Plutonia - Have been wanting to thank you...

[Project Willow]

Instead we moved to the country – yeah!

Thank you for sharing your experiences. I'm remembering that when a government doctor (normative side) had to produce a set of diagnoses for me in the mid-90's, autism was one. I was stunned. Subsequent docs relegate it to a pair of alters. I am glad to understand it better as I really don't generally manifest the symptoms as you're describing them, so the overlap in coping devices is interesting. We use whatever tools we can, don't we?

My ex-lover was an aspie, as best as I can guess anyway. He was very smart, and a gifted artist. He seduced me by initiating conversations about the latest findings in astrophysics, or medical science which lead us into exchanges of quasi-nonsensical metaphysical or philosophical theorizing that only the two of us could ever understand. We had a secret language.

Ramachandran's original article was in Edge and is totally worth reading. It's a convincing argument for how culture is transmitted:

I'm certainly no expert and I defer your greater knowledge, but I'm not entirely convinced. I'd wager there's more to the story yet to be discovered.

that the emergence of a sophisticated mirror neuron system set the stage for the emergence, in early hominids, of a number of uniquely human abilities such as proto-language (facilitated by mapping phonemes on to lip and tongue movements), empathy, "theory of other minds", and the ability to "adopt another's point of view".

For instance, I don't believe that these abilities are uniquely human, only that the quality of their development in us is uniquely human.

Intriguingly, in 2000, Eric Altschuller, Jamie Pineda and I were able to show (using EEG recordings) that autistic children lack the mirror neuron system and we pointed out that this deficit may help explain the very symptoms that are unique to autism: lack of empathy, theory of other minds, language skills, and imitation. [3] Although initially contested, this discovery — of the neural basis of autism — has now been confirmed by several groups including our own (spearheaded, in part, by Lindsey Oberman in my lab).

Maybe my problem with this is simply rhetorical. These descriptions seem too broad. Are some auties really completely incapable of empathy? It's an interesting theory you have about the mu waves.

Here are the main two yea and nay studies re: mirror neuron dysfunction and autism:

Oberman, Lindsay M.; Edward M. Hubbarda; Joseph P. McCleery; Eric L. Altschulera; Vilayanur S. Ramachandran; Jaime A. Pineda (July 2005). "EEG evidence for mirror neuron dysfunction in autism spectrum disorders". Cognitive Brain Research 24 (2): 190-198.

Churchland, Patricia S. (2011). Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality. Princeton University Press. pp. 156. ISBN 9780691137032.

Thanks for those. I've always just assumed science would tell us that morality is a cultural construct that both describes, and can be categorized within, sets of behavioral strategies necessary for survival in primate groups with highly complex social relationships. I didn't think this general precept was nascent. Perhaps Churchland is providing new specifics related to recent discoveries, but what is her beef with the other set?

[Elvis]

I hope this thread is an appropriate place for this story, I didn't want to start a new thread with it. I hadn't heard of this and find it intriguing:


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/1 ... d%3D126825

Jacob Artson, LA Teen With Autism, Communicates Through Typing

Kathleen Miles
First Posted: 1/12/12 12:50 AM ET



LOS ANGELES -- For the first seven years of Jacob Artson's life, his family believed the doctors who labeled their nonverbal son with autism as "mentally retarded."

And yet, just before Jacob's seventh birthday, a miracle happened. Jacob's social skills therapist told the family about facilitated communication, a method by which a facilitator attempts to teach individuals with a disability to organize and control their body and attention in order to communicate by typing.

Jacob's mother, Elana Artson, told The Huffington Post in an email that when she first heard about the method, she "didn't expect anything to come of it. Jacob couldn't read, so how was he going to type? But I figured that I would be able to say that we had tried before crossing it off our list of possible therapies."

So Elana took Jacob to see Darlene Hanson, a speech therapist who is now the director of communication services at Whittier Area Parents' Association for the Developmentally Handicapped (WAPADH) in Whittier, Calif. Elana described in an email what happened in the first hour Jacob was with Hanson:

"Darlene wrote eight words on a board -- shoe, bus, house, etc. -- and asked Jacob, 'Which one do you ride to school?, Which one do you wear on your foot?, Which one do you live in?' Each time, with her providing support, he pointed to the correct answer," Elana wrote. "She gave him a break, and he went to look at some model trains in the corner of the room (like many kids with autism, Jacob was fascinated by trains).

