Two years ago I started volunteering in a local kindergarten class. The class consisted of seven rambunctious boys who tested my youth with their high energy and extreme enthusiasm for Star Wars. It was there that I was first introduced to a young man, let’s call him Billy, who had recently been diagnosed with Aspergers syndrome. Knowing what little I knew about autism at the time, I was amazed at Billy’s high verbal skills and keen interest in socializing with the other boys.
The more time I spent with Billy, however, the more problems I realized he was having. Even today, after reading Temple Grandin’s accounts of her childhood and the Rogers and Ozonof (2005) article on sensory dysfunction, I think there was more to Billy’s situation than I understood at the time.
When it came to speaking, Billy was a master. One day I sneezed and he sat me down and gave me an extensive overview of the body’s immune system. I was impressed, to say the least. He knew more about white blood cells then I did. And yet as I read Temple’s autobiography I can’t help but recall things that I thought very little of at the time. To begin with, Billy and I had this ten minute discussion without our eyes ever meeting. He used hand gestures to help describe the flow of blood and stood up excited when he told me about bacteria, but never once did he look at me or make note that I was still there. In fact, I think I could have left and he wouldn’t have noticed. As Temple describes it, I think he was in his “inner world,” blocking out much of his surroundings. Additionally, in reading Temple’s autobiography I made another interesting realization. As I said earlier, Billy had no trouble talking, but there was something a bit bizarre about his speech. I must thank Temple for now, two years later, explaining to me what it was. Billy was exhibiting little to no change in his intonation. His voice was flat and steady as he spoke in an almost robotic sort of way. Now let me explain to you how our conversation ended. Right around the white blood cells attacking the invader germs, Billy noticed a piece of lint falling from the ceiling. For the next three minutes he followed it around the room. When it finally hit the floor he went and played Legos, as if nothing had ever happened.
As for social interactions, Billy had a fondness for being around his peers. The other boys seemed to notice little to nothing of Billy’s condition and included him in everything they did. When they played Lego Star Wars, they would pass him a car and yell “YOU’RE ON THE GOOD GUY’S TEAM.” Let’s note that I was always on the bad guy’s team. Billy had fun participating, but when the boys got too rambunctious you could find him sitting in the corner, rocking back and forth, spinning the wheel of his car over and over again. Quite often when the class got too loud you would find Billy standing in place rocking himself or spinning the wheel of his car. Call it under arousal or over arousal, but it seems pretty clear to me that there was a threshold for how much stimulation Billy could handle. I can’t help but think of the boy from Autism: The Musical who was playing outside with the girls at school. He ran around the carelessly with them, but soon he stopped. He covered his ears and stood alone, presumably to block out some of his world as the kids continued to play around him.
The article by Rogers and Ozonof seems inconclusive in determining if children with Autism are experiencing under arousal or over arousal. Was Billy spinning rocking back and forth to calm himself or was he needing some more arousal? There seems to be a lot of contradicting information out there. To start with, Metz (1967) claims that autistic children have a preference for higher volume sounds than normally developing children. Presumably this means that autistic children are experiencing under arousal. Perhaps things such as flapping and rocking are means to provide more stimulation. In contrast, Hutt, Hutt, Lee, and Ounsted (1964) concluded in their study that children with autism experienced high levels of activation in their brain stem during and EEG. Unlike Metz, they concluded that stereotyped behavior, was a means of suppressing some of the over arousal they were experiencing.
So where do we go from here? It seems obvious to most that there is some sense of sensory dysfunction in children with autism. Temple, Billy, and Wyatt all exhibited such problems. But with such varying (and quite dated) information, I think it is important for us to go further, conducting more studies on the topic, in order to better understand what children with autism are really experiencing.
No comments:
Post a Comment