Haven't seen this before

[conuly]

http://www.aspergerjourneys.com/2009/06/02/intense-world-syndrome/

I'm feeling inexplicably exhausted right now, so I'm not going to read it just yet, I'll do that later.

Comments

[dandelion.livejournal.com]

It's an interesting article, but the author does come off as more than a little touchy. The conclusions do seem valid, but things like this grated on me:
"It’s so insulting. I don’t mind a Rat Model of any disease on the planet, but autism is not a disease. It’s who I am. It’s pretty weird to have a Rat Model of Who I Am."
If you take ordinary rats and subject them to stimuli which NT people can cope with and autistic spectrum people can't, all you'll do is prove ordinary rats can cope. Obviously. I know that plenty of autistics don't see autism as a problem or want autism taken away from them (as if that were even possible), but you have to admit that the way an autistic person functions and interprets stimuli is different to how a NT person does, else there wouldn't be an autism label. You'd just be considered neurotypical, when so many of autism's behaviours can't be thought of as typical of the average human population (stimming, fixations, experiencing threat through social interaction, etc). Plenty of people with bipolar disorder, for example, say that the mania and depression is integral to them and they wouldn't want it taken away from them, but that doesn't change the fact that we need models of bipolar disorder to find out what the bipolar label actually means for those people with it. Otherwise, again, we would tell bipolar people that they are normal, and that they ought to experience everything in the same way that non-affected people do. Which they clearly can't.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

I suppose you might come off as "a little touchy" too, if you had to put up with years of people with Neurotypical Syndrome (http://isnt.autistics.org/) making high-handed, condescending and erroneous pronouncements about what you thought, felt and experienced, and what ought to be done about it (for your own good of course.)

Don't know if you're old enough to remember this - I'm guessing not - but there was a time, not so very long ago, when male Experts habitually made exactly the same kind of pronouncements about womens' thoughts, feelings, and experiences, and how they related to female physiology:

"Everything in Freud's patronizing and fearful attitude toward women follows from their lack of a penis, but it is only in his essay The Psychology of Women that Freud makes explicit... the deprecations of women which are implicit in his work. He then prescribes for them the abandonment of the life of the mind, which will interfere with their sexual function. When the psycho-analyzed patient is male, the analyst sets himself the task of developing the man's capacities; but with women patients, the job is to resign them to the limits of their sexuality. As Mr. Rieff puts it: For Freud, "Analysis cannot encourage in women new energies for success and achievement, but only teach them the lesson of rational resignation."
~The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm (http://www.uic.edu/orgs/cwluherstory/CWLUArchive/vaginalmyth.html)

... Women who objected to being defined by those who did not and could not share their experience were considered 'touchy', yes; also 'neurotic', 'hysterical', and a host of other perjorativer labels calculated to discount and marginalize them.

"If you take ordinary rats and subject them to stimuli which NT people can cope with and autistic spectrum people can't, all you'll do is prove ordinary rats can cope."

.... what an astonishing statement. For one thing, there is no such thing as a stimuli with which all NTs can cope, and all auties cannot cope. It doesn't work like that. The hallmark of the autism spectrum is extreme individuality, AKA 'uneven development'.

But, leaving that aside, I'm picturing little lab rats, ordinary non-autistic lab rats, coping with their ordinary neurotypical day of getting dressed in their work clothes, driving their cars to their jobs, getting through a day of phone calls, paperwork and meetings, arranging a date, driving home to shower and change into evening clothes, then going out to a nice restaurant together, going dancing, getting lucky, etc.

(By the way, I'm autie myself, and I can cope with all those things, with ease and enjoyment on a good day. With stress and angst on a bad one, but not such that Herr Doktor Observer would observe it, assuming I was a little autie rat in a lab, trying my best to 'pass' as an ordinary rat.)

The thing I'm saying here, in case I haven't made it clear, is that rats are not humans, humans are not rats, and the vast majority of stimuli that auties have trouble with only exist in human society. They do not exist in rat society, such as it is. Rat life is extremely simple and straightforward, and most of the neccessities for coping with it come as part of the package, i.e. as instinct.

Humans, even auties, are products of human culture, and human culture varies greatly. A child of three is already, and permanently, shaped as an individual by his or her individual human experiences. There are no cultural variances in rat society, because they don't have that much brain. Their cerebral cortexes are miniscule, and practically smooth.

"The dominant feature of the human brain is corticalization. The cerebral cortex in humans is so large that it overshadows every other part of the brain."
~Human Brain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_brain)

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

"Otherwise, again, we would tell bipolar people that they are normal, and that they ought to experience everything in the same way that non-affected people do."

Actually, this happens all the time. And it happens to autistic people all the time as well. It was the constant refrain of my own youth, in fact: "you're no different from anybody else", except when I was hearing "you have such incredible potential". Never mind that these statements are contradictory, and both of them were discounting of my feelings and difficulties.

Dig this little factoid: because I've put in decades of perseverative effort, I can cope with every kind of stimulus an NT can cope with. I can drive in Seattle rush-hour traffic. I can run a chain-saw. I can attend a formal ball in a fancy dress, give a presentation to a room full of strangers in suits, keep a room full of 3-year-olds safe and happy all day, ride a Greyhound bus across country... to name just a few things that a lot of folk, autie or NT, don't cope with well. Whatever I have to do, I can do it - there is nothing I 'can't cope with'.

And along with that, I have the ability to read as fast as I can scroll; to copy-edit with machine-like speed and accuracy; to learn languages as efficiently as a person 1/5 my age; to hear frequencies far above and below the 'normal' range; to tell which string of which violin out of 20 is out of tune; to learn a poem or musical piece on one attempt and remember it for the rest of my life; to play any instrument I can get a clear tone from (i.e. anything but brass or reed) as soon as I pick it up; to scan a person and know what their health problems are at a glance; to run through forest at night without a flashlight; to move around my house almost as easily in pitch-dark as in daylight - including being able to locate any book (of about 800) on my bookshelves by touch; to recognize people by their footsteps alone; to assemble a complex electronic device correctly, without fail, every single time over hundreds of trials....

.... yes indeed, all those things and more are "integral to me", and, rather understandably, I would not want them taken away. Nor, I think, would any NT person who was lucky enough to have them. But no NT person ever will, because it's that very combination of hyper-perception, hyper-attention and hyper-memory that makes it all possible.

You find a rat who can do any of the things I can do, and then we'll examine the potential validity of the Rat Model of Autism.

[queenlyzard.livejournal.com]

This is quite fascinating indeed. It makes a lot of intuitive sense to me, given what little I know about autism (mostly from people like you, Connie). Of course, the intuitive findings are always the ones that require the most proof, in my book.

This theory does go a long way towards explaining, however, why milder versions of autism can be so closely linked with impressive intellectual abilities and only the more severe versions are a true "disability." Like ADD, perhaps, autistic characteristics are in many ways highly adaptive ones-- but, as always, too much of a good thing can be a right disaster.

Best of all, it seems likely that this approach to understanding autism provides a lot more possibility for -- well, I don't want to use the term "treating" it -- but I think the more we understand about why autistic kids withdraw, get stuck, and find the world too difficult to handle, the more we'll be able to find ways to help them accommodate. For starters, it seems like the obvious first step for any autistic child is to keep them in as low-stimulation an environment as possible, at least to begin with, and work from there.