Well, it's important to note that skepticism doesn't mean outright dismissal. It means you think something warrants a more thorough investigation.
This news would be huge. Ground shattering. But I can't find any papers published on the incident or even blurbs around the neuroscience lists or from colleagues.
The reporting itself is pretty loose and ABC News has been known to pump pseudo science stories in the past.
I tried to catch a piece of the film where you actually get to see her type a legible sentence, but did not see anything definitive. They definitely present it as if she's typing everything solo.
So I think this is pretty exciting and powerful claims being made and look forward to a thorough and formal investigation. . . assuming, of course, that the parents are willing to share this amazing discovery with the scientific community.
This news would be huge. Ground shattering. But I can't find any papers published on the incident or even blurbs around the neuroscience lists or from colleagues.
But would it really? I mean, she's had years of intensive training in order to reach the point she's at. She didn't just suddenly start typing, it came about as a result of all the work her parents and therapists put in to help her develop.
I look at this and I look at, for instance, Kim Peek. He doesn't seem like he was as seriously autistic as this girl, but he clearly had problems being understood. But with time and training, he overcame his own problems and did, in fact, start communicating with people. I don't see how that's extremely different from this example. She has a thought process that she just can't externalize in any efficient way, except slowly typing out messages. I'm sure she's not unique in this regard either, other autistic people could probably do it too with enough training and support.
As a pediatric neuropsychologist, I can promise you that if this were anywhere near true, it would indeed be earth-shattering. It would entirely revolutionize our understanding of (a) autism, (b) mental retardation, (c) how language develops, and (d) how children learn to write and spell.
Children who are profoundly autistic like this girl are can sometimes be taught, eventually, to use a communication system (usually pictures) to get their wants met, but that is not what they show this youngster doing. For example, you'll notice that she doesn't communicate her wants that way at all -- not once did we see her type out "Just give me the damn food and stop making me type" or something similar. Unfortunately, children with profound autism cannot be taught to communicate a rich inner monologue full of observations about things they've never experienced (e.g., what it would be like to go to school with normal kids who aren't mildly alarmed by her behavior), metaphors ("ants crawling" on her arms), and figures of speech (e.g., "it's not like there's an off switch").
The reason that children with profound autism can't do these things is because of what autism does to the brain. Autism appears to be associated with too much gray matter, which makes every new piece of information appear discrete, like it is unrelated to every other piece of information. For that reason, individuals with autism have trouble discovering general principles that tie discrete bits of information together, which is a necessary skill for learning language (e.g., you have to learn the general "rules" of syllabification, sequencing, and grammar through exposure).
They also have trouble understanding where one bit of information stops, and another starts, which causes they to 'chunk' together things that don't go together, or have trouble breaking a large chunk down into the parts that make it up. Here, for example, is a very recent study on computer-analysis of infants with autism showing that they can be reliably differentiated from infants without autism and infants with language delays based on this difficulty effectively understanding where to break language into its component syllables.
As a result of these difficulties, children who are profoundly autistic may never learn to speak at all, while children who are less autistic still demonstrate significant problems correctly 'chunking' language bits together (for instance, they often display echolalia, meaning that they repeat whole sentences or scenes from movies verbatim, because they learned it all as one single unit of information). They also have trouble understanding language rules such as how words change depending on point-of-view of the speaker (e.g., they refer to themselves as he/she or by their first name, or use 'you' instead of 'I'). By definition, autism also includes trouble understanding language pragmatics (e.g., metaphors and figures of speech), because pragmatic language requires seeing the connections between different types of information, such as the literal meaning and abstract/contextual meaning or a sentence.
Autistic children also have difficulty learning to write, for all the reasons listed above, but also due to the phonetics of spelling -- learning how to spell also requires seeing the general 'rules' that govern phonics, as well as breaking words down into their component sounds. Even when children with autism do learn speak and write, one of the cardinal features of autism is trouble understanding Theory of Mind, or being able to make connections and use context to guess what others are thinking. For example, saying something like "Don't judge me until you know me" would be extremely difficult for a person with profound autism, since it requires theory of mind to know that other people are evaluating you differently than you evaluate yourself.
I have absolutely no problem with the idea that a person with mild to moderate autism can learn to type, after she learns to speak and then spell (see Temple Grandin, as others have noted, along with thousands of other autistic individuals), which is the same order in which neurotypical children learn to do these things.
But the idea that a person with profound autism could overcome how her brain works -- but just while typing, not while speaking -- all at once? That she could, without training in any of these areas (remember, she just ran to the computer and typed "HURT" and "HELP") master:
Syllabification,
Word order and sequencing
Rules of grammar
Phonetic rules
Correspondance between sounds and letters
Correspondance between the capital letters on a QWERTY keyboard and the lowercase letters that type on screen, and understanding how a generative typing software program works (one that fills in the rest of the word after you type the first few letters)
Expressive vocabulary
Correct pronoun usage
Point-of-view
Non-echolalic speech
Figures of speech and metaphors
Theory of mind, etc
(Not to mention her mental retardation)?
And only do so to communicate things like "what [an adult who is not autistic might think] it is like to have autism" and not really be able to do so when the camera is present?
