Lorenz Wagner

An International Bestseller, the Story behind Henry Markram’s Breakthrough Theory about Autism, and How a Family’s Unconditional Love Led to a Scientific Paradigm Shift Henry Markram is the Elon Musk of neuroscience, the man behind the billion-dollar Blue Brain Project to build a supercomputer model of the brain. He has set the goal of decoding all disturbances of the mind within a generation. This quest is personal for him. The driving force behind his grand ambition has been his son Kai, who has autism. Raising Kai made Henry Markram question all that he thought he knew about neuroscience, and then inspired his groundbreaking research that would upend the conventional wisdom about autism, expressed in his now-famous theory of Intense World Syndrome. When Kai was first diagnosed, his father consulted studies and experts. He knew as much about the human brain as almost anyone but still felt as helpless as any parent confronted with this condition in his child. What’s more, the scientific consensus that autism was a deficit of empathy didn’t mesh with Markram’s experience of his son. He became convinced that the disorder, which has seen a 657 percent increase in diagnoses over the past decade, was fundamentally misunderstood. Bringing his world-class research to bear on the problem, he devised a radical new theory of the disorder: People like Kai don’t feel too little; they feel too much. Their senses are too delicate for this world.

How a Renowned Neuroscientist and His Son Changed Our View of Autism Forever

The Boy Who Felt Too Much

Michelle

"We say autistic people lack empathy. No, we lack empathy. For them."

"What an unbelievably intense world," Kamila said. The colors, the impressions overwhelmed her. It was almost too much. That made her think of Kai. "This is how Kai must feel. He lives in an unbelievably intense world."

Perhaps Kai could forgive, but he certainly couldn't forget. Henry and Kamila knew all too well how the animals in the lab had behaved. Not only were their feelings amplified and their senses overdeveloped, but they also couldn't forget. Every trauma, every minor pain branded them.

Plasticity is the basis of all learning. Like the brains of these sea nomads, the brains of autistic people adapt. They block out dangers: the noisy world, us.

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