YouSaid · the spoken record

Michelle Dawson

lines on the record: 61
first: 2018-08-01
most recent: 2018-08-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Performs badly on an IQ test and so on. Just something, there is something bad going on here, and it's sort of the equation that the more atypical a person is, the worse they must be. They must not be intelligent. There must be something extra wrong more wrong about their behavior, and so on. Now, this is where I'm very familiar with the whole history of this, and it's obviously problematic. I mean, we don't. I hope we don't. look at a blind person who is a successful lawyer and assume that he's only very mildly blind or not, you know, barely blind at all. And then look at a blind person who has a very bad outcome and assume that they must be very severely blind. We do make those kinds of judgments in autism as saying the more atypical the person is, the worse they must be in some sense. Now that kind of bias has not only harmed”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would be careful about the sort of people in general. I would say that maybe it does seem to be something that if you take sort of the median person that you do this sort of as societies sort of collectively not necessarily as individuals, it seems to be something that people are very bad at is to detect abilities and worth in highly atypical individuals. And you for sure, I mean, you see this very much in autism with the whole notion of severity. And there is no workable definition of autism severity. People use that word all the time. They use it to mean that somebody's had a bad outcome or that someone has badly behaved or that somebody”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is a small literature that shows some connection, I think it's very weak, and I say no. I don't think autism is about personality. Autism is sort of orthogonal to personality. It's not. The two are not related. Whatever relation there is does not arise from some third factor, let's say. If there is one. And again, the evidence is, I think, very weak connecting autism to personality. So just say that maybe if there's something, let's say that personality in autistics might be more high variants. That would be my totally wild guess. But I don't think autism itself is about personality.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 when 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. And 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. Do they have what kind of access to information? Do they have in whatever context they're in, whether it's in their home, in their school? 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.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Started age two. If they're in a book rich, text rich environment and have free access to this, they will figure out how language is structured. And that happens even with very difficult orthographies like English. So English orthography is so difficult that typical children take an extra year or so to learn it because it's wacky. I mean, it's not in a lot of ways. It doesn't make sense. The rules don't make sense. But autistic children, even starting with these very young children, can work this out. They figure out the irregularities. They figure out the irregularities with using this sort of array of information from words to letters to words to phrases to sentences to paragraphs to entire text and arrays and so on. And they all figure it out. And typical children don't really do this. Spontaneously”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, the sort of almost classic example is hyperlexia, which you see in starting with very early in development. So you see this in very young autistic children who have a spontaneous interest in printed materials. It can be just text, but the information can include other kinds of printed materials, the numbers, combinations of letters and numbers, and they use this information across different scales. So from individual letters like the alphabet, given the opportunity, they will order individual letters into the order the alphabet, for instance, but they don't just use single letters, they will also use complex arrays of text like newspapers. So these are very young children.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The problem here is that there's a really long list of things that autistic people can do well given the opportunity. Give us, say,”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They can, so that depends on what is available in the environment and not all autistics are well situated when it comes to access to information that they can process well. So autistics are different in the kinds, quantities, and arrangements of information they process well. So just having a huge quantity of information is not necessarily all that an autistic person needs. The atypicality is more complex than that, but yes, an autistic person can process more information across levels and scales without losing it or without a lot of the information sort of being edited in sort of cognitive editing, various ways that information is made manageable in a typical brain. Autistic people don't need to do that to get the information in A way that it can be processed and useful that they can learn from it and use it.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The best understanding is seeing autism as atypical brain functioning resulting in atypical processing of all information, so that's information across domains, social, non-social, across modalities, visual, auditory, whatever its source, so whether it's information from your memory, information coming from the outside world, that that is atypical. So that is very domain general atypicality. What autistic brains do with information is atypical. How it's atypical, in my view, involves what I've called cognitive versatility and less mandatory hierarchies in how the brain works such that, for example, an autistic brain will consider more possibilities will non-strategically combine information across levels and scales without losing large parts of it, and so on. And that applies to all information.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that the DSM could be a very bad big deal to people who, for instance, are denied basic human rights or standards in science for people who are not situated like that, and that would be most people, the shortcomings of the DSM-5 will be offset by people in research and practice who have good standards, who understand that their job is to benefit people more than they harm them, who know how to read the scientific literature, and so on. So it depends who you are and how you're situated. And also you have to consider the larger context of what people see as influential or not, which might be very arbitrary at any moment.”
2018-08-01 · Conversations with Tyler · Michelle Dawson on Autism and Atypicality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source