Uta Frith's comment

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I have a lot of comments to make on here, but first,to put the recent posts into perspective, a person who is autistic may not need help because of his surrounding circumstances in that a situation is not stressful, such as he has money or because of circumstances fell into a good job, but then all kinds of things could go wrong, so these various diagnostic criteria may be fine in terms of getting help from the outside for a person who is not able to function, but this should not define who is autistic. For instance, to give an episode from when I was forty years old and living in a rented duplex as a single mother with a ten year old child: There were two doors, one mine and one to the unit of the couple next door, and that guy (who I really had nothing against up till then) one day painted his door a very vivid kelly green and it jarred my delicate color sense so much that I freaked out and actually scraped the paint off his door. Needless to say my child and I were evicted and miraculously with the help of my boyfriend at the time found this great place where I have been living for over forty years....and I'm lucky I didn't get evicted from here as I had all kinds of problems with very noisy neighbors, and there was all kinds of serious drama around that, but then my parents died and I got some money (all gone now:-) and rented the place above this one, so now I have dead quiet most of the time. If that had not happened, then anything could have gone wrong and I would have gotten assistance, but the problem is things can go very wrong before a person can get assistance or in ways they cannot get assistance, and if I went to a therapist it is unlikely I would have mentioned the incident about scraping the paint off the door and other such things, like how I cut the red stripes out of blankets:-).

People have a choice of looking at being autistic around getting aid and around how society treats you, etc., and this is one aspect, but they also have the choice of focusing on understanding your own mind. That is an entirely different venture. of course a person can do both, but generally the former supercedes the latter. Imo Uta Firth is not going to help autistic people do the latter. I know some think she is doing so, but from my perspective that is an illusion. Yes, it might maybe help a little bit to know that autistic people are detail oriented and then to look at oneself and see, yes, I am detail oriented, and so try to work on that, not that most people even probably can or do work on it, and I do not even know if they should, but in short it is all just doing further detailing inside of detailing. To really understand oneself is something else. It has the potential to transform your mind and even to change the physical brain, yes, change it, and it will ultimately affect other minds and brains, also, because all people are interconnected. But there is a tendency to look at oneself looking at details without realizing one is making it into a detail. Now how does that dynamic work? If you see how the actual dynamic works, then that opens a door. but if you say you are just like this---this is how you are and other people should accept that, then that is a different ballgame. Yes, maybe other people should accept that, though I am not sure they always should, but the point is that ones own mind is stuck in a box, and I think this particular psychologist is encouraging autistic people to be stuck in that box. She is framing things in certain ways so as to make a very simplistic picture, and I think she's doing it this way because it supports her personal special interest and her profession.

None of this means that a person should not accept himself as he is, but the problem is accepting ones own wrong thinking and believing it is true, so making all of it literal in a way that it really is not and then imposing this limited view on oneself and other people and expecting them to accept it and even getting angry if they do not

From a clinical point of view probably what she is doing has some value but I think many people are way overestimating that value.

I think the subject is fascinating, though. To anyone who is following this thread, are you learning anything about yourself from it? To me having a bug up my b*tt about this person, Uta Firth, would not be interesting. There would have to be some kind of learning around it that would give the experience value. I do think we all have these various bugs, though, and that these bugs in some way move us and move society. Often we are just bitten up, but there is a way to consciously use that kind of experience. Look what happened when people tried to kill certain bugs with ddt--the bugs eventually became immune to it and just came back again, even stronger than before..

Re the box with the sliding top experiment, I saw this program on Nova today about these experiments with cockatoo's, a bird that is very smart and can solve problems, such as pick locks, and the people running one experiment needed to wear sunglasses so the bird wouldn't pick up clues from the movement of their eyes....is it possible the autistic children somehow picked up clues that they were not supposed to do the tapping part before they opened the box::-)))? And you don't need eye contact to pick up those kind of clues...subtle muscles movement and/or voice tone is plenty ample. Imo, we can assume the psychologists probably did not want them to do the tapping part, asif the autistic children did not tap, this would support their hypothesis...

From the Nova program, " Chimps, crows and parrots share that they live in groups...."The key is not the physical nature of these animals but the environment that has made them the way they are" ..."complex social lives may create better problem solvers"...crows make 3 kinds of tools,,some of them complex multi-step tools...,and pass the knowledge of how to make them to their offspring...

Perhaps having more than one kind of brain in the same human group would give this group a better chance to survive then all in the group being exactly the same....in very simple conditions this might work differently in regard to an interdependent group brain than it does today.

That's very interesting, but I think that the children who did not tap on the box were better problem solvers, and that's why they didn't tap. Tapping didn't solve the problem of getting the boat out of the box.

It's a matter of being interested in how things work and understanding how things work, as opposed to being interested in the social dynamics of doing things.

Edit again:
The autistic kids were probably not very good at picking up cues from the experimenters in the first place.
The world does need two kinds of people.

Yes, navigating the social world would take a certain kind of problem solving too.