"Then Darlene took out a portable keyboard. She said one of those trains had 'Santa Fe' written on it. 'Can you type Santa Fe?,' she asked. Jacob typed 'Sants 4e.' I started to get excited -- if she was moving his hand, she wouldn't have let him overshoot the correct letters, right? Next question: 'What is the car on the back of the train called?' Jacob began to type h-e- (okay, deflate -- This wasn't real, I'm thinking to myself) -l-p-m-e. Then she asked him a series of questions and asked him to type Y for yes and N for no. 'Did you type Help me?' - Y. 'Do you need help spelling?' - N. 'Do you need help typing?' - Y. 'Is holding your hand helping?' - Y.

"What happened during that hour changed Jacob's life (and ours) more dramatically than I ever dreamed possible," Elana added. "In Judaism, we have a blessing for everything."

As she recounted to HuffPost, on the car ride home from the first meeting with Hanson, she called her husband, Jacob's father, Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, and said, "'There must be a blessing for this because I've just witnessed something completely miraculous. I think Jacob can read and spell.'"

Over the next few weeks, Elana and Brad began to realize that, although Jacob's motor processing was challenged, his cognitive skills were intact. Jacob, who is now 19 years old, was freed from the constraints and misunderstanding that had come from being nonverbal. Elana, Brad and Jacob's twin-sister, Shira, got to know their son and brother for the first time.

In her email to HuffPost, Elana recalled some of the first times Jacob was able to clearly communicate with his family:

More and more information spilled out as he began to explain what having autism was like for him and what we could do to help him. One day, Jacob woke up totally out of sorts. 'My ear hurts,' he typed. 'Both ears?,' I asked. 'No, just the left one.' We went to the doctor, and, indeed, Jacob had an infection in his left ear but not the right one. He told me the name of a boy in his class he wanted to have a play date with. He had always hated going to the synagogue on Purim (the kids dress up, and there is a very chaotic celebration) but he typed that he wanted to be Thomas the Tank Engine. With his Thomas the Tank Engine costume, Jacob sat though all the noise and chaos with the other kids.

Jacob's parents recounted other breakthroughs, including when Jacob typed that his tantrums one week were due to missing his twin-sister, Shira, who was away at camp. "I was flabbergasted," Jacob's mother wrote. "Jacob used to play with his sister all the time when they were younger, but I wasn't sure how aware he was of her anymore."

In an email to HuffPost, Jacob's father, Brad, depicted a more recent moment of communication that he said was particularly meaningful:

We were on a plane, and Jacob typed to me how angry he was at me, how I had upset him at the airport -- the kind of criticism of parents that typical teenagers share verbally. As his criticisms of me continued (I was not expecting them!), we both realized what a breakthrough this moment was. At that point, he and I became too excited to continue typing. He typed how awesome it was that he could chew me out in private, and I responded that he was now a real teenager! We spent the rest of the flight smiling and hugging each other!

Perhaps what is most remarkable about Jacob's ability to express himself through typing is how eloquent, thoughtful and intelligent he is. He sent an email to HuffPost explaining what it was like for him before he could communicate. "Before I was introduced to typing, I had retreated into anxiety, fear and despair. I read everything around me from books to TV credits to the newspaper on the kitchen table but I had no one to share my ideas with so I just retreated into my own imaginary world. I wasn't suicidal because I have an incredibly supportive family, but I was constantly frustrated at my limitations."

Jacob also described the moment he learned to type. "Suddenly, the whole world opened. At first, it was so hard to get my body organized that I could only get out a word or two. But the more I practiced, the more I could type. It was such a total high to share what had been bottled up inside me for years that I couldn't wait for the next opportunity to type. My family had so many questions for me and I had so many questions for them. It was heaven on earth."

Darlene Hanson, who still works with Jacob on his typing, explained to The Huffington Post that the definition and understanding of autism has changed in the last 15 years. "Previously, everyone thought people with autism were retarded. Even now, children who actually have autism are labeled as mentally retarded because they fail to perform on school tests," she said. "But we understand autism as more of a movement disorder now. People with autism often have difficulty communicating, but that doesn't mean the cognitive ability isn't there."

According to Autism Speaks, autism is the fastest-growing serious developmental disability in the country, and more children are diagnosed with autism than with AIDS, diabetes and cancer combined. According to the latest Center for Disease Control report (2009), approximately 1 in 110 children and 1 in 70 boys nationwide have autism, and it is estimated that about 30 percent are nonverbal. The number of nonverbal individuals with autism who have learned to type is unknown, although WAPADH is compiling a database for this purpose.

In addition to WAPADH in California, Syracuse University's Institute on Communication and Inclusion (ICI) is the only other facilitated communication training center in the country. For those who don't live in Southern California or in the New York City area, ICI has a bank of names of trainers nationwide who can teach facilitated communication.

