jerry fischbach, who's really a profound student of the biology of autism and social implications is going to describe what we understand about the syndrome and also its biological underpinnings. allison singer is going to give us an inside view of autism. she has a beautiful daughter that suffers from autism and she has a brother who suffers from autism so she knows what it's like to have autism but also she knows what it's like to be a caretaker of a person with autism. so we're going to get a double perspective of hers. uta frith is a wonderful person and one of the most profound students in autism she was one of the pioneers in developing the theory of mind and pointing out how this is the defining feature of it. she not only characterized in the psychological terms but she also began to stud stud the biology of it and she'll describe the difference between the social network in normal kids and kids. and the genetics of the disease which matthew state is going to describe is really quite fascinating because several new insights into human genetics emerge as the genetics of autism

people now began to explore a number of neurological diseases and jerry fischbach is going to speak about that and saw that all of them could be localized to one or more areas of the brain, neural circuitry of the brain. when psychiatrists began to explore the brain or psychiatric disorders, schizophrenia, depression, addiction, they didn't find obvious lesions in the brain. and so many thought that these are not brain-based disorders, these are mental disorders. and a few far-sighted psychiatrists realized early that it's very likely that they are brain disorders but undetectable with the techniques available. the situation changed remarkably in the last 40 years. a new synthesis occurred within psychiatry giveen in good part by basic science. first of all, that was sort of philosophical synthesis when cognitive psychology, the science of the mind, merged with neuroscience, the science of the brain, to formulate a new science of mind. and as we discussed in the earlier series, fundamental assumption of the new science of mind is that every mental process-- from the most trivial one, hitt