Normocentric World

Here at SFARI.org, most of the researchers we write about, whether geneticists, neuroscientists or clinicians, are trying to understand the intricacies of the autistic mind — and some, ultimately, are trying to ‘normalize’ it.Laurent Mottron, professor of psychiatry at the University of Montreal in Canada, has long argued against this notion of ‘normal.’As he wrote in a Nature commentary earlier this month, Mottron believes that "autism should be described and investigated as a variant within the human species,” not as a defect to be suppressed.His argument reminds me of a popular psychological test called the Strength Deployment Inventory, or SDI, that companies often use to train managers. The test is based on the premise that an individual’s weaknesses are merely misplaced strengths. Arrogance is misplaced confidence, according to this logic, an indecisive individual is one who is flexible, and a gullible person is often trusting.The same dual perspective can be applied to autism. People who don’t have autism — or, as Mottron calls them, "normocentric" — often describe the features of autism as deficits: delayed, obsessive, narrowly focused, socially awkward, uncommunicative.But some of these traits can, in the right circumstances, be advantageous. An obsessive person might be passionate, and one who's narrowly focused probably has exceptional attention to detail.Mottron argues that the normocentric attitude is pervasive in the scientific literature of autism, and he has a point. For example, he points out that some brain imaging studies find that people with autism have abnormally thick cortical layers, whereas others find them abnormally thin, but in either case, the findings are called deficits. And many autism papers end with a paragraph about how the data could help treat the disorder.Read more at...SFARI, November 2011.