0:00:01.119,0:00:03.027
I always wanted to become

0:00:03.027,0:00:05.867
a walking laboratory of social engagement,

0:00:05.867,0:00:09.943
to resonate other people's feelings, thoughts,

0:00:09.943,0:00:14.999
intentions, motivations, in the act of being with them.

0:00:14.999,0:00:20.878
As a scientist, I always wanted to measure that resonance,

0:00:20.879,0:00:23.377
that sense of the other that happens so quickly,

0:00:23.377,0:00:25.682
in the blink of an eye.

0:00:25.682,0:00:28.032
We intuit other people's feelings.

0:00:28.032,0:00:29.019
We know the meaning of their actions

0:00:29.019,0:00:31.959
even before they happen.

0:00:31.959,0:00:33.857
We're always in this stance of being

0:00:33.857,0:00:36.828
the object of somebody else's subjectivity.

0:00:36.828,0:00:40.025
We do that all the time. We just can't shake it off.

0:00:40.025,0:00:41.676
It's so important that the very tools that we use

0:00:41.676,0:00:44.079
to understand ourselves, to understand

0:00:44.079,0:00:48.226
the world around them, is shaped by that stance.

0:00:48.226,0:00:51.460
We are social to the core.

0:00:51.460,0:00:54.234
So my journey in autism really started when I lived

0:00:54.234,0:00:57.811
in a residential unit for adults with autism.

0:00:57.811,0:01:01.129
Most of those individuals had spent most of their lives

0:01:01.129,0:01:05.021
in long-stay hospitals. This is a long time ago.

0:01:05.021,0:01:09.303
And for them, autism was devastating.

0:01:09.303,0:01:12.558
They had profound intellectual disabilities.

0:01:12.558,0:01:15.860
They didn't talk. But most of all,

0:01:15.860,0:01:19.690
they were extraordinarily isolated

0:01:19.690,0:01:22.931
from the world around them, from their environment

0:01:22.931,0:01:25.392
and from the people.

0:01:25.392,0:01:28.244
In fact, at the time, if you walked into a school

0:01:28.244,0:01:32.267
for individuals with autism, you'd hear a lot of noise,

0:01:32.267,0:01:37.730
plenty of commotion, actions, people doing things,

0:01:37.730,0:01:41.455
but they're always doing things by themselves.

0:01:41.455,0:01:45.527
So they may be looking at a light in the ceiling,

0:01:45.527,0:01:48.936
or they may be isolated in the corner,

0:01:48.936,0:01:52.495
or they might be engaged in these repetitive movements,

0:01:52.495,0:01:56.696
in self-stimulatory movements that led them nowhere.

0:01:56.696,0:02:00.095
Extremely, extremely isolated.

0:02:00.095,0:02:03.688
Well, now we know that autism

0:02:03.688,0:02:07.426
is this disruption, the disruption of this resonance

0:02:07.426,0:02:09.770
that I am telling you.

0:02:09.770,0:02:11.728
These are survival skills.

0:02:11.728,0:02:13.879
These are survival skills that we inherited

0:02:13.879,0:02:16.433
over many, many hundreds of thousands of years

0:02:16.433,0:02:18.719
of evolution.

0:02:18.719,0:02:24.033
You see, babies are born in a state of utter fragility.

0:02:24.033,0:02:26.064
Without the caregiver, they wouldn't survive, so it stands

0:02:26.064,0:02:28.447
to reason that nature would endow them with

0:02:28.447,0:02:31.680
these mechanisms of survival.

0:02:31.680,0:02:34.255
They orient to the caregiver.

0:02:34.255,0:02:37.697
From the first days and weeks of life,

0:02:37.697,0:02:41.183
babies prefer to hear human sounds rather than just

0:02:41.183,0:02:43.128
sounds in the environment.

