This seems to do a nice job capturing alot of previous discussion on list with the addition of some new angles Dee
My comments throughout. No reflection on Dee or anyone else, except perhaps the psychiatric industry . . .
http://www.msnbc.com/news/958646.asp?cp1=1
Girls, Boys and Autism
By Geoffrey Cowley NEWSWEEK
Sept. 8 issue � Andrew Bacalao has a good, sharp mind. At 13, he’s a decent pianist, a devotee of Frank Lloyd Wright, a master at videogames and jigsaw puzzles. He remembers phone numbers like a Pocket PC, and he can dismantle a radio or a flashlight in the time it takes some people to find the power switch.
BUT DROP IN ON ANDREW at home in Oak Park, Ill., and you quickly
sense that something is amiss. “Can you look at her?” his mom, Dr. Cindy
Mears, prompts, as a NEWSWEEK correspondent greets him in the living room.
He stays on the couch, feet up, mesmerized by a handheld game called Bop It
Extreme. Soon he’s making soap bubbles and running outside to bang on the
windows. Andrew does eventually talk, but conversation doesn’t come easily.
When his mom asks him not to burp, he tells the guest, “I’m going to
unbutton your outfit.” He’s merely offering to take her jacket�and he seems
to think his choice of words is just fine.
What do you make of such a kid? A generation ago, he might have been
written off as a discipline problem or a psychopath�someone who insiists on
misbehaving even though he’s smart enough to know better. But we now know
there are different kinds of intelligence, which can crop up in unusual
combinations. The world, as it turns out, is full of people who find fractal
geometry easier than small talk, people who can spot a tiny lesion on a
chest X-ray but can’t tell a smile from a smirk. Most of these folks qualify
as “autistic,” but not in the traditional sense. Classic autism is a
devastating neurological disorder. Though its causes are unclear, it has a
strong genetic component and is marked by rapid brain growth during early
childhood. Many sufferers are mentally retarded and require lifelong
institutional care. But autism has many other faces. The condition, as
experts now conceive it, is like high blood pressure�a “specctrum disorder”
in which affected people differ from the rest of us only by degrees. The
question is, degrees of what? Can autistic tendencies be measured on some
scale? If so, is there a clear boundary between normal and abnormal? And is
abnormality always a bad thing? What promise does life hold for people like
Andrew?
Or perhaps the problem is that there are different degrees of "normal" rather than one monolithic category.
One might even go so far as to ask if there might not be over six billion different degrees of "normal" . . .
Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen has a thesis
that bears on all these questions. In a bold new book called “The Essential
Difference,” he de-fines autism as an imbalance between two kinds of
intelligence: the kind used to understand people (he calls it “empathizing”)
and the kind used to understand things (“systemizing”). Though most of us
have both abilities, studies suggest that females are better than males at
empathizing, while males have a stronger knack for systemizing. By
Baron-Cohen’s account, autism is just an exaggerated version of the male
profile�an extreme fondness for rule-based systems, coupled with an
inability to intuit people’s feelings and intentions. The truth may not be
quite that simple, but the concepts of “E” and “S” offer a powerful new
framework for thinking about boys, girls and autism. If Baron-Cohen is
right, autism is not just a disease in need of a cure. It’s a mental style
that people can learn to accommodate. Sometimes it’s even a gift.
It’s no secret that autism affects boys more than girls. Males
account for more than 80 percent of the million-plus Americans with autistic
disorders. Are these conditions partly an expression of male thought
patterns? Do boys live closer to the autistic spectrum than girls? Not in
every case. But when researchers study groups of people�infants, todddlers,
teens or adults�an interesting pattern emerges. Newborn girls gaze llonger at
faces than at mechanical mobiles, while boys show the opposite preference.
By the age of 3, girls are more adept than boys at imagining fictional
characters’ feelings, and by 7 they’re better at identifying a faux pas in a
story. The disparity is just as striking when adults are asked to interpret
facial expressions and tones of voice. Women rule.
