Autism-like glitches of human brain

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Whenever I mention to people that autism is not a disorder/disability/disease/defect, but just being "different," many people think that I am just trying to encourage parents, to give people some hope. I see that deep down, many parents still tend to view autism as something of a "defect," to say the least.

Also, I see people coming up with all sort of "treatments" for autism, without really having any justification/understanding, except for statistical correlation. Statistical correlation is a horrible approach, as correlations often are accidental, and may have nothing to do with causality. For instance, there was a recent study in Denmark that showed circumcision is linked to autism. Other studies have shown links between autism and things like (a) drinking cow milk, (b) air pollution, (c) mother's obesity, etc. etc. It so seems that, virtually anything you can think of, can be linked to autism.

I guess the problem is, most people don't understand autism, simply because they themselves have never felt autistic, one single day in their lives.

But a brain is a brain, autistic or not. The essential hardware relies on the same principles. It then occurred to me that, perhaps we can show specific examples of "glitches" of "normal" brains, to help people understand what autism is all about. This way, perhaps people can really start to understand how to approach autism, correctly.

Recently I saw two video clips that I think can help to this purpose.

Autism in my definition is "unmitigated auto-feedback due to an overly connected brain." As result of the auto-feedback inside the brain, the signals are amplified and latch onto single processes. I call this phenomenon as "maximization of contrast." But guess what? Human brains work based on contrasts, and that is a general feature. It's just that the neurotypical brain and the autistic brain choose to focus on different aspects, but the underlying principle of contrast is the same.

So here we go with the two video clips. The first one is a PBS documentary on "Magic and the Brain"

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/psychology-magic.html

the second video clip is about a road rage incident in Chengdu, China. This second video is quite graphical, so viewers are warned.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/24/asia/china-road-rage/

I am not interested in magic or road rage discussions here. (Yes, the road rage was violent.) I am using these two video clips to understand how human brain works, and how we can use lessons from these two video clips to understand autistic people, using experiences that neurotypical people can relate to.

In the first case of the magic with cup and balls, the audience is easily distracted by the magicians, and are not able to pay attention to the magicians sneaking in more balls under the cups. In the second case of road rage, I went through the video clips about a dozen times, almost to the point of watching it frame by frame, before I realized that the woman driver actually turned on her turning signal light, long before cutting in front of the male driver. Like the male driver, I did not see the intention of the female driver, simply because my eyes were focused on something else: I was paying attention to the car in front of the male driver, and generally to the right-hand side of the road. So, it did seem that the woman's car popped up out of nowhere, almost causing an accident.

Why do we miss some crucial signals, even in neurotypical settings? Why do we not see the other hand of the magicians, or the turning light of the woman driver?

I think the underlying explanation is that our brain work with signal contrast, instead of signal strength. I work in the field of machine learning, where a mathematical model known as ANN (Artificial Neural Network) is widely used to solve business problems. It is well-known that the neurons in the brain have a threshold activation value. When we focus too much on certain signals, other signals in contrast go below the threshold activation value, and are ignored. This shouldn't be considered as a defect: it's a feature of the human brain. The threshold feature is what enable us to focus on what's important to us. It's the very feature that has enabled us to survive as a species.

This feature of "heightened attention" has its glitches, as shown by the magic and road rage video clips.

If you understand this feature of human brain, then you understand the brain of autistic people, too. The autistic brain behaves just like the above two cases. But, instead of focusing on magician's face or hand motions, or the car immediate in front, autistic people's minds latch onto some other topics/issues. So they miss the clues from other people's speech or social gestures. Similarly, when autistic people focus too much on certain sensory signals or painful experiences, they develop sensory issues or throw tantrums. At the very bottom of it all, all autistic manifestations come from "maximization of contrast." That's all.

As I have pointed out, human brain's "heightened attention" is a feature, not a defect. This feature has allowed most of our ancestors to focus on what's important, and escape dangerous situations. There is a cost-benefit tradeoff for this feature, and natural selection has dictated that the benefit of this feature far outweighs its shortcomings.

Similarly, I also view the "heightened attention" in autistic people as a feature, not a defect. This feature of autistic people, if properly developed, allows them to see things that no else can see, and solve problems that no one else can solve.

Sure, there are some undesirable side-effects to the "heightened attention". But if you can figure out how to decipher a magician's tricks, or avoid car accidents, then you are actually able to interact with autistic people. Most people would be very interested in understanding how a magic is done, or how to avoid car accidents. What they don't realize is that, using the very same techniques, they will be able to interact with autistic people, and in particular, to help children on the spectrum develop.

In the case of magic, you could use clear cups, you could block the face of the magicians or the upper half of the video, and you replay the video again and again, until the audience learn to get to pay attention to the other hand of the magicians. In the case of road rage, the female driver of course needed to switch lane much earlier, but, another thing that she should have done is to provide motion signal of her intention (start to move her car to the right), beside just using the turning signal light. After all, plenty of car drivers don't even bother to use turning signals, and they don't get into accident situations. My wife told me she knew someone who would "shake" her car whenever she needed to switch lane. I guess that works because, when people see your car "shaking", beside thinking you might be a crazy driver and so they'd better keep some distance from you, the most important thing is that the "shaking" will divert their attention from other things to pay attention to you. I don't think the "shaking" is truly necessary, but slight pulling to the right would provide a motion signal of your intention, which is much more visible than a turning light.

