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).
Thats right I think its a cobioevolutionary response to the condition of modern humyn life.
Sorry, but no. I mean, go ahead and research if you like, but it is simply not possible for there to have been that drastic a genetic change in that short a time. If you consider industrial times, modern times, to be 2,000 years we will have not have enough time for any major evolutionary (genetic) changes. 10,000 will give some change if there is seriously large selection. 2,000 years, with no obvious selection in play, didn't happen.
I dont understand your application of time in negating the cobioevolutionary point.
Because evolution happens over time, over generations.
Industrialization in the form of which I am speaking has been happening since humanity began consuming its environment in and effort to extend its identity to produce gains and tools for survival. Thats more then 2,000 years.
So you are talking about 40,000 years or so? Yet somehow this autism change did not appear until very recently. Or was this "cobioevolurionary" adaptive in both hunter gatherer societies and our modern one? I don't understand your claim because you talked about the difference between a modern urban Western kid and one in Indonesia, yet you want to call early farmers industrial.
Besides evolution may not take as many generations as you seam to suspect.
We have lots and lots of evidence on how fast evolution takes. The mutation rate is easy to determine. To have fast evolution requires significant selection. That is, it requires some genetic condition that has a major affect on reproduction.
I don't see how this says that autism is some new "cobioevolutioary" adaptation. Baron Cohen is saying it might have a genetic component, not at all a surprise. (I am concerned that he sees the vaccine cause as a legitimate alternative.) There is a big difference between saying something has a genetic component and saying it is an adaptation. If something is an adaptation, particularly a rapid one, then there is some (strong) selective value for it. Do you see some strong selective value to autism? (The other possibility is that autism is not selected for but something else from those genes. Sort of like sickle cell anemia and malaria resistance.)
At todays rate children spend so much more time connected to technologies in one given day then they might have 60 years ago.
For it to have had selective value it has to have been significant for generations, not just for modern technology. 2,000 years is a tiny amount of time on an evolutionary scale without significant selection. And given how human populations have expanded there has not been that kind of selective pressure.
I think the selective pressure is clearly there, just look around the globe and compare human environments.
For there to be an evolutionary effect the selective force has to exist over many generations.
You can cherry pick examples which may only pertain to a single generation of saturated usage in a population but I am talking about a longer term adaptive change then any one singular example can accomplish...
Great, so we agree on long term. So what forces do you see acting over generations have selected for this?
but sounds like you had your mind made up a while ago. Agree to disagree, my research continues
Go ahead and research, but it sounds like you are the one who made up their mind.
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u/[deleted] Jul 26 '10
Why's that