Group items tagged

all the success stories related inside the pages of EPSS are accompanied by fortuitous exposure to various forms of structured material, clearly marking out the most promising path for autistic development and growth.

And of course these discussions fly in the face of the current clamor for early intervention in autism, where it would seem the goal is always to yank the autistic child away as early as possible from his or her preferred method of engaging the world, and substitute instead an intense bombardment of socially based indoctrination, hoping to turn the child around while there is still time for the “malleable” brain to be re-molded.

In my opinion, it is no mere coincidence that the very same elements that stand at the core of the Mottron team's affirmative description of autistic perception and cognition are also the very same elements that stand at the core of humanity’s sudden departure off the savannah and leap into the modern world.

Admittedly, a thorough discussion of such a topic would be much too large for inclusion in an academic research paper such as EPSS, but the fact that the Mottron team does not mention, or even hint at, the connection between the features of autistic perception and the features of human cognitive history leave it unclear whether the team has ever considered such a connection.

At this point in time, the Mottron team seems to be the only autism research team heading in a positive and enlightening direction—a direction that is constructive for autistic individuals everywhere—and I look forward to all their future contributions.

Look at the content of any intelligence test—language, arithmetic, patterns, designs. What we measure with the aid of those I.Q. booklets are not the abilities we inherited from out our animal past, but instead their exact counterpart; we measure only those skills the species has been adding throughout all its history since. In some sense, an intelligence test measures the modernness of an individual; an intelligence test measures an individual’s ability to appropriate for himself the same set of skills the species has been appropriating as a whole—skills that do not find their origin in our biological nature, but instead owe their existence to the strange, brewing mixture of non-biological pattern, structure and form that has been rapidly taking shape all around us.

The unusual characteristics of humanity’s transformational individuals are not the result of their genius, they are genius’s prerequisite

But counter to prevailing wisdom, there are many autistic individuals—most likely a majority—who do make substantial progress by means of an alternative perceptual course, a course that allows them not only to navigate meaningfully their surrounding world, but also to assimilate, if somewhat awkwardly and belatedly, to the human species itself (and thereby explaining how autism, estimated to be present in nearly one percent of the human population, could go entirely unrecognized until as recently as sixty-five years ago).

all autistic individuals must crystallize their existence by means of this alternative perceptual course—it becomes, in essence, autism’s most salient feature.

The unusual behaviors and interests of autistic children—lining up toys, staring at ceiling fans, twirling, flapping hands repeatedly, fascination with knobs, buttons, switches, letters, shapes and digits, watching the same video again and again, singing the same song over and over—these activities betray a form of perception completely unlike that of most other children, a perception noticeably absent in social and biological focus, but also noticeably drawn to symmetry, repetition and pattern.

The unusual routines of autistic children are the natural, indeed the expected, mode of expression for a form of perception engaged primarily by the structural aspects of the non-social, non-biological world.

Autistic individuals would have been the first to notice the inherent structure contained in the natural world—the geometry of plants, the isomorphisms of natural objects, the logic of the celestial seasons—only they would have had motivation to embrace such form, only they would have had the need to perceive nature’s symmetry, repetition and pattern in order to form their cognitive grounding.

We know only bits and pieces about the four Greeks on Professor Flynn’s list, but filling in with the traits from the list’s more modern members, we can reasonably summarize all the unifying characteristics: late- or strange-talking, socially awkward, irascible, obsessed with structure, compelled by form, unusually—not necessarily greatly—intelligent.

The continuing medicalization of autism, the insistent demonization of autism’s spontaneous effect—these carry the danger of an unforeseen consequence. For the cure of autism will not be the end of a tragic brain disorder; autism’s eradication will not see the passing of a troubling mental disease. The removal of autism from the entire human species will produce only an ironic solution to the mystery of our expanding human intelligence, it will produce the ignoble end to the Flynn effect.

When confronted by data that runs counter to our accustomed way of seeing things, we as humans have but two choices: we can try to explain the results away, or we can adjust our perception of the experienced world. The former choice paves the all-too-common road of modern academic science; the latter, as described above, walks the more promising path of genius.

Autism is not a mental illness, not a brain disorder, it is instead the source of humanity’s changing perception of its experienced world; it is, with care and understanding, genius’s fertile soil.

The upshot of these differences is that the columns in an autistic brain seem to be more connected than normal with their close neighbours, and less connected with their distant ones. Though it is an interpretative stretch, that pattern of connection might reduce a person’s ability to generalise (since disparate data are less easily integrated) and increase his ability to concentrate (by drawing together similar inputs).

Dr Snyder argues that savant skills are latent in everyone, but that access to them is inhibited in non-savants by other neurological processes. He is able to remove this inhibition using a technique called repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation.