Michelle Dawson: evaluation

Transcript context

…My mother used to tell me that when I was two, I just taught myself how to read. For a very long time, I never took her seriously. I just thought, “Well, mothers say things like this.” But when I learned about hyperlexia, it occurred to me that she had an actual, literal point. So, if you’re a hyperlexic, and then you grow up, you keep some kind of special reading ability typically? We don’t know nearly enough about how any autistic strength in processing information evolves over time. And again, you have to keep in mind that we start looking at this in children. You don’t know what kind of information is going to be available to them. We are not paying attention to that at all. At the same time, now, in autism, one of the most common aspects of popular interventions is to really ration information, keep it away from autistic people. So you have to consider that in how an ability develops. What kind of access to information do they have in whatever context they’re in, whether it’s in their home, in their school, and so on? But it is not a dead end, that is for sure. It’s been thought of wrongly as a dead end, and that’s been true of autistic abilities in general — that they are thought of as dead ends. But it’s clearly not the case, even in situations which are very far from good for the autistic person as far as availability of information and their overall situation with respect to how resourceful they can be, how they can add to and build on their abilities, and so on. Now often, in popular discourse, you’ll hear autism or Asperger’s associated with a series of personality traits or features of personality psychology — a kind of introversion or people being nerdy in some regard. In your approach, do you see any connection between personality traits and autism at all?…

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