#uta frith

[kozlarz]

uta frith pmo so bad with her - as professional and clinical as it was - anti-self advocacy rant. she clearly just wants professionals to have control over their autistic patients and she hates how so many autistic people want and have autonomy, and have assembled together to support their higher support needs folk. "Do we ask whether psychopathic girls have been overlooked?" - she clearly doesn't know and doesn't care. she didn't even check because that's not her point of interest, her only point of interest is control over autistics. she undermines whether sensory gear actually helps us because she doesn't care about autistic people's autonomy. because if we're to get any help, it's only on her and the other professionals terms, and we don't get to question or object them. she barely sees autistic people as people, which is hilariously ironic considering the ridiculously flawed "theory of mind" test she helped develop.

just a whole shitshow altogether. and it's all for what? to save your schools and nhs some money? dame, get a grip.

[chriswhodrawsstuff]

What an Uta fool!

I feel annoyed that I’m having to write this as I am quite ill right now and I have too much on my plate already. If this seems a bit rambling, it’s because I won’t be going over it numerous times. Also, there are people going into this in far more depth than I shall. 84 year old academic and emeritus (read long retired) professor Uta Frith has just been interviewed for a publication that I’m…

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[ramyeonpng]

This is so disappointing

Uta Frith: why I no longer think autism is a spectrum

The autism spectrum has widened to the point of collapse, affecting how teachers should support autistic pupils in the classroom, researcher

[pneumaticpresence]

For people who can read, there are no pure representations of the sounds of words in the brain because they’ve been contaminated by spelling. Language is a virus, as the musician-artist Laurie Anderson said, but orthography is the virus that infiltrates language, as observed by the noted British cognitive neuroscientist Uta Frith: “Learning an alphabetic code is like acquiring a virus [that] infects all speech processing, as now whole word sounds are automatically broken up into sound constituents. Language is never the same again.”

Mark Seidenberg, Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can’t, and What Can Be Done About It (2017)

[maaarine]

Uta Frith:

“Because of the loosening of the diagnostic categories, the categories become so incredibly wide that there are people in this [autism] spectrum who probably shouldn’t be there.

That’s a rather controversial thing to say.

How can you deny someone a diagnosis when they’ve been perhaps looking for an answer to their problems for all the lives?

I think it’s all to do with the dearth of other categories.

We don’t know anything about personality variants that are perfectly normal and part of our human nature.

We can have people who we’d say are “a bit on the spectrum”, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with them. 

For me it’s still a difficult thing to include them in the autism spectrum, because they don’t actually belong there — I look at it from a clinical point of view.

That’s a problem we’re having at the moment. What should we do about this enormous neurodiversity?

Is it really the case that everything shades into everything else? Is it all the same thing, and neurotypical is under the same umbrella, just slightly less?

Or do we have a need to see some subgroups and categories? I suppose I’m tending towards that, but it’s an ongoing discussion. (…)

We always knew there were people who might be called ‘little professors’, or being somewhat distracted, not being very sociable.

They’d be often admired and not considered anything other than rather eccentric.

Many families have such a member amongst their relations. ‘My uncle never married, he was very bookish.’

I think most of these cases have nothing to do with autism other than a kind of reminiscence of the features.

So they have these features, but for different reasons.”

Source: Research Comms: Professor Uta Frith

[maaarine]

MBTI & Ideas Asperger

Egocentric vs allocentric

“When we adopt an egocentric stance we understand the other person relative to ourselves, which allows us to locate him in our social world and to interact with him.

For example, Piaget pointed out that young children can easily understand the relationship between themselves and their mother but it is more difficult for them to understand that their mother is also their father’s wife.

This understanding requires an allocentric stance, which represents the other independently of one’s own current relation with her.”

“do not understand how you are related to the others”

“The reverse question can also be asked: what would happen if we had only an allocentric representation of others and ourselves?

If you do not understand how you are related to the others, if you do not know your social location relative to them in an immediate way, you may suffer from poor social interactions.

You may lack an ‘‘immediate, pre-reflective, or implicit understanding of the meaning of social interaction’’ (Zahavi & Parnas, 2003).

You may try to compensate for your lack of egocentric representations of others by using your allocentric social knowledge.

Yet, this knowledge will not have been acquired on the basis of normal social experience and may result in a set of abstract rules.

The allocentric stance is detached from interactions with people, while the egocentric stance is immersed in social interactions and directly connected to them.”

‘‘like an anthropologist on Mars”

“AS [Asperger Syndrome] people are famed for being able to adopt an unbiased and highly abstract stance towards the social world, like ‘‘an anthropologist on Mars’’ (Sacks, 1995).

They thrive on the idea of rules. This is shown whenever AS individuals talk about generalities of how people with AS behave, and about rules that other people might follow in their social interactions that they feel they have worked out by logical analysis. (...)

They have high-level social knowledge and are able to see social structures and relationships in a detached way that can give rise to the impression that they are cold and distanced.

However, their personal logic of how the social world should work may be very formal and far from reality.”

Source: Frith, Uta, and Frederique De Vignemont. "Egocentrism, allocentrism, and Asperger syndrome." Consciousness and cognition 14.4 (2005): 719-738.

See also: James Damore

See also: Jordan Peterson

[maaarine]

Serious Science: Uta Frith: Talents in Autism

“[Detail focus] is very different in different individuals, and you don’t find it in all autistic people, so it’s a particular cognitive style, a particular cognitive phenotype which differs between individuals.

There is a lot of research going on in this area. It has been a very fruitful topic in order to find out how in fact we extract meaning in general from the world, meaning in a sort of overall sense.”

[maaarine]

Serious Science: Uta Frith: Theory of Mind

“Theory of mind is a pervasive human ability that we didn’t even suspect existed until we studied autism. (...)

That particular ability is what we hypothesize is missing in autism and that is why they have this very interesting and typical inability to engage with other people in reciprocal fashion."