- 6 months ago
Professor Matt Lerner, PhD joins WIRED to answer the internet's burning questions about neurodiversity. What are some signs of autism? What did people with autism do in the past? What does reading with dyslexia feel like? What does it mean to be "on the spectrum?" Can I diagnose myself with ADHD with TikTok videos? Answers to these questions and many more await on Neurodivergent Support.
Director: Justin Wolfson
Director of Photography: Kevin Dynia
Editor: Alex Mechanik
Expert: Matt Lerner
Line Producer: Jamie Rasmussen
Associate Producer: Paul Gulyas; Brandon White
Production Manager: Peter Brunette
Production Coordinator: Rhyan Lark
Casting Producer: Nick Sawyer
Camera Operator: Lauren Pruitt
Sound Mixer: Rebecca O'Neill
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Supervising Editor: Erica DeLeo
Additional Editor: Samantha DiVito
Assistant Editor: Andy Morell
Director: Justin Wolfson
Director of Photography: Kevin Dynia
Editor: Alex Mechanik
Expert: Matt Lerner
Line Producer: Jamie Rasmussen
Associate Producer: Paul Gulyas; Brandon White
Production Manager: Peter Brunette
Production Coordinator: Rhyan Lark
Casting Producer: Nick Sawyer
Camera Operator: Lauren Pruitt
Sound Mixer: Rebecca O'Neill
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Supervising Editor: Erica DeLeo
Additional Editor: Samantha DiVito
Assistant Editor: Andy Morell
Category
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TechTranscript
00:00Hi, I'm Matt Lerner. I'm an associate professor and program area leader at the A.J. Drexel Autism
00:04Institute. I'm here today to answer your questions from the internet. This is Neurodivergent Support.
00:13Alaafia Oluwu asks, what exactly does it mean to be neurodivergent? Great question, Alaafia.
00:20Neurodivergent is not a diagnosis. It doesn't exist in the DSM, Diagnostic Statistical Manual.
00:25It is a description that has sort of emerged from the community. It's really meant to describe
00:31the whole set of differences of ways of either perceiving the world, interacting in the world,
00:38ways of being in the world, and really ways brains working, right? That's the neuro part,
00:43that is kind of different from the norm in a way that might make it more difficult to kind of click
00:51in and feel connected and kind of at pace with the rest of the social world. Nemgem asks,
00:59do you see the words physically jumping around the page and moving or just in the wrong location?
01:04So this is the question about dyslexia. I'd like to give you an illustration of kind of what that
01:08looks like. Up here, you probably see the words the way that you typically see them on a page.
01:15They're standing still. They're in the place that you expect them to be. They stay there,
01:19and you kind of read them in order. Down here, you see the way that many, not all,
01:24but many dyslexic people view these words. So you can see they might be a little bit jumbled around.
01:29Maybe the order is flipped or switched, but they're kind of not staying put and doing the
01:34things in the order that you need to be able to read them fluently and fluidly. And so folks with
01:40dyslexia are often doing this extra cognitive effort of trying to figure out not just what does this say,
01:45but when I look at it, what do I think it's sort of meant to say? And how do I get the letters to
01:52look the way they're supposed to look so that it does? The Aspie World asks,
01:57autism social masking, what is it and why do we do it? There's this term called masking or
02:04camouflaging. Sometimes it's called pan or passing as non-autistic. Essentially, these are all different
02:10terms for when autistic people are working, either working hard to present as not autistic or to kind
02:17of minimize their autism features, or when autistic people are doing that, whether or not they're doing
02:24it intentionally, maybe because that's just how they've learned or where they've learned. What it is
02:29is still, there's a lot of research into it, but it's generally this idea of sort of effortfully
02:34trying to impede doing things that autistic people do to fit in. So many autistic people like to use,
02:44you know, fidgets and things like this, right? And, you know, maybe they'll not have a fidget nearby.
02:50Or many autistic people might have a particular topic or thing that they like to talk about socially
02:56or like to talk about their interest. Maybe they won't do that in certain contexts. Many autistic people,
03:03for instance, say that eye contact, the thing I'm doing with you right now into this camera is
03:08uncomfortable or is hard to do. But many autistic people who are masking or camouflaging might force
03:14themselves to do that, even if it's uncomfortable. All of those are efforts to try to sort of fit into
03:20this neurotypical world. Some emerging research suggests that that is really, that can be taxing,
03:25that it's sort of using up a lot of cognitive resources, brain resources, effort, emotional resources
03:31to try to do that to fit in. But one thing we hear a lot from the autism community is that over time
03:37it can, it can be taxing. There's some evidence, some emerging evidence that it can be related to
03:42things like anxiety and depression, because if you're working that hard, you're sort of spending
03:47yourself out. So finding ways to help autistic people not have to mask quite so much so that they
03:53can be their authentic selves seems like an important goal.
