My thought process goes from specific pictures to general concepts, where as most people think from general to specific. I have no vague, abstract, language-based concepts in my head, only specific pictures. When I do design work, I can run three-dimensional, full motion "video" images of the cattle handling equipment in my head.
I can "test run" the equipment on the "virtual reality" computer that is in my imagination. Visual thinkers who are expert computer programmers have told me that they can see the entire program "tree," and then they write the code on each branch.
It is almost as if I have two consciences. Pictures are my real thoughts, and language acts as a narrator. I narrate from the "videos" and "slides" I see in my imagination. For example, my language narrator might say, "I can design that.
When the correct answer pops into my head, it is a video of the successful piece of equipment working. At this point, my language narrator says, "I figured out how to do it. Images are constantly passing through the computer screen of my imagination. I can see thought processes that others have covered up with language.
I do not require language for either consciousness or for thinking. When I learned drafting for doing my design work, it took time to train my visual mind to make the connection between the symbolic lines on a layout drawing and an actual building.
To learn this I had to take the set of blueprints and walk around in the building, looking at the square concrete support columns, seeing how the little squares on the drawing related to the actual columns. After I had "programmed" my brain to read drawings, the ability to draw blueprints appeared almost by magic. It took time to get information in, but after I was "programmed," the skill appeared rather suddenly. Researchers who have studied chess players state that the really good chess players have to spend time inputting chess patterns into their brains.
I can really relate to this. When I design equipment I take bits of pictures and pieces of equipment I have seen in the past and re-assemble them into new designs. It is like taking things out of the memory of a CAD computer drafting system, except I can re-assemble the pieces into three-dimensional, moving videos. Constance Mibrath and Bryan Siegal at the University of California found that talented, autistic artists assemble the whole from the parts.
It is "bottom up thinking," instead of "top down thinking. Children and teenagers with autism or Asperger's need teachers who can help them develop their talents. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of developing a talent into an employable skill.
The visual thinkers like me can become experts in fields such as computer graphics, drafting, computer programming, automotive repair, commercial art, industrial equipment design, or working with animals. The music, math, and memory type children can excel in mathematics, accounting, engineering, physics, music, translating engineering and legal documents, and other technical skills.
Unless the student's mathematical skills are truly brilliant, I would recommend taking courses in library science, accounting, engineering, or computers. Learning a technical skill will make the person highly employable. There are few jobs for mediocre mathematicians or physicists. Since social skills are weak, the person can make up for them by making themselves so good at something that people will hire them. Teachers need to council individuals to go into fields where they can easily gain employment.
Majoring in history is not a good choice because obtaining a job will be difficult. History could be the person's hobby instead of the main area of study in school. Many high functioning autistic and Asperger teenagers get bored with school and misbehave. They need mentors who can teach them a field that will be beneficial to their future.
I had a wonderful high school science teacher who taught me to use the scientific research library. Computers are a great field because being weird or a "computer geek" is okay. I know several very successful autistic computer programmers. A bored high school student could enroll in programming or computer-aided drafting courses in a local community college. To make up for social deficits, autistic individuals need to make themselves so good that they are recognized for brilliant work.
People respect talent. A paper published last month in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders sought to measure the output of creative ideas in a sample of autistic and neurotypical people. The participants were asked to think of as many non-obvious uses for a brick and a paper clip as possible.
Neurotypical participants would think of all the easy answers—like using the paperclip to reset their iPhones—and only then move on to more innovative uses. But the autistic people jumped straight to the ingenious responses, saying they would use the paperclip as a weight for the front of a paper airplane, for example, or for heating up in order to suture a wound. What else can you do with wire? The idea that autistic brains are intrinsically deficient is one of the many myths Steve Silberman debunks in his recent book, Neurotribes.
Not all the features of atypical human operating systems are bugs. Early childhood interventions should focus on harnessing strengths, Mottron says, rather than erasing the differences between autistic children and neurotypical kids. In time, the appropriate therapies may prove to both expose and help develop the underlying intelligence of ASD patients. One of the enduring mysteries of autism is that the syndrome is just as often associated with the increased likelihood of genius as it is with cognitive challenges.
Historically, most patients with ASD were viewed as also having below-average intelligence. The limitation of past methods of IQ testing was that it was based solely on verbal communication skills.
As more sophisticated IQ tests were developed, it soon became evident that previous assumptions about intelligence and ASD were flat wrong in many cases. These autistic savants exist at the other end of the spectrum, exhibiting feats of mental intelligence that the neurotypical can only marvel at.
The potential for those structural changes to yield genius or below-average intelligence is also still shrouded in mystery. For applied behavior analysts, this creates a challenge in adapting to enormously different types of behavior from patients at either end of the spectrum.
Although the behavioral issues of all ASD patients tend to fall into similar categories, such as communication challenges , difficulty in social interaction, and repetitive behaviors, the underlying issues may vary according to the intelligence of the patient.
ABA is not just used to treat ASD, however, and ABAs with neurotypical patients might have noticed something curious about some of them: even geniuses without an ASD diagnosis often have an unusual number of the symptoms of autism. A Yale University and OSU joint study of eight child prodigies three of which were diagnosed as having autism found a number of fascinating parallels between the participants with ASD and the neurotypical participants.
Both shared an inclination toward obsession, late development of verbal skills, and difficulties with social interaction. Even more interesting, for a syndrome with known genetic links , half of the participants were found to have family links to ASD.
In the general population, only about one percent of people have family histories of autism. All of this suggests that perhaps the autism spectrum may be broader than the current diagnostic criteria for ASD specify—or that autism itself is a condition rising largely from atypical developments in regions of the brain responsible for intelligence. Some even theorize that autism is the result of enhanced, but imbalanced, components of intelligence.
In this view, the autism-high IQ connection is the result of a process that has run amok… in some cases becoming unbalanced to the point where it creates cognitive challenges, and in others tipping toward genius. Though there have been studies that have begun to explore the implications of this, at this point it still remains a hypothesis.
But there continues to be mounting evidence that ABAs working with individuals across the ASD spectrum and outside it can benefit from understanding the apparent relationship between intelligence and the behavioral symptoms they are presented with.
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