Red Flags
Kids with classic autism are typically diagnosed at the age of 3, but experts say earlier intervention can give them a better shot at a normal life. Parents should contact a developmental pediatrician if their child:
Does not babble at 1 year
As opposed to those adults we all know who babble continuously . . .
Begins developing language, then stops abruptly
Doesn't respond to his name, but has normal hearing
Cat.
Doesn't point to things to direct his mother's attention
Maybe he's already found that she doesn't give him the cookie even if he points, so what's the point of pointing?
Avoids eye contact and cuddling
Males aren’t hopeless, though.
Well, gee, I'm glad to hear that.
They show a lifelong advantage on tests of spatial and mechanical reasoning. In fact they’re nearly twice as likely as women to score more than 700 on the SAT math test, and four times as likely to become engineers. Social conditioning may account for some of that gap. It may also help explain the thrill that 2-year-old boys get from trucks, blocks and other mechanical toys. But there has to be more to the story. Consider what happened when psychologists Gerianne Alexander and Melissa Hines tried out six toys on vervet monkeys at UCLA’s Non-Human Primate Laboratory. Male monkeys favored the boy toys (a ball and a car). Females spent more time with a doll and a pot.
Is the latter a reference to how long they take in the bathroom?
And the gender-neutral toys (a picture book and a stuffed dog) got equal attention from both groups. The findings suggest that sex hormones may sculpt our brains as well as our bodies, priming males and females for different styles of thought�whhat Baron-Cohen calls a “Type E” style and a “Type S” style.
And what the French have for years, if not centuries, referred to enthusiastically as "Vive la difference!"
It’s not hard to see how autism fits into this scheme. In its
classic form, the condition leaves people virtually devoid of social
impulses. Autistic kids have trouble communicating, and games like peekaboo
leave them cold. They seem to perceive people as unpredictable objects. Yet
they often excel at systemizing. “Even young autistic children love to
classify and order things,” says Dr. Bryna Siegel of the University of
California, San Francisco. “They’re interested in categorical information.”
Siegel recalls a mother’s story about taking her autistic son and
nonautistic daughters to see “Finding Nemo,” a movie about a clown fish who
loses his mom and gets separated from his dad. “The little girls wanted to
know if Nemo was scared,” she says. “The autistic boy wanted to know exactly
what clown fish eat.”
Autistic people are famous for collecting such facts, and many can
recall them with breathtaking precision. Patricia Juhrs, director of a
Rockville, Md., group called Community Services for Autistic Adults and
Children, has an adult client who has memorized every top-10 song list
Billboard magazine has published since 1947. Tell him which day you were
born, and he’ll tell you what was playing on the radio. Even when they lack
such savant skills, autistic people often excel at mundane, detail-oriented
tasks. “I maintain that we should have autistic people running the scanners
at airports,” says Catherine Johnson, an author and activist whose two
autistic sons amuse themselves by putting together jigsaw puzzles with the
picture-side down. “No normal human being can process that much detail.”
She’s half joking, but studies support her contention. As you’d
expect, autistic people score even lower than typical males on tests that
involve predicting people’s feelings and interpreting their facial
expressions. But when challenged to find the triangle embedded in a complex
design, or predict the behavior of a rod attached to a lever, they fare as
well as normal males, if not better. The same pattern holds when autistic
people are polled directly about empathizing (“I can pick up quickly if
someone says one thing and means another”) and systemizing (“I am fascinated
by how machines work”). In a recently published study, Baron-Cohen’s team
found that mildly autistic adults trailed normal women and men on a 40-item
empathy test, but trumped both groups on a systemizing survey. In short,
they were more male than the men.
The findings square nicely with Baron-Cohen’s model, but the model
takes us only so far. As it turns out, autistic people are not just extreme
systemizers. They systemize in a distinct and unusual way. When normally
developing kids draw a picture of a train, they start with a gestalt, or
general idea: a series of long, flat rectangles with wheels underneath.