0:02:43.128,0:02:45.138
They prefer to look at people rather than at things,

0:02:45.138,0:02:47.183
and even as they're looking at people,

0:02:47.183,0:02:49.747
they look at people's eyes, because

0:02:49.747,0:02:54.096
the eye is the window to the other person's experiences,

0:02:54.096,0:02:56.214
so much so that they even prefer to look at people who are

0:02:56.214,0:03:00.525
looking at them rather than people who are looking away.

0:03:00.525,0:03:03.131
Well, they orient to the caregiver.

0:03:03.131,0:03:05.458
The caregiver seeks the baby.

0:03:05.458,0:03:09.085
And it's out of this mutually reinforcing choreography

0:03:09.085,0:03:12.904
that a lot that is of importance to the emergence of mind,

0:03:12.904,0:03:17.587
the social mind, the social brain, depends on.

0:03:17.587,0:03:20.268
We always think about autism

0:03:20.268,0:03:25.347
as something that happens later on in life.

0:03:25.347,0:03:30.745
It doesn't. It begins with the beginning of life.

0:03:30.745,0:03:35.049
As babies engage with caregivers, they soon realize

0:03:35.049,0:03:39.256
that, well, there is something in between the ears

0:03:39.256,0:03:40.666
that is very important --

0:03:40.666,0:03:44.849
it's invisible, you can't see -- but is really critical,

0:03:44.849,0:03:46.308
and that thing is called attention.

0:03:46.308,0:03:49.138
And they learn soon enough, even before they can

0:03:49.138,0:03:51.818
utter one word that they can take that attention

0:03:51.818,0:03:57.555
and move somewhere in order to get things they want.

0:03:57.555,0:04:00.679
They also learn to follow other people's gaze,

0:04:00.679,0:04:02.949
because whatever people are looking at is

0:04:02.949,0:04:06.704
what they are thinking about.

0:04:06.704,0:04:09.346
And soon enough, they start to learn about the meaning

0:04:09.346,0:04:12.771
of things, because when somebody is looking at something

0:04:12.771,0:04:14.823
or somebody is pointing at something,

0:04:14.823,0:04:17.752
they're not just getting a directional cue,

0:04:17.752,0:04:20.310
they are getting the other person's meaning

0:04:20.310,0:04:23.389
of that thing, the attitude, and soon enough

0:04:23.389,0:04:27.488
they start building this body of meanings,

0:04:27.488,0:04:29.801
but meanings that were acquired within the realm

0:04:29.801,0:04:32.202
of social interaction.

0:04:32.202,0:04:34.043
Those are meanings that are acquired as part

0:04:34.043,0:04:38.030
of their shared experiences with others.

0:04:38.030,0:04:44.862
Well, this is a little 15-month-old little girl,

0:04:44.862,0:04:48.594
and she has autism.

0:04:48.594,0:04:52.016
And I am coming so close to her that I am maybe

0:04:52.016,0:04:56.265
two inches from her face, and she's quite oblivious to me.

0:04:56.265,0:04:57.623
Imagine if I did that to you,

0:04:57.623,0:04:59.549
and I came two inches from your face.

0:04:59.549,0:05:01.655
You'd do probably two things, wouldn't you?

0:05:01.655,0:05:05.767
You would recoil. You would call the police. (Laughter)

0:05:05.767,0:05:08.316
You would do something, because it's literally impossible

0:05:08.316,0:05:10.892
to penetrate somebody's physical space

0:05:10.892,0:05:12.247
and not get a reaction.

0:05:12.247,0:05:15.931
We do so, remember, intuitively, effortlessly.

0:05:15.931,0:05:17.348
This is our body wisdom. It's not something that is

0:05:17.348,0:05:21.898
mediated by our language. Our body just knows that,

0:05:21.898,0:05:24.661
and we've known that for a long time.

0:05:24.661,0:05:27.600
And this is not something that happens to humans only.

0:05:27.600,0:05:30.824
It happens to some of our phylatic cousins,

0:05:30.824,0:05:32.818
because if you're a monkey,

0:05:32.818,0:05:34.914
and you look at another monkey,

0:05:34.914,0:05:38.932
and that monkey has a higher hierarchy position than you,

0:05:38.932,0:05:42.485
and that is considered to be a signal or threat,

0:05:42.485,0:05:45.365
well, you are not going to be alive for long.

