[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercada center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at [Music] arcades.in conversations withth tyler.com today we're up in Montreal all and I'm very honored to be here with Michelle Dawson Michelle is one of the people I
admire most actually she has become a very well-known and very influential autism researcher her background she is herself autistic in some regards you could describe her as self-taught but she has become a kind of one-woman force advocating for more science and you're you're shaking your head now not an advocate she is arguing for Science and ethics being brought into the autism
discourse and discourse more generally would you accept that description of what you do uh good enough good enough okay fa enough let me start with a very general question if you ask what would be the most underrated non-accountable and mysterious Force controlling people's lives and I said that right now it was actually something called the DSM Diagnostic and statistical Manual of
mental disorders which influences a lot of issues in the law what insurance companies do what hospitals do when people are institutionalized what would your reaction be to that statement I think that uh the DSM could be a a very bad big deal to people who for instance are denied basic human rights or standards in science for people who are not situated like that and that would be
most people the shortcomings of the dsm5 will will be offset by people in research and practice who have good standards who understand that their job is to benefit people more than they harm them who know how to read the scientific literature and so on so it depends who you are and how you're situated and also you have to consider the larger context of what people see as influential or not
which might be very arbitrary at any moment so what would be the best understanding of autism from your perspective the best understanding is seeing autism as atypical brain functioning resulting in atypical processing of all information so that's information across domains social nonsocial across modalities visual auditory whatever it source so whether
it's uh information from your memory information coming from the outside world that that is atypical now uh so that is very domain general atypicality what autis IC brains do with information is atypical how it's atypical in my view involves what I've called cognitive versatility and less mandatory hierarchies in how the brain works such that for example an autistic brain will
consider more possibilities will uh non- strategically combine information across levels and scales without losing large parts of it and so on and that applies to all information so that is strictly my view I'm not sure anyone would agree with me do you think it's true that autistic brains somehow take in or process more information they can so that depends on what is in available in
the environment and not all autistics uh are well situated when it comes to access to information that they can process well so uh autistics are different in the kinds quantities and Arrangements of information they process well so just having a huge quantity of information is not necessarily all that an autistic person needs the atypicality is more complex than that but yes an
autistic person can process more information across levels and scales without losing it or without you know a lot of the information sort of being edited in sort of cognitive editing various ways that information is made manageable in a typical brain autistic people don't need to do that to get the information in a way that it can be processed and and
useful that they can learn from it and use it so what's an example of something an autistic person might be better at doing than a non-autistic person again with a lot of variation across autistics you know the the the problem here is that there's there's a really long list of things that artistic people can do well given the opportunity give us say half a dozen just bullet point so uh I
mean the the sort of almost classic example is uh um hyper Leia which you see in uh starting with very early development so you see this in very young autistic children who have a spontaneous interest in uh printed materials it can be just uh text but the information can include uh other other kinds of printed materials and numbers uh combinations of letters and numbers
and they use this information across different scales so from Individual letters like the alphabet given the opportunity they will order uh individual letters into uh the order of the alphabet for instance but they don't just use single letters they will also use complex arrays of text like newspapers so these are very young children this can you know start at age
two if they're in a bookr tax Rich environment and they have free access to this they will figure out how uh language is structured and that happens even with very difficult orthographies like English uh so English orthography is so difficult that typical children take an extra year or so to learn it because it's wacky I mean it's it's not it it in in a lot of ways it doesn't
make sense the rules don't make sense but autistic children even starting you these these very young children can work this out you know they they figure out the irregularities they figure out the regularities with using this sort of array of information from words to you know letters to words to phrases to sentences to paragraphs to entire text and arrays and so on and they will
figure it out and typical children don't really do this spontaneously my mother used to tell me that when I was two I just taught myself how to read and for a very long time I never took her seriously I just thought well mothers say things like this but when I learned about hyperlexia it occurred to me that she had an actual literal point so if you're a hyperlexic and then you grow up
