Laurent Mottron has found that autistic people rely less on the verbal parts of the brain. His colleague researcher Michelle Dawson is autistic. He describes her as a bottom-up heuristic, meaning she comes up with ideas only from available facts. “As a result, her models never over-reach, and are almost infallibly accurate.” By contrast, he describes his top-down approach: “I grasp and manipulate general ideas from fewer sources, and after expressing them in a model, go back to facts supporting or falsifying this model. Combining the two types of brains in the same research group is amazingly
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