0:05:45.365,0:05:49.786
So something that in other species are survival mechanisms,

0:05:49.786,0:05:53.207
without them they wouldn't basically live,

0:05:53.207,0:05:55.907
we bring into the context of human beings,

0:05:55.907,0:06:00.070
and this is what we need to simply act, act socially.

0:06:00.070,0:06:02.973
Now, she is oblivious to me, and I am so close to her,

0:06:02.973,0:06:04.971
and you think, maybe she can see you,

0:06:04.971,0:06:06.591
maybe she can hear you.

0:06:06.591,0:06:08.931
Well, a few minutes later, she goes to the corner of

0:06:08.931,0:06:14.530
the room, and she finds a tiny little piece of candy, an M&M.

0:06:14.530,0:06:19.400
So I could not attract her attention,

0:06:19.400,0:06:21.829
but something, a thing, did.

0:06:21.829,0:06:24.471
Now, most of us make a big dichotomy

0:06:24.471,0:06:28.806
between the world of things and the world of people.

0:06:28.806,0:06:33.397
Now, for this girl, that division line is not so clear,

0:06:33.397,0:06:36.527
and the world of people is not attracting her

0:06:36.527,0:06:38.010
as much as we would like.

0:06:38.010,0:06:40.044
Now remember that we learn a great deal

0:06:40.044,0:06:42.445
by sharing experiences.

0:06:42.445,0:06:45.616
Now, what she is doing right now is that

0:06:45.616,0:06:50.095
her path of learning is diverging moment by moment

0:06:50.095,0:06:53.913
as she is isolating herself further and further.

0:06:53.913,0:06:56.879
So we feel sometimes that the brain is deterministic,

0:06:56.879,0:06:59.401
the brain determines who we are going to be.

0:06:59.401,0:07:02.241
But in fact the brain also becomes who we are,

0:07:02.241,0:07:06.254
and at the same time that her behaviors are taking away

0:07:06.254,0:07:09.137
from the realm of social interaction, this is what's happening

0:07:09.137,0:07:14.529
with her mind and this is what's happening with her brain.

0:07:14.529,0:07:20.367
Well, autism is the most strongly genetic condition

0:07:20.367,0:07:23.820
of all developmental disorders,

0:07:23.820,0:07:26.695
and it's a brain disorder.

0:07:26.695,0:07:29.304
It's a disorder that begins much prior to the time

0:07:29.304,0:07:32.170
that the child is born.

0:07:32.170,0:07:35.884
We now know that there is a very broad spectrum of autism.

0:07:35.884,0:07:38.396
There are those individuals who are profoundly

0:07:38.396,0:07:41.394
intellectually disabled, but there are those that are gifted.

0:07:41.394,0:07:43.522
There are those individuals who don't talk at all.

0:07:43.522,0:07:45.794
There are those individuals who talk too much.

0:07:45.794,0:07:48.295
There are those individuals that if you observe them

0:07:48.295,0:07:51.304
in their school, you see them running the periphery fence

0:07:51.304,0:07:53.603
of the school all day if you let them,

0:07:53.603,0:07:55.961
to those individuals who cannot stop coming to you

0:07:55.961,0:07:57.966
and trying to engage you repeatedly, relentlessly,

0:07:57.966,0:08:01.897
but often in an awkward fashion,

0:08:01.897,0:08:05.672
without that immediate resonance.

0:08:05.672,0:08:09.604
Well, this is much more prevalent than we thought at the time.

0:08:09.604,0:08:11.088
When I started in this field, we thought that there were

0:08:11.088,0:08:13.941
four individuals with autism per 10,000,

0:08:13.941,0:08:15.972
a very rare condition.

0:08:15.972,0:08:20.005
Well, now we know it's more like one in 100.

0:08:20.005,0:08:25.028
There are millions of individuals with autism all around us.