Autistic kids often start with peripheral details and expand them into
dazzling 3-D renderings. “They don’t do it in a logical order,” says Siegel
of UCSF.
According to his definition of "logic" . . .
“They do it as you would if you were tracing.” Stephen Wiltshire, 29, had never spoken when he started sketching at the age of 5. He still lives with his mother in West London, but he has since achieved world renown for his visionary portraits of buildings and vehicles. “Cadillac, Chevy, Lincoln,” he says when asked about his passions. “Sears Tower, the Frick, the Chrysler building.” His speech, like his work, is virtually free of generalizations. As a friend once observed, he is “rooted in the literal, the concrete.”
Wiltshire may have Type S tastes, but his avoidance of abstractions
can’t be passed off as a typical Type S tendency. It gets at something more
specific, says neuroscientist Laurent Mottron of Montreal’s Hopital
Riviere-des-Prairies. It reveals a preference for parts over wholes, a
tendency to process information one piece at a time instead of filtering it
through general categories. Most of us simplify the world to make it more
manageable. Whether we’re taking in sights, sounds or sentences, our brains
ignore countless details to create useful gestalts. Autistic people make
generalizations, too (“it’s a train,” “it’s a blender”), but studies
suggest
they work from the bottom up, attending doggedly to everything their senses
take in. That has nothing to do with maleness, but it helps explain various
aspects of autism�the encyclopedic memory, the lightning-fast calcullation
and the extreme sensitivity to sounds, lights and textures. It also ties in
neatly with recent studies linking autism to superfast brain growth during
the first years of life. Researchers believe that process may generate more
sensory neurons than the brain can integrate into coherent networks.
Baron-Cohen doesn’t dispute any of this. The E-S model may not
capture all the nuances of autism, he says, but it sheds new light on the
narrow interests and repetitive behaviors that people across the autistic
spectrum display. “Consider the child who can spend hours watching how a
glass bottle rotates in the sunlight but who cannot talk or make eye
contact,” he says. “The old theories said that this was purposeless
repetitive behavior. The new theory says that the child, given his or her
IQ, may be doing something intelligent: looking for predictable rules or
patterns in the data.” In other words, the E-S model may be incomplete but
it’s still valuable�for it reveals the sanity and dignity off autistic
behavior. “People with Asperger’s syndrome [a mild form of autism] are like
saltwater fish forced to live in fresh water,” a patient once explained to
Baron-Cohen. “We’re fine if you put us into the right environment. But when
the person and the environment don’t match, we seem disabled.”
Some advocates insist that conditions like Asperger’s syndrome are
not disorders at all, just personality variants that have been misconstrued
as defects. They believe that people at the high-functioning end of the
autistic spectrum should be spared psychiatric labels. But when the labels
are applied without stigma, they can be liberating.
Is it even possible to apply any label to a person without any trace of stigma?
Like father, like son: Dave Spicer didn't know he had autism till his son
Andrew was diagnosed with the disease
Dave Spicer had never thought of himself as autistic until 1994,
when his 8-year-old son, Andrew, got a formal diagnosis and he was diagnosed
too. Spicer, then 46, was a computer programmer and system designer, but his
social ineptitude had cost him two marriages and blighted his career. He
recalls leaving business meetings thinking all had gone well, only to
discover that he had annoyed or offended people. “A social situation is like
a square dance where the caller is speaking Swahili,” he says. “There will
be a cue and I won’t get it, and I’ll stumble into people.” Spicer’s son is
now thriving in a mainstream high school after several years of special
education, and Spicer himself has learned to play to his strengths. He has
gone back to college. He socializes on his own terms, and doesn’t berate
himself for being different. “My favorite story about autism is ‘The Emperor
’s New Clothes’,” he says. “The boy didn’t understand social norms, but he
spoke the truth. I think society needs us.”
Gifted geeks aren’t the only ones saying that. Juhrs, the
social-service organizer, has found that even profoundly autistic adults are
often highly employable. “If they’re matched properly with work they enjoy,”
she says, “they can do as well or better than people who aren’t disabled.”