Hanson said she believes facilitated communication is not more common because there is a lack of awareness about it and a lack of professionals who teach it. Additionally, although it can be taught to individuals of all ages, it doesn't work for everyone, she said.

Facilitated communication has sparked controversy for decades, with skeptics saying that the ideas being typed can be influenced by the facilitator. Connie Kasari, a professor at UCLA's Center for Autism Research & Treatment, told HuffPost in an email, "FC [facilitated communication] is misused I think when persons are full on prompted forever. You have to be sure the person is initiating the communication and that it is not entirely facilitated and potentially not the individual's thoughts." She added, "But to say that a kid who is nonverbal needs access to communication is an important message."

For Jacob, facilitated communication means that someone needs to touch his elbows while he types on a computer or his iPad. "He says that if we don't touch his elbow, he's thinking about a Disney movie or people in his life," Hanson said. "He has to turn off this other noise that's going on in his head in order to type. Someone touching his elbow helps Jacob focus on what he wants to type." Hanson was clear that the goal with facilitated communication is always for the subject to become an independent typer, and she believes Jacob is not far from reaching that goal. Hanson is also working with Jacob to improve and better control the minimal speech abilities he has.

Jacob is now able to work toward his high school diploma so that he can attend college. He has traveled to New York City and Washington, D.C. to give speeches and presentations, which are read aloud for him and followed by audience questions he answers through typing.

Jacob wrote to HuffPost that typing has also increased and improved his social interactions, including "teaching about autism at school and at my sports programs, participating in the teen Bible study class at my synagogue, writing a song for a musical theater production I was in, chatting on Facebook and texting my sister."

Jacob's goals after college are to advocate for the inclusion of all people and to become, not surprisingly, a writer. For those of us who don't understand or know how to act in the presence of someone with autism, Jacob has some advice. "For people with autism, every day is an unending struggle to remember that we are not so different after all. You can help by smiling at us, by welcoming our presence and encouraging our participation. In the end, it comes down to recognizing God's image in every single human being."

[Plutonia]

Instead we moved to the country – yeah!

Thank you for sharing your experiences. I'm remembering that when a government doctor (normative side) had to produce a set of diagnoses for me in the mid-90's, autism was one. I was stunned. Subsequent docs relegate it to a pair of alters. I am glad to understand it better as I really don't generally manifest the symptoms as you're describing them, so the overlap in coping devices is interesting. We use whatever tools we can, don't we?

Incredibly, improbably, brilliantly too.

You might want to check out Donna Williams, Willow. She's written extensively about here life as an autistic person and was recently (3-4 years ago?) diagnosed with DID. She was interviewed on CBC back in the '80's, I think and to do it she had Peter Gzowski send her an audio tape of him asking her the questions that he was going to ask on air, so that she could familiarize herself with his voice and questions, so as not to be overwhelmed and unable to verbalize responses.
Her interview with Gzowski: http://blog.donnawilliams.net/2009/07/3 ... -williams/
Her site: http://www.donnawilliams.net/author.0.html

Ramachandran's original article was in Edge and is totally worth reading. It's a convincing argument for how culture is transmitted:

I'm certainly no expert and I defer your greater knowledge, but I'm not entirely convinced. I'd wager there's more to the story yet to be discovered.

Oh, I'm not suggesting it's an end-point. There don't seem to be end-points to, well, anything, as far as I can tell, not even the periodic table. Just one more piece of the puzzle. But if it's true that spectrum folks' mirror neurons work differently than other folks, it answers for why we tend to not get social cues, for instance.

that the emergence of a sophisticated mirror neuron system set the stage for the emergence, in early hominids, of a number of uniquely human abilities such as proto-language (facilitated by mapping phonemes on to lip and tongue movements), empathy, "theory of other minds", and the ability to "adopt another's point of view".

For instance, I don't believe that these abilities are uniquely human, only that the quality of their development in us is uniquely human.

Your right, of course they aren't. The difference is our awareness of our "awareness" of ourselves.

Intriguingly, in 2000, Eric Altschuller, Jamie Pineda and I were able to show (using EEG recordings) that autistic children lack the mirror neuron system and we pointed out that this deficit may help explain the very symptoms that are unique to autism: lack of empathy, theory of other minds, language skills, and imitation. [3] Although initially contested, this discovery — of the neural basis of autism — has now been confirmed by several groups including our own (spearheaded, in part, by Lindsey Oberman in my lab).