0:08:25.028,0:08:28.394
The societal cost of this condition is huge.

0:08:28.394,0:08:31.557
In the U.S. alone, maybe 35 to 80 billion dollars,

0:08:31.557,0:08:34.864
and you know what? Most of those funds are associated

0:08:34.864,0:08:37.044
with adolescents and particularly adults

0:08:37.044,0:08:39.205
who are severely disabled,

0:08:39.205,0:08:41.344
individuals who need wrap-around services, services

0:08:41.344,0:08:44.070
that are very, very intensive, and those services

0:08:44.070,0:08:48.339
can cost in excess of 60 to 80,000 dollars a year.

0:08:48.339,0:08:51.901
Those are individuals who did not benefit from early treatment,

0:08:51.901,0:08:56.360
because now we know that autism creates itself

0:08:56.360,0:08:59.064
as they diverge in that pathway of learning

0:08:59.064,0:09:01.200
that I mentioned to you.

0:09:01.200,0:09:03.613
Were we to be able to identify this condition

0:09:03.613,0:09:07.680
at an earlier point, and intervene and treat,

0:09:07.680,0:09:09.654
I can tell you, and this has been probably

0:09:09.654,0:09:13.034
something that has changed my life in the past 10 years,

0:09:13.034,0:09:16.765
this notion that we can absolutely attenuate

0:09:16.765,0:09:18.922
this condition.

0:09:18.922,0:09:21.301
Also, we have a window of opportunity, because

0:09:21.301,0:09:24.437
the brain is malleable for just so long,

0:09:24.437,0:09:25.789
and that window of opportunity happens

0:09:25.789,0:09:27.492
in the first three years of life.

0:09:27.492,0:09:30.890
It's not that that window closes. It doesn't.

0:09:30.890,0:09:34.459
But it diminishes considerably.

0:09:34.459,0:09:37.563
And yet, the median age of diagnosis in this country

0:09:37.563,0:09:39.714
is still about five years,

0:09:39.714,0:09:41.980
and in disadvantaged populations,

0:09:41.980,0:09:45.229
the populations that don't have access to clinical services,

0:09:45.229,0:09:48.338
rural populations, minorities,

0:09:48.338,0:09:50.957
the age of diagnosis is later still,

0:09:50.957,0:09:53.302
which is almost as if I were to tell you that we are

0:09:53.302,0:09:55.719
condemning those communities to have individuals

0:09:55.719,0:10:00.195
with autism whose condition is going to be more severe.

0:10:00.195,0:10:03.168
So I feel that we have a bio-ethical imperative.

0:10:03.168,0:10:06.025
The science is there,

0:10:06.025,0:10:09.083
but no science is of relevance if it doesn't have an impact

0:10:09.083,0:10:12.741
on the community, and we just can't afford

0:10:12.741,0:10:14.705
that missed opportunity,

0:10:14.705,0:10:17.861
because children with autism become adults with autism,

0:10:17.861,0:10:22.139
and we feel that those things that we can do

0:10:22.139,0:10:24.462
for these children, for those families, early on,

0:10:24.462,0:10:26.856
will have lifetime consequences,

0:10:26.856,0:10:30.952
for the child, for the family, and for the community at large.

0:10:30.952,0:10:33.672
So this is our view of autism.

0:10:33.672,0:10:36.538
There are over a hundred genes that are associated

0:10:36.538,0:10:38.664
with autism. In fact, we believe that there are going to be

0:10:38.664,0:10:43.168
something between 300 and 600 genes associated with autism,

0:10:43.168,0:10:46.839
and genetic anomalies, much more than just genes.

0:10:46.839,0:10:51.430
And we actually have a bit of a question here,

0:10:51.430,0:10:54.915
because if there are so many different causes of autism,

0:10:54.915,0:10:57.930
how do you go from those liabilities

0:10:57.930,0:11:00.930
to the actual syndrome? Because people like myself,

0:11:00.930,0:11:03.615
when we walk into a playroom,

0:11:03.615,0:11:06.835
we recognize a child as having autism.

