Energy saving accounts for the suppression of sensory detail

High functioning autistic people can exhibit exceptional skills with numbers, eidetic imagery and recall of concrete detail, as brought to popular attention in the film Rain Man. However, it now transpires that these skills are to some extent latent within all of us. We do not have access under normal circumstances to this concrete detail, yet brain stimulation experiments show that it exists in all of us. This paper proposes that one of the reasons for this lies in the brain's need to conserve energy. Computer simulations using a spiking neural network support this hypothesis. A spiking neural network was set up with a number of feature detectors feeding an output unit, which in turn generates inhibition of the input neurons. This reduces the spike activity of the input, and thus overall energy usage.