03:57Tesla Cox asks, how do I tell my real doctor that I've been diagnosed neurodivergent with ADHD from
04:05TikTok doctors? Okay, let's break this one down a little bit. You can't be diagnosed neurodivergent.
04:10Like we said, it's not a formal diagnosis. Number two, I'm not sure what a TikTok doctor is per se.
04:18The important thing here, though, that Tesla Cox is getting at is, you know, there is a wealth of
04:25information now, deluge of information online about neurodivergence, about different ways of being,
04:32people sharing their own experiences, sometimes people who are clinicians providing their own
04:37insights online on the internet. And it's great to have access to the end of that information.
04:41The key thing to understand, though, is that that information is not always accurate in reference to
04:47our actual diagnostic categories that you could get from a doctor and get covered by your insurance or
04:51anything. In fact, some studies have suggested studies of both presentations of autism on TikTok,
04:59presentations of ADHD on TikTok have shown that well over 50% of the features said to be associated
05:05with ADHD or autism in TikTok aren't part of the diagnostic category. So what does this mean?
05:12What do you do? Number one, probably wouldn't go to your real doctor and say, TikTok told me I have
05:18this. But what you might do is say, gosh, I was, you know, watching these videos on TikTok and it kind
05:23of struck a chord with me and it made me want to know more. And I think that's what this stuff can
05:28be good for. It can help you to open the door to say, gosh, if there are things that have been harder
05:33for me than I thought, or things that were hard for me, but it never occurred to me that it wasn't
05:38hard for everybody. What do I do with that? That's a really good thing to take to a doctor to get
05:45their feedback. Sirius Toe 9303 asks, is love on the spectrum a good representation of autism and are
05:51there better ones? That's a great question. Love on the spectrum is one of a small but growing number
05:56of shows that has actually autistic people being portrayed. Some aspects of the portrayal and those
06:02relationships are kind of made for TV, like a lot of reality TV. But I think what's really valuable
06:09about it is that it's taking seriously the fact that the best way to know autistic people or any
06:16neurodivergent person is to actually get to know them and see them and see how that community presents
06:22itself. So if the question is, are there better ones? I think the best representations are by autistic
06:28people representing themselves in their own experiences, either autistic actors acting or autistic
06:35people living and sharing their own experience, so that we are not caricaturing, but truly trying to
06:42appreciate all of the different ways that autistic and other neurodivergent people live and experience
06:47their world. Kobaney-Wittet1 asks, what are signs of autism? The features of autism fit into two general
06:55categories, social communication and restricted and repetitive behaviors and kind of sensory stuff.
06:59So social and communication might be kind of really straightforward difficulties with
07:05communication, language development, kind of speaking and communicating in kind of the ways that are
07:12expected for a person's development, as well as more complex and subtle social challenges like
07:16coordinating and social interaction, friendship making and connection, eye contact, nonverbal cues,
07:23picking up social nuance, all features like that. That's the social communication side. In the other
07:27side, the kind of restrictive repetitive behavior side, you might have somebody who has like a really
07:31restricted interest or focus. It could be like a topic that they're really interested in or it could
07:35be, you know, a child who runs a car back and forth over and over again on the table or on their hand. You
07:40also might have repetition of certain words or phrases over and over again. There's this concept called
07:48echolalia where somebody kind of hears something and then kind of keeps echoing it back over and over
07:53and over. And this also kind of loads on with the sensory features of autism. Some folks on the
07:59spectrum, again, are going to be very sensitive to touch or smell or taste or sounds or lights and that
08:07those kind of sensitivities can make it very difficult to be in those environments. People might cover their
08:12ears and need earplugs to be able to manage certain settings. Lights like the ones in the room that I'm in
08:18right now might feel very bright and overwhelming. They also might engage in something called stimming,
08:22which is a way in which, you know, folks on the spectrum might use something like this and kind
08:26of, you know, over and over again, kind of move it around as a way to kind of feel good. But it
08:31really, it's a way to kind of regulate and manage that sensory experience. Folks on the spectrum have
08:35lots of different kinds of stims. They might hum auditory stims. They might have visual stims,
08:41like looking at their hands and finger flicking out of the corner of their eye. And some folks have
08:44larger stims like rocking or even hand flapping or pacing back and forth. Zoe Blade asks,
08:50what is and isn't stimming? So stimming is a term in the autism world, autism field, sort of a colloquial
08:58term for self-stimulatory behavior. You know, kind of traditional sort of ideas of stimming are,
09:05it might be things like rocking, flapping. There's this finger flicking thing that many autistic kids do,
09:12but it might also involve taking a toy and kind of, you know, playing with it like this over and over
09:19again. And some people do auditory stimming, like humming or maybe saying a word over and over again.
