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Three years ago, a Cornell statistician, Gregg Easterbrook, published a paper showing the rates of autism diagnosis increased during long periods of wet weather. His theory as to why this was the case was based on the increased amount of television watching during rainy weather.

Naturally the “vaccines cause autism” bunch hooted him down. They want to blame an exogenous factor, such as vaccines, rather than have to face the possibility that their own child-rearing technique, namely using the TV as a baby sitter, might be implicated. Unfortunately for the vaccine crowd, there’s not a single credible demographic study that implicates vaccines, and several very big studies have been done in several different countries.

To some degree, the TV theory makes quite a bit of sense. Infant brains are still intensely wiring up their brand new neurons and most of that wiring is predicated on early inputs. Motion and sound are two of the biggest inputs, as infants track what is going on around them and their new brain is furiously trying to makes sense of it all.

Now if you set that infant down alone in front of a big screen TV with surround sound, with continuously flashing images that make no sense whatsoever and continuously blaring sound that makes no sense whatsoever, what do you think is happening inside that baby’s tabula rasa as it furiously finishes knitting its unfinished neurons, recording the nature of its discovered world.

I think Easterbrook’s theory merits further investigation. It would be fairly easy to design studies that compare rates of autism amongst various cultures with varying amounts of infant TV watching. Other studies could compile statistics based directly on questionnaires.

Autism is a terrible thing, and it is indeed increasing. All reasonable avenues need to be pursued, regardless of politics. Just think. If it turns out TV is implicated, then prevention can be achieved simply by better parenting.