Uta Frith
The Life Scientific
BBC
4.6 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 6 December 2011
⏱️ 29 minutes
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Summary
Professor Uta Frith came from a grey post war Germany to Britain in the swinging sixties, when research into conditions such as autism and dyslexia was in its infancy. At the time many people thought there was no such thing as dyslexia and that autism was a result of cold distant parenting, but Professor Frith was convinced that the explanation for these enigmatic conditions lay in the brain. And she set out to prove this through a series of elegant experiments. Together with her students Francesca Happe and Simon Baron Cohen she developed the idea that people with autism find it hard to understand the intentions of others, known as theory of mind. Neuro-imaging experiments carried out with her husband Professor Chris Frith, meant she was able to show that there is a region in the brain which is linked to dyslexia. Uta Frith talks about her pioneering work that has changed how we view these brain disorders with Jim Al Khalili. Producer: Geraldine Fitzgerald.
Transcript
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| 0:34.0 | Hello, today I'll be talking to the psychologist |
| 0:37.8 | Uter Frith. |
| 0:38.8 | Uter came from a gray post-war Germany to London in the swinging 60s and never left. |
| 0:46.5 | Her curiosity has driven her lifelong research into dyslexia and autism. |
| 0:51.8 | Conditions which were barely acknowledged in the 1960s when the prevailing |
| 0:55.9 | view was that autism was due to parents being cold and distant towards their children and |
| 1:01.8 | dyslexics were just lazy. This style of thinking |
| 1:05.3 | meant parents often felt they were being blamed for their children's behavior |
| 1:08.8 | something that Uta thought was particularly unfair. She was also one of the first scientists to listen |
| 1:14.9 | to people with autism and their parents to really understand what it felt like to be autistic |
| 1:21.2 | and to see if there were any clues that could help understand what was going on in the |
| 1:25.7 | brain. Her studies into autism and dyslexia have fundamentally changed how we view |
| 1:31.4 | these conditions and given us a strong theoretical understanding |
| 1:35.4 | of what might be happening. Theories that she would support later with brain |
| 1:40.3 | scans when the technology made it possible. Now a professor at University |
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