Autism Answers Back

When the Brain Takes a Different Road and Still Arrives

AABdifferentneuralpathways Autistic cognition is not broken but wired through different rhythms — an alternative strategy, not a deficit.

For decades autism research has returned to the same script: autism is a deficit, an impairment, a disorder. The story is so familiar that many do not even hear it anymore. It becomes background noise — the baseline hum of how autistic life is narrated by science. And then once in a while a study cracks that story. Wired Differently? Brain Temporal Complexity and Intelligence in Autism Spectrum Disorder is one of those studies. Published in Brain Sciences in July 2025 and led by Dr. Moses O. Sokunbi with Oumayma Soula, Bertha Ochieng and Roger T. Staff of De Montfort University Leicester, the University of Sfax and Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, it dares to suggest something radical in its simplicity: autistic brains are not broken. They are organised differently.

That difference matters. Because when you stop calling it deficit you stop calling us broken. And when you stop calling us broken the whole system of interventions, therapies and measurements starts to look less like care and more like control.

A Closer Look: Brains at Rest, Minds in Motion

The research team used open-access data from the ABIDE I project, specifically the Leuven cohort. Fourteen autistic men and fifteen matched controls had been scanned with resting-state fMRI. Instead of asking people to complete tasks or respond to prompts, the data captured the brain’s natural rhythms — the quiet background music of thought. The authors then analysed those scans for signal “complexity” using three tools: the Hurst exponent, fuzzy approximate entropy and fuzzy sample entropy.

Here’s what they found. There were no overall group differences in brain complexity between autistic and control participants. But within the autistic group, performance IQ showed a significant negative correlation with two entropy measures (fApEn and fSampEn). Higher entropy values were linked with lower performance IQ scores. In the control group, no such relationship existed. The divergence was confirmed by statistical interaction tests: the entropy–IQ relationship was significantly different in autistic people compared to controls.

This is not dysfunction. It is divergence. Not every autistic person processes information the same way, but in this small sample, the shape of the relationship between brain signal irregularity and problem-solving ability looked different from the control group. That difference is what the authors call “an alternative neural strategy.”

Breaking the Script: From Deficit to Diversity

The most striking line in the paper may be this: the findings “may not only reflect deficits but also an alternative neural strategy.” To see that sentence in a peer-reviewed journal matters. Because so much of autism research is still written in the old voice — the voice that assumes autistic life is tragedy, that our differences must be minimised, that our cognition is error. Sokunbi and colleagues step out of that voice, if only briefly, and write something closer to what autistic people have been saying all along: our ways of thinking are legitimate. In the cautious world of academic publishing, that is not nothing — and they deserve a mild round of applause for choosing words that push back, however gently, against the deficit default.

The implications are practical as well as political. The authors suggest these findings could inform diagnosis and support planning in the NHS. But the deeper implication is this: if autistic difference is not deficit, then the systems built on deficit logic — schools, clinics, workplaces — are built on shaky ground.

What the Frame Still Misses

And yet the old frame still lingers. Because this study, like almost all before it, uses neurotypical people as the baseline. The “normal” group against which autistic brains are compared. That baseline is itself a power move: it decides in advance whose cognition counts as standard and whose counts as deviation. Sokunbi and colleagues reinterpret deviation as strategy, which is progress. But the study is still written about us, not with us. No autistic authors. No autistic framing. No autistic narration of what “different organisation” means in our own lives.

This is the gap. Without autistic voices shaping the questions, research risks becoming another form of extraction. Even when the findings sound supportive, the structure still reproduces the same imbalance: autistic people as data, not as narrators.

Questions That Point Forward

So the task now is not only to celebrate studies that reject deficit but to ask what comes next. If autistic brains show a distinct relationship between neural complexity and intelligence, then:

These are the questions that shift research from observation to transformation. They are the questions that stop science from treating autistic life as anomaly and start treating it as part of human variation.

Closing: The Door That’s Now Ajar

Wired Differently? shows that autistic cognition is not simply deficit but may follow distinct dynamics. That is no small thing. But it is only the beginning. Because acknowledgment is not redesign. The systems that govern our lives — education, healthcare, employment, policy — will not change just because a paper says the words “alternative neural strategy.” They will change only if the frame changes. And frames change when power changes: when autistic people narrate our own research, set our own terms and design systems that fit us instead of demanding that we fit them.

The door is ajar. Whether it opens wider depends on what happens next — not just in journals but in the structures that decide what counts as care, what counts as success and what counts as a life worth living.