Maybe my problem with this is simply rhetorical. These descriptions seem too broad. Are some auties really completely incapable of empathy? It's an interesting theory you have about the mu waves.

Oh, the experts get so many things wrong all the time that I tend to ignore those bits and focus on what's useful. I think at least some of the ways that autism is described is down to projection - insensitive, unfeeling, selfish etc.

There's a new hypothesis about Autism emerging that is getting closer to the nub. It's being called Intense World Syndrome and Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg's brilliant review is a good example of the two world's colliding. Just a couple of snippets to give you a taste:

I’ll get the negative aspects of the article out of the way first, and then we can look at the positive things the authors have to say.

Problems with the Article
1. There is the usual garbage about how we suffer from a horrendous disease. For example, the article begins with the following words: “Autism is a devastating neurodevelopmental disorder…”

They’re lucky I’m tenacious and hopelessly optimistic. And autistic and hyper-focused. Otherwise, I’d have stopped right there.

2. The authors show a stunning lack of knowledge about how autistic people learn and develop over the course of our lives. For example, the authors state, “Autism is now recognized as a neurodevelopmental disorder manifesting within the first 3 years after birth and progressively worsening in the course of life.”

I guess I’m lucky I can still write. I’d better get going on the rest of this post before I lose any more brain function.

...

Theory of Mind (ToM) and Mind-Blindness

Just because it’s so wonderful to hear someone else say these things, I’ll let the researchers speak for themselves:

“Autistic people are thought to be severely impaired in empathising with other people and ‘reading their mind,’ which is captured in the ‘theory of mind’ or ‘mind-blindness’ theory of autism… The proposed deficits in reading other people’s feelings and thoughts and the lack in empathising with other people has been commonly used to explain the impairments in social interactions and communication as well as inappropriate responses in social encounters…

We…propose that the autistic person may perceive his surroundings not only as overwhelmingly intense due to hyper-reactivity of primary sensory areas, but also as aversive and highly stressful due to a hyper-reactive amygdala, which also makes quick and powerful fear associations with usually neutral stimuli. The autistic person may well try to cope with the intense and aversive world by avoidance. Thus, impaired social interactions and withdrawal may not be the result of a lack of compassion, incapability to put oneself into some else’s position or lack of emotionality, but quite to the contrary a result of an intensely if not painfully aversively perceived environment.”

I think they’re onto us now.
http://www.journeyswithautism.com/2009/ ... -syndrome/

Thanks for those. I've always just assumed science would tell us that morality is a cultural construct that both describes, and can be categorized within, sets of behavioral strategies necessary for survival in primate groups with highly complex social relationships. I didn't think this general precept was nascent. Perhaps Churchland is providing new specifics related to recent discoveries, but what is her beef with the other set?

I think her beef is that it doesn't answer. She was a philosopher who became a "bioculturalist", that is, her position now is that biology and culture are so intertwined they can't be separated.

While Churchland's intellectual opponents over the years have suggested that you can understand the "software" of thinking, independently of the "hardware"—the brain structure and neuronal firings—that produced it, she has responded that this metaphor doesn't work with the brain: Hardware and software are intertwined to such an extent that all philosophy must be "neurophilosophy." There's no other way.

....

Oxytocin's primary purpose appears to be in solidifying the bond between mother and infant, but Churchland argues—drawing on the work of biologists—that there are significant spillover effects: Bonds of empathy lubricated by oxytocin expand to include, first, more distant kin and then other members of one's in-group. (Another neurochemical, aregenine vasopressin, plays a related role, as do endogenous opiates, which reinforce the appeal of cooperation by making it feel good.)

The biological picture contains other elements, of course, notably our large prefrontal cortexes, which help us to take stock of situations in ways that lower animals, driven by "fight or flight" impulses, cannot. But oxytocin and its cousin-compounds ground the human capacity for empathy. (When she learned of oxytocin's power, Churchland writes in Braintrust, she thought: "This, perhaps, Hume might accept as the germ of 'moral sentiment.'")

From there, culture and society begin to make their presence felt, shaping larger moral systems: tit-for-tat retaliation helps keep freeloaders and abusers of empathic understanding in line. Adults pass along the rules for acceptable behavior—which is not to say "just" behavior, in any transcendent sense—to their children. Institutional structures arise to enforce norms among strangers within a culture, who can't be expected to automatically trust each other.

