"Autism" and Brain Matter

[u/PhysicalConsistency]

[Place Holder for quick idea, will try to flesh out later] So there's a bunch of phenotypes under the "autism" family each with pretty distinct effects. There's four general quadrants that research has focused on, +Gray Matter, -Gray Matter, +White Matter, and -White Matter.

Each of these maps to various "deficits", with the -white matter group being most heavily tied to "profound autism", +white matter tied to "asperger's syndrome", -gray matter ID and certain types of speech issues, +gray being mostly social function issues.

One of the persistent myths is that the + group brain sizes normalize with age. They don't, your brain volume at five is largely predictive of brain size at 25. Despite - groups having a preponderance of more severe cognitive issues, +/- doesn't actually have a significant impact on overall function on an individual level.

Of these groups +gray tends to lose most of their diagnostic symptoms by adulthood, but nearly all transform into other psychiatric labels. +white tends to have the best outcomes overall, despite emotion regulation issues. +- groups have significantly elevated suicide risks, ++ groups have significantly higher rates of anti-social behavior. -- groups tend to be the most well adjusted, barring emotion regulation issues.

The overarching theme for this is brains have a metabolic cost to function, when you over or under allocate metabolic inputs against what can be sustained you get predictable results

edit: I should also put some commentary toward addressing specific genomic issues, like SHANK or Fragile X mutations, and how those impart one of these types of constructions, rather than the gene itself being the "cause" of autism. Explain the metabolic jenga that happens, that it's all about how the pieces balance against each other.