09:24So again, there can be visual, there can be tactile, there can be auditory. The best evidence about
09:30stimming is that it is a tool that autistic people are using to kind of regulate their sensory system,
09:39which can often get a little bit overwhelmed and kind of putting that energy somewhere.
09:45Jay Cartier three asks, is autism really on the rise? Are we just better at identifying it these
09:51days? When we think about the rise in autism, we think about four sets of factors that could be
09:57happening. Number one, change in diagnostic criteria. So when you look at the DSM or to diagnostic Bible,
10:07you know, back in the 1980s or even earlier, there were fewer ways to have autism and they generally
10:13required much more significant challenges to be on board. You know, somebody who is developing language
10:20at a sort of usual rate and is integrated into school would have a lot of trouble even getting
10:27an autism diagnosis. Those folks were there, but they weren't getting autism diagnoses back in the
10:3380s, 70s, earlier. It really wasn't until the DSM-IV in the mid-90s that we even had these sort of
10:40broader criteria, broader ways of having an autism diagnosis. And so that change alone has dramatically
10:47expanded the ways to even be diagnosed as autistic. So that's contributed a huge amount to the rise.
10:54The second is broader awareness. And these things go hand in hand. And so, yeah, somebody who's going to
11:01their, you know, doctor somewhere in the middle of like a rural county in the middle of the country,
11:06that doctor, you know, 20, 30 years ago may have never seen an autistic person and may have never
11:11even thought to look for autism. But now we know more about autism. There are more representations in
11:17the media. There's much broader awareness. And once you, once folks start to see somebody who's autistic
11:24in their practice or in their world, they go, oh, yeah, I can kind of notice that. The third thing has to do
11:29with changes in stigma and how autism is viewed. So because of the first two things, all of a sudden,
11:36you know, the ideas it used to be that, you know, getting diagnosed with autism was quite scary for
11:41families. For some, it might still be, but much more commonly, the idea was, what is that? And what's
11:46going to happen to my child? The last thing, the fourth, is a true rise in autism, even after correcting
11:54for population growth and understanding that the populations grow over time. The best we can tell
11:59from really good epidemiological research over many, many years, looking at millions of people,
12:04is that the vast majority of the rise in autism is attributed to the first three things. That is most
12:11of why autism is on the rise. Quinn the Cats asks, this is about to sound like the dumbest question ever,
12:17but what exactly is ADHD? It's not a dumb question, Quinn the Cats. There are kind of three types of ADHD
12:24and they kind of each answer the question. One is ADHD inattentive type. So meaning folks with ADHD
12:31inattentive type struggle to pay attention, maintain attention. They might seem to sort of, you know,
12:38wander off or have trouble kind of staying engaged in a conversation or on a topic and might struggle
12:45academically as a result of this. Then there's what's called ADHD hyperactive type. And these
12:51are kids who kind of move all around the place, have trouble controlling their bodies, have trouble
12:57sitting still. There's a item on kind of the ADHD questionnaire that says acts as if driven by a
13:02motor. And I feel like this is the one when I talk to parents often, they're like, yeah, that one,
13:06he acts like he's driven by a motor and the motor doesn't stop. And then there is ADHD C, which is the
13:13most common, which is the combined type, which is basically the inattentive stuff and the hyperactive
13:18stuff all mushed together. A Redditor asks, what did people with autism do in the past? So the answer
13:24is that people with autism in the past did the same things other people did. They existed out in the
13:31world. There's a book called Autism in History that profiles a lord, kind of sub-lord from the
13:39countryside. It makes the case that this particular person was autistic. The idea is that he happened
13:45to be in an environment where his quirky way of being was notable. He showed up, a lot of the stuff
13:52comes from court documents, but he had kind of all of these supports and resources and things around
13:57him. And he kind of went about his life in his kind of very unique and particular way. So in that book, the
14:02court documents describe him as saying odd sorts of movements. They would say he would sort of ramble on in
14:07ways that they considered to be, you know, incoherent, but they said not unintelligible, that, you know,
14:13they sort of were streams of meaningful words and sentences, but that they didn't really have a way