0:11:06.835,0:11:08.978
So how do you go from multiple causes

0:11:08.978,0:11:12.428
to a syndrome that has some homogeneity?

0:11:12.428,0:11:15.005
And the answer is, what lies in between,

0:11:15.005,0:11:17.660
which is development.

0:11:17.660,0:11:20.776
And in fact, we are very interested in those first

0:11:20.776,0:11:23.515
two years of life, because those liabilities

0:11:23.515,0:11:26.269
don't necessarily convert into autism.

0:11:26.269,0:11:28.765
Autism creates itself.

0:11:28.765,0:11:33.614
Were we to be able to intervene during those years of life,

0:11:33.614,0:11:36.117
we might attenuate for some, and God knows,

0:11:36.117,0:11:39.753
maybe even prevent for others.

0:11:39.753,0:11:41.837
So how do we do that?

0:11:41.837,0:11:44.753
How do we enter that feeling of resonance,

0:11:44.753,0:11:48.778
how do we enter another person's being?

0:11:48.778,0:11:52.276
I remember when I interacted with that 15-month-older,

0:11:52.276,0:11:54.438
that the thing that came to mind was,

0:11:54.438,0:11:56.953
"How do you come into her world?

0:11:56.953,0:12:01.233
Is she thinking about me? Is she thinking about others?"

0:12:01.233,0:12:05.577
Well, it's hard to do that, so we had to create

0:12:05.577,0:12:09.056
the technologies. We had to basically step inside a body.

0:12:09.056,0:12:12.985
We had to see the world through her eyes.

0:12:12.985,0:12:16.024
And so in the past many years we've been building

0:12:16.024,0:12:19.657
these new technologies that are based on eye tracking.

0:12:19.657,0:12:22.175
We can see moment by moment

0:12:22.175,0:12:25.456
what children are engaging with.

0:12:25.456,0:12:28.175
Well, this is my colleague Warren Jones, with whom

0:12:28.175,0:12:31.152
we've been building these methods, these studies,

0:12:31.152,0:12:33.143
for the past 12 years,

0:12:33.143,0:12:35.863
and you see there a happy five-month-older,

0:12:35.863,0:12:41.686
it's a five-month little boy who is going to watch things

0:12:41.686,0:12:44.509
that are brought from his world,

0:12:44.509,0:12:47.088
his mom, the caregiver, but also experiences

0:12:47.088,0:12:51.520
that he would have were he to be in his daycare.

0:12:51.520,0:12:54.152
What we want is to embrace that world

0:12:54.152,0:12:55.481
and bring it into our laboratory,

0:12:55.481,0:12:58.603
but in order for us to do that, we had to create

0:12:58.603,0:13:01.853
these very sophisticated measures,

0:13:01.853,0:13:05.280
measures of how people, how little babies,

0:13:05.280,0:13:08.263
how newborns, engage with the world,

0:13:08.263,0:13:09.890
moment by moment,

0:13:09.890,0:13:13.163
what is important, and what is not.

0:13:13.163,0:13:16.104
Well, we created those measures, and here,

0:13:16.104,0:13:19.503
what you see is what we call a funnel of attention.

0:13:19.503,0:13:21.836
You're watching a video.

0:13:21.836,0:13:24.494
Those frames are separated by about a second

0:13:24.494,0:13:27.262
through the eyes of 35 typically developing

0:13:27.262,0:13:28.544
two-year-olds,

0:13:28.544,0:13:31.519
and we freeze one frame,

0:13:31.519,0:13:35.020
and this is what the typical children are doing.

0:13:35.020,0:13:39.461
In this scan pass, in green here, are two-year-olds with autism.

0:13:39.461,0:13:43.084
So on that frame, the children who are typical

0:13:43.084,0:13:46.039
are watching this,

0:13:46.039,0:13:48.588
the emotion of expression of that little boy

0:13:48.588,0:13:51.498
as he's fighting a little bit with the little girl.

