Autism and the arts

Recent articles

Brains of many colors with people standing on them, coming out of the shadows

Book Review: ‘Nobody’s Normal’ chronicles the intertwined history of mental illness and stigma

Anthropologist and autism expert Richard Roy Grinker’s latest title reveals how our definitions of mental illnesses and notions of ‘normality’ reek of cultural biases that stop many from seeking help.

By Claudia Wallis
26 January 2021 | 6 min read
young autistic girl in playroom with a tennis ball that matches her yellow dyed hair.

Inside a summer camp for autistic children in Russia

Photographs show how a camp in St. Petersburg this summer helped children on the spectrum and their families find some fun during the pandemic.

By Polina Porotskaya
1 September 2020 | 5 min read

Explore more from The Transmitter

Clockwise: lab mouse, zebrafish, octopus, rat pushing a cube, nematodes, fruit fly.

The term ‘model organism’ should be reserved for biological systems

By referring to artificial neural networks as model organisms, we run the risk of distorting funding priorities and disregard the explanatory power of a shared evolutionary history across biological organisms.

By Marc Coutanche
13 November 2026 | 6 min read

New phase of BRAIN Initiative spawns basal ganglia ‘parts list’

With a standardized cell naming system and infrastructure for data collection and analysis, the basal ganglia project sets the stage for a whole-brain primate atlas.

By Claudia López Lloreda
12 November 2026 | 1 min watch
Research image showing genes containing microexons in mice.

Machine-learning model spots autism-linked variants that scramble splicing

The model provides a way to investigate genetic variation in regions of the genome whose functions have been difficult to interpret.

By Giorgia Guglielmi
12 November 2026 | 4 min read