all-female cluster immediately threw off the results. “When we analyzed their data, we realized that it looked really different than the data we had collected up until that point” from their all-male pool, recalls D’Mello, then a postdoctoral fellow in neuroscientist John Gabrieli’s lab at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at M.I.T. The study, which has not yet been published, involved looking at how the brain of an autistic person responds to seeing the same face or object—or hearing a word—over and over again. The focus was not on sex differences, but the researchers now wondered whether there were some. |
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