14:17to contextualize what he was saying and meaning. Sort of in the same way that somebody on the spectrum
14:22might, you know, have a real strong, what we call perseverative interest, like a fixation, just sort of
14:27talk about that without necessarily checking that the other person is following along with what
14:30they're saying. DescriptionMean9351 asks, people keep saying that I can't have Tourette's because I
14:37developed it at two. People say you have to be born with it. You can develop tics later on. And there
14:43are lots of different reasons and ways that tics can kind of onset later. But yes, a person can start
14:49to develop tics at two or even, or even later than that. I screwed up real bad asks, my tics feel half
14:56voluntary? Question mark. So this is about Tourette's and other tic conditions. So tics are kind of an
15:02interesting phenomenon. The one way that people think about tics is there's this sort of like
15:07surge of a feeling, a need to do a thing. And that that surge is like a wave that's cresting over a
15:14person and can't, and kind of can't be stopped. The kind of historical way of thinking about it that
15:19psychologists sometimes say is that it's easier to stop a tic once it starts than to stop a tic from
15:25starting. So half voluntary. The idea is, is that the sort of surge of the wave that of kind of
15:33compulsion that comes from it, the tic is, might be able to be kind of diverted, right? Maybe, maybe
15:38the idea is that, you know, if a person can feel it coming on, they might be able to say, all right,
15:42I'm going to, you know, do this motion, but not that, or I'm going to do my best to kind of hold
15:47it back. So there's almost like this, it's like you can, you can put a canal along the wave that you can
15:52kind of pick something about it, even if you can't pick it. Paper Joshi asks, I never understood how
15:57hyperfocus is a symptom of ADHD. It's a really good question. So ADHD broadly has to do with, you know,
16:04sort of difficulties, sustaining attention, kind of hyperactivity, maybe working memory problems. So
16:11how is it the case that folks with ADHD can hyperfocus if their problem is focus? Well, one way to think
16:22there's difficulty with the sort of lever that regulates your focus. Often what we have to do
16:29throughout our day is take our focus and kind of pivot it somewhere else and say, I'm focusing over
16:34here. I'm focusing over here. I have to give you my attention now, and I have to keep doing it for as
16:39long as you need me to pay attention to you. That is what our brains are doing. Folks with ADHD might
16:45struggle to kind of do that shifting at the rate and the way that people want. So they might kind
16:51of get stuck in like, I can't really hold my focus here. So I'm going to kind of keep bouncing
16:55around. But they also, when they do find something that is motivating, that is engaging, that they're
17:01interested in, it's sort of like then they're locked into that and can't quite yank that lever off
17:06of that topic. A Redditor asks, does reading improve with practice for dyslexics? The thing for
17:13dyslexic people is that the strategies that they need to use to get the words to behave the way
17:20that they need them to be able to read are learnable, are teachable. They can take effort, but then that
17:25effort, like a muscle, can get flexed and built over time. And so in a similar way as that, right,
17:30folks, if they are practicing using those skills and strategies effectively, things can get a little
17:37bit easier. But fundamentally, they're still managing kind of a different way of perceiving
17:43that information to make it work for them. Qgirl50 asks, is autism genetic? Have they identified a gene?
17:50A lot of very smart autism researchers over the last 20 years have done the kind of work that you do
17:55in a petri dish with a DNA sequence. They've done the kind of work where you look at really gigantic
18:00populations of people and look at kind of genetic markers. And what they found is actually more and
18:05more and more specific genes, areas on the human genome that seem to be related to autism that have,
18:12again, this idea of sort of like an autism load to them. And there's certain ones where they call
18:17them loci, sort of areas on the gene of the DNA strand that if there's a little bit of a difference,
18:25maybe you can might see a little bit of autism features. Sometimes if there's a lot of a
18:30difference, you might see more features. So altogether, what this suggests to us is a lot,
18:35actually well over 50, some estimate at least 70% or more of variation amount of autism that's
18:43sort of out there in the community, in the world is attributable to genetic factors.
18:48Titanic Man asks, is there a reason why some people with Tourette's have swear words specifically
18:52as their tick? Of all the words that could be their tick, why is it almost always profanity?
