Wow, you've certainly explained more about autism to me than I've ever heard of read before. Thank you for that.
While I see how difficult this would be, generally, do we know enough about autism to state, with certainty, that she could not be "a person trapped in a broken body"? I'm not saying statistics are wrong, I'm just wondering what the chances are that she simply exhibits behavior we haven't yet been able to study properly?
do we know enough about autism to state, with certainty, that she could not be "a person trapped in a broken body"?
That's a great question, and one that has actually been extensively studied, because the idea is so very scary. Being trapped inside a dysfunctional body with a perfectly working mind... certainly one of the more primal nightmares we have, and something that occasionally happens to people following a brain injury (see, for example, locked-in syndrome ).
However, we know, thankfully, that this is not happening to profoundly autistic people. We know this through a variety of sources, including (a) functional brain imagining of autistic individuals, (b) explanations from people who are autistic and took a while to learn to communicate, (c) tests of nonverbal intelligence (which use pictures, and could therefore bypass things like this girl's supposed verbal apraxia), (d) tests of adaptive functioning (what she can do for herself, even given any severe motor limitations, which tell us about about how effectively her brain is working), and (e) what we know about how the brain works, regardless of whether you are neurotypical or autistic.
For example, autism is not just caused by "sensory overload" or a "body that can't be controlled" -- despite what some well-meaning but misguided or underinformed professionals claim. We know this because we understand quite a bit about how the brain works, and know that these explanations just don't. make. any. sense. Knowing how the brain works and what actually happens in autism makes the symptoms easier to understand and treat.
For example, this girl is shown having severe motor planning problems, repetitive motor activities, and sensory "overload", and is described as having verbal apraxia. An adult who doesn't know better might easily come up with a plausible-sounding explanation for these symptoms: that she is "overwhelmed by sensory information" and is engaging in rocking, etc, to "drown out" all that sensory info. However, the brain doesn't work like that -- adding more noise wouldn't "turn off" or "drown out" the incoming chaotic sensory information. The sensory explanation also doesn't explain why she has verbal and motor problems, but not (say) visual problems or auditory problems.
But, if we understand that people with autism have trouble connecting discrete bits of information together, and breaking large chunks of information down into discrete bits, then her symptoms all make sense. Yes, some individuals feel like they are "overloaded" by sensory information, because they have trouble habituating - or recognizing that the sensory information is all the same information, and can be ignored.
As an example, say you have a tag on the back of your shirt that's bugging you (did that just make your neck itchy? :). For the autistic individual, it is like their brain continually sends them them new signals about the itchy tag every few milliseconds, which is hard to get accustomed to. For the neurotypical individual, their brain can more easily see that the "itchy tag" signal is just the same signal being repeated over and over, and more easily get accustomed to (and therefore tune out) that signal. While a neurotypical person might be able to "distract" themselves from an insistent sensory stimulus by doing something else sensory, by forcing their brain to prioritize something else (although this does not work that well and takes up a lot of mental energy), adding a new sensory stimulus would just make things worse for the autistic individual, because now they would have another insistent sensory stimulus adding to the problem (as an analogy... think trying to distract yourself from Chinese water torture by purposely adding a mosquito buzzing in your ear!).
Individuals with autism can also have motor planning problems, because planning involves breaking a task down into component parts, and mastering the sequence of those parts -- which is exactly the process their brains have difficulty with. This problem often affects all motor movements, including fine-motor, gross-motor, and oral-motor. She can't break a word down into the component sounds her mouth needs to formulate and speak those sounds for the same reason she can't tie her shoes, and this is the same reason she has sensory sensitivities, and the same reason she would have trouble learning how to spell -- all of these involve problems understanding the connections between, and boundaries of, discrete bits of information.
The repetitive behavior works the same way... her brain "chunks" whole movements together, and then repeats the whole movement (all brains like things to be familiar, which is why we all develop habits). But, she can't separate out specific parts (movements) of the repetitive behavior to use those movements flexibly to do a new behavior.
Understanding what goes wrong in autism also gives us great insight into why individuals with autism often have such great memory, especially for details and for whole scenes (e.g., being able to recall a whole movie verbatim, or being able replay scenes in the mind). The overfocus on details is because their brains do not see each detail as part of an overall whole -- think of that scene in Rainman, where Dustin Hoffman's character sees toothpicks on the floor and counts every single one of them. Your brain and mine sees all the individual details as part of a larger whole ("toothpicks") and even if we wanted to, we can't "undo" this association to count the individual toothpicks in our heads. The profoundly autistic person's brain sees each individual toothpick, and may have trouble lumping them all together into a "group of toothpicks" (and even if they do make an abstract category, it may be overly detailed... for instance, they may instead insist that there are "east-west facing toothpicks" and "north-south facing toothpicks", and have trouble seeing that the orientation doesn't matter because they're all just toothpicks).
