From what I have read autism is a condition in which inputs cause the child to feel strong emotions that are not necessarily rational. I don't see that cannabis would cause the child to think in a rational manner unless it was to cause him/her to focus on things more.
"From what I have read autism is a condition in which inputs cause the child to feel strong emotions that are not necessarily rational. I don't see that cannabis would cause the child to think in a rational manner unless it was to cause him/her to focus on things more."
I think this is probably a symptom of what I described above, rather than the root cause. Read Temple Grandin's book Animals in Translation if you want a better account.
The book is written by an autistic woman who discovered that she has a really uncanny ability to understand animals. Basically she is able to see which stimuli are causing cattle and other animals to freak out, and the way she is able to do this is because her perception of the world is altered in a way that makes these stimuli (and their effects) more salient. For example, she will realize that the reason the cow won't move is because it sees a shadow, which no one else can recognize even though it's right in front of them. Apparently both autistics and animals are set off by some of the same things, because they don't have the natural ability to generalize phenomena. (So if they see a shadow, it's like a completely new thing to them each time and it scares them.) Although it seems like this particular author has learned to intellectualize that ability, so as an adult she has learned to get around the fact that the part of her brain which is supposed to do that isn't working. Anyway I'd really recommend this book, it sounds really flaky but it's incredibly intellectually interesting, and has so many implications for so many things it's ridiculous.
(Note that there may be several types of autism, which science hasn't yet differentiated because people could be having different subjective experiences, while the behavioral outcomes are the same. I'm not saying this is the case, it's just a possibility that has to be kept in mind, because people as introspective and articulate as Grandin are rare so understanding in these areas moves slowly.)
