A couple of recent news stories about autism

I had intended to post about gender and privilege today (mainly in response to recent posts at Taking Up Too Much Space and Questioning Transphobia), but i'm having a bit too much trouble getting my head round the concepts and then turning my thoughts into words to write coherently about the topics, so i'm going to post on some recent autism-related media stories instead...

There are 2 in particular i want to deal with in this post - there's another one that needs a pretty hardcore fisking and therefore a post to itself - and i think they're interestingly related...

The first is this story from Medical News Today (actually found via the Fortean Times breaking news page, which shows that things turn up in odd and unexpected places), "Unlocking The Inner-Savant In All Of Us"...

I'm going to leave aside the many things i find deeply problematic about the article (particularly some of the language used), and concentrate on the actual science. The idea that "savant skills" (which, although it's been said many times, it's still worth pointing out, not all autistic people have, and the stereotype that all autistic people have them can be extremely damaging to those autistic people, like myself, who don't have them, leading to doubts that we are "autistic enough" and/or self-hatred and feelings of "I'm so useless, i don't even have savant skills") are not necessarily exclusive to autistics isn't new - in fact, IIRC, several of the people historically documented as "idiot savants", from whom the concept originated, were probably not autistic (altho probably non-neurotypical in other ways). The idea that neurotypical people could be "given" savant skills is one i haven't encountered before tho (and has kind of scary implications for "enhancement" purposes, if it could be used by governmental or military forces - in fact, it reminds me an awful lot of River Tam in Firefly)...

It also reminds me of a conversation i had about savants long before i identified as autistic, while i was volunteering on a holiday camp for young adults with learning disabilities (which was something of a formative experience for me, as i was there ostensibly as a "non-disabled" "carer", but found myself identifying with the learning-disabled people there - and in particular seeing some of them as probably more mentally and socially functional than me in many situations - in ways that were part of my gradual self-realisation process that led to my self-diagnosis a couple of years later), where someone else was saying that savant abilities were far beyond what "normal" people were capable of, and i replied, using the small knowledge of autism i had at the time, that i didn't think "normal" people were necessarily incapable of doing the things that savants did, but merely incapable of wanting to.

Of course, there were several revelations i had subsequent to that conversation about just how much difference there actually was between me and "normal people", but for some reason that conversation stuck in my mind... i think it may have been my first realisation of how much i was bothered by some of the "othering" language used to talk about savants (and other impaired/disabled people who were celebrated for their achievements).

The second, via Autism Vox, is this Daily Telegraph story that autism is "caused by a supercharged brain":

"Our hypothesis is that autistic people perceive, feel and remember too much," Kamila Markram told the New Scientist.

Faced with this "intense world" , autistic infants withdraw, with serious consequences for their social and linguistic development, she added.

Repetitive behaviours such as rocking and head-banging, meanwhile, can be seen as an attempt to bring order and predictability to a "blaring world".

This feels incredibly familiar to me - all my life i always felt that i felt all emotions, both positive and negative, much more strongly than other people, and in the absence of knowledge about autism came up with words like "hypersensitive" to describe myself. (It's also probably part of why, before i discovered the much more fully satisfactory explanation offered by Asperger's, i tentatively self-diagnosed as bipolar for a while - my main reason for that being the extreme strength of both my depression and elation, and the way that i could very easily rollercoaster from despair to ecstasy and back again within a single day (i still do, but probably deal with it a bit better/use it a bit more fruitfully than i did in my undiagnosed days) - i have, however, never had the days- or weeks-long periods of mania that are generally considered diagnostic for bipolar...) Linking this to the sensory-overload aspects of autism makes perfect sense in context.

In particular, with regard to empathy, and the assertion that autistic people supposedly lack it, i have always felt that my major problem in dealing with other people's suffering is not a lack of empathy, but an overload of it - when people i care about tell me about any sort of bad things in their lives, i tend to jump straight to total identification with them - not just feeling for them but feeling like them, or perhaps more accurately feeling like how i would feel if the same thing happened to me - which can leave me in a less "together" state than them, and thus not much use to them (or even lead to a really fucked up situation of them "helping" me rather than vice versa). I would often actually be a more effective support to my friends if i had less empathy...

The "hypermemory" and compulsive routines (getting "stuck on a track") aspect is also extremely familiar to me - and sounds like a probable link to the phenomenon of autistic "inertia". What i'm not sure about is whether this implies an actual greater input from the senses into the autistic brain, or merely a greater input relative to the brain's processing power (which could merely imply a deficit in processing power relative to the same amount of information input)...

The only thing in this article that really doesn't fit me is the bit about abnormally fast/large brain growth - i have, if anything, an unusually small head/skull for an adult of my size (in particular a very narrow head from side to side - which is something i've noticed in quite a few autistic or suspected-of-being-autistic people). However, this could be to do with my general build - strongly ectomorphic, with very long limbs compared to the size of my head and torso, or to do with my forceps birth (which has been documented to influence adult skull shape).

One commenter at Autism Vox also mentioned "the theory that the brain is not integrated well across various areas of the brain" as possibly linked to all this, which brings me back to the following quote from the first article:

"Normally we are aware of the whole and not the parts that make it up. These attributes of objects are inhibited in normal brains" says Snyder.

"Savants have access to the less processed information, before it is packaged into holistic concepts and labels. Autistic savants tend to see a more literal, less filtered view of the world."

- so these 2 articles, despite both arguably containing stereotypes and pseudoscience, do both seem to provide useful pieces of a general theory for how autistic brain function differs from neurotypical brain function...

There is good reason for autistic people to be inherently suspicious of any such "scientific" research into autism, as all science - and, IMO, particularly science relating to human physical and mental functioning - is biased according to the politics and economics of the society it is carried out in, and any research into autism from the scientific establishment is likely to be used by the disablist political establishment in its quest to "cure" or eliminate autistic people.

However, i do think that some of this research can be useful from a neurodiversity/autistic liberation perspective, for better understanding ourselves and better explaining our differences from the "norm" - as not better, not worse, but simply different - and in promoting better understanding - and thus better accommodation - of our differences across wider society. I think that the sensory/informational/emotional overload aspect of autism is one aspect which neurotypical people very often are either ignorant of or even actively hostile towards accommodating, and that stereotypes of autistic people as "unfeeling", "lacking in empathy" or "emotionless" can combine with observations of autistic people experiencing overload to produce a perception of autistic people as selfish and/or as burdens on others who "take" but never "give" in social interaction, causing resentment, anger, jealousy and hatred towards autistic people (something i have experienced myself both in situations where i was known to be autistic and, actually more often and more damagingly, in situations where i was not "out" as autistic, but where the same perceptions were applied to me and the "selfishness" attributed to class privilege and/or contempt for others).

This is why, unlike some people i have encountered in the autistic self-advocacy/autistic liberation movement, i am not necessarily opposed to research into the biology of autism - while such research certainly can be used for negative purposes in analysing difference in order to eliminate difference, the same understanding can also be used to celebrate that difference with pride.

What we need, ultimately, is research on autism (and the same applies IMO to any other impairment/disability) done not by establishment scientists with links to those with curebie or otherwise anti-diversity agendas, but by autistic (or insert other impairment here) people ourselves, and placed within a social rather than medical model of disability. However, in the meantime, there is still some worth to be gained from existing autism research, despite the need to critically sift through the bullshit surrounding it first...