This article is too long to post but thought the message was kind of bizarre somehow--it's talking about how neurotypicals get bamboozled by magicians or are oblivious to gorillas walking in front of their eyes but somehow this inattention blindness is important for survival and the fact that people with autism are not fooled in this fashion is a possible way to diagnose them. I think this lack of "inattention blindness" would be a tremendous advantage.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Autism/aut ... _pitchlist
The magician placed a coin atop an airtight rubber seal on a cup and -- abracadabra -- the shiny piece fell to the bottom of the cup.
But he didn't fool 8-year-old Stephen Shore, who was the only one among his fellow Boy Scouts who saw through the magic trick.
"People didn't see the slit in the piece of rubber," said Shore, now 48 and an assistant professor of special education teacher at New York's Adelphi University. "I went up and just kind of pushed my finger into the slit."
Illusions are the stock and trade of magicians but researchers at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Ariz., want to know why people like Shore, who fall along the autism spectrum, are not so easily fooled.
Shore has lived his entire life with autism, a neurological disorder often marked by joint-attention deficits, or difficulty reading social signals; the same kind that a magician deliberately uses to throw attention away from the deception.
"Someone on the autism spectrum is looking exactly where the magician doesn't want him to look," Shore said.
Scientists Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik, co-authors of the upcoming book "Neuro Magic," are seeking funding to begin research that they hope will use magic as a tool for the diagnosis and treatment of autism -- despite some parents' fear that such research is too limited in scope.
11 Nov 2009, 4:46 pm