you keep some kind of special reading ability typically we don't know nearly enough about how any autistic strength in processing information evolves over time and again you have to keep in mind that we start looking at this when you know in children you don't know what kind of information is going to be available to them we are not paying attention to that at all and at the same
time uh now in autism one of the most common aspects of popular interventions is to really ration information uh keep it away from autistic people so you have to consider that and how how an ability develops do they have what kind of access to information do they have in whatever context they're in whether it's in their home in their school but it is not a
dead end that is for sure it's it's been thought of wrongly as a dead end and that's been true of of you know autistic abilities in general that they are thought of as as as dead ends but it it's clearly not the case even in situations which are very far from good for the autistic person as far as availability of information and uh their their overall situation with
respect to how resourceful they can be how how they can add to and build on their uh abilities and so on now often in popular discourse you'll hear autism or Asbergers associated with a series of personality traits or features of Personality psychology so a kind of introversion or people being nerdy in some Regard in your approach do you see any connection between personality
traits and autism at all there is a small literature that shows some connection uh I think it's very weak and I say no uh I I don't think autism is about personality autism can is is sort of orthogonal to personality it's not the two are not related you know whatever relation there is does not you know arises from some third Factor let's say if there is one and and you know
again the the the evidence is I think very weak connecting autism to personality uh so just say that maybe uh if there's something let's say that personality in in autistics might be more uh High variance that would be my totally wild guess uh but I don't think autism itself is about personality one thing if I think about your work in general one thing it's caused me to do
is to see a new bias in how humans make judgment and that is a bias to underrate atypical kinds of intelligence and I view this as a Common Thread running through your work and maybe this is what I'm reading in rather than anything you've said explicitly but if you look at say issues of animal intelligence there's a growing body of evidence that animals feel pain they're intelligent
they lead social lives they're complex in ways maybe we hadn't understood earlier still a lot of people don't absorb this knowledge very readily uh if you consider Down syndrome individuals when I was growing up uh there was a common sense of a kind of hopelessness now there's a Down syndrome individual who's a lobbyist people playing roles on TV and so on and this would not have
been expected by most people in the 1970s so why do you think it is we have this bias to underrate atypical kinds of intelligence or do you even agree with that characterization I I would be careful about the sort of people in general I I I would say that maybe there it does seem to be it does seem to be something that if you take sort of the the median the median person that that
that you know you you or you do this sort of as a you know as as socities sort of collectively not not necessarily as individuals this seems to be something that people are very bad at is to detect abilities and worth in in highly atypical individuals and uh you for sure I mean you see this very much in autism with the whole notion of severity and uh
there is no workable definition of autism severity uh people use that word all the time they use it to mean that somebody's had a bad outcome or that someone has badly behaved or that somebody performs badly on an IQ test and so on uh just something there is something bad going on here and it's sort of the equation that the more atypical a person is the worse they must
be they must not be intelligent there must be something extra wrong more wrong about their behavior and so on now this is where I'm very familiar with the whole history of this and it's obviously problematic I mean we don't I hope we don't look at a blind person who is a successful lawyer and assume that he's only very mildly blind or not you know barely blind at all and then look at a
blind person who has a very bad outcome and assume that they must be very severely blind we do make those kinds of judgments in autism is saying the more atypical the person is the worse they must be in some sense now that kind of bias is not only harmed a lot of autistic people uh it really has impeded research and we we do not have a definition for autism severity but it
gets that idea that bias very very unhelpful and harmful bias that the more atypical an individual is the more there must be wrong with them I mean in autism it's been PR it's just you know if you want to take autism is almost the paradigmatic case of of that happening so if you want to make a case for that uh autism would be where to do it are there biases that non-autistic
individuals have that autistics might have less or maybe not at all well uh there's a literature testing some of these by es you know the the the short answer is yes though I I think in all cases you you would want to uh you want a bigger literature you'd want to wait for replications and so on what's an example of a possible bias that's weaker in autistics well noticing that two
offers which are opposed in different ways are actually identical are being um more likely to notice that the two that the outcome will be identical however it's well so those framing effects now that's been replicated once where in effect the autistics are less likely to be fooled by the framing so they they detect when two situations are the same whereas the typical group are biased
