The largest brain imaging study ever performed has identified candidate genes that influence brain size and general intelligence, according to research published 15 April in Nature Genetics.

Rather than a tangled bowl of spaghetti, the neural wiring in the brain is arranged in an orderly fashion, like a woven piece of cloth, according to research published today in the journal Science.

A detailed brain imaging study of people with Williams syndrome, a developmental disorder characterized by a highly sociable personality, has found a series of structural, functional and connectivity deficits that converge on a part of the brain called the insula. The findings were published online 12 March in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Brain imaging studies of people with autism show that specific areas respond more strongly to song than do those of controls. The opposite is true when listening to speech.

The development of white matter tracts, the nerve bundles that join one brain region to another, is different in babies who go on to develop autism compared with those who do not, according to a study published 17 February in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

The brains of men and women with Asperger syndrome are more similar than are those of male and female controls, according to a study published in the January issue of the American Journal of Neuroradiology. The results lend support to the ‘extreme male brain’ theory of autism, the researchers say.

Autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder show genetic and neurobiological overlap, which may provide clues to the origin of both disorders, says Joel Nigg.

Analyzing the organization of whole-brain structural networks could reveal differences in the way brains of children with autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders are wired.

Individuals with autism and those with specific language impairment have similar language deficits, but show differences in connectivity between language-related regions on structural brain scans, according to a study published 2 November in Cerebral Cortex.

Individuals who carry an autism-linked common variant in the MET gene have abnormally low brain connectivity, according to unpublished research presented at the 2011 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington, D.C.