Simons Foundation

Although most people regularly tune up their cars, you probably haven’t needed to bring your brain in for a tune-up, despite the fact that the human brain is far more complex than the internal combustion engine. What’s more, unlike most machines, your brain is constantly changing in order to store memories and adapt to a fluid environment. Our brains are faced with a fundamental challenge: They must preserve the integrity of the neural circuits that subserve behaviors over the lifetime of an organism, while at the same time allowing plastic mechanisms to shape and fine-tune their function.

In this talk, Nancy Kanwisher will consider the functional architecture of the social brain in typical subjects as an avenue for considering which functions are affected and which are preserved in autism.