A very moving documentary narrated by a wonderful, fascinating and passionate woman, Professor Uta Frith, a developmental psychologist who has dedicated the rest of her career trying to unravel the mystery of the autistic mind.
"I’ve often imagine myself being a bit of autistic. I’m certainly obsessively focused on my work, I’m very analytical and detached and I certainly have said things that have hurt people without realizing it... I’m generally baffled by the complexity of social relationships"
To all of us who have ever hurt someone without wanting it, don't miss the end of the documentary!
When pioneering developmental psychologist Professor Uta Frith started her training back in the 1960s, she met a group of beautiful, bright-eyed young children who seemed completely detached from the rest of the world.
In this film, Uta shows how people with autism perceive the world and interact with their surroundings, and how, for them, another kind of reality exists. She meets people with autism who have extraordinary talents, and explains why they often fail to understand jokes. She also explores whether many of us could be just a little bit autistic.
These fascinating people show us that another kind of reality exists and it’s full of immense challenges and mysteries but also joy. By understanding their world, we can learn more about our world.
Autism takes on many forms and exists on a wide spectrum from mild to severe. It was and still is characterized by a difficulty these people have to communicating and interacting with others and by their tendency to repeat activities over and over again. For them, it’s challenging to make effort with people, to be engaged with people.
Most of us instinctively know that other people have their separate believes, wishes and intentions of their own and it turns out that it is the key to understanding why other people are doing what they are doing. It’s our extra-social sense. What psychologist have learned over the last 50 years, is that not having that kind of social navigation system is what set autistic apart from the rest of us.
The experiment of the triangles story shows us how interpretation are crucial in social interactions.
The case of Sarah shows us how complex autism can be. She is a very clever woman who consciously studies and imitates the way people respond to each other in social situations and that very faculty enables her to effectively mask her autism when she is in public.
Sarah and Key, also autistic, found each other on the Internet. They get on really well , just the two of them. They are committed to total honesty in their constant reflection and analysis;
They say: "You are my required amount of social contact. I’m your 5 ml tea spoon of social contact a day. I don’t miss people. We are like peas in a pod"
They do show us that autistic people can have meaningful interactions.
You can measure autistic traits just like any other metric with a rule, on one end of the spectrum you have people with no autistic traits at all and on the other end you have people with all autistic traits. On the average, most of the people are scoring right in the middle, very few people have no autistic traits and very few people are diagnosed at the maximum. There is a natural selection to have an average number of autistic traits.
Some people are developing a secondary depression because they have got a higher number of autistic traits while other people are doing just fine irrespective of their score. They are diagnosed when there is a clear clinical need which lead to something like a grey area, it’s all about clinical judgment.
The autistic brain may be wired differently and there may be a genetic origin to this but we don’t know the detail yet.
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