such that they are fooled by the framing uh you know and it's not 100% but autistics are just they will still consider it what about optical illusions is there evidence there it's very mixed uh and it very it's very picky about the the the task and the instructions so some more than others I think that the table and now I'm trying to remember the
Shepherd's Table or have I got the name of the table right the the table illusion has been replicated the the one with the line now I've forgotten its name uh has been replicated others not so much uh and you do it it's very mixed I don't think that there's a question of what can autistics see an illusion they probably can do they consider other possibilities yes they do and they will
consider other possibilities that the typical population might not so that produces some you know some differences in in in results depending on on the task and so on are there examples of confirmed biases and autistics where the bias is stronger in autistics I would say no keep in mind what I think here is not that autistics don't have biases I istics can they will process information
atypically within that range is the possibility of checking you know what what is the typical hierarchy even if it's not it's not it won't be mandatory though that won't be it they will consider other possibilities so that will attenuate biases as opposed to strengthen them and that I think is what you find in the literature you know again depending whether the task is
sufficiently complex for that showing what the task demands are you know my favorite of these and um is that though it doesn't it's a bit dodgy because it comes from a couple different papers but it shows where a bit of my background going way back in in perception and finding that autistic people were better at drawing impossible figures so impossible figures are like Pen Rose
triangles they're things that you can't build and so this was interpreted as a couple of possible deficits you know whether or not failing to see the global structure for instance yet if you ask autistic people whether the impossible figure is impossible they know it it's impossible so autistics can have both the possibilities they understand that an impossible figure is a sort of
possible drawing now there are a variety of claims that autistics either have difficulties processing social information or lack certain kinds of social intelligence or they're awkward in particular social situations in in your framework how do you make sense of these claims and how would you describe or redescribe the phenomena people are talking about how autistic
people perform in Social tasks is high variance it is very hard to pull out specific deficits where you can't point out areas where autistics have performed at least as well as typical people on the task now there is an exception uh which is the most replicated autistic deficit uh I believe there's one finding in the contrary Direction but all the rest and there's a lot especially for
the autism literature show what what is considered an autistic deficit so this is the uh the task of attributing deep mental states to geometric shapes usually there are triangles they will be animated they sort of move around and it goes beyond simp attributing agency to the triangles which autistics can do you must attribute mental states to them profound mental States like they're
jealous or they're flirting and autistics are very bad at this task and this has been replicated quite a lot uh even at a populationbased level which is not something you necessarily see a lot of so uh is this a social deficit autistics are definitely bad at this task now why might that be if you look at things in my own biased way it may not necessarily be that artistics don't
notice that these interactions between geometric shapes or among geometric shapes resemble something social that involves mental States but they are less likely and there are not going to totally get rid of the accurate information these are just freaking triangles is the F they they will only go so far you know they won't they they are not going to lose that
possibly important information that these are just triangles and this might you know that you would think that this would be quite reasonably produce a bit of caution in assuming that you know quite a lot about their profound mental States it's the following a fair description let's say that many autistics are taking in more information than would be typical so sometimes those
autistics will end up confused or they will feel confused or act as if they appear they're confused but other times if they develop procedures for processing that information rules they become better at interpreting the information maybe they have to become better because they face this more difficult task so you will have autistics show unusual Mastery of social
situations even if they appear awkward they'll see much more detail than non-autistics would in some cases but then in other cases they'll be more confused and that's where this High variance comes from that you mentioned earlier there's a a huge literature and autism about how autistics judge facial expressions of emotion in in other people what you have in the autism
literature is you haven't only just turned autistic people into sort of stereotypes and cartoons you've done that to the typical population this is really at odds with the non-autism literature on facial expressions which is much more complicated in the autism literature it's assumed that you can just read people's inner emotions and and mental states which aren't mental states are
not necessarily well- defined that it's sort of a simple matter that it is sort of written all over somebody's face or even uh you can read it just from looking at a photo of their eyes and things are far more complicated than that in the literature in the non-autism literature and for example the MIT their affective competing group rosand Picard did uh these fantastic studies showing
