Little professor

I’ve been wanting to continue posting about what I was like growing up, hopefully to help people understand Asperger’s syndrome better.  But I’ve been a little nervous about writing this part, because it feels a bit like bragging.  It’s honestly not my purpose to boast, though, and I hope it will make sense once you’ve read the rest.

Hans Asperger described the children he studied during the 1940s as “little professors,” because they tended to study a specific interest in great detail, and then repeat the facts they had learned to anyone who would listen.  They would use formal language as if they were delivering a lecture, an effect that can seem comical coming from a young child.

I definitely had the “little professor” trait.  I learned to read when I was quite young– I honestly can’t remember not being able to.  My favorite sort of books to read were reference books that used pictures and symbols to communicate information along with words.  I would spend hours reading these books over and over again.

What sorts of things captured my interest?

• Road maps.  A long while ago, I posted a funny story about how one year I said my favorite Christmas gift was a Philadelphia road map.  I was fascinated by the symbols used on maps for different types of roads and the names of the roads themselves.  I could watch for the road names on signs when I was riding in the car and figure out where all of the places we visited were.  At home, I would spread the map out on the floor and use highlighters to trace paths on it.  When my youngest brother Andrew was born, I told my grandparents how to get to the hospital when I went with them to visit my Mom for the first time.  I was four years old.
• The states in the U.S.A. and the countries of the world.  I had an old atlas in my room that I turned through until the pages were falling out. I liked how each country was marked by a change in color and had its own flag.  Finding all of the countries on each map was like a game, especially in the case of tiny ones like Liechtenstein.  Before long, I could draw a map of state or country borders from memory.
•  The bones and organs of the body.  Another of my favorite books was a human anatomy book; it was like a map of the inside of the body.  I liked learning all of the strange names for bones– vertebrae, phalanges, scapula, femur– and I could feel where they were inside me.  I read about the path that food takes through the body after you eat it.  I learned about the circulatory system (heart and blood vessels) and respiratory system (lungs).  I liked how I could ask my Dad, the doctor, any question, and he would know the answer to it.
• Astronomy.  I loved learning facts about the planets.  Each one has its own day (Jupiter’s is 10 hours; Venus’s is 243 days) and its own year (Mercury’s is 88 days; Pluto’s is almost 250 years).  On some planets, I would weigh just a couple of pounds; on others, I would weigh a ton.  Then there were the constellations– 88 of them, just as many as there are keys on a piano.  I had a wonderful book by children’s author H.A. Rey that taught me how to recognize the brightest constellations in the sky, but I wanted to learn about all of them, even the ones without any bright stars, like Lacerta the lizard and Camelopardalis the giraffe.
• Math.  Before I was old enough to start school, I did math workbooks for fun.  Really!  I enjoyed books that taught arithmetic by lining up rows of circles or squares so I could see what 9 + 5 or 3 x 10 looked like.  I would spend hours drawing squares so I could see what a hundred looked like– then a thousand.  (It didn’t occur to me until just now that I seem to have been a very visual learner.  Strange, because I’m actually diagnosed as having a non-verbal learning disability.  Are diagrams and maps considered verbal or non-verbal information?)

I’ve been thinking about why children with Asperger’s display the “little professor” behavior.  Some of the writing I’ve seen on the subject argues that these children are merely “parroting” information they’ve heard or read and don’t really understand the complicated subjects they are talking about.

An Asperger’s life story

I’m working on Flash homework right now, so I don’t have as much time as I’d like to comment, but I came across a fascinating site yesterday.  It’s an autobiographical account by a 35-year-old woman with Asperger’s syndrome about her experiences as a young child, going to school, growing up, and looking for a place in the world:

My Asperger’s Syndrome Story

Like me, she grew up before anyone knew about Asperger’s, which in her case led to a lot of misunderstandings and hardships when her behavior just didn’t seem to make sense to those around her.  Some parts of her story are very sad, but I think she tells it very well.  There’s a lot in it to think about, as it relates to both children and adults with autism.

I’ve been wanting to describe a little more about my own experiences growing up (a process I’m not done with yet!).  Reading this account again makes me thankful for parents, teachers, and classmates who were willing to let me do my own thing or overlook my weirdness at times; I was spared a lot of unnecessary hardships because of the kindness of others.

