Friday, October 18, 2013
Slice of Life 1
I suppose I'll always have my early intervention notes. I guess what I was wishing for as I was looking for books at the library today is how it is living with Cedar, my toddler. I guess the part that is strange for me is having lived through this twice before and the inevitable tendency to make comparisons. We're told we shouldn't, but it's kind of an automatic process. I'm mining my past experience looking for hope, I suppose.
Was my oldest this quiet? Was she this odd? When she babbled, was it the same? I didn't record very much from that time because I was so anxious about her. Am I the same? Am I hiding from the reality of it as I did for the first couple months after Cedar was diagnosed?
Hekka was diagnosed at a much older age (first through third grade), because her speech was not especially delayed. I went the long way around, looking for another explanation of her deficits. And a big part of finally accepting her diagnosis was seeing the disorder in myself. So there was double the grieving process and on the heels of that, Cedar's diagnosis. And somewhere in there, Sputnik spending a lot of time in the assistant principal's office.
dys hors d'oeuvres
I had a discussion with some friends online recently where someone threw out the term aspie, and I said I didn't like the way that tries to make a cute pet name out of a disorder, and they said it was just short for Asperger's Syndrome, which the third person (who was indirectly being called aspie) said they felt was less stigmatizing than ASD. I suppose I could make a comic of it, only it wouldn't be a comic, it would be an illustration.
A: I am frustrated by an interpersonal interaction
B: The dilemma of the aspie in a neurotypical world
Me: I don't like the term aspie. It diminishes ASD.
A: I don't like ASD.
Me: Disorder means a condition that impairs function.
A: I think a syndrome is less bad than a disorder.
Me: A syndrome is actually set of problems. I don't think it's less bad.
There was probably some pictures of cats and dictators with humorous captions blended in, but that was the conversation.
Today I decided to pick up a book about ASD, Paul G. Taylor's A Beginner's Guide to Autism Spectrum Disorders and pretty quickly ran into this same concept, the desire to destigmatize disorder. It's probably a particular annoyance I have as a linguist, when people try to water down the language.
In the case of A, I probably have to grant that he doesn't have a disorder, since he was about to find a career where his qualities were an asset, attract a spouse, reproduce, and otherwise lead a functional life. He just gets into a lot of arguments with people on the internet.
We have the case of my older daughter, and I'm not sure what the argument is there. She seems pretty successful at this point and was never diagnosed, but we got her into an early reading program due to her language delay and she had one year of speech therapy during kindergarten. So she's successful, but I believe it was due to identification of a problem and early intervention.
In my own case, I feel disordered. I have married and reproduced, but I've been sadly underemployed most my life. Eta: Understanding that this was the product of a disorder allows me to feel less anger at myself. Naming the disease from self is a two edged sword. Sure it can make you feel stigmatized, but it may also frees you from the limitations of the disease if you are able to move past it. ASD may not have been the most important reason for my lack of career progress since I had MDD, but I think it definitely figured into it.
I certainly believe there are aspects of ASD that suit one better for life, such as the ability to focus and diminished impact of peer pressure. But I think there is a quantum of identity deeper than brain architecture. I suppose that makes me superstitious. 3.
A: I am frustrated by an interpersonal interaction
B: The dilemma of the aspie in a neurotypical world
Me: I don't like the term aspie. It diminishes ASD.
A: I don't like ASD.
Me: Disorder means a condition that impairs function.
A: I think a syndrome is less bad than a disorder.
Me: A syndrome is actually set of problems. I don't think it's less bad.
There was probably some pictures of cats and dictators with humorous captions blended in, but that was the conversation.
Today I decided to pick up a book about ASD, Paul G. Taylor's A Beginner's Guide to Autism Spectrum Disorders and pretty quickly ran into this same concept, the desire to destigmatize disorder. It's probably a particular annoyance I have as a linguist, when people try to water down the language.
In the case of A, I probably have to grant that he doesn't have a disorder, since he was about to find a career where his qualities were an asset, attract a spouse, reproduce, and otherwise lead a functional life. He just gets into a lot of arguments with people on the internet.
We have the case of my older daughter, and I'm not sure what the argument is there. She seems pretty successful at this point and was never diagnosed, but we got her into an early reading program due to her language delay and she had one year of speech therapy during kindergarten. So she's successful, but I believe it was due to identification of a problem and early intervention.