that people smile and frustration and those are real honesty goodness Ean type Smiles you know with you have the whole facial action coating thing going on those are real genuine Smiles uh that people smile and frustration when they're genuinely frustrated they don't do it when they're acting out frustration and there are many other examples like that people smile for many
different reasons that may they may uh uh and that is acknowledged to some degree in the literature in the typical population not in the autism literature where things are supposed to be are completely simple they're just very cricat and cartoonish now what you find is that the typical population can decipher their way through this they know what these facial expressions are
supposed to represent even if they don't look like that in real life autistics are are maybe because their exper experences are quite complex with how people respond to them starting early in life and I'm just wildly speculating here but artistics are going to notice that things are more complex and uncertain than that and again it's the considering more possibilities and that
will very much hamper their task performance if you are what you are looking for is this sort of automatic certainty uh that these acted expressions are sort of all there is which is not accurate and that leads to many problems because we're actually training autistic people to ignore the complex real important information in favor of the cricketer stereotyped simplified probably wrong information
and we should really think about that but that gives you an idea of looking at Social deficits thinking about how autistics process information and also actually looking at the literature itself let me mention a few cognitive skills and just run through them briefly but tell me what you think we know about autistics and non-autistics chord disaggregation you hear a chord and you
want to figure out what are the notes inside the cord what do we know so autistics are good at cord disembedding and that's what that ability is called now this is a a great way to bring in the importance of the literature on autistic Savant autistic savants are the best way to think of them is autistics who are very obvious you know multiply large numbers in their head they can do
the so it's very obvious that they are processing information atypically that makes them very obvious autistics they are very obviously High variant in their range of abilities uh so there can be quite drastic contrast between things that they are bad at and things that they are excellent at and this again makes some very very obvious people their abilities are extraordinary for
anybody they have difficulty doing quite basic things so they're very obvious they've been extremely important in research in spite of the literature on them being tiny it's disproportionately contribute to what we know yet you know this extraordinary contribution of these individuals has just been really um gets denigrated all the time that's awful to
see so this is how we know because autistic sants can disaggregate chords this was then studied in less obviously talented artistics who it turns out are better at disaggregating cards cord dis embeddings this that Pamela Heaton did work in this area and uh my favorite bit in this literature is in uh book chapter by Linda pring where they tested Derek paravicini so he is blind and autistic
outstanding musician uh he's considered intellectually disabled developmentally disabled however you want to put it as they do in the um in the Savant literature they they test these Savant against uh people who are experts so expert musicians and you know they conk out pretty quick after five or six notes they're getting in a lot of trouble they can't disembed
these chords they can't tell you which notes they consist of and Derek parvini kept going and he could do the first chord in hard day night perhaps right well exactly but but you know what what what they said in this what what the researchers here didn't anticipate and you know it's just sort of awful that this isn't reported in in a formal paper this is this is in a book chapter but
that it didn't occur of them that they would run out of fingers you know they they were 10 note cord and he could still disembed it and they had not anticipated that they would need someone with more than 10 fingers to properly test the limits of this autistic person's ability so this is somebody who is a a creative fantastic musician in every sense but to know that he can do
this I mean it's almost like almost by accident that we know this and we have not managed to get to the limit of his abilities here because they just didn't anticipate what do you think of the hypothesis that virtually all autistics are in some logical way savants but there's a socially constructed category of savant that some things such as multiplying large numbers or doing the
calendar trick whether a particular day far in the future is a Monday or a Wednesday that is regarded as being a savant but if you have a quite ordinary skill that you're very good at like making managerial decisions no one will call you a Sur vond but in essence you're doing the same thing agree or disagree uh I'm not going to answer that I'm going to totally answer a different
question which is that what people should notice first off is that Savant skills are sort of conglomerated in specific areas why might that be uh so music hyperlexia drawing in in three dimensions calculation calendar calculation why because this is information that is tends to be available in most environments and that I often quite hard to take out of those
environments now you have to think so the people can't take it away from autistics you can always look at calendar think they TR so they do now so this is taking that information away is a feature of many if not most popular autism interventions so that's awful so why I'm answering the question why are some people considered seant and some not first so it is we don't know
