Autism made simple

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Hi,

I just updated the theory part of my book's website.

http://www.eikonabridge.com/autism-made-simple

I would appreciate your feedback.

regards,

I'm not totally convinced but it's an interesting take on autism. Your explanation is pretty clear. I'm sceptical of everything until I see results so it's nothing personal- we've just not had a tremendous amount of success with anything so I don't get my hopes up anymore.. I also think one of my kids doesn't really fit either type- guess I'd have to buy the book to find out more, huh..

Do you think if your method was applied properly to all children with autism, all of them would become verbal, communicative, and sociable? Or just some?

I have only two data points: my children of ages 5 and 6. On the pro-picture side, I am very confident since another friend of family has started to draw pictures and she is getting excellent results as well. On the pro-video side, no one else that I am aware of has ever made video clips for their children the way I have made. I am not a clinical psychologist or therapist. I am simply a parent, sharing the success story of my children.

In lieu of more data points, I can only offer my guess. My guess is it will work with most children, even the tough cases. I can only offer my guess from what I know about autism. These children have more synaptic connections (this is solid, I have read more than a few related article). I have read also that some researchers have had hard time finding patient cases that have both autism and Alzheimer's. What I mean to say is that, despite more matured age, I believe that people with autism still have synaptic connections to spare. I would tend to believe that there is hope for improvement, at any age. Still, it's always true that the earlier the intervention, the better. I hate the word "intervention," if it were up to me, I'd say instead: the earlier the communication, the better.

We do hang around with other families with children with autism. It's not that we don't try to help other families. But autism is a tricky issue. When I meet with new friends, I always tell them that I have two children on the spectrum, and by the way, I myself am, too. Virtually all my friends and co-workers know about my children's condition. I do not see other people comfortable of being as open as I am. Privacy gets in the way. And frankly, most people view autism as a defect, something to hide, to be ashamed of. Another thing is, most parents are very proud about themselves. They all have searched through all best services providers, read books. Now here comes someone and tells them bizarre picture drawing techniques that they have never read anywhere. What do you expect? I would say so far only one single family faithfully followed our advice, and the mother is happily excited at getting excellent results and going out to tell everyone about it. If I do write a book, it's because people will never believe you unless it's in a book. Strange, but true.

That being said, please take it all simply as something fun to do. I find it surprising that so many books talk about the visual nature of children with autism, but none of them ever asks parents to "talk" to their children through personalized, cartoon-style video clips. I know I am probably a bit more privileged, since I have worked in computer game industry before. I have worked with animation artists. But still, I have used only very basic video editing software to make silly video clips to "talk" to my children. It's home made stuff, so I never had to worry about quality of video.

I have been there, like other frustrated parents. Nothing really makes you feel better than actual results. For the first 2.5 years of my son's life, I was lost. I did not have problem communicating with my daughter (15 months older than my son). I taught her almost everything through pictures. She started to read words around 27 months, despite being non-verbal. She just kept making more and more progress. But my son was a different case. He never could pay attention to any of my drawings. He was hyperactive. It was impossible to get his attention. The worse part was, I grew apart from my son. My wife at one point told me: "Do you even realize that he is your son?"

That was until the day I found out how my son's brain worked. I realized that instead of static pictures, he could actually pay attention to video clips. Let me tell you what I did after that. I did two things: (1) I made several short video clips, to teach him to map people's pictures to stick figures. I would start with a family video, say, of my son, for 5 seconds or so, then insert a static picture frame of himself. Then I pasted in a "cartoonized" version of the picture frame (checkout cartoonize.net, for instance), then I pasted in my hand-drawn stick figure. Then I reverted the sequence. I did this in two cycles. Sounds complicated, but the idea is to show him a video sequence of himself (or his sister, or his mom) gradually morphing into a stick figure, and backwards. This way, I taught him to identify stick figure characters with actual people. He learned this way that stick figures actually represented people, including himself. It's important that the video clip has your voice over input as well, calling out the names of the persons. (2) The success story came from a dinosaur video clip. I inserted 4 additional static frames into a dinosaur video that he liked. Each frame contained simply the stick figure of myself, my wife, my daughter, and my son. And I would utter some non-sensical words like "Papaosaurus, PAPA!", "Mamiosaurus, MAMI!", "Mindyosaurus, MINDY!" and "Ivanosaurus, IVAN!". Really silly stuff. Each frame lasted only around 3 seconds. I call this technique "doing commercials", just like commercials on the TV programs in the USA. Guess what? That was the way how my son learned to call me Papa. That was how he learned to focus on stick figures. It worked like magic. At that moment I knew I had everything solved. He was 2.5 years old, but I already knew I don't ever need to worry or be pessimistic again. I could see the future. Inability to focus, lack of eye contact, tantrums, speech problems, all went away one by one. He also learned to read from my drawings. I knew everything would be fine, the day when my son called me Papa.