0:13:51.498,0:13:53.558
What are the children with autism doing?

0:13:53.558,0:13:57.003
They are focusing on the revolving door,

0:13:57.003,0:13:59.094
opening and shutting.

0:13:59.094,0:14:01.546
Well, I can tell you that this divergence

0:14:01.546,0:14:02.415
that you're seeing here

0:14:02.415,0:14:05.605
doesn't happen only in our five-minute experiment.

0:14:05.605,0:14:09.006
It happens moment by moment in their real lives,

0:14:09.006,0:14:11.726
and their minds are being formed,

0:14:11.726,0:14:14.806
and their brains are being specialized in something other

0:14:14.806,0:14:18.585
than what is happening with their typical peers.

0:14:18.585,0:14:21.772
Well, we took a construct from

0:14:21.772,0:14:24.966
our pediatrician friends,

0:14:24.966,0:14:26.893
the concept of growth charts.

0:14:26.893,0:14:28.862
You know, when you take a child to the pediatrician,

0:14:28.862,0:14:33.066
and so you have physical height, and weight.

0:14:33.066,0:14:35.895
Well we decided that we're going to create growth charts

0:14:35.895,0:14:38.354
of social engagement,

0:14:38.354,0:14:41.155
and we sought children from the time that they are born,

0:14:41.155,0:14:46.984
and what you see here on the x-axis is two, three, four,

0:14:46.984,0:14:50.824
five, six months and nine, until about the age of 24 months,

0:14:50.824,0:14:53.555
and this is the percent of their viewing time

0:14:53.555,0:14:55.251
that they are focusing on people's eyes,

0:14:55.251,0:14:57.611
and this is their growth chart.

0:14:57.611,0:15:00.641
They start over here, they love people's eyes,

0:15:00.641,0:15:03.095
and it remains quite stable.

0:15:03.095,0:15:07.021
It sort of goes up a little bit in those initial months.

0:15:07.021,0:15:09.315
Now, let's see what's happening with babies

0:15:09.315,0:15:11.823
who became autistic.

0:15:11.823,0:15:14.028
It's something very different.

0:15:14.028,0:15:17.818
It starts way up here, but then it's a free fall.

0:15:17.818,0:15:21.237
It's very much like they brought into this world the reflex

0:15:21.237,0:15:25.168
that orients them to people, but it has no traction.

0:15:25.168,0:15:28.238
It's almost as if that stimulus, you,

0:15:28.238,0:15:31.139
you're not exerting influence on what happens

0:15:31.139,0:15:35.030
as they navigate their daily lives.

0:15:35.030,0:15:41.052
Now, we thought that those data were so powerful

0:15:41.052,0:15:44.060
in a way, that we wanted to see what happened

0:15:44.060,0:15:47.453
in the first six months of life, because if you interact

0:15:47.453,0:15:48.790
with a two- and a three-month-older,

0:15:48.790,0:15:53.342
you'd be surprised by how social those babies are.

0:15:53.342,0:15:55.949
And what we see in the first six months of life

0:15:55.949,0:16:02.087
is that those two groups can be segregated very easily.

0:16:02.087,0:16:04.961
And using these kinds of measures, and many others,

0:16:04.961,0:16:08.977
what we found out is that our science could, in fact,

0:16:08.977,0:16:11.618
identify this condition early on.

0:16:11.618,0:16:14.522
We didn't have to wait for the behaviors of autism

0:16:14.522,0:16:17.670
to emerge in the second year of life.

0:16:17.670,0:16:20.932
If we measured things that are, evolutionarily,

0:16:20.932,0:16:25.054
highly conserved, and developmentally very early emerging,

0:16:25.054,0:16:27.755
things that are online from the first weeks of life,

0:16:27.755,0:16:29.617
we could push the detection of autism

0:16:29.617,0:16:32.081
all the way to those first months,

0:16:32.081,0:16:36.222
and that's what we are doing now.