anything we we are not interested in what kinds of information artistics have available to them starting development so I'm trying to get other people interested in that it's very uphill you know because artistics are maybe specific on how they start to figure out how to how to work with the kinds quantities and Arrangements of information they process well so let's
say an artistic will have access to say music and they will have access to good music and so on and they will they will figure that out and they have access to piano which is particularly seems a particularly good array of information for autistics this generally Savant tend they're not the musicians aren't all pianists uh but an awful lot of them are and in the piano all the information is
there right it's it's in front of you it's it's complex it's all there so this tends to be the kinds of information that autistics will start with now let's say you have somebody and they figure out they figure out me music you know they figure it out at at all levels you know from a single note to complex compositions and this is what savants do what if they realize then and it's in
their environment that they can apply this to something else and you do get savants that have multiple abilities that used to be considered wrongly not what happened but it is what happens and the idea of an autistic polymath has just not been explored at all so you get a paper where the autistic person you're you're just exploring specific aspects
of their extraordinary music ability you know you will only mention in passing that there are an outstanding chess player and we we don't know we don't know anything more about that um so that's just an example that is actually in the literature true or false autistics often have weaker episodic memory and they're less likely to think in terms of stories and when they watch
movies or read books they will pick out very different pieces of information and have very unorthodox readings relative to the mainstream I would say that's very well established though it is not interpreted that way so the way to interpret it is that autistics do not organize information in memory typically it should not surprise anybody they do not use narratives to
edit things to organize things and that means that they perform very differently on episodic memory tasks and in related in um tests that require people to organize information into sort of common or popular narratives there are at least two kinds of IQ tests and autistics do better on one than on the other and some of your best known research is in this area tell us the basic finding there are
very different approaches to measuring intelligence uh one is a battery of tests uh uh as in waxler Scales of intelligence you are trying to get at General abilities by using a an array of different specific tests so you're trying to get at something latent so these are just specific abilities but through those that you come up with some kind of late and general uh ability that
we call intelligence or full scale intelligence or you can take one specific one test with one format that is sufficiently complex and difficult that it gets at the same thing just with one test so that would be Ravens Progressive matric a test that been extremely influential on the entire intelligence literature it's a what those questions look like just give us a
very direct intuitive sense it's it's a matrix of entries uh so the number varies and you have the last one in the Matrix the last item in the Matrix is is missing and you choose the right one from an array of offered answers so that's it it sounds too simple or easy but it is a very complex test it is and and a very difficult one in effect it's played a large role in defining what
general intelligence is and which test do artistics tend to do better on and why so artistics do better on Raven and quite a bit better in some IND idual the discrepancy is spectacular uh it's a lot so how they would be judged and again go to the Savant literature and this is what influenced me to pursue this you'll have an individual in the Savant literature who really cannot perform
other tests would be judged as very intellectually disabled on other tests effectively doesn't even have C reform receptive language test much less produced language and the score is very high on Ren so one possibility uh I mean better than most of the typical population all but you know one or 2% so you know and and again he had to have the opportunity to
do that for us to find that out so there's a lot of interesting things about that because if you look at what the kinds of deficits that have been assumed that autistics have in processing complex information in executive functioning in working memory in um all kinds of complex pures this is what Raven actually demands and what was your role in discovering this
differential between the two kinds of IQ tests your personal role well as a researcher there was a paper in 2004 and and it was one I sort of one of the first ones I actually kind of looked at in an editing capacity after it was sort of accepted uh provisionally it did find though a very tentatively that autistics were possibly performing better on Raven than than these other tests and the
interpretation in the paper was that Raven wasn't a good test for autistics it must overestimate autistic intelligence and I thought first um that there are other possibilities and also I looked around at how Raven was being first off I had to look at what Raven was and how it was being interpreted in the autism literature was is that when autistics performed well on it was very
was almost denigrated as a test this is just you know visual spatial abilities and so on and look in the intelligence literature and you have this test that is really Central in defining human intelligence that is very important and requires all these abilities that autistics supposedly don't have and I thought well isn't this worth pursuing and it did take a lot of persuasion to
