May 13th, 2010
Back on April 2nd, I posted on World Autism Awareness Day and wrote about my sense that my autistic friends didn’t have a problem with their mirror neurons. Instead, I felt that they had a problem with sensory overload.
And I’m not the only one!
Neuroscientist Ilan Dinstein and colleagues performed an fMRI brainscan study on 13 autistic adults and 10 “neurotypical” adults and found that there was no deficit in the mirror neuron systems of the autistic adults. You can see a video about the study here.
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April 2nd, 2010
The United Nations has declared today World Autism Awareness Day. Excellent!
I had the opportunity to work with a group of young adults on the Autism Spectrum, and in order to get ready, I read everything I could get my hands on. Autism has been described as a form of “mind blindness” by British psychopathology professor and researcher Simon Baron-Cohen … as a lack of function in the mirror neurons that help us empathize with each other. I thought, huh, will I be meeting people who are on the other end of the spectrum from me?
As it turns out, autism isn’t that simple, and I didn’t find complete mind blindness in my Spectrum friends. Rather, what I saw was a group of people who were dealing with incredible sensory stimulation, both from the outside world, and from their own brains. This often created a great deal of emotional turmoil, as you can imagine, but because there were so many communication and socialization deficits, it was hard for my friends to deal with their often intense emotions. Some would completely withdraw, some would engage in “stimming,” which is a repetitive action that brings them some sense of peace and control, and others would lash out. It is not a fun condition to have!
It is also not a concrete condition, which is why it is referred to as a spectrum disorder. There are many possible versions of it, and each person on the Autism Spectrum is an individual, just as we (who are called neurotypicals) are. I love the term neurotypical. It makes us sound boring, which we often are!
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