0:16:36.222,0:16:39.290
Now, we can create the very best technologies

0:16:39.290,0:16:42.895
and the very best methods to identify the children,

0:16:42.895,0:16:46.038
but this would be for naught if we didn't have an impact

0:16:46.038,0:16:49.680
on what happens in their reality in the community.

0:16:49.680,0:16:51.986
Now we want those devices, of course,

0:16:51.986,0:16:54.839
to be deployed by those who are in the trenches,

0:16:54.839,0:16:57.362
our colleagues, the primary care physicians,

0:16:57.362,0:17:00.067
who see every child,

0:17:00.067,0:17:02.210
and we need to transform those technologies

0:17:02.210,0:17:05.315
into something that is going to add value to their practice,

0:17:05.315,0:17:07.520
because they have to see so many children.

0:17:07.520,0:17:09.594
And we want to do that universally

0:17:09.594,0:17:11.727
so that we don't miss any child,

0:17:11.727,0:17:14.180
but this would be immoral

0:17:14.180,0:17:19.081
if we also did not have an infrastructure for intervention,

0:17:19.081,0:17:20.328
for treatment.

0:17:20.328,0:17:22.864
We need to be able to work with the families,

0:17:22.864,0:17:26.279
to support the families, to manage those first years

0:17:26.279,0:17:30.191
with them. We need to be able to really go

0:17:30.191,0:17:34.348
from universal screening to universal access to treatment,

0:17:34.348,0:17:37.451
because those treatments are going to change

0:17:37.451,0:17:41.030
these children's and those families' lives.

0:17:41.030,0:17:45.287
Now, when we think about what we [can] do

0:17:45.287,0:17:48.510
in those first years,

0:17:48.510,0:17:50.910
I can tell you,

0:17:50.910,0:17:53.737
having been in this field for so long,

0:17:53.737,0:17:56.832
one feels really rejuvenated.

0:17:56.832,0:18:00.664
There is a sense that the science that one worked on

0:18:00.664,0:18:04.371
can actually have an impact on realities,

0:18:04.371,0:18:07.266
preventing, in fact, those experiences

0:18:07.266,0:18:11.268
that I really started in my journey in this field.

0:18:11.268,0:18:14.460
I thought at the time that this was an intractable condition.

0:18:14.460,0:18:18.346
No longer. We can do a great deal of things.

0:18:18.346,0:18:21.083
And the idea is not to cure autism.

0:18:21.083,0:18:23.683
That's not the idea.

0:18:23.683,0:18:25.889
What we want is to make sure

0:18:25.889,0:18:28.465
that those individuals with autism can be free from

0:18:28.465,0:18:32.695
the devastating consequences that come with it at times,

0:18:32.695,0:18:35.569
the profound intellectual disabilities, the lack of language,

0:18:35.569,0:18:39.238
the profound, profound isolation.

0:18:39.238,0:18:41.505
We feel that individuals with autism, in fact,

0:18:41.505,0:18:44.300
have a very special perspective on the world,

0:18:44.300,0:18:47.723
and we need diversity, and they can work extremely well

0:18:47.723,0:18:50.090
in some areas of strength:

0:18:50.090,0:18:53.493
predictable situations, situations that can be defined.

0:18:53.493,0:18:56.502
Because after all, they learn about the world almost like

0:18:56.502,0:19:01.203
about it, rather than learning how to function in it.

0:19:01.203,0:19:04.001
But this is a strength, if you're working, for example,

0:19:04.001,0:19:06.081
in technology.

0:19:06.081,0:19:08.354
And there are those individuals who have incredible

0:19:08.354,0:19:09.779
artistic abilities.

0:19:09.779,0:19:11.699
We want them to be free of that.

0:19:11.699,0:19:15.084
We want that the next generations of individuals with autism

0:19:15.084,0:19:18.239
will be able not only to express their strengths

0:19:18.239,0:19:20.461
but to fulfill their promise.

0:19:20.461,0:19:24.030
Well thank you for listening to me. (Applause)