go in that direction to sort of question the commonplace and typical and this is typical of the autism literature autistics perform well on the test there must be something wrong with the test now before you offered an understanding or conception of what autism is a definition but if we get to the nitty-gritty question of what's the core mechanism or the core difference in
autistic brains some people have suggested there's some kind of weaker or disabled or maybe more optional form of top- down processing so there's may be more direct access to smaller bits of information or greater optionality as to the level at which information is accessed if you're characterizing of what you think autism actually is in terms of how the information is
processed what do you think of that hypothesis and how would you best articulate how you understand it well it's my hypothesis uh the optionality anyway uh so that's me so I I put maybe not the person you should ask no you are the person I should ask now how do I answer that so uh this first came out of you know that these things don't happen in the proper order if you look at the
literature so this came out of it actually a lovely study done by Isabelle suer who was a PhD student at the time and she was looking at categorization so her field is categorization and she was looking at how autistic people categorize elipses and the interesting thing about categories uh is that they distort perception people uh will believe that things on either they will form a
category boundary let's say why ellipses versus skinny ellipses and um where they put the boundary will mean that they um they sort of distort how they see that those things that are just one side or the other of that boundary even though the difference isn't any greater than those who are you know both on one side and both on the other the difference between the two is is is actually the
same but because there's been this sort of division into two different categories so this is called a discrimination Peak and you notice that it's because it's found in the typical population it's not considered a deficit or a bi it's considered a peak um something good so the question was do artistics have this this peak and so they were asked to do two things
classify these ellipses which is in effect categorize them so can they categorize these ellipses as wide or skinny you can look and see uh you know whether they're doing this uh and then do they produce a discrimination Peak so the autistics produced this completely typical classification curve so they formed typical categories when this was the task but when they're asked to
discriminate one from another you know is just tell them apart they did not show a discrimination Peak that is to say they were not biased by the category boundary I sort of leapt in on this because this was considered to be a deficit in category formation and you know I said you you can't say that because the autistics when you asked them to form categories formed typical
categories you can't form more typical categories in that the classification curve was identical then you asked them to discriminate they performed that task that doesn't mean that they forgot how to categorize it means that the the categorization they they didn't have you know that bias was not useful in performing the Discrimination task accurately there came the idea of
autonomy so this means that discrimination was autonomous in the autistics it was autonomous from categorization in the typical population even when it wasn't useful they formed categories they had to so there you had these non-optional categories they formed categories even when it produced biases even when it wasn't useful for the task they had to they had no choice
in the autistics it was optional the processes were more autonomous I've also called this cognitive versatility it doesn't mean that you know again it doesn't mean that autistics can't do this it doesn't mean that they can't do what might be thought of as top- down processing what might be thought of as using priors or what might be thought of as um predictive processing or whatever
it's not that they can't do it it it's that it is not so mandatory or automatic it is more optional and more versatile with this optionality does that mean that on average autistics are somehow more different from each other than non-autistics are when you're and you see this very striking in the literature and I've just been really you can see this in the whole predictive processing
literature where there's sort of one optimal way to process everything which is amazing this is how you know supposedly not only you know within one person but across the entire population you know there's the premise that there is sort of this optimal predictive inference and this you know that that there is one optimal way to process everything so if you have a a hierarchy
of information processing that is similar across typical people and I do believe you have that I mean there is some variation but the hierarchy Works in about the same way so you would get much more similarity I mean it doesn't mean that everyone's similar they're brought up in different places they have different experiences they have different genetics they have different
on and on but they have that greater similarity in in what they do with information that will make them more similar in what they do with information and that will give them much more in common autistics do not have that which makes them not just different from typical people but quite different from each other this is I think being slightly recognized now that autistic
people may be more idiosyncratic this word is popped into the literature there's a new fairly new literature with respect to autism and rare copy variants and denovo copy variants in the genetics of autism what do you think we're learning from these articles that we should be less Hasty in in deciding things about autistic genetics I mean I think that's the main message you know