In my own case, I feel disordered. I have married and reproduced, but I've been sadly underemployed most my life. Eta: Understanding that this was the product of a disorder allows me to feel less anger at myself. Naming the disease from self is a two edged sword. Sure it can make you feel stigmatized, but it may also frees you from the limitations of the disease if you are able to move past it. ASD may not have been the most important reason for my lack of career progress since I had MDD, but I think it definitely figured into it.
I certainly believe there are aspects of ASD that suit one better for life, such as the ability to focus and diminished impact of peer pressure. But I think there is a quantum of identity deeper than brain architecture. I suppose that makes me superstitious. 3.
Thursday, October 10, 2013
The grammar of intention
For my biology class I needed to choose an article from a specific date range from the Public Library online Science (PLoS). Just by way of explaining why I am talking about an article from 2005. I could see if there's been more recent inquiries along this line, but this is the one I just wrote a summary of so I'll be talking about it. So the article is "Grasping the Intentions of Others Using One's Own Mirror Neuron System" by Iacaboni et al.
This article came up in a search for articles on autism, even though autism is only referred to briefly in the abstract. But if you know people with autism, the whole article is very interesting as it ties together the autism triad of language disorder, social dysfunction, and motor atypicality. (The language disorder connection is not as obvious, hence the title of this blog, but does come up in the references.)
Mirror neurons are neurons in the brain that respond the same whether the subject is making an action or observing another making the same action. What this experiment looked into is whether mirror neurons are mirroring the just the action or the reason for the action (the intention). The took a couple dozen people and scanned their brains by MRI while showing them pictures of a tea cup being lifted either by the handle with two fingers or gripping the cup with the entire hand. These actions were imposed over a blank background, an orderly pre tea setting, and a disorderly after tea setting. The brain scans showed activity greater than the sum of action and context, possibly coding of intention.
What would be interesting about this coding of intention is if the intention of picking up a cup to drink were a relationship between the action of lifting the cup and the action of drinking (if I understood the discussion correctly). Rather than the brain being a like dictionary with the label of actions in one place and their meanings in another, intention was a chain of "logical association" between the actions. So the social dysfunction of autism could be the same variation (if you don't like the word failure) in reading people as in speaking words.
Of course I remember how exciting Theta grid theory first sounded when I took Morphology and the Lexicon, the idea that the meaning of words was their relationships with each other. Thought there always comes a point where this theory breaks down. Of course, that's with the limitation that a word is symbolic, while anything encoded in the mirror neuron system has an actual correlate to reality.
My experience with Aspergers/HFA is that the connections are there, but they don't follow the regular rules. The ASD child seems clueless about some situations but is inflexible about others. Think of echolalia applied to actions and intentions.
This article came up in a search for articles on autism, even though autism is only referred to briefly in the abstract. But if you know people with autism, the whole article is very interesting as it ties together the autism triad of language disorder, social dysfunction, and motor atypicality. (The language disorder connection is not as obvious, hence the title of this blog, but does come up in the references.)
Mirror neurons are neurons in the brain that respond the same whether the subject is making an action or observing another making the same action. What this experiment looked into is whether mirror neurons are mirroring the just the action or the reason for the action (the intention). The took a couple dozen people and scanned their brains by MRI while showing them pictures of a tea cup being lifted either by the handle with two fingers or gripping the cup with the entire hand. These actions were imposed over a blank background, an orderly pre tea setting, and a disorderly after tea setting. The brain scans showed activity greater than the sum of action and context, possibly coding of intention.
What would be interesting about this coding of intention is if the intention of picking up a cup to drink were a relationship between the action of lifting the cup and the action of drinking (if I understood the discussion correctly). Rather than the brain being a like dictionary with the label of actions in one place and their meanings in another, intention was a chain of "logical association" between the actions. So the social dysfunction of autism could be the same variation (if you don't like the word failure) in reading people as in speaking words.
Of course I remember how exciting Theta grid theory first sounded when I took Morphology and the Lexicon, the idea that the meaning of words was their relationships with each other. Thought there always comes a point where this theory breaks down. Of course, that's with the limitation that a word is symbolic, while anything encoded in the mirror neuron system has an actual correlate to reality.
My experience with Aspergers/HFA is that the connections are there, but they don't follow the regular rules. The ASD child seems clueless about some situations but is inflexible about others. Think of echolalia applied to actions and intentions.
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