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This is the topic for my webpaper but I thought it related to well to what we discussed on Thursday. My 3 year old cousin Katie was adopted and spent the first 5 months of her life in an orphanage in rural China. She was diagnosed with autism about six months after my uncle and aunt picked her up, and after communication with the orphanage to try and assess the level of sensory stimulation she received they discovered that Katie had been (like so many other children in these situations) left in a crib in the same room without any toys and was only picked up to have her diaper changed. She had looked at the same walls and ceiling everyday, heard the same sounds and had the same physical contact with her caregivers (essentially no sensory variation, no chances to make summaries of observations etc).

So though we concluded that an action potential can start and end in the middle of a nervous system, I am wondering how that much activity is possible when there have been so few inputs. Katie's inputs were severely limited and thus her development was hindered, so how can the "leaky regions of membrane" idea work in this case when there are so few- if any- sources of stimuli for the brain to work with? Or are these input-independent action potentials the reason why my cousin survived for her first five months?