I hope I can post more soon!

20/20 story: Carly Fleischmann

Since I quoted Carly Fleischmann in my post yesterday, I wanted to share the video I saw about her online.  She also blogs and posts on Twitter.

One of the things I thought was interesting about the video was that writing was not an easy process for Carly, even though she had plenty to say.  The first time she tried writing, she threw up after it was done.  It took months for her to write again after the first time she tried it.  The video shows how excruciatingly slow it can be even now for her to get the words out.  Honestly, I wasn’t expecting that, but it makes perfect sense.

If this had been a movie script instead of a real-life story, I’d imagine it would show someone who had never been able to communicate in words before being incredibly relieved and suddenly writing great volumes of words.  But this isn’t a movie script.

Writing isn’t easy, and I think it can be even tougher if you’re accustomed to your thoughts going a lot faster than you can write.  I can identify with the experience of being stuck in front of a blank screen for hours, or erasing and rewriting the same sentence again and again, and I don’t experience the painful physical sensations that Carly writes about.  One of the most interesting things to me about the video is how it shows her perseverance.

I hope and pray that the video will help people to understand autistics a little better; I think it has done so for me.  Another thought that occurs to me is that I also hope parents of autistic children don’t expect them to be exactly like Carly.  There’s only one person like her in the world, just like there’s only one person like me, and only one person like your child.  Everyone has their own personality, strengths, and weaknesses.

Eye contact

Why do so many of us on the autistic spectrum have trouble making eye contact?  Lack of eye contact seems to be one of the traits most often named as going along with autism and Asperger’s syndrome.  Maybe that’s because eye contact is such an automatic thing for most people, they notice when it’s missing or brief, even in a young child.

Think of how often people attach significance to eye contact or its absence:  “I could see it in his eyes.”  “She couldn’t even look me in the eye when she told me.”  “He looked nervous; his eyes were constantly darting back and forth.”  These sorts of conclusions aren’t always right, particularly with an autistic person, because it’s very possible to be sending out a signal you don’t mean to without realizing it.  Someone might think I am looking down because I’m embarrassed by what I’m trying to say, when I’m actually just trying to concentrate on what I’m saying.

This is just a guess, but I don’t think that things like eye contact or body language are innate, because it is possible to learn them and improve throughout your life; it’s just that learning to make “normal” eye contact usually seems to take a lot more work for autistics than for others, and it often needs to be a conscious effort rather than something that we absorb automatically.

But what is it about the way our brains are wired that causes such a difference?  One theory comes from observations of brain activity in both autistic and non-autistic people as they performed a task involving face recognition.  Each hemisphere of the brain has a bundle of neurons deep inside it called the amygdala, and several studies have indicated that these parts of the brain behave differently in autistics than they do in non-autistics.

Here’s where it gets confusing.  I was all set to explain how experiments showed activity in the amygdalae for non-autistic people when they looked at human face to identify it or tried to read its emotions, while autistics showed little or no activity in the amygdalae.  That’s what a study in 2000 found.

But then I found a 2009 paper that reported the exact opposite!  This study concluded that there was actually more activity in the amygdalae of an autistic brain than there tended to be in a non-autistic brain.  When it comes to how the brain works, there’s a whole lot we don’t understand.

But anyway, the theory I’d heard before was that, for whatever reason, the part of the brain that most people use to process human faces as a special category of information doesn’t operate the same way in an autistic person.  Because of this, faces are processed the same way anything else is– a collection of visual information without any special “markers.”

So maybe autistics don’t tend to make eye contact because our brains don’t “latch on” to human faces as different or more significant than their surroundings in the way that neurotypical brains do.

When I heard this explanation, I thought it was interesting, but something about it didn’t seem quite right.  It wasn’t until I saw an ABC news segment about a remarkable girl named Carly Fleischmann that I was able to put it into words.

Storycorps video: A boy with Asperger’s interviews his mother

A friend of mine shared this video with me, and I wanted to post it here.  This video was made from an audio recording of a 12-year-old boy named Joshua interviewing his mother.  Animation was added to go with the audio.  It’s really sweet, and I can see a little bit of myself in him.