Anyway, "modulation" is the key. For both stims and sensory/tantrum issues. For stimming behaviors, you modulate in your main message into your child's favorite stimming behavior, and help them learn new skills. STIMMING TIME IS LEARNING TIME. As for sensory/tantrum issues, the modulation goes in the opposite direction. You don't solve tantrum/sensory issues when they are already happening. You starting point must be fun and happiness. Saturate first the brain of your children with fun experiences. At the moment of their "maximum happiness," that's the moment you should introduce the problematic sensory signals, or remind them of their recent tantrum situations. Autism, to me, is a communication problem, and that's all. It's not the children's fault. The failure of communication resides with the adults.

What bothers me is that people make autism into something complicated, which it is not. (See for instance the symbol of a "puzzle piece" used by Autism Speaks, for instance.) People have such a fragmented understanding of autism, simply because they have not one day felt autistic themselves.

Once you understand autism, once you have a "model" understanding of autism, you can go much further beyond the limitations of the "correlation-based" approach. For instance, in a recent talk I gave, I explicitly stated out the following. My children are already older (5 and 7 years old), but I said on a slide, that if I have to do it all over again:

In their early childhood (< 5 years old)
I wouldn’t
- spend time on potty training
- teaching them to make eye contact
- teaching them to talk
- teaching them to socialize
I would instead
- start to make videos and draw pictures much earlier
- teach them to read much earlier (18 months after birth)
- let them play building-block toys much earlier

Yeah, I told my audience: that's a very radical point of view. I know, you won't find these points stated by any "expert" on autism out there. They wouldn’t dare. Their mindset is entirely correlation-based. In contrast, by having a model understanding of autism, you get a coherent picture, and can go places that no one has gone before. The fact is, due to some insurance mishap, my son (5 years old) has not had ABA service in these last 3 months. Yet, in these are the 3 months that his speech has improved the most. All of a sudden, we realized that his internal thinking ability is much, much more mature than we have supposed. On the surface he may appear still very childish, but that's just a façade. He may still not express well verbally, but his rationalizing ability is definitely not childish. My son's main daily activity nowadays consists of playing with building blocks, making elevators, car washes, cable cars, etc. From his passion about these objects, he has learned to talk, to draw picture, to write, to type on computers, to do math problems, and frankly, to make excellent eye contact and to socialize. As for my daughter, she thrives in public school environment, virtually everybody is her friend.

As a society, we've been wrong about autism for 70+ years (since Leo Kanner's paper in 1943). We pay too much attention to our kids' shortcomings (tantrums, sensory issues, speech delay, etc.) We only wanted to "solve" these shortcomings by overcompensating in these areas. In the process we ruin the parent-child relationship, destroy our children's self-esteem, and treat them as second-class citizens. What for? To me, these children instead need to develop their visual-manual skills first. As I've said before, Bill Gates wearing a diaper is still Bill Gates. So what's the point of worrying so much about potty training? Tantrums? I know plenty of Nobel Prize winners that have personality issues (which I view as sign of underdevelopment). My point is, develop these children intellectually first, in the visual-manual direction, and everything else will fall into place, by themselves. Once your children are developed in the visual-manual direction, those things that you worry so much about (potty training, verbalizing, socializing, eye contact, empathy, control of tantrums) would all happen by themselves, much earlier and much better, than if you just focused on those areas.

When my children grow up, I don’t want my children ever to say: “When I was a child, my parents thought I was defective and applied this and that therapy to me.” I want them to say, “When I was a child, my parents drew pictures and make funny cartoon video clips for me. My parents took me to elevator rides. It was a lot of fun.” Respect your children as equal-rights human beings. Autistic children have long memories, you don’t want to be marked down as a manipulative parent. You are your children’s role model. When my children grow up, I fully expect them to understand everything I have done with them, there is never a secret to hide. There is never a trick I have done. You want them to remember you as a friend. I fully expect them to realize that they are autistic, so they can realize that they are special, so they can be proud of themselves.

I'm marking this to come back and read the full post later, but I also would like to note that most adult Autistics agree with you. In the polls in the rest of the site, many of us would not even trade our Autism for a million dollars because of the unique way we get to perceive the world. This is not to say that there are not natural an society-created disabilities with Autism, but it's ok to be born with different strengths and weaknesses than society expects.

I hate all of those studies linking autism to this or that. People email me those stupid studies all the time. For what it's worth, my kids didn't drink cows milk because one of them had a dairy allergy, I am the opposite of obese, my children aren't circumcised, they were given Mercury free vaccinations on a slower schedule (one of my kids has many allergies, and I felt more comfortable this way- nothing to do with Autism hysteria), yet they both have neurological differences. I don't see them as a disability either. There is great value in taking in information differently, and I wish people would stop acting like it's a horrible, scary problem that must be fixed and erased.

I don't care about eye contact and don't want to socialize much, mostly I am focused on research, that is what makes me eager to get out of bed each day and not want to go to sleep at night. I look at the eyes ~5% of the time during social interaction and each look is so short that there is no mutual meaningful eye contact, but I get along ok when I have to interact with others. Socializing is a distraction from what I am interested in, it is too boring and I lack social motivation.

Your post makes sense to me, Jason.

This is essentially a "play to strengths" strategy-seldom a bad idea.

I thought the cup and balls example was an excellent illustration.

Thanks for providing the Cliff’s Notes summary. The "play to strengths" strategy is always a good idea.

This post now makes me wonder whether – if it’s just me – or do others have challenges reading really long posts. This is not a complaint to the OP. I have always had this problem (even when reading literature by the acclaimed masters), but just assumed it was a concentration issue.


Interesting. I have two daughters. While I did realize it was my responsibility to teach my daughters how to read, I had no idea it was my responsibility to teach them how to socialize. I am not even certain how to go about doing that. I guess I am fortunate I had my wife around.

By the way, regarding reading. I am quite certain I enjoyed reading and acting out Dr. Seuss books just as much as my daughters enjoyed listening to me read them. Those certainly were fun times.