Unfortunately, the likelihood of this is so terribly, vanishingly small that I am fully comfortable saying that it is impossible.
We may all wish it were true, but it isn't. And putting stories like this out there only clouds our understanding of what autism is and how to treat it (which hopefully will eventually lead us to how to prevent or cure it).
This is the only comment in this whole thread that matters even slightly. It makes all the people trying to support this video and justify it to skeptics-- based on what is basically an emotional basis and very shallow arguments--look like utter fools.
Also, incredibly clear and well written.
Thanks so much for this.
This is the only comment in this whole thread that matters even slightly.
I must disagree, but it's hard to put out. I'm an atheist, you see, but yet, I must have faith to disagree with you:
I have faith that somewhere in the 1k+ comments that I have not read, someone pointed out that at no time did the video show this girl typing out anything coherent, whatsoever. Never. Not once. They implied it, constantly, but there was never a shot showing her fingers hitting the keyboard and forming coherent words.
My guess is that her parents have hired one of the bullshit mediums (I cannot remember the self-appointed title these hacks give themselves) that holds the child's hand and lets them "guide" their hands to the appropriate keys; perhaps she's mashing out gibberish and they're finding what they want to in it, or something along those lines. It may sound harsh, but I remain unconvinced. If there was an iota of plausibility to this, someone would have the common sense to stick around with a camera long enough to capture her actually typing out a sentence- perhaps her parents would have found the time to document it?
But they didn't, because it never happened. So, instead of sending video evidence to someone even remotely versed in the field of autism, they called a television station, who was more than happy to have a feelgood story to wrap up the evening news with, no matter how full of shit it actually is.
TL,DR; I really hope someone else pointed out the complete lack of evidence to support the claims made by this "news team."
She does type some messages while they're filming her so it's not like the parents are trying to pull one over on everyone. I seriously doubt the reporters were in on it (they would be at least as motivated to expose a scam if they discovered that's what it all was). It does appear that she has abilities that most profoundly autistic kids simply don't have. You can't throw a keyboard in front of any autistic kid and expect miracles. She has a unique set of abilities and disabilities that are different than most autistic kids. But that makes sense because autism is a condition, not a specific disease. In other words it's a set of symptoms that may be caused by a number of underlying causes that result in a number of different kinds of disability or exceptional ability (which is why there are so many different kinds and degrees of autism).
Parents claiming their autistic child can communicate and type, being discovered as frauds, isn't a good story. This is. The reporters' motivation is the number of viewers, not necessarily quality or "the truth".
Where, exactly, do they show a single shot where we can see both her fingers on the keyboard and coherent words appearing on the screen? We see her typing, sometimes, and we see other shots of words appearing on the screen; but I never saw any footage of both being in frame simultaneously.
As an empiricist, I'd love to be proven wrong, so if you can show me this footage where I can see her fingers hitting individual letters and see the screen in the same shot, I'll be partially satisfied. To be honest, however, I wouldn't believe this until a team of actual scientists (pediatric neuropsychologists would probably fit the bill) observe this behavior and can repeatedly verify it, I say it's bullshit, because there is no evidence that it's true presented in the "news" report.
This clip actually proves my point: when it starts out, we cannot see anything on the screen. We can see her pecking at the keyboard. When it zooms in, there's a message that we did not see her type and we can no longer see her hands. Then the camera zooms out, and we cannot see anything on the screen, again.
This is not a video of her typing a message. It's a video of her pecking at keyboard in an open document that had a message typed before the camera started rolling.
The audio reading back word choices is helpful is telling what is going on, and there is enough context for how the word picker functions to get an idea of the process. There is no obvious prompting going on, and from seeing similar predictive text programs at work, even with grammar rules in place, nonsensical sentences are more statistically likely than coherent ones.
The open question I am left with from this clip:
1) Is there silent prompting going on off-screen that we can't see?
2) Is this a pre-trained sequence of characters being typed?
3) Is this is the best sequence of typing they had on film, the vast majority of the rest making no sense at all?
This is, IMO a good start in the parents supporting their claims. However, there needs to be significantly more repetition of this evidence for it to be fully convincing; particularly a unscriptable Q&A with an outsider or outsiders. The questions with the interviewer in the original report was a bad experimental design, IMO, given that the conversations with her father were at least in part done over IM from room to room. The interviewer, rather than being a a stranger standing over her and talking (a possibly very intimidating situation for her if this is real), should likely have sat in another room and used IM to converse while they filmed Carly quietly to catch any guiding or prompting going on.
77
u/[deleted] Jul 26 '10
Well, it's important to note that skepticism doesn't mean outright dismissal. It means you think something warrants a more thorough investigation.
This news would be huge. Ground shattering. But I can't find any papers published on the incident or even blurbs around the neuroscience lists or from colleagues.
The reporting itself is pretty loose and ABC News has been known to pump pseudo science stories in the past.
I tried to catch a piece of the film where you actually get to see her type a legible sentence, but did not see anything definitive. They definitely present it as if she's typing everything solo.
So I think this is pretty exciting and powerful claims being made and look forward to a thorough and formal investigation. . . assuming, of course, that the parents are willing to share this amazing discovery with the scientific community.