In seeking out jobs for her clients, Juhrs never appeals to employers for
charity. She asks if there are jobs they’ve had trouble filling. As it turns
out, the Type S tasks that her people thrive on�inspecting garments,, coding
inventory, assembling components for the fuses on nuclear submarines—are
often the same ones that ordinary people can’t stand. “Once our folks get
into going to work, they don’t want to miss a day,” she says. “We have to
talk them into holidays.”
Tapping these strengths makes obvious sense, but the deficits
associated with autism are just as real. Are people like Spicer destined to
fail in love and the workplace, or can their social handicaps be conquered?
Unlike systemizing, empathy involves snap, intuitive judgments that you can’
t always make by following a recipe. “Most people learn to interact socially
just by observation,” says Stephen Shore, a mildly autistic Boston
University doctoral student who heads the Asperger’s Association of New
England. “People on the autistic spectrum regard things as a set of rules.
We have to figure them out or be taught.” Like Tom Hanks in “Big,” Shore
thought sleepover the first time a woman invited him to spend the night. But
through painstaking study and practice, he has developed a good enough
social repertoire to sustain a career and a 13-year marriage.
Was Shore just lucky, or is there a lesson to be drawn from his
experience? Can people on the autistic spectrum learn to compensate for
their lack of natural empathizing ability? The answer depends on the person
and the condition. Siegel estimates that 25 percent of classically autistic
children respond to intensive interventions and that 7 percent do well
enough to attend mainstream schools and lead normal lives. The response
rates are much higher among mildly affected kids, and experts agree that
early intervention is the key to success. “The earlier you can get into a
treatment program,” says Andy Shih of the National Alliance for Autism
Research, “the better the prognosis.”
The programs go by different names�applied behavioral analyssis,
discreet trial training, pivotal response treatment�but most of themm use
simple conditioning exercises to open lines of communication. “With an
average child, you can point to something red and ask what color it is,”
says psychologist Robert Koegel of the University of California, Santa
Barbara. “Autistic kids are screaming, trying to get out of it. But what if
they love M&Ms? When we ask which one is red, they take a red one. They’re
highly motivated.” Naming colors is simpler than decoding social signals,
but they, too, can be mastered by unconventional means. Baron-Cohen’s team
has developed an interactive computer program that pairs 418 emotions with
distinct facial expressions. Preliminary studies suggest that anyone,
autistic or not, can develop a better eye for flattery, boredom or scorn
simply by practicing for 10 weeks with these electronic flashcards.
As fate would have it, some of the best natural readers of feelings
and faces are themselves profoundly disabled. People with a rare genetic
disorder called Williams syndrome are often severely retarded. Yet they’re
hypersocial, highly verbal and often deeply empathetic. “In some ways,” says
research psychologist Teresa Doyle of the Salk Institute, “Williams syndrome
is almost an opposite of autism.” Ten-year-old A. J. Arciniega will never
play Bop It Extreme the way Andrew Bacalao does, let alone dismantle a
radio. But he shakes hands eagerly when greeted by a NEWSWEEK correspondent,
and gladly engages in conversation, asking about the visitor’s children and
their interests. Settling in with a wordless picture book, he pages through
the story of a boy and a dog who lose their frog and set out to find him.
There is no plot in A.J.’s telling, but his feeling for the characters is
irrepressible. “Ron! Ron! Where are you?” he exclaims when the boy is shown
calling for his frog. ” ‘Woof! Woof!’ the dog moans.” Neither Andrew nor
A.J. is in for an easy life�as Baron-Cohen might say, things are simmpler in
the middle of the E-S spectrum. But the world will be richer for both of
them.
So, although as anyone who has been on this list knows for long knows how much I hate PC-speak, perhaps the term "differently-abled" is a good replacement for "disabled" after all . . .
Glass Half Full (Though It Probably Needs Washing If It's In My Kitchen) Maru
-- Ronn! :)
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