... her biocultural view is compatible, she thinks, with Aristotle's argument that morality is not about rule-making but instead about the cultivation of moral sentiment through experience, training, and the following of role models. The biological story also confirms, she thinks, David Hume's assertion that reason and the emotions cannot be disentangled. This view stands in sharp contrast to those philosophers who argue that instinctual reactions must be scrutinized by reason. The villains of her books are philosophical system-builders—whether that means Jeremy Bentham, with his ideas about maximizing aggregate utility ("the greatest good for the greatest number"), or Immanuel Kant, with his categorical imperatives (never lie!), or John Rawls, erector of A Theory of Justice.

.... "What seems more likely is that there is a basic platform that people share and that things shape themselves based on that platform, and based on ecology, and on certain needs and certain traditions."
...

Owen Flanagan Jr., a professor of philosophy and neurobiology at Duke University and a friend of Churchland's, adds, "There's a long tradition in philosophy that morality is based on rule-following, or on intuitions that only specially positioned people can have. One of her main points is that that is just a completely wrong picture of the genealogical or descriptive story. The first thing to do is to emphasize our continuity with the animals." In fact, Churchland believes that primates and even some birds have a moral sense, as she defines it, because they, too, are social problem-solvers.

https://chronicle.com/article/The-Biolo ... cs/127789/

But in the end, her argument seems to come down to her preference for oxytocin as the agent for moral behavior and thus culture reinforcer, over mirror neurons. That's a gross oversimplification, btw, but one of her examples is particularly interesting in the context of neoteny:

Oxytocin's primary purpose appears to be in solidifying the bond between mother and infant, but Churchland argues—drawing on the work of biologists—that there are significant spillover effects: Bonds of empathy lubricated by oxytocin expand to include, first, more distant kin and then other members of one's in-group. (Another neurochemical, aregenine vasopressin, plays a related role, as do endogenous opiates, which reinforce the appeal of cooperation by making it feel good.)

But, I think that the "survival of the fittest" evolutionary paradigm is being challenged in all sorts of ways right now and that multiple disciplines are competing to explain supposedly moral behaviors like reciprocity, sharing and a sense of fairness, that are being found in animal groups:

Blood sharing between both related and unrelated vampire bats also occurs on a reciprocal basis; that is, bats that Wilkinson had experimentally starved for one night and that then received blood from another individual were more likely to donate blood to that individual when it, in turn, was starved. That reciprocity almost certainly evolved in response to two basic realities: a bat that cannot find a blood meal will starve to death in less than three days, and yet on any given night, as Wilkinson found, about one in fourteen adult bats and fully a third of young vampires-in-training will fail to feed. And so there will be numerous occasions over a vampire bat’s lifetime both to receive and to share food.

Therefore, it’s remarkable but not surprising that Desmodus can remember past donors as well as recognize cheaters—those individuals who try to beat the system by not sharing blood. There’s another way in which bats discriminate among recipients: adult males will share blood with females and young bats, but rarely with other adult males. That makes perfect sense. Why share food with someone who may be your rival for a mate?

http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/featur ... ats?page=2

]]]]]



edit: to fix formatting - which is not working! Trying again. And will again later. Bleh

[Plutonia]

LOS ANGELES -- For the first seven years of Jacob Artson's life, his family believed the doctors who labeled their nonverbal son with autism as "mentally retarded."

And yet, just before Jacob's seventh birthday, a miracle happened.

Thanks Elvis. This actually happens fairly often. The perception of it as miraculous, results from the popularization of a whole lot of wrong-thinking about autism.

Autism is classified as a developmental disorder, which means that it's considered to be a childhood condition. The fact is, that for the vast majority of autistic children, their autistic traits diminish over time and they are able to integrate pretty well into the general population - thus the numerous, recently diagnosed, schooled and working autistic adults. The percentage of severely disabled autists who do need long-term care is in the single digits ( it's hard to find the actual number because there's so much hysteria and obfuscation around this supposed "epidemic" but IIRC, it's 3 or 4 %.)

That used to be the medical paradigm for autistic treatment until the rise of the behaviorists in the late 20th century. Ivar Lovass in particular led the campaign that successfully re-branded autism as a "devastating" disease that required early, intensive, behavioral interventions - which included electo-shocking small children BTW. It's Lovass' model that Michelle Dawson gutted in the Auton case, which sought to mandate ABA therapy for all Canadian autists, not just children. Here's a part of her submission:

E. THE BLANK SLATE
"You see, you start pretty much from scratch when you work with an autistic child. You have a person in the physical sense—they have hair, a nose and a mouth—but they are not people in the psychological sense. One way to look at the job of helping autistic kids is to see it as a matter of constructing a person. You have the raw materials, but you have to build the person."—Ivar Lovaas, 1974