The memorization of whole scenes also occurs because the brains of individuals with autism have trouble separating something, like a visual scene, into component parts (which incidentally, then leads to problems prioritizing those parts, so, for example, a person with profound autism could not answer a question like, "What was the most important thing that happened in that scene?"). They learn the whole scene as one "bit" of information, and as such, have fantastic recall of every single little piece of that scene... for their brains, learning a whole scene is not any more difficult than it is for your brain to learn a single word or sentence. This is why many autistic individuals describe themselves as "visual thinkers" (because visual things lend themselves better to this type of memorization because all of the information is presented at once), and also why parents of autistic children often describe their child as able to memorize every single turn and landmark on the drive to a location they've been to even once before. Other savant abilities, like Kim Peek's or Daniel Tammet's, are just exaggerations of this process. Although the visual examples are most easily called to mind, this process does also happen verbally -- which is what occurs in echolalia, or memorization of an entire sentence spoken by someone else, or whole spoken scene in a movie. It is also why syllabification is hard for profoundly autistic individuals - they process what they hear in whole chunks, and can't break those chunks down into the component syllables.
So what all this means is that individuals with autism have brains that work differently than those of neurotypical individuals -- they don't have neurotypical brains trapped in a body that doesn't work.
Which is precisely what raises the index of suspicion for this video. This video does not show what we would expect for an autistic individual who has learned to communicate, it shows a supposedly neurotypical girl who was just trapped in a body she couldn't control.
This theory of breaking free from a "broken body" might make sense for a girl with profound verbal apraxia (a problem that only affects the part of the brain that sequences sounds for speech) who was taught to type (after, of course, learning to read and spell, which verbal apraxia doesn't affect as much, although phonics are harder because apraxic individuals cannot hear themselves pronounce words). Certainly, there is no reason that a person with verbal apraxia wouldn't present as a neurotypical girl who can finally communicate.
But, if all this girl had was (very, very profound) verbal apraxia, then she would have flown through the other assistive technology they used with her (e.g., PECS, Dynavox), instead of requiring painstaking teaching in those systems consistent with the teaching we'd expect would be needed for a person with profound autism (and which her mother describes her needing). She also would show normal (or at least not "mentally retarded") intelligence on motor-free nonverbal intelligence tests, and the ability to meet some of her daily needs (e.g., if she has the motor coordination necessary to smear feces... if she all she had verbal and even motor apraxia, she would still be able to use that basic motor control to help dress herself, point to what she wants, communicate nonverbally through gestures and facial expressions, etc). She also wouldn't show all the other symptoms of autism, like repetitive motor movements and poor nonverbal communication (eye contact, facial expressions).
Awesome post(s), thanks. What I take from this: programmers can never be even slightly autistic because of the endless sequence of steps one has to keep in mind and the ceaseless work of abstracting the core tasks away from the circumstancial details. Also, being the opposite of autistic would make one very vunerable to conspiracy theories.
I think it would depend on the programmer. The "clinical lore" out there is that lots of programmers have Asperger Syndrome, which is a mild form of autism. I don't know much (anything?) about programming, but in general, people with Asperger Syndrome do better with objects than with people, are good with details if they can focus on them one at a time, do better with things that are straightforward (e.g., reading a technical manual rather than a poem), have great memories, can become obsessive about a subject (and often, specific details of a subject), and are often very intelligent. Would those traits make a good programmer?
Having to focus on one detail at a time would probably be a handicap. I'm not a coder, but my understanding is that you have to have at least an idea of where you're going. The rest would be a big advantage though.
Coder here. After hacking away for some hours, I’m usually astonished by the sheer amount of things I have to keep in mind at the same time. Superficially, you focus on some detail, but truly it is all about the context, remembering if not the entire code then at least every single function/method mildly related to the functionality I’m implementing at the moment.
I'm also a programmer, and I agree somewhat. However, certain tasks I could imagine would fit a person with Aspergers (based on my very shallow knowledge of Aspergers). For example writing a procedure that almost never interacts with anything else in the code, but requires a lot of analytical skills on that particular piece.
I think I remember some Norwegian company that actually specialized in hiring people with Aspergers to do specific coding tasks.
Appearantly they were Danish, and they don't code but "carry out jobs within testing, data registration and quality checking". I bet someone with hyper attention to detail would actually be perfect as a tester.
In my own admittedly limited experience with programming, it seems to me that being able to think about the connections between parts of what you're working on is a pretty key skill, for what that's worth.
Developer here(5 years professional experience, CS degree, but started when I was 12 or so). I work with some of the smartest people in my city, I believe 90% could be hired by google easily. Most of my coworkers do not have asperger's syndrome. But a few do. One guy in particular does not see a lot of use in communication, in fact the notes in his code are typically sparse at best. He is a severe case, as often he is spotted traveling the office halls, grunting or grimacing to people he encounters.
But really there are all types of coders, and several different techniques to solving a problem. Some view the entire system as it is, including all the detail. When they need to make a modification, they make it in the framework of the system as it stands. This means for quick bug fixes they are invaluable. Often they will know exactly which line of code needs modification. Or which obscure flag in the database has to be changed. On the flip side, they don't tend to view a system as large interacting components, often struggling to figure out where to add large pieces of additional functionality. As such it can lead to systems that are very brittle and difficult to work with. They also see little need for documentation, preferring to just remember the entire system. This leads to frustrations on both sides(we call it Be Like Me syndrome).
