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.
Learn more ➤ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1X8__QutRI&feature=youtu.be
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00:00 Introduction
00:40 Beyond the spectrum of autism
02:28 Clinical psychology in the 1960’s
06:53 A changing picture of autism
10:06 Identifying autism scientifically
13:11 Mentalising
16:34 The Sally Ann test
21:50 Brain imaging
28:19 Aspergers
33:44 Autism diagnoses increase
37:48 The spectrum is broken
43:34 Masking and camouflaging
49:29 Identity or pathology
52:58 Where do we go from here?
#autism #neuroscience #neurodiversity
