In laboratories studying the genetic roots of autism, researchers have found that the same outward struggle — an overwhelming sensitivity to sound, an inability to tune out the world — can arise from fundamentally different conversations happening inside the brain. Three distinct genetic variants, each linked to autism, led zebrafish to the same behavioral shore by entirely different neural paths. The discovery quietly dismantles the assumption that autism's sensory differences share a single mechanism, and opens a more precise question: not just what is happening, but which pathway brought ea