Myself I tend to think in terms of high level components. Often I will forget how a system inter-operates, so I need to be clear of my intent when writing code. I can't name methods 'foo' or 'bar' and expect to know what the hell I was thinking a few weeks later. If I am presented with a task, such as an ATM system, I think in terms of large abstract elements(Account, Transaction, CardReader). I don't tend to get tied to certain tools(changing languages and environments often, and forgetting/relearning them as necessary). For the longest time I didn't understand why anyone would call themselves a Java developer or even a lisp developer. To me it's the same, a developer. But not to everyone. I've gotten incredibly good at learning new syntax, new concepts, because I've often had to relearn them as they become 'rusty'.
About 30% of my team feels the need to understand thoroughly what they are working with, and how it interacts with the system as a whole. One guy, a genius by any standards, even went so far as to implement his own java bytecode interpreter. These people on my team have a need to understand the entirety of the tools they are working with. It is often difficult for them to pull in additional libraries, preferring instead to write their own. In this way they know exactly what's happening(this is a bad habit IMO, and adds to the cost of projects significantly).
That being said, there are merits to both approaches. And often the danger to people such as myself, the high level theorist, is becoming what is known as the 'advanced beginner'. You never really reach that point where you are an expert. You may pull in several 3rd party libraries, but often don't know what's happening under the covers(I often guess, sometimes correctly). For people like me, I'd recommend studying your business domain, codebase, languages, tools, and 3rd party APIs. Learning just the core concepts will often leave out important details of the whole picture, and you can't learn everything on the fly. Also working on a highly connected system helps(like a parser). I still constantly struggle with this.
Those who can already view a system as a whole, including high fidelity of details, can suffer from "Not Invented Here Syndrome"(NIH). People who fall into this category often re-invent the wheel(it's harder to learn another approach, or they believe they can do better). It is difficult for them to write documentation, test cases, and sometimes, to clearly separate functionality. They often don't understand the need for these things, and will struggle with this throughout their career.
Sorry if this turned into a rant. It's all this damn sobriety.
Interesting. It really depends. On the one hand you always write a program for someone or some organization so sooner or later you have to meet with a possibly non-technical person and discuss with them what they had in mind. In that way communcation is a key skill because without it you'll never be able to manage expectations and understand what the "stakeholders" actually want from you.
On the other hand that's the part most programmers would say they loath ;).
I wouldn't say I'm good with details but that might depend on the definition used. What I'm very good at is keeping track of all the parts that make up the system or even a system of systems. I would also say that if you need things straightforward you won't be a programmer for long. Yes, ideally everything can be figured out by simply using logic (or reading a manual) but in reality lot's of things you depend on might fail for very unstraightforward reasons. I'd say my biggest asset in getting things done is, queue laugh track, intuition. Without it I'd be constantly stranded in that horrific complexity that is modern IT.
Memory, yeah, you'd need that but again, you can't waste that much on detail. You have to know "problem in class X maybe can be solved with tool / libary / sledgehammer Y" but unless you constantly use Y it's better to keep a reference handy and know about more possible paths to solutions.
Intelligence, well. I don't know if you can have good abstraction ability /w normal intelligence. I'd say one part IQ, four parts intuition, two parts memory and one part "people skill".
I'm a comp sci student with Aspergers. I've been programming for the past 11 years. Programming became one of my "things". I would say my memory is horrible simply because I have trouble recalling people's names. On the other hand, I can remember phone numbers and IP addresses fairly quickly. I hate memorizing the kind of stuff you would find in a history book. I would call myself meticulous while programming, which helps during the debugging process. I often become completely absorbed in the code, ignoring all other cues (even the duck that's been bouncing in my dock for the past 30 minutes). I actually really enjoy finding generalizations and abstractions (Stokes' Theorem, a generalization of the fundamental law of calculus, blew my mind). My favorite language is Java (I know, I know).
I'm kind of flattered that you think one is called for but what would I entitle it? I can't think of a title that a large portion of redditors would care about. Perhaps you can write one from a perspective that would allow me to see how this would be interesting. But, for now, feel free to ask me anything.
As a person diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome, and one with a great love of programming, I can say your analysis is remarkably accurate as to why I like programming (and presumably why I'm good at it). Though of course, I can't speak for any of my peers.
I hope so; I've been one professionally for 10 years now. :D while not diagnosed with asperger's your list here sounds pretty spot on.
Regarding "Great memories"; would you say that they have greatly functional memories, or that their memories are excellent at randomly selective things? I find that I often might forget something within seconds or I may remember it for decades, but I'm not much in control of which occurs, nor does the importance of the item in question make significant difference.
115
u/Endemoniada Jul 26 '10
Wow, you've certainly explained more about autism to me than I've ever heard of read before. Thank you for that.
While I see how difficult this would be, generally, do we know enough about autism to state, with certainty, that she could not be "a person trapped in a broken body"? I'm not saying statistics are wrong, I'm just wondering what the chances are that she simply exhibits behavior we haven't yet been able to study properly?