Here’s the original link to the movie:  http://storycorps.org/animation/q-and-a/

I was having some trouble getting the movie to run at that site, so here’s another one you can try if that happens to you too:  http://rauchbrothers.com/video/explore/q-and-a/

Adventures in faceblindness

Overall, I think it has been great being back in school again.  It gives me a chance to interact with people near my own age and work on my social skills, an area in which I’m often very uncertain.  But from time to time, I’m reminded that my mind just doesn’t seem to work the same way as other people’s.

On the morning of my final presentation in Photoshop class, I was walking to my third-floor classroom, and as I entered the stairwell, I held the door open for a young woman, and she smiled at me.

I thought it was nice of her to do that, as not many people smile at strangers early in the morning.  As I walked up the stairs a few steps ahead of her, I expected her to leave the stairwell at the second floor.  (I often find myself keeping track of where other people are going and sometimes hoping they will go another direction, as I feel more self-conscious if I know someone else can see me.)

But the woman kept following me up to the top floor of the building, and she was still following me down the hall toward my classroom!

As I neared the classroom, I began to suspect what turned out to be the case.  She had been one of my classmates in that class this whole quarter!  Her smile had been one of recognition, but embarrassingly, I wasn’t able to recognize her outside of the classroom.  It was only after she sat down in her usual seat two chairs away from me that I was able to remember that I had seen her before.   

Literal thinking and literal speech

One trait that often comes along with Asperger’s is a very literal mind. In my mind, words tend to correspond to specific concepts, and the construction of a sentence is a lot like the building of a mathematical formula– it’s meant to communicate (usually) one particular thing.

Of course, language is much more complicated than that. Sometimes two completely distinct concepts are represented by the same word. Often, the same word can have different meanings depending on the context of the words around it or the context of the entire conversation. And there are endless ways to play with this capacity for words to mean different things– poetry, metaphor, puns are all possible because of all this. And if the words are spoken out loud, things like vocal inflection and facial expressions can influence the meaning as well.

I think it’s likely that all children get confused about an expression they haven’t heard before, but Asperger’s can make it easier to miss some of the contextual signals that clue people in about what a person means. A manager at CNN who has Asperger’s shared an example of this from her elementary school days:

“In first grade, whenever someone made a mess in the classroom, the teacher would ask a student to get the janitor. The student would come back with Mr. Jones (not really his name), who carried a broom and large folding dustpan. When I was asked to get the janitor, I looked all over the school and reported back to the teacher that I could not find it. After all, the person was Mr. Jones, so the janitor must be the object, right?”

That’s very logical thinking! I have a couple of funny examples of my own literal thought processes from when I was the same age.

What about girls with Asperger’s syndrome?

In my last post, I said that I think researchers have overlooked Asperger’s syndrome in females, and that’s the biggest problem I have with the “extreme male brain” theory of autism. I’m not the only one that thinks so. Recently I read a very interesting article online from the British Sunday paper The Observer:

Doctors are ‘failing to spot Asperger’s in girls’ by Amelia Hill, April 12, 2009.

The article quotes Dr. Judith Gould, director of the UK’s National Autistic Society.  In 1979, she and Lorna Wing co-wrote a paper that helped to begin the process of defining Asperger’s and the autism spectrum.  The British government is forming a strategy on dealing with autism, and Gould is pushing for an effort to pay attention to girls on the spectrum.

“We’re failing girls at the moment. We are doing many thousands of them a great disservice. They are either not being picked up in the first place, but if they ask for help they are being turned away. Even if they are referred for diagnosis, they are commonly rejected.”

One problem that you can run into in science is that forming a theory requires making assumptions, and if you’re not careful, those assumptions can be self-reinforcing.  If you go back to the posts about defining Asperger’s, you’ll remember that the syndrome is defined by a set of outward characteristics that seem to go together.

Most of the people diagnosed according to those characteristics are male, which leads to the expectation that most of the people who will be diagnosed will be male.  And because Asperger’s is still such a new diagnosis, even a lot of professionals don’t know a lot about what to look for.  I have read accounts of girls being told “You can’t have Asperger’s; you’re a girl,” even when they believe the traits of Asperger’s actually do describe them quite well.

