In special education, there’s too much emphasis placed on the deficit and not enough on the strength.
What a horse does under compulsion he does blindly, and his performance is no more beautiful than would be that of a ballet-dancer taught by whip and goad. The performances of horse or man so treated would seem to be displays of clumsy gestures rather than of grace and beauty. What we need is that the horse should of his own accord exhibit his finest airs and paces at set signals.
When something is “all in your mind,” people tend to think that it’s willful, that it’s something you could control if only you tried harder or if you had been trained differently. I’m hoping that the newfound certainty that autism is in your brain and in your genes will affect public attitudes.
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.
Complicating matters even further, on a day-to-day basis, in the same individual, the sensory sensitivities can change, especially when the person is tired or stressed. These.
People who are attached to each other develop a social dependence on each other that’s based in a physical dependence on brain opiates.
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.
Neuroanatomy isn’t destiny. Neither is genetics. They don’t define who you will be. But they do define who you might be. They define who you can be.
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.
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.
Impaired social interactions and withdrawal may not be the result of a lack of compassion, incapability to put oneself into someone else’s position or lack of emotionality.
The Mind of a Mnemonist.
Neurotypical people seem to think and feel that it’s okay to be rigid as long as their ideas are shared by enough people.
To destroy other people’s culture is to rob them of immortality.
The body and the brain aren’t two different things, controlled by two completely different sets of genes. Many of the same chemicals that work in your heart and organs also work in your brain, and many genes do one thing.
For me and other people on the autism spectrum, sensory experiences that have little or no effect on neurotypical people can be severe life stressors for us. Loud noises hurt my ears like a dentist’s drill hitting a nerve. For.
Many of these individuals agree that sensory issues are the primary challenge of autism in their daily lives. There.
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.
We’d discuss one unwritten rule and a hundred exceptions would instantaneously appear.
During meals, I was taught table manners, and I was not allowed to twirl my fork around over my head. The only time I could revert back to autism was for one hour after lunch. The rest of the day, I had to live in a nonrocking, nontwirling world.
One of the most profound mysteries of autism has been the remarkable ability of most autistic people to excel at visual spatial skills while performing so poorly at verbal skills.