PEOPLE with autism seem not to daydream in the way that other people do.
When the minds of non-autistic people are 鈥渋dle鈥�, a network within the brain involved in social and emotional thought is, in fact, active. People often drift into daydreams at these times, but when we have to concentrate on a task, we suppress daydreaming.
A team from the University of California at San Diego used functional MRI to show that while this network is more active in non-autistic people when their brains are resting than carrying out a cognitive test, there is no difference between the active and resting brains of people with autism (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0600674103).
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鈥淭he absence of this activity in autism might mean that they have a different sort of internal thought,鈥� says co-author Daniel Kennedy.