we doing the Seesaw between we had you know the the denovo story was just very you know the denovo rare variant story was just a very big deal so that you have an entire collection you have the Simon Simplex collection which is just really designed to find these which were assumed to you know if we find these you know we will we will crack autism
genetics and but just to clarify you're saying the literature has shown that autistics are quite different from each other in their mutations no that's not that's not what I'm saying say I'm saying autistics are will be quite different from each other in uh because you know those are two different issues so how autistics Pro process information and the sort of genetics that may lead
to brains that work like autistic brains so I'm not a genetics person so I do cognitive stuff but I think the genetic stuff is really you know a cautionary note of Leaping to conclusions that for instance you have these sort of rare denovo variants that are the real big deal and even looking for them in the most favorable circumstance possible that is you're looking in families that
only have one autis person they did not find much but that was the sort of leading story for a long time we are now the Seesaw is sorted back to Common variants and we are getting slightly more complicated views that if you have a rare variant that doesn't mean you don't also have common variants that are contribute to how I typically your mind works so it's been a you know this sort
of long slog but it is a cautionary note against sort of any simplistic explanation for uh autistic genetics and I think we have real problems in you know I think there's been some progress but I I do think we have real problems in you know where we've looked how we've looked some of that mirr is just what has happened generally in genetics in percentage terms is autism becoming more
common or more frequent over time no autism has not become more prevalent there is no reason to believe that it has and there you know the idea that it has become our pent has been sort of very destructive for us in research and to to actual autistic people uh since the premise really what you're saying when you say that there's been a large increase in autism prevalence that you
are saying older autistics don't exist that means we can't learn anything from them you know including from their early development from their outcomes from their achievements we just start of would totally erase them and write them off so maybe autistics are being treated worse over time at least in their roles as children is that possible that is possible uh just like it is possible
again very hard idea to test and it's one that I wouldn't even think that I would ever say uh but I've said it uh and I've even presented about it is asking whether an Autism diagnosis is more beneficial than harmful very hard question to investigate people have actually one there is an actual purpose-built study that does that in in in a way that is you know obviously has
a lot of flaws but found that the the probable autistics who weren't diagnosed were better off and in populationbased studies like the one in Korea the autistics who had not been diagnosed did not have an existing diagnosis were much better off you often find that autistics who are diagnosed older uh at older rather than earlier ages are are better
off it's is the contrary to everything you've ever heard probably and so on I don't think that those things are being taken seriously enough we we definitely are getting data from autistic people who are diagnosed as adults who seem to be better off than what you find in longitudinal studies of autistics who are diagnosed as children who all very very hard to interpret but the question
is raised and uh the fact that is out there and and I'm not saying trying to discourage or encourage anything or give advice in the least but it speaks to I think my own concerns maybe they've been futile but about uh standards basic standards in research and practice standards of science ethics uh in medicine these are things I see as human rights issues they are to me a big deal
and we should be very concerned that we are doing things to autistic people that we know produce bad outcomes in in anyone one of my striking takeaways from your work and just to be clear I don't think you've ever said or written this in general terms but just to see the extent to which parents do not necessarily have the actual interests of their children at heart
that parents seem to have a strong bias for children who will be a lot like they are and they will take a lot of steps to try to make their children more like them even if that in some ways harms the child from the point of view of the child itself I think of diagnosis as a kind of segregation and in most other settings we're morally very reluctant to segregate but somehow when it comes to
children we seem really quite willing to segregate this is moral split so to speak possibly not always for any good reason so first I'm going to totally disagree about the parents keep in mind in autism you have very very loud people loud Advocates loud influential Advocates that does not mean and those are autistics and non-autistics professional organiz ations people
selling services whatever very loud Advocates they are not necessarily representative but they're the most influential group right sure but you can't you can't extrapolate from that to parents in general you just absolutely can't you know the literature is different from what you get from the very loud Advocates and of course you have a lot of autistic parents of
autistic Offspring is still very poorly studied but this definitely happens the reprodu Ive Fitness as they call it of autistics has been wildly underestimated I think this again my my own view as a non- genetics person so you have that uh but I think you have to be care very careful not to confuse advocacy and autism with you know any group in particular like parents or or autistics
