What I've tried to do is combine both my personal experiences with scientific research. I like to cross the divide between the personal world and the scientific world.
When I was in high school and college, I thought everybody could think in pictures. And my first inkling to my thinking was even different was when I was in college and I read an article about, you know, some scientist said that the caveman could not have designed tools until they had language.
From a scientific standpoint, Aspergers and autism are one syndrome. Aspergers is part of the autism spectrum, not a separate disorder.
One big question that's come up is: Has autism increased on the mild side of things? I don't think so - they've always been here. Some of this is increased detection.
When you take a drug to treat high blood pressure or diabetes, you have an objective test to measure blood pressure and the amount of sugar in the blood. It is straight-forward. With autism, you are looking for changes in behavior.
I was fascinated with optical illusions.
I replaced emotional complexity with visual and intellectual complexity. I questioned everything and looked to logic, science, and intellect for answers.
Nature is cruel, but we don't have to be.
There's a saying in engineering: You can build things cheap, fast, or right, but not all three.
And while we are on the subject of medication you always need to look at risk versus benefit.
DIFFERENT NOT LESS.
Teachers who work with autistic children need to understand associative thought patterns.
There is a tremendous range of children with a PDD label.
I had people in my life who didn't give up on me: my mother, my aunt, my science teacher. I had one-on-one speech therapy. I had a nanny who spent all day playing turn-taking games with me.
You have got to keep autistic children engaged with the world. You cannot let them tune out.
Many autistic children like to smell things, and smell may provide more reliable information about their surroundings than either vision or hearing.
The Intense World paper proposed that if the amygdala, which is associated with emotional responses, including fear, is affected by sensory overload, then certain responses that look antisocial actually aren't.
Some people with autism who don't talk, all they hear are vowel sounds. Like if I said 'cup,' they might just hear 'uh.'
I think that autistic brains tend to be specialized brains. Autistic people tend to be less social. It takes a ton of processor space in the brain to have all the social circuits.
As you may know, some of the stereotyped behaviors exhibited by autistic children are also found in zoo animals who are raised in a barren environment.
If you have autism in the family history, you still vaccinate. Delay it a bit, space them out.
Many of these individuals agree that sensory issues are the primary challenge of autism in their daily lives.
Eye contact is still difficult for me in noisy rooms because it interferes with hearing. It's like my brain's wiring lets only one sense function or the other, but sometimes not both at the same time. In noisy rooms, I have to concentrate on hearing. Some.
Some autistic children cannot stand the sound of certain voices. I have come across cases where teachers tell me that certain children have problems with their voice or another person's voice. This problem tends to be related to high-pitched ladies' voices.
Thomas McKean, an autistic champion of self-advocacy.
In dealing with autism, I'm certainly not saying we should lose sight of the need to work on deficits, But the focus on deficits is so intense and so automatic that people lose sight of the strengths.
If language naturally evolves to serve the needs of tiny rodents with tiny rodent brains, then what's unique about language isn't the brilliant humans who invented it to communicate high-level abstract thoughts. What's unique about language is that the creatures who develop it are highly vulnerable to being eaten.
Computerized medical records will enable statistical analysis to be used to determine which treatments are most effective.
Research has shown that a barren environment is much more damaging to baby animals than it is to adult animals. It does not hurt the adult animals the same way it damages babies.
I like to figure things out and solve problems.
I had problems getting my words out. If people spoke directly to me, I understood what they said. But when the grownups got to yakking really fast by themselves, it just sounded like 'oi oi.' I thought grownups had a separate language. I've now figured out I was not hearing the hard consonant sounds.
Animals like novelty if they can choose to investigate it; they fear novelty if you shove it in their faces.
Normal people have an incredible lack of empathy. They have good emotional empathy, but they don't have much empathy for the autistic kid who is screaming at the baseball game because he can't stand the sensory overload. Or the autistic kid having a meltdown in the school cafeteria because there's too much stimulation.
I am different, not less.
Language just gradually came in, one or two stressed words a time. Before then, I would just scream. I couldn't talk. I couldn't get my words out. So the only way I could tell someone what I wanted was to scream. If I didn't want to wear a hat, the only way I knew to communicate was screaming and throwing it on the floor.
My thinking pattern always starts with specifics and works toward generalization in an associational and nonsequential way.
At the age of three, Tito Mukhopadhyay was diagnosed with severe autism, but his mother, Soma, refused to accept the conventional wisdom of the time that her son would be unable to interact with the outside world. She read to him, taught him to write in English, and challenged him to write his own stories.
Animals make us Human.
I get great satisfaction out of doing clever things with my mind, but I don't know what it is like to feel rapturous joy.
I like to cross the divide between the personal world and the scientific world.
One of the problems in understanding sensory issues is that sensory sensitivities are very variable, among individuals and within the same individual. A person can be hyper-sensitive in one area (like hearing) and hypo-sensitive in another (like touch). One.
My problems are sort of more on a nuisance level. I can't stand scratchy clothes, I've got to have soft kinds of cotton against my skin, and I don't know why some 100% cotton t-shirts itch and others don't; it has something to do with the weave.
Children between the ages of five to ten years are even more variable. They are going to vary from very high functioning, capable of doing normal school work, to nonverbal who have all kinds of neurological problems.
There's a point where anecdotal evidence becomes truth.
Costs for liability insurance are higher than costs for many procedures. There is a need to reform liability laws to stop out-of-control health care costs.
People are always looking for the single magic bullet that will totally change everything. There is no single magic bullet.
I was expected to sit at the table, learn how to eat properly.
Kanner had cause and effect backward. The child wasn't behaving in a psychically isolated or physically destructive manner because the parents were emotionally distant. Instead, the.
I think the core criterion is the social awkwardness, but the sensory issues are a serious problem in many, many cases of autism, and they make it impossible to operate in the environment where you're supposed to be social.