I am a visual person, so I detected signs in my children that no one else detected. Even nowadays, when my wife want to convey some message to my son, she would still come and ask me: "could you draw picture for Ivan so that he can learn not to push people from behind?"

That's the way how I always talked to my children. Through pictures. They are genuinely happy children. I guess having a daddy that can speak in their visual language has helped a lot. I speak 5.5 languages, not counting German or French, both of which I also had some exposure. However, when it came to my children, I needed to learn yet another language: the visual language.

Try it. I believe that all children with autism are visual. And as parents, we owe them at least that much. We need to learn to speak their language.

Sorry for the long rant.

regards,

I support your efforts to develop methods for teaching autistic children, but I think that you can improve your message by focusing mostly on the methods and not making the strong, broad generalizations on your webpage. Those claims are just unsupported speculations and don't really help your message of teaching visually and not focusing on verbal + social, which I think is a good approach. But the truth is that you only have two data points, your own children, to support your methods and claims, and it seems that you dont' have much experience with other autistic children or direct experience using your methods with other autistic children, who may have different traits than your children and yourself, and some of whom have additional issues like intellectual disability. As an example, other parents have tried many ways to teach their children visually, and one thing that they noticed from multiple autistic children (non-verbal + ID) is that while visual is a good way to teach, the children don't understand drawings at all. Possibly because they have severe problems with abstraction, they can't relate a drawing of an object or a stick figure to the real object or a live person or photo of a person. What most do get instead of drawings is photos in which everything except the object or person is photoshopped out, so they can focus on the one thing in the picture and learn the word for it to learn to read. These other parents also figured out that reading is key and should be taught as early as possible. Basically the age when NT children are learning to speak is when autistic chidlren should learn to read.

Anyway, I just want to make these suggestions in the hopes that more parents will:
1) try to teach their children in visual ways, including your methods and whatever methods they come up with
2) question the traditional therapies for autism, e.g. ABA/ST that focus on social + emotional + verbal instead of visual + cognitive + academic development

Thanks for your comment. I feel positive about WrongPlanet. It is a friendlier environment, since many if not most people here are on the spectrum.

Regarding
- intellectual disability
- children don't understand drawings at all
those are labels that are all too easily slapped onto children with autism.

It seems to me that you may have missed the details about how to teach children to learn to understand drawings. I can't really blame you. It's not something obvious. It's obvious to me now, but for the first 2.5 years of my son's life, it was not obvious.

Please re-read my message to WelcomeToHolland. I have been there, done that. It still gives me shivers. For the first 2.5 years of my son's life, that was probably what I did: doubting my son's intellectual capability, and accusing him of not understanding drawings at all. It was only when I put my head to work that I realized how wrong I was.

I am still building up the website. In the coming weeks I will be uploading some more video clips. I guess then, and only then, will people understand my words. For now, please re-read my message to WelcomeToHolland, and try to understand the techniques I have described.

Stick figures are important. Not just in teaching children to focus. But because with stick figures you can talk to your children, at bedtime. Tantrums go away, that way. With photo pictures, you can't do that. You can draw figure sticks at anytime to your children. You achieve bonding and communication. Photo pictures are not really a language. Drawing stick figures is a language. If you think about it, ultimately all written human languages came from stick figures. You tell me, but I can't find a replacement to stick figures.

regards,

I don't particularly enjoy pitching in technical discussions into autism. My editors have removed from my book most of the advanced discussions that involved scientific concepts, so to make the book accessible to the general public.

Still, I guess when it comes to website content, I can afford a bit more liberty. I have added the following paragraph. Basically, please do not think that I make strong statements out of blue. I am a scientist, a theorist, for that matter. Behind the scene, there is a large arsenal of logical steps that lead me to make those statements. I understand the wording below is largely beyond the general public, but I do have scientist friends, and this part is for them.

Digression: Maximum Contrast in Quantum Field Theory
The idea of auto-feedback (self-interaction) leading to maximum contrast is well understood in quantum field theory. For those with some physics background, here is some analogy. Kenneth Wilson is probably the first person to provide full insight into the renormalization of quantum fields through his study of the Renormalization Group. Structural simplicity happens when there is renormalization: most operators become irrelevant, with only a few becoming relevant. That is what happens in both autism and quantum field theory. If I dare to make simple, bold statements, it's because I firmly believe that the auto-feedback (self-interaction) process inside the autistic brain leads to maximum contrast, which translates into structural simplicity in the manifestations of these children. If we consider verbal and social skills as non-renormalizable/irrelevant operators, the same quantum field analogy points to its solution. Irrelevant operators do not mean that these processes will not happen: they simply require an high-order interaction through the relevant/renormalizable operators, like the case of light-by-light scattering or Higgs boson decay into two gluons. Translating this into autism, this means that verbal and social skills can and will happen: we just need to go about them through these children's strong visual skills.

The same consideration goes behind simplification into stick figures and classification of types of autism. You don't need quantum field theory to understand autism. But knowing other areas of science definitely helps you build a coherent mental model and reach conclusions easier and faster.