Autism and Conditioning

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I don't believe any amount of conditioning can change the wiring in your brain that makes you autistic, or we would all outgrow it. Believe me, the world at large, not to mention my parents when I was growing up, have all INSISTED on changing every autistic thing about me and after half a century, they have all FAILED. Overcoming a phobia with CBT is a mental exercise and as such, a world away from rewiring neural processing connections.



It's always struck me that it's the constant barrage of high intensity sensory data keeping us on the verge of being overwhelmed by the inability to process it all, that creates the NEED to maintain routine. Knowing that unexpected changes and sudden switches from one field of focus to another are likely to put us in overload, it's only natural that we should attempt to keep the parts of our lives over which we CAN exercise some control, in strict order, to keep surprises to a minimum.

That being the case, insisting that an autistic forcibly change their routines, just to prove to outsiders that it can be done, is indeed, a form of torture. Just because you can accomplish it doesn't mean you SHOULD, and in the long term, is likely to cause severe psychological and emotional damage.



Reducing an autistic human being to the level of a Pavlovian dog. The very definition of "dehumanization."





Precisely. And I can attest from personal experience, that's exactly what it does. It makes one afraid to try anything by turning every experience of everyday life into one giant endless anxiety attack.

Fear is an emotional state caused by the (conscious or unconscious) expectation that an aversive experience is about to occur.

Conditioning away fear works by exposing the person to the feared situation while ensuring that the aversive experience does not take place.

So, the question is - among people with insistence on routines, what are they afraid will happen if something changes, and can we prevent that happening?

I've done a lot of thinking about why autistics often hate change. And my theory is that it's because change is overloading.

See, one of the most basic forms of learning is habituation - with most kinds of stimuli, if you are repeatedly exposed to them, your response to them becomes less pronounced. For example, one time there was a spider living in my home. I discovered that if I blew on the spider, she would curl up and play dead. However, over time, she stopped curling up when I blew on her. This demonstrates habituation.

Habituation occurs on a neurological level too, in the form of reduced neural activity to a repeated stimulus. It also occurs on the level of internal experience, with the person no longer being consciously aware of a stimulus (unless reminded) once they've habituated to it.

Overload is essentially when too much is sent to conscious awareness, and this outstrips the limited processing power of the conscious mind. It's more common in autistics because our brains are less good at weeding out irrelevant stimuli before they reach conscious awareness. If you are habituated to a situation, you won't be consciously aware of as many details about it, and as a result, you're less likely to become overloaded in that situation.

So, if they can expose the child to change without causing overload, then they could condition the child to tolerate change better. But since overload is inherently aversive, the more times the child gets overloaded by a change in routine, the worse their fear of change will become.

am only able to speak of own experience with this,but in own case the exact circumstances above;a lot of changes in life and routine ended in multiple big police incidents and self/KoR being detained under the mental capacity act on a section three for four months in a secure intelectual disability A&T hospital called greenways.
are welcome to read the blog of mine to see experiences of what happened and what the hospital was like,though theres only so many ways to call something a hellhole.
was released in december but there were changes to routine so ended up in another big police incident again and was redetained until jan twenty second.

For starters: the principles demonstrated by Pavlov have virtually nothing to do with behavior management and change as it relates to this topic.

That said, principles of behaviorism are at work in virtually every facet of daily life. My favorite example of negative reinforcement is the beeping sound the car makes when it first starts; that noise stops when the seat belt is connected. The noise is interpreted by most people (NT or otherwise) as a negative; clicking the seatbelt in removes the negative. That's negative reinforcement. Have automobile manufacturers reduced people who can hear to the level of a Pavlovian dog? I guess (even though this example is also not Pavlovian conditioning), but somehow I just don't feel dehumanized by Honda.

Nicotine replacement products (Nicorette, Nicoderm, etc.) work on the the behaviorist principle of extinction. Smoking (behavior) is replaced by the patch/gum/lozenge; over time, the use of that product is reduced, until the need for it is gone. Again, not dehumanizing.

I used positive reinforcement to get my husband to wash the dishes. At first, every time he washed the dishes after dinner, I made a big deal of thanking him and giving him a beer. Very quickly, he figured out that I appreciated what he was doing. Dehumanizing? Eh. I don't think so; even if it is, the bottom line is, my husband washes dishes.

Not all behavior change is bad. Not all behavioral change programs are bad. Okay?

Going back to the original post, I think parents of an autistic child (1) strictly prohibiting rituals, and (2) enforcing lots of changes, are courting disaster. If a behavior/ritual isn't maladaptive, why mess with it? Even if the child is going to therapy to learn a behavior (so, positive reinforcement; and again, this is not Pavlovian conditioning), it's not going to work if the child can't figure out what new behavior is being reinforced.

I don't know. I bet it would be torturous for the child though.

The problem is that it's not fear. When things change suddenly and unexpectedly, I have trouble because it's a lot of new information to process, and I have to respond very quickly, which I have trouble doing.
I don't FEAR that this will happen. This HAPPENS.
The only way to prevent it is to give me fair warning of upcoming changes wherever possible.