In addition to that problem, what if the definition itself is biased because it is based on what Asperger’s typically looks like in a male?  Might it not be the case that the same cognitive condition might tend to have different outward signs in females than in males?  The differences in behavior between genders are not all due to physical differences in the brain.  There are a lot of societal and cultural differences in the things that boys and girls tend to do, and in the ways that they are expected to behave.  It seems quite reasonable to me that Asperger’s syndrome would tend to look a bit different in girls than in boys, and we won’t know what to look for until we pay attention and look for it.

Theories of autism: Extreme male brain

Okay; we’re up to our fourth cognitive theory of autism, a series of theories that attempt to explain the outward traits of autism by some difference in the brain or mind.

This theory is another one advanced by psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, so it builds somewhat on his earlier ideas about theory of mind.  (He gives credit to much earlier researchers 60 years ago for first suggesting the “extreme male brain” idea, but it had not been considered for a long time.)  My feelings about the two theories are similar, meaning that I think Baron-Cohen has observed something real, but I’m not sure he has the whole picture right.  (And, to be fair, he doesn’t claim to– this is the way science works.  You create a scientific model based on observation and adjust it as new information comes in that works for or against it.)

Anyway, my material for this post largely comes from a 1999 paper by Baron-Cohen, accessible here in PDF format.  Baron-Cohen starts off by assessing the three cognitive theories of autism I’ve talked about on this blog, noting both strengths and weaknesses in each theory.  Then he cites a few findings from research:

• Autism seems to be at least partly linked to genetics.  In the general population, autism seems to occur at a rate of somewhere between 0.05% and 0.1%.  But if a child is diagnosed with autism, there is a 3% chance that his or her sibling will also– a significantly higher number.  Also, among identical twins, there is a 60% chance that if one is diagnosed with autism, the other will be as well.  So while genetics may not be the only thing that determines whether you are autistic or not, there definitely seems to be a link.

  (I can personally attest that, while none of the other members of my family have been diagnosed with Asperger’s, we share a lot of the same personality traits.  Some of the material I read about the traits of Asperger’s made me say “This isn’t a disorder; this is my family!”) 

• Most of the people diagnosed with autism are male; the ratio is about 4 to 1.  If you only look at Asperger’s diagnoses (those with no delay in speech or cognitive development), the ratio is even more extreme, 9 to 1.

  It’s unclear why this is, though.  Some genetic conditions, like red-green colorblindness, much more commonly occur in males because the genes for them are on the X chromosome.  In order for a girl (with two X chromosomes) to be red-green colorblind, for example, she needs to receive the colorblindness gene from both her mother and her father.  A boy receives an X chromosome only from his mother (he gets a Y chromosome from his father), and if his one X chromosome has the colorblindness gene on it, he will be colorblind.  (I’m probably oversimplifying this example, but hopefully you understand what I mean.)

  But so far, at least, genetic research does not indicate that autism is linked to the X chromosome.  It seems to be tied to multiple genes on multiple chromosomes among the other 22 that humans have.  Researchers are trying to trace it to something they can identify (I think there was a recent article about a new finding in this area), but it’s really complicated.

Baron-Cohen then cites research noting that men and women tend to have different areas of cognitive strength.  Here are the strengths he lists for females:

• Language tasks; girls tend to develop language skills faster than boys.
• Tests of social judgment.
• Measures of empathy and cooperation.
• Perceptual speed; the ability to quickly identify matching items.
• Ideational fluency; the example Baron-Cohen gives of this is quickly listing as many things as you can that are a specific color.
• Fine motor coordination.
• Mathematical calculation tests.
• Pretend play in childhood.

Studies show that males tend to be weaker in the above areas but stronger in the following:

• Mathematical reasoning; especially in areas like geometry, word problems, and higher-level math.
• The embedded figure test; being able to find a shape in the middle of a jumble of distracting information.
• Mentally rotating or folding an object and predicting what it will look like.
• Some spatial skills.
• Target-directed motor skills; guiding or intercepting projectiles.

If you know much about the traits of autism, a lot of these weaknesses and strengths probably sound pretty familiar.  Some of the descriptions of being excessively literal and concrete or socially clueless at times do sound similar to the kinds of things that people joke about as being a “guy thing” (and provide sitcom writers with plenty of material).  Could it be that an autistic brain is an “extreme” version of the male brain, with these weaknesses and strengths magnified even more?