"In any case, what one usually sees when first meeting an autistic child who is 2, 3, or even 10 years of age is a child who has all the external physical characteristics of a normal child—that is, he has hair, and he has eyes and he has a nose, and he may be dressed in a shirt and trousers—but who really has no behaviors that one can single out as distinctively ‘human’. The major job then, for a therapist—whether he's behaviorally oriented or not—would seem to be a very intriguing and significant one, namely, the creation or construction of a truly human behavioral repertoire where none exists."—Ivar Lovaas, 1976

"To use another analogy, at the beginning of treatment, the children may be regarded as having close to a tabula rasa. In this sense they can be considered very young persons, as persons with little or no experience, presenting the teacher with the task of building a person where little had existed before."—Ivar Lovaas, 1989

"Instead, the fascinating part for me was to observe persons with eyes and ears, teeth and toenails, walking around yet presenting few of the behaviors one would call social or human. Now, I had the chance to build language and other social and intellectual behaviors where none had existed, a good test of how much help a learning-based approach could offer."—Ivar Lovaas, 1993

"[T]hey need to be taught virtually everything, and the teaching needs to proceed in minute increments instead of major steps. Thus, at the beginning of treatment, the individuals may be regarded as being close to a tabula rasa. In this sense, they can be considered very young or recently born, as persons with little or no experience."—Ivar Lovaas, 2002
68. ABA/IBI as an autism treatment is advertised to be observation- rather than theory-driven. A reading of the relevant science undermines this presentation. From the outset, behaviour analysts like Dr Lovaas reported their observations of autistics in ways betraying comprehensive a priori prejudices which were copiously reported not just as theory but truth.

69. Autistic characteristics were described as atavistic, pathological, bizarre, impoverished, and primitive. Autistics were said to be "a sad and baffling lot", "untouchable—even more so than the lepers of old"; they cause "confusion, agony, and despair". Then we were firmly classified as less-than-human blank slates. The portrayal of autistics as inhuman, and as inherently failing to meet the requirements for personhood, has continued to the present and was ubiquitous in Auton and Auton’s aftermath.

70. Under the influence of Auton’s history, Allan C. Hutchinson, associate dean at York University's Osgoode Hall Law School, wrote a representative version of autistic inhumanity or non-personhood. In a prominent Globe and Mail op-ed piece, he despairs because the SCC decision denies constitutional status to autistics in Canada. That is, he believes that unless we undergo fully-funded ABA/IBI, we are not human at all. We are the zeros described by Dr Lovaas. Our humanity and our personhood have to be built from scratch, because we don’t inherently have any. Mr Hutchinson accepts that there are humans who are not born but must be built, and only by being built can these entities attain humanity and therefore constitutional status.

71. Mr Hutchinson has a great deal of company, as witnessed by the post-Auton clamour generated by those calling themselves equality rights or autism advocates. As noted above, the SCC decision was widely declared to be the end of equality, Canada, justice, the Charter, etc, as we know them—all because autistics would not as a matter of course have our transformation from inhuman to human via Lovaas fully funded as "medically necessary" treatment. This widespread alarm takes as a starting point that anything is better than being autistic, and that there is literally nothing to lose if autistics are medically mandated to dedicate our lives to achieving non-autistic status.

72. This view of autistics is most strikingly manifested in ABA/IBI not in the behaviour analysts’ catalogue of apparent autistic weaknesses, but in how ABA/IBI practitioners deal with evident autistic strengths. In 1985, a published study co-authored by Dr Lovaas looked at "self-stimulatory" behaviours in six of the experimental group children whose outcomes were later reported in Dr Lovaas’ famous 1987 study. One of these six children, a "best-outcome" or "recovered" child, was a savant. By the time this boy was in kindergarten, he was a calendar calculator. This ability "suddenly emerged". The boy was able rapidly and accurately to extract weekdays for any date in any of the five years since his birth year. He had other extraordinary abilities. A neighbourhood woman called him a "genius".

73. Dr Lovaas classified this boy’s genius as "obsessions", and just more "self-stimulatory" abnormal behaviours. Various methods, including the physical punishment which was essential to Lovaas (1987), had been used consistently over the course of this boy’s treatment in order to eliminate all traces of unwanted autistic behaviours. Successfully extinguishing the unwanted genius behaviour near the end of this boy’s treatment was described as requiring only "minor discouragement from his parents and the project staff".

