Uta Frith, Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Development, University College London
Fifty years ago the word ‘autistic’ was not in our vocabulary and only few people knew anything about the condition. Now autism has become part of our everyday language and there seems to be an increase in cases. But is there a real increase?
Autism is now an umbrella term for a very heterogeneous clinical picture including very mild as well as very severe cases. There is however a common denominator and it comes down to two features: difficulties in social communication and narrow interests.
In her lecture Uta Frith argues that the type of social communication difficulty in autism is not simply a personality factor. Rather it is due to the lack of a newly discovered social sense, known as ‘mentalising’, our GPS in the social world. The detail focussed tendencies seem to have a different origin, and they can be more or less pronounced in everybody. Thus, there may well be many different forms of autism, and in some sense we can all be a ‘little bit autistic’.
