I’m a comedian. I’ve stood backstage at a comedy club on a Friday night hearing the noise of the baying crowd the other side of the curtain, knowing full well I’m about to be fed to the lions. Yet even when I look back at those moments, none of them seem as daunting as...
autism
In 1877 prison authorities calledon Francis Galton with a pressing question. Could it be the case that certain types of crimes correlated with particular facial characteristics? They presented him with a large number of photos of delinquents and Galton set out to arrange them...
Transported to a world of emotion
Why would the UK government fund Cambridge University and a Manchester-based production company to make a series of children’s animation? After all, professional-quality animation doesn’t come cheap. The answer is that...
Since autism was first described more than 60 years ago (Asperger, 1944/1991; Kanner, 1943), researchers have been trying to pinpoint the underlying basis of the disorder. Yet autism still continues to perplex, even though the need for an understanding of the disorder is...
Classic autism and Asperger’s syndrome both share three core diagnostic features: difficulties in social development, and in the development of communication, alongside unusually strong, narrow interests and repetitive behaviour. Since communication is always social, it might...
Recent research in cognitive neuroscience has advanced our knowledge of the brain areas underpinning imitation – a process often exploited in education that is said to provide a foundation for language acquisition, skill learning, socialisation and enculturation (Brass &...
Our ability to experience and understand expressed emotions is something we take for granted. Whilst we may be aware that the feelings we experience in response to a spring morning, or a heavy day at the office, differ in quality from those we experience when listening to a...
It is generally accepted that Asperger’s syndrome (AS) lies within the autism spectrum, and as such it has long been seen entirely as a developmental disorder consisting of impairments in social interaction, social communication and imagination (Wing & Gould, 1979)....