18:57So this is partially a myth and misunderstanding and partially not. So it turns out a lot of ticks
19:05are not profanity. Many folks with Tourette's have much subtler presentations. You know, they might be
19:12really small ticks, little motor tick, you know, a slight smirk or a twitch of the eye or, you know,
19:16kind of a little head tick that can happen. And those are actually much, much more common.
19:22They're not as attention grabbing. And so people don't necessarily notice them and
19:26call attention to them quite as much. And so, yeah, it's not the case that most people with
19:32Tourette's, for instance, have swear words as their ticks. It is the case, though, that there are a
19:37subset of folks where their ticks are profanity. It's a little bit complicated as to why. And there's
19:43a lot of interesting research kind of trying to understand this question. The best that I
19:47understand is that to some extent, ticks do have to do with this kind of motivation and
19:52self-regulatory system, right? There's this sort of urge, sort of surge, like you said before,
19:58and then this kind of, you know, pullback. And the thing is, there are lots of things that we try to
20:03self-regulate about during the day, right? We try not to have road rage. We try not to steal our
20:11siblings' candy when it's sitting next to them. And we try not to swear. There's, you know, some
20:17evidence that suggests that, you know, that process might be getting wrapped up for those folks, that
20:22that's, that there's this sort of self-regulatory thing. I'm not going to do it. And the brain is
20:27kind of like, all right, I'm going to push through the thing I'm really not, don't want to do right
20:31now. I'm not meant to do right now. And it becomes that thing. And then it gets stuck. That's
20:35one of the, I think, more intriguing ideas as to why, when it's profanity, why it's that.
20:43Estella Like Salt says, genuine question. If ADHD is viewed as a problem to where medication is taken
20:51for it, why is it not the same with autism? This is a genuine curiosity. I'm not saying that either
20:58should be medicated. Please don't take this as I'm saying autism should be medicated. Appreciate
21:02the sensitivity, Estella. The answer actually is that has less to do with the idea that the
21:08medical field thinks that one should and the other shouldn't. It actually has to do with the
21:11available medications that exist. ADHD since the 80s has stimulant medications and then now other
21:18types of medications that help to manage attention and focus and self-regulation. For autism, the sort
21:26of quest for medication, you know, assuming that you're sort of believe in medication as being
21:33important, which many do, has been a lot more fraught. As I've described, autism has these sort
21:38of two core areas, right? Social communication, restrictive repetitive behavior. And we've really
21:44haven't found many things that can really, on their own, help with the social communication
21:50piece. Social stuff is a lot more complicated than regulating attention. Same thing for restricted
21:56repetitive behaviors. There's sort of some evidence of some things that can help a little bit if folks
22:01are like really, really struggling a lot with those things. But for the most part, that's a lot more
22:07difficult too. There are a couple of medications that are FDA approved to address things like
22:14significant aggression in folks on the spectrum. But that's really only for a subset of people who are
22:20experiencing those challenges. And importantly, you might notice that's not a core part of autism.
22:25A Reddit user asks, is there a way to treat ADHD without meds? Great question. So yes, there are
22:30behavioral and psychological treatments for ADHD and within, you know, kids and adults. In childhood,
22:38there are a number of kind of what are called like behavioral parent training or, you know, parent
22:44management type approaches, which involve helping to kind of boost what's called like the
22:50salience or the ways in which things that kids with ADHD might miss that they kind of need to do
22:55helps them kind of attend to it by giving them lots and lots of reward and support and attention
23:00for kind of getting it, right? Because many ADHD kids, they kind of might know what to do or have
23:05a sense of what to do, but they kind of miss it in the moment or they can't figure out how to translate
23:09that knowing into doing. Bass Billions asks, what does on the spectrum mean? Autism is also called
23:17autism spectrum disorder in the DSM. Even though lots of different things are spectra, spectrums,
23:24lots of different conditions, autism has sort of come to be referred to as sort of the spectrum.
23:30And what's really interesting is that autism has undergone an incredible evolution over the last
23:37several decades. As recently as the 70s or 80s, people thought of autism as the most categorical
23:44thing. You could go to, you know, psychiatry conferences and famous psychiatrists would say
23:50things like, well, if there's anything that can be diagnosed in a waiting room by watching a child
23:55for a few minutes, surely it's autism. Because the idea is that autism was seen as so different,
24:00so categorical, that you could kind of just spot autism when you see it. And now it's swung
24:06all the way the other way from being this really seen as so dramatically different that you could
24:11just sort of spot autism anywhere to being the spectrum, the spectrum, the thing that is not
24:16about categorical difference at all. And I think this tells us a lot about our evolving understanding
24:21of autism, but also our evolving understanding of the individual differences between people.
