A Follow-up on Teaching Children with Autism to Talk About Things Happening Inside Themselves
I have often had what I think is a great new idea for research, treatment, or other aspect of practice. Then, I start to dig into the scientific literature and determine what is known about the topic. But once I start to dig, I frequently find that my idea has already been taken, extensively discussed, researched, and evaluated. What’s going on?
This is such a common occurrence that I developed a hypothesis that might explain this phenomenon. My premise–people are going back in time, stealing my ideas, and publishing them before I have a chance to do so. But as it turns out, people coming up with similar ideas in scientific and innovative fields is very common, and there is a much more plausible hypothesis to explain this phenomenon–the “Adjacent Possible.” The adjacent possible hypothesis states that in most fields, new ideas come from possible new combinations at the current cutting edge.
Therefore, my friend Katie and her students probably did not travel through time to steal my idea on how to teach children with autism to talk about private events. They did years of work to publish a great paper on this topic, while I just spend an hour or two on my blog. It may seem like an amazing coincidence that the procedures are nearly identical and were published at nearly the same time. But in science, this happens all the time. It just so happens that teaching children with autism to talk about private events is a common problem in the field, so it makes sense that multiple people would be thinking about it.
In the old days, some researchers hid their program write-ups and made them confidential. Frequently, they refused to share these write-ups; it was a big challenge to locate material as simple as prompting and fading procedures for teaching skills like imitation or matching. Often, these would be printed with warnings about who could and could not use the plans. Thankfully, those days are mostly behind us. Sharing ideas widely, with many people working on the adjacent possible, leads to Poogi for all of us.