74. Special, or savant, abilities are strongly associated with both autism and with autistic traits. Peaks of ability, which act as precursors to special or savant abilities, exist in all autistics. They are central to who we are and how we learn. Behaviour analysts have treated these scientific facts as detritus littering the road to normalcy, or as a mirage. The very-respected behaviour analyst Gina Green, while urging her fellow behaviour analysts to renew their "vows to science", also warns us all against being fooled by autistics who "seem to have astonishing special talents", as if our abilities, too, are in the realm of the unethical pseudoscience she rails against.

http://www.sentex.net/~nexus23/naa_vic.html#e

Kinda sounds like sanctioned human experimentation on a vulnerable sub-class, don't it. Grrr.

Now I've forgotten the other point I was going to make.

Oh well.

Here's Michelle Dawson's essay:

THE MISBEHAVIOUR OF BEHAVIOURISTS http://www.sentex.net/~nexus23/naa_aba.html

[vanlose kid]

behaviorism: materialism gone wild. completely scientific though. "this bio-mechanism is a machine. let's see how it works. poke, prod, jigger, poke, prod, jigger..."

the "problem" is with the fixing of what is normal. say the range of human emotional-expression runs from the introvert at 0 to the extrovert 100 (rough and meaningless but as if, okay?) then it seems the range of normalcy (as per hollywood and tv generally) lies around 80-90 on the scale. this is of course considered scientific such that e.g. someone from a cultural background that prizes calm collectedness in the face of things, a certain stoicism, is considered either abnormal or repressed (thank you Freud).

that's just one part of it. the problem with scientific (quantifiable) ideas of norms is that a sort of platonic Ideal is fixed as the norm on the basis of which all else is judged. what's more this Ideal-bio-mechanism has never and will never exist. it is not any particular human being now or in the past, but an ideal set as a standard to which one either must conform in the now, or as a "progressivist" evolutionary target that shall/must be reached in some rosy utopian future: the perfectly rational human bio-mech. science is great like that.

generality and universality is the driving force. (did someone say Ockham? he probably turns at least twice a day in his grave every time his words are used to justify scientific idiocies/cruelties in this manner but whatever.) variety and the particular are dismissed as not seeing the forest for one individual tree, as unscientific.

science legislates as well. although scientism's adherents would never admit it. scientific dogma in the hands of zealots cause as much harm as any dogma. but don't say this. that's irrational and unscientific.

what is repression to some might in fact be "normal" in the sense that there are among humans a vast variety of ways with which one deals with whatever is the case. culture plays a role but so does personality. it is only those who view a child as a blank slate to be programmed according to a specific set of standards and aims who think that the being or person of this particular child has no role to play at all. this makes it easier to "know" a person too, because you have the book, and as far as the person conforms to the book he is normal. as far as he does not you have in your hand the justification with which you can do to him whatever you please.

to say, as a parent, that looking into your new born child's eyes you see a person is plain romanticism and nonsense--is feminine fluffery and not scientific at all. "there's nothing there, Maude! pull yourself together!"

it would be an achievement (of culture, wisdom, understanding, not of science) if this child, each child, were met as a person from the beginning. someone one has to get to know. if this child is one who is overwhelmed by this world in which the child finds him or herself thrown then that should be the standard by which you interact with this particular child. not this empty ideal of the normal that makes most of humanity sick by fiat.

every child is what it is and not an instantiation of some universal scientific blueprint from which it more or less deviates.

sorry. /rant

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[Plutonia]

if this child is one who is overwhelmed by this world in which the child finds him or herself thrown then that should be the standard by which you interact with this particular child.

There is another option which is to look at the world and ask, is there a way to arrange things so that this child is less overwhelmed?

That's one of the more effective "treatments" for autism.

/mini rant

[Nordic]

Damn Elvis, you trying to make me cry with that story? I had to stop reading it, because I was getting too choked up.

[vanlose kid]

if this child is one who is overwhelmed by this world in which the child finds him or herself thrown then that should be the standard by which you interact with this particular child.

There is another option which is to look at the world and ask, is there a way to arrange things so that this child is less overwhelmed?

That's one of the more effective "treatments" for autism.

/mini rant

yeah, well, they kind of go together, much the same way the logic of growth and progress go together with all that that entails.

we have a surplus of science and entertainment, what we lack is culture. one that for instance does not deem you weird if you choose not to watch television or entertain yourself 24-7, or whatever the current norm is.



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[Plutonia]

what we lack is culture. one that for instance does not deem you weird if you choose not to watch television or entertain yourself 24-7, or whatever the current norm is.


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Oh-oh-oh-oh!

