The Leaf Blower Conundrum

And the Rich Club Network

I walk into the bathroom and find a black and green leafblower perched on the counter. Its vacuum tube sticks straight up in the air, obscuring the window, and the collection bag hangs, empty of leaves. Thank goodness.

Hmmm.

I step into the hallway and check my watch. I’ve been running errands for less than an hour, but a lot can happen in a short time. The sounds of Minecraft float down the hallway; my son is engaged in changing the world.

Double hmmm.

Life with an autistic adult is never dull. I’ve been his mother for a long time and I understand Allen and his often nonsensical actions pretty well, but I am flummoxed by the presence of the leafblower. In the bathroom. As I traverse the distance to the computer room, I construct a careful question.

I note that my bedroom door is firmly closed.

Triple hmmm.

The computer room door is open, but I knock on the doorframe so Allen is not startled. He turns around.

“Oh,” he says. “You’re home.”

“Yep.” I lean casually against the wall. “I’m sort of wondering why there’s a leafblower in the bathroom. Can you tell me about it?”

It takes a moment for Allen to process my words, but he faces me. “Well, it was like this. I was in the kitchen, eating lunch, and I heard a funny noise coming from your room. It was weird and loud, like a big whooshing sound, and I didn’t know what to do. So I shut your door and put the leafblower in the bathroom.” He grins at me, arms crossed, satisfied with his explanation.

“Oh.” I digest the information, fitting together the missing pieces in my head. Asking “why” will not be productive at this point. But I hazard another question. “Will the leafblower stay there forever?”

“Not FOREVER, Mom!” he says. “Just as long as it needs to.” He turns back to his game, collecting cubes that will order the video world he understands.

The conversation is clearly over.

“Okay.” I leave him to it and head towards my bedroom door, listening closely before I turn the knob.

Nothing.

As I change my clothes, the bits of the 5,000-piece puzzle begin to align themselves. In a few moments, I think I’ve put it together.

Photo by Nathalia Segato on Unsplash

Like other autistic brains, Allen’s has problems with neural connections. The “rich club network”—yes, that’s the real name—operates similarly to a highway system, with volumes of information speeding to different regions (Spectrum News, 2014). But neuro-diverse people like Allen have an “overfilled” brain. The neural connections do not always make it to the right regions, causing disorganized thought. They got lost along the way.

Blame it on synapses. Before birth and during infancy, an abundance of synapses form in the cortex, but after about 4 years of age, selective paring prune away those that are redundant or no longer needed (Embrace Autism, 2023). In a neuro-typical brain, the number of synapses is reduced by about 50%.

But in an atypical brain such as Allen’s, the number pruned is only about 16%. This makes Allen’s rich club network ineffective at making connections because there are just too many routes to take. The network chooses whatever seems to make the most sense.

The choice may not make sense to the rest of the world.

My own brain has the typical number of synapses and works rather well. I’ve managed, I think, to mirror Allen’s thought process.

He heard a noise and perceived it as a threat. In a linear thought process, he would have gone to investigate, but his non-linear neurons lit up with activity, frantically searching for a connection to something. Anything. And something about the noise was reminiscent of a leafblower. With that connection completed, Allen had two choices.

Ignore it or do something.

And being Allen with his quirks and synapses and obsessive-compulsive tendencies, he needed to do something. Anything. One of the benefits of an overload of synapses is the ability to solve problems up to 40% faster than those of us who are less fortunate. Allen’s solution was to control what he could by taking the known leafblower and putting it into a time-out until the threat had passed.

Makes perfect sense, right? Well, at least it did to Allen. And now that I’d thought it through, it made “Allen sense” to me. But as I head to the kitchen to start dinner, another thought occurs to my completely neurotypical brain with its pared-down number of synapses and efficiently running rich club network.

Where the heck did Allen get a leafblower?