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by clolege 741 days ago
Yeah I'm curious if the negative effects of autism could be due to the brain physically running out of space and getting "compressed?"

It reminds me of trepanation, the old-school mental health procedure to just drill a hole in the skull. Some people still do it and swear by it [0], saying that it relieves pressure.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0202909/

1 comments

Autism is a sensory processing disorder in which your brain receives too much stimulus. This it makes sense it would occur when you have too many neurons (or connections) as that would cause increased response to any external stimulus.

It’s not because of “skull pressure”

Well, it seems logical that any "overgrowth" would need more space - but it looks like our skulls are malleable and continue to fuse into adulthood. I wonder if there's a process where they grow to the size needed by the brain?

TIL that our heads grow by about ~8% (in circumference) after we're tweens [0]. Cool!

[0] https://www.craftyarncouncil.com/standards/head-circumferenc...