Resituating the narrative in Neurodiversity Week

It was both interesting and troubling to read Dame Uta Frith’s recent article in the Times Educational Supplement (TES). Interesting because it appeared to me to be an attempt by cognitive science to regain control of the narrative about autism – a questionable aim given that discipline’s limited success in moving us forward in our understanding of what we call autism in the first place. And troubling because the narratives told about autism matter deeply.

TES has a wide readership of educators who might, quite reasonably, take what they are told by a disciplinary expert as scientific fact, but what we read in the article is largely opinion. As so often happens, comments in the article are now being repeated across online platforms as if they were established truth – something that could have dangerous consequences for some of the most vulnerable people in society. And the reader might assume that models of autism produced by cognitive science have told us something about autism that has meaningfully improved the actual lives of autistic people.

But the problem for cognitive science is that the models it uses to explain the complexity of the human mind – particularly in relation to what we call autism – are abstractions that present themselves as complete representations. Attempts to explain human behaviour via cognitive science have historically relied on abstraction and reduction of what a human being is.  Computational models of the mind treat the human as though they are merely an information-processing unit: a computer. Explicitly or implicitly, feeling is left out of the equation, repeating the error made by Descartes regarding the primacy of thought and the possibility of separating the mind and the body.

But I argue that human beings are primarily feeling beings. This matters greatly for wellbeing and, in education, for learning. The work of neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio shows how integral feeling is to thinking, learning and being itself. So, when Frith states, for example, that the energy costs associated with what is often called masking have no scientific basis, she could perhaps look beyond her own disciplinary understanding of what counts as science. It’s also important to note that such assertions risk talking over the lived experience of millions of people who are actually feeling, living and learning in environments that frequently treat them as if those experiences do not count. The neurodiversity movement has shown us that it is time for a change in the way we think and talk about autism, and in whose narratives are included.

Dr Chris Bailey is a senior lecturer in the Sheffield Institute of Education