In his State of the Union address on February 12, the president mentioned neuroscience as a priority, and the Obama administration recently launched a “human brain mapping project” akin to the Human Genome Project. Grandin suggests that such research should be guided in part from the experiences of those with neuropsychiatric conditions:

In 2011, I contributed an article to a big scholarly book on autism. More than fourteen hundred pages. Eighty-one articles in all. Guess what. The only paper that addressed sensory problems was mine.

Over the decades I’ve seen hundreds if not thousands of research papers on whether autistics have theory of mind - the ability to imagine oneself looking at the world through someone else’s point of view and to have an appropriate emotional response. But I’ve seen far, far fewer studies on sensory problems - probably because they would require researchers to imagine themselves looking at the world through an autistic person’s jumble of neuron misfires. You could say they lack theory of brain.