Michelle Dawson: belief

Transcript context

…With this optionality, does that mean that, on average, autistics are somehow more different from each other than nonautistics are? You see this fairly striking in the literature. You can see this in the whole predictive processing literature, where there’s one optimal way to process everything, which is amazing. This is how . . . supposing, not only within one person but across the entire population, there’s the premise that there is this optimal predictive inference, that there is one optimal way to process everything. So if you have a hierarchy of information processing that is similar across typical people — and I do believe you have that. There is some variation, but the hierarchy works in about the same way, so you would get much more similarity [in non-autistics]. It doesn’t mean that everyone’s similar. They’re brought up in different places, they have different experiences, they have different genetics, they have different on and on. But they have that greater similarity in what they do with information that will make them more similar in what they do with information and that will give them much more in common. Autistics do not have that, which makes them not just different from typical people, but quite different from each other. So this is, I think, being slightly recognized now, that autistic people may be more idiosyncratic. This is where it has popped into the literature. There’s a fairly new literature with respect to autism and rare copy variants and de novo copy variants in the genetics of autism. What do you think we’re learning from these articles?…

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