24:26A Reddit user asks, how does the brain structure of autistic people differ? Lots of really interesting
24:33research has gone into this. Well, I think one of the big things I would say we do know more and
24:39more about these days is the idea of kind of the connections of autism. There's this fancy term,
24:45a connectopathy. It's a $10 million word there. But the idea that autism can be defined by a difference
24:51in the way the brain interconnects with itself. And while this is still evolving, broadly speaking,
24:56there's this idea that autism has a lot more connections. Autistic brains have a lot more
25:04connections kind of locally, kind of close by, little short distance neuron connections. But that
25:09globally, kind of long distance connections across different regions of the brain, there seem to be
25:15fewer of them. And there's actually even some thought that this might help to explain some parts of what we
25:21understand about autism. Because maybe those short distance connections, you know, they might be
25:26telling us something about some of the difficulties in sensory processing, right? Be like, you know, if
25:31you've got all these short distance connections going fire, fire, fire, fire, fire, it might be harder, you
25:35know, if things are really loud or things are really bright to manage that. But then those longer distance
25:40connections, which are used maybe for more broader processing or development or learning, those, if they're
25:46sparser, might take longer, it might be more difficult for those connections to kind of grow and, and learn.
25:53Arcticos02 says, what age do you think it would be appropriate to diagnose someone with autism?
25:59So one thing we do know is that autism is by and large with you at birth. So by the time somebody is born, their
26:07brain is sort of wired up in that direction if they are going, if they are, they are autistic. Those developmental
26:13trajectories can change one way or another in a variety of different ways, but that's, that's by and large
26:18what we know. So one of the goals actually is to get diagnosis as early as possible so that there can
26:23be support as early as possible, early intervention and other kinds of supports, which you can get in
26:28every state in America. We want to make sure that those things are available so that folks have the
26:32best opportunity. For years, it was thought that three might be kind of on the earliest side, you know,
26:39then would sort of push to two. And I would say, you know, clinically, it's now possible using some
26:44of our best diagnostic tools to diagnose toddlers, even down to like 18 months, some even down to 12
26:51months using our clinical tools. But increasingly, diagnostic science in autism has really been
26:57picking up and there's, there are now some cutting edge studies using tools like some kinds of brain
27:02imaging and eye tracking that are promising for diagnosing autism as young as six months and maybe even
27:08younger. So let's see where that goes. Judicia Eye Review asks, does autism correlate with IQ or does
27:17high IQ correlate with autism? Headline here is that autism does not really correlate with IQ. Autism
27:25does not discriminate by race, color, IQ, or other features. Autism exists everywhere in the world across
27:34the whole spectrum of being. I think the interesting kind of tricky question here is that very often,
27:40because of the different ways of thinking and processing that autistic people have,
27:44performance of autistic people on IQ tests can be really different. You could have these big
27:49splits or sort of islands of ability where somebody might seem to have really strong verbal ability,
27:54but then much less strong ability in other areas like processing speed or self-regulation or visual
28:01perception. Or it might be the other way. They might have great, you know, visual perceptual or
28:05processing ability and less ability in spoken language. Pip D Burley asks, what myths about autism annoy you?
28:13What is the reality versus the myth? There are a lot of myths about autism, but probably the one
28:18that is often most frustrating is the idea that autistic people lack empathy and can't understand the
28:24feelings of others. This is very common kind of colloquial idea that comes out of sort of observing
28:31autistic people kind of seeming disconnected and sort of seeming not to pay attention to the needs of
28:35other people, seeming off to be in their own world, right? Autism literally from the Greek,
28:39you know, means self-ism. Autos is self. And so there's this notion, I think this implicit notion,
28:45that autistic people are self-ish, that they're sort of focused on their own needs and can't really
28:50feel those of others. But actually, one, actually autistic people will tell us all the time that that's not
28:55true, that that's not their experience at all, that maybe they might struggle to communicate their
29:00understanding in the same way, but that they can very much. And, and increasingly research,
29:05even on very young and even, you know, minimally verbal autistic people, shows us that myth really
29:09is myth. That autistic children and adults do co-feel, they can empathize, often sometimes quite
29:16profoundly. In fact, so much so that they're overwhelmed by, you know, the feeling of another
29:22person. And that itself might interfere with the ability to express it. That's all the questions for
29:27today. Hope you learned something. Until next time.
29:32You know, let me check.
29:37Like, sleep in your moment.
29:41Bye.
29:47Bye.
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