We do! I was just now listening to Tyler Cowen talk about that very thing! It's just that it's so new we don't recognize it. It's hard to describe. It has to do with little bits, information flows, co-creation, streams of meaning, long intervals of interest, authenticity, contribution and interiorization.

Have a listen, see what you think: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/0 ... ultur.html

BTW, Cowen is probably "on the spectrum", as we say.

[vanlose kid]

ps, (re)reading this book right now and:

The sickness of a time is cured by an alteration in the mode of life of human beings, and it was possible for the sickness of philosophical problems to get cured only through a changed mode of thought and of life, not though a medicine invented by an individual.

Think of the use of the motor-car producing or encouraging certain sicknesses, and mankind being plagued by such sickness until, from some cause or other, as the result of some development or other, it abandons the habit of driving.--Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics II, 23.

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[Plutonia]

ps, (re)reading this book right now and:

The sickness of a time is cured by an alteration in the mode of life of human beings, and it was possible for the sickness of philosophical problems to get cured only through a changed mode of thought and of life, not though a medicine invented by an individual.

Think of the use of the motor-car producing or encouraging certain sicknesses, and mankind being plagued by such sickness until, from some cause or other, as the result of some development or other, it abandons the habit of driving.--Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics II, 23.

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Nice synch vk!

And yes.

The Americanization of Mental Illness

Swimming against the biomedical currents of the time, they have argued that mental illnesses are not discrete entities like the polio virus with their own natural histories. These researchers have amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that mental illnesses have never been the same the world over (either in prevalence or in form) but are inevitably sparked and shaped by the ethos of particular times and places. In some Southeast Asian cultures, men have been known to experience what is called amok, an episode of murderous rage followed by amnesia; men in the region also suffer from koro, which is characterized by the debilitating certainty that their genitals are retracting into their bodies. Across the fertile crescent of the Middle East there is zar, a condition related to spirit-possession beliefs that brings forth dissociative episodes of laughing, shouting and singing.

.....

“We might think of the culture as possessing a ‘symptom repertoire’ — a range of physical symptoms available to the unconscious mind for the physical expression of psychological conflict,” Edward Shorter, a medical historian at the University of Toronto, wrote in his book “Paralysis: The Rise and Fall of a ‘Hysterical’ Symptom.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/maga ... wanted=all

[vanlose kid]

^^ yeah



Freud's beloved "hysteria", nothing but an expression of human despair due to the fact that no one would take the time to just sit down and listen. what a "great" man he was.

edit: "what the patient must realize is that she is sick and the aim of therapy is to get her to accept the diagnosis."

brainwashing. (and to think that some believe Bernay's thoughts were a perversion of Freud's when they follow logically.)

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[Plutonia]

I'm not a fan of Freud either, vk.

Though, as he was sexually abused by his nurse as a child, one could interpret his drive to "fix" women as a sublimated compulsion to make his child-self safe.

But what is Cowen's prediction at the end of The Future of the Universe?

[vanlose kid]

what we lack is culture. one that for instance does not deem you weird if you choose not to watch television or entertain yourself 24-7, or whatever the current norm is.


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Oh-oh-oh-oh!

We do! I was just now listening to Tyler Cowen talk about that very thing! It's just that it's so new we don't recognize it. It's hard to describe. It has to do with little bits, information flows, co-creation, streams of meaning, long intervals of interest, authenticity, contribution and interiorization.

Have a listen, see what you think: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/0 ... ultur.html

BTW, Cowen is probably "on the spectrum", as we say.

he may be. not sure. but on listening, first thought: Freakonomics. second thought: snakeoil. he sounds confused. they both do.

whatever his prediction is it's probably sugary.

sorry if i sound dismissive. but being able to break things into bits (what things and how) and putting them together however you see fit doesn't necessarily entail that what you come out with has use or sense. seems to me he has a pitch and massages whatever he likes around it.

is the moniker "behavioral economist" supposed to suggest that what TC's doing is empirical as opposed to the Keynesian rationalists? is that a good thing?

empiricists are no closer to "reality" than rational/idealists (reality is how they define it, makes theory generation so much easier, everyone can be original). they carry the same philosophical baggage. they just do different things with it.

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[vanlose kid]

I'm not a fan of Freud either, vk.

Though, as he was sexually abused by his nurse as a child, one could interpret his drive to "fix" women as a sublimated compulsion to make his child-self safe.

But what is Cowen's prediction at the end of The Future of the Universe?

just a hunch, but it probably involves something as crass and pedestrian as the realization of Nozick's pleasure machine with everyone hooked up and "happy, happy" and he's sorry he's going to miss out.

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