My son Charlie is finishing up his best school year ever: Today, though bleary-eyed, he got out of bed on his own when I asked, pulled on his blue hooded sweatshirt, and shuffled out to meet the yellow school bus. It’s only a short ride as he attends a school in our town but once he had a far longer ride.
On the way to work a few mornings ago, traffic stopped almost as soon as I pulled onto the highway. I could hear the wail of an ambulance behind me. Cars edged over to the right and a huge truck …read more

Dr. Keith Shafritz, an assistant professor of psychology at Hofstra University, is using a form of functional magnetic imaging to study why autistic children engage in repetitive behavior such as hand-flapping, rocking, and lining up objects. From today’s Newsday:
In children with autism, Shafritz found deficits in specific regions of the cerebral cortex, the outer layer of gray matter linked to all higher human functions, including repetitive behavior. He also mapped deficits in the basal ganglia, a region deep below the cerebral hemispheres.
“We like to think about the research process as discovering clues why people engage in certain behaviors,” Shafritz …read more