In an interview on The Mind and The Brain

Tell me about Autism: Explaining the Enigma by Uta Frith. 

It’s about autism, which most people have heard of now, but which wasn’t so well known in 1989 when the book was published. Prior to Frith’s work autism was really considered a sort of emotional disorder: a lot of people used to think it was caused by parents not being warm enough (for which, by the way there is absolutely no evidence). But nothing is purely environmental, and nothing is purely genetic – most things are a result of an interaction between the two, and it looks like this is the case for autism. One aspect of the book which revolutionised the way we think about this condition was Frith’s cognitive theories of autism. She was one of the first scientists to propose that autism is characterised by neurocognitive impairments: that is, an impairment in a circuit in the brain which allows us to perform some cognitive process. 

Does she give case studies?

She does give vivid case studies, and she also describes experiments as if you’re actually in the room doing them. I read the book as a teenager and it was one of the inspirations for me to become a cognitive neuroscientist. Uta writes brilliantly about these scientific findings in a way that is easy to understand, even with no expertise in the subject, and she makes quite complicated concepts very comprehensible and fascinating to read about. 

One of the things that inspired me about this book was that it illustrated that you could actually do experiments which look at these aspects of psychology that seem so abstract and unreachable: like our ability to understand other people’s minds. You can actually parse that down to its very basic components, and you can experiment to see whether children with different conditions have problems with different aspects of some high-level cognitive capacity like ‘Theory of Mind’, which she concentrates on. ‘Theory of Mind’ is our ability to attribute mental states like intentions and beliefs and desires to other people. We do it all the time: we constantly read other people’s behaviours and actions in terms of their underlying mental states and emotions. For example, if I grasp a glass of water you don’t have to ask me why; you automatically infer things, like my intention, which is to drink water from the glass, or my belief that there’s drinkable water in the glass. Frith’s idea was that perhaps this cognitive process of theory of mind is impaired in autism, and she published the first paper showing this in 1985. What comes across in the book is her absolute fascination for autism, and the different ways of investigating its causes. Even though the term ‘autism’ was only coined in the mid-1940s, she’s really interested in historical descriptions of children who seem to have had autism, like the 19th-century foundling Kaspar Hauser. One whole chapter in this book is about the lessons from history that can teach us about autism.