for that matter uh their views I think that's a real problem now the segregation thing I have a massive bias against segregation see this may be one place where I'm as an autistic see there's I have an Absol not not just a bias but I have a I have a profound segregation deficit and anybody who's tried to segregate me has going to run into that so if you try to segregate me
I'm not going to go there so it should not be segregation DSM should not be segregation DSM five autism DSM autism is segregation why because the diagnosis segregates autistic people into lower standards of Science and ethics than would be acceptable for anybody else that's what your diagnosis does now you may be lucky anyway you may encounter extraordinary individuals who know your
autistic and who will apply good standards of Science and ethics to you that certainly happens but you must be lucky it will not be the kind of morea taken for granted where the exception is that you will be denied these standards and if you are there will be recourse in autism that is not the case so to me that is a segregation I can't speak to the other diagnoses I haven't found I've
looked very hard and have not found a situation like you have an Autism where you have these unacceptably low standards that are sort of universally advocated for and that there is no advocacy in the other direction and you have the the influence of advocacy is just completely determinative as you know there's a Danish firm called specialist STNA right and they make a
point of hiring autistic people to do things such as programming is that in your view an instance of possibly unjust or harmful segregation if you're autistic and you want to be in the workforce in a way that is not very potentially harmful to you you would be wise to seek out Enterprises like this because they are they shouldn't so first off obviously they shouldn't be
necessary obviously autistics should be able to go into the workforce like everybody else be respected for their abilities not be discriminated against due to their job unrelated atypicalities job irrelevant atypicalities that is not the case so you have autistic people who as employees are being very underappreciated and undervalued and so you have these
organizations and it's sort of it's it's very it's sort of massive you have these huge efforts to get autistics employed under this sort of umbrella of these sort of you know we will test these autistics we will make sure you know we will we will sort of hire them out to firms we will get the firms used to having autistics around we will Coach people through things and so on and this
allows autistics to be in the workforce in a much less precarious way than they would if they simply went out in the world and then had to face this sort of problem of being denied basic rights and standards uh which is just a very precarious situation you may be lucky but you would have to know it's only luck no matter how hard you work no matter how good your work is your
situation is very precarious whereas with you're sort of under under them you know I'm trying to think of the the right term you're sort of almost endorsed you're an Endor Autistic or you have this sort of stamp of approval and that sort of indicates to the employer that they should treat you in a certain way so that will improve your chances greatly and make you sort of much in a
much less precarious situation and we are more and more sort of uh and yes it is a PHA segregation of saying yes this is what we should do to get autistics employed now it's very hard to argue against that in the current situation if you think of the United States there's been such a thing as gay identity politics those groups have fought for the legalization of gay marriage and
they achieve that I would say that's a very good thing it spread to many parts of the world often before the United States should there be some kind of comparable identity politics for autistics given that in some ways it has helped gay individuals oh my goodness so no no and I'm not even sure I don't you know keep in mind I think that what well first off I'm going to say what happened
gay and ivid what helped gay individuals is having human rights and the benefit and protection of basic standards in science and ethics I think that's what autistics are missing not identity politics Michelle and I have a co-authored piece on Alan touring maybe we'll get to that next time my last question is on what I call the Michelle Dawson production function so you know a
great deal about autism how is it that you given your history you are not trained as an Autism researcher in the formal sense but how is it that you learn about AU ISM I had to uh so it came out of my situation being terrible say I was quite motivated I started by I had been told over and over again that I was too stupid no other way to put it to understand autism research I tried other
avenues I was in very difficult situation legally ev Everything and really because I had to address these these these legal issues and questions I I I did actually look at the autism literature and suddenly I had information I could really work with suddenly there it was you know this information that I was supposed to be too stupid to work with and uh I can
tell you that view continues onwards that I'm still too stupid to work with the the literature but what I found is that the information I really needed was in those papers uh so I read a lot a lot of papers I read a lot of papers I have not been taught how or what or where to read or anything I read a lot of papers I read Associated information like trial registration grant information to get
the information as complex and as useful as possible Michelle Dawson thank you very much thank you thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the [Music] show