A lot of differant opinions on this, love the bit she talks about some things – adding this to my diary of clip clips
About the video
Autism pioneer Uta Frith wants to dismantle the spectrum. After a career spent grappling with the condition’s neural underpinnings, she is unwavering in her controversial call to scrap our current view of it and start again.
Frith’s influence on our ever-shifting understanding of autism has been monumental: she developed two landmark theories about how autistic minds might develop differently to neurotypical ones, and was among the first to test ideas like these using newly available brain scanners in the 1990s.
Since then, the number of autism diagnoses has sharply risen, especially among women and girls – largely because of a softening and broadening of how we define the condition.
But Frith thinks that many people at the milder end of the spectrum have little in common with those who are profoundly autistic. “There’s absolutely no overlap,” she says. “That is the sign that the spectrum isn’t holding.”
In this video, she sits down with New Scientist editor Thomas Lewton to discuss autism.
other comments:
One of the problems with the “Sally Ann test” that I’ve seen written about is that some autistic children, especially those who are used to being told that what they experience is wrong (sensory issues, etc), can interpret this as effectively a trick question. “If I was in Sally’s place, I wouldn’t know it had been moved, so I would look in the same place I had put it. BUT, everyone else always seems to know all sorts of things that I don’t know without being told.
So Sally must have some way of knowing where it actually is. Otherwise what’s the point of the question?” So they “fail” the test because they’re so used to feeling like they don’t have all the information others do and having their own experiences dismissed, and are trying to work around that by outsmarting the question!
///
“perfectly unremarkable childhood”!?!?! It was enough to have good marks at school and you past as normal for adults, but the kids knew I wasn’t. I learnt talking at age 3 but no one noticed because it was preschool. I was dislectic but labelled lazy by my father who didn’t allow me being tested. I could list so many things. It is OK to try to name dome group of autistic people something else, but saying about perfectly unremarkable childhood is rather offensive to me (diagnosed at 41).
///
