Scientific research is a mentor-driven field. Every established researcher can list the teachers upon whose shoulders he or she stands. Some can even remember the first meeting, that pivotal moment of connection where the fateful bond was formed.
For a young German woman named Uta Aurnhammer, that moment came at the Maudsley in 1964. A year earlier, Aurnhammer had received a diploma in psychology from Saarland University in Germany, though she had no real intention of making a career in the social sciences. That changed when she reached London. Initially, she came over only for a little English-language study, but the energy of 1960s London appealed to her, and she began looking for a way to stay longer. Tipped off about a slot in a work-study program in research psychology, she applied, but with little expectation of being accepted. To her great good fortune, not only was she chosen, but the position turned out to be in the Institute of Psychiatry, which meant she would be working at the Maudsley.
Aurnhammer found the place to be an intellectual banquet. Its spirit of iconoclasm suited her perfectly, as did the view shared by everyone at the institute that they were engaged in work that mattered, that they were probing previously uncrossed frontiers. Aurnhammer loved being taken along for the ride, and when she wasn’t doing coursework or staying up late with a dictionary plowing through the especially arcane English of psychology research reports, she could be found in the Maudsley’s canteen, kicking around ideas with fellow grad students and faculty. She even met her future husband, British-born psychologist Chris Frith, during her first few months at the Maudsley. As he spoke no German, their friendship became a full-time immersion in English, to her benefit. A year after their first meeting, she became Uta Frith.
It was her participation in a “journal club” that led Frith to find her mentors. Weekly, she and a group of other young psychology apprentices got together and reported on particularly interesting research papers they had each picked off an assigned list. The week Frith’s turn came around, she arrived excited to discuss a paper she had chosen at random, one that had been published the year before. It covered some experiments into the perceptual differences of children labeled “psychotic”—the term that eventually would be replaced by “autistic.”
Frith had been around a few such “psychotic” children at the Maudsley, and she had personally observed what the paper was talking about. Often the kids would look straight through the person sitting right in front of them—or they seemed to be deaf to someone slamming a book onto a desktop just behind them. They never turned around or even flinched, yet their hearing was perfectly intact. This selective imperviousness to interruption was one of those associated traits of autism—like the indifference some kids showed to extreme hot or cold—that disturbed parents but tantalized inquisitive psychologists.
On the ward, Frith had heard some psychiatrists attributing these behaviors to a malfunctioning parental relationship. She found this explanation unconvincing but knew of no data supporting alternative theories. In the paper Frith chose to discuss, though, the authors had constructed an experiment that identified cognitive patterns unique to children with autism, in relation to how they registered the shape, size, brightness, and orientation of line drawing. To be sure, it was a narrow, almost esoteric, discovery. But it was solid, experiment-based, and indisputably indicative of a neurological component to autism.
Frith brought the paper to her journal club not knowing that its authors worked out of the same Maudsley campus where she was doing her clinical training. As soon as she realized this, she had someone point them out to her—O’Connor and Hermelin. One day at lunch, Frith approached them in the hospital canteen. Speaking German gave Frith a quick “in” with Hermelin and made it easy for her to have a fluent, deep conversation about experimental psychology. The two professors were immediately impressed by Frith’s boldness and curiosity as she framed some penetrating questions about their study. By the end of that meeting, Frith had found her mentors. Soon afterward, Hermelin and O’Connor invited her to pursue a PhD in experimental psychology under their guidance.
That was how, in 1966, Frith came to make her own journey out to the school on Florence Road, to carry out an experiment whose results would rank among the most intriguing and influential of its era.
The night before, Frith had stayed up late readying her materials, preparing a large set of hand-drawn cards. Though the experiment had been designed primarily by her new thesis advisors, Frith was to take the lead on its execution. It was set up like a memory game. Frith would read through a list of eight words. After each list, she would ask the children to repeat the words they had heard in the same order she had used.
But there was a twist. In some lists, the words were presented in a wholly random order. For example: “day she farm when cat fall back rake.” But in some lists, the words actually made a little bit of sense as parts of sentences, such as: “ride home by car write to us now.” As always, there was to be a control group—children without autism matched for “mental age.” Each child in each group would go through eight lists in eight “trials.”
The results were unambiguous. With the random word lists, the kids with autism were on par with the other kids at repeating back most of the eight words, and were actually better at retaining the last few words from each list in their memories.
With the non-random lists, however, the kids without autism had a tremendous advantage. They were obviously recognizing those partial sentences inside the word strings, then using that recognition as an aid to remember all the words in those lists.
But for the kids in the autism group, it was as if “write to us now” was just as random as “cat fall back rake.” Failing to spot the organizing presence of language, their brains got no memory help from words that actually did make sense together. They just didn’t hear it.
But then Frith pulled out the cards she had worked on the night before. These contained pictures—little line drawings of ordinary objects like a house, a duck, a pair of scissors, or an umbrella. She placed these cards face-up in sets of four in front of a child in a certain order. She paused, scrambled the cards, and then asked each child to restore them to their original order.
This time too there were clues built in to assist memory. Certain cards fit together in the logical sequence of an unfolding process. For example, when Frith laid down a picture of a burning candle, next to it she placed a picture of a similar candle nearly melted down to a stub. Or, next to a drawing of an egg in an eggcup, she placed a drawing of a similar egg in a similar cup, only the egg was cracked open and half-eaten.
In this purely visual memory test, the kids without autism again did well when such visual clues to meaning were provided. But so did the kids with autism. Indeed, their scores were virtually identical to those of the control group.
This intriguing experimental outcome became a classic of the autism world and pointed to a powerful hypothesis: that while children with autism may miss some of the intricacies of language and the meaning contained therein, they were strikingly capable of deriving meaning from information provided through nonlinguistic means. Moreover, these results suggested again that autistic children were better attuned to visual rather than auditory learning. These insights were repeatedly confirmed by other experiments and integral to ways in which teaching methods were shaped in the years to come.
Generously, when O’Connor and Hermelin published this research, they named Frith as a collaborator in a front-page footnote: “This work was carried out by Uta Frith in collaboration with the authors.” Such a prominent acknowledgment of a graduate student was not common in that era; perhaps this spoke to her mentors’ conviction that Frith, their protégée, was going to go far in her field.
They were right about that. Uta Frith would go on to become one of the biggest names in the field of autism research. In addition to composing her own probing questions about the nature of the condition and designing experiments to answer them, she became the field’s leading “explainer” of autism to the general public. She hosted numerous television programs and was quoted often in the press. Her book, Autism, Explaining the Enigma, was the first one by a hands-on researcher to explain the condition as a matter of scientific interest to a general audience. In its pages, Frith wrote about the experiments performed on Florence Road with the same sense of wonder that had first attracted her and her mentors to autism, the same wonder she then passed down to some of her own brilliant students. She described, in plain English, the nuances of their experiments and framed their findings in a way that suggested that the study of the “autistic” brain was actually the study of all brains. The book would be translated into ten languages and go through several reprints.
Popular curiosity about autism was starting to catch on. The questions asked in London, which picked up pace in the 1970s, were stoking the fire at just the right time. The researchers weren’t finding all the answers; instead, the questions kept leading to more and better questions.