| 9:31a |
Recommended link; robot for teaching "social skills" in autism... Thanks to today's KurzweilAI.net Daily Newsletter, I'd like to point to an article by Emmet Cole titled "Using a Robot to Teach Human Social Skills," at http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/07/autistic_robot . I recommend reading the article, but I need to prologeminate here just a tad. I am much irritated by the opening sentence, which says: "Children with autism are often described as robotic: They are emotionless. They engage in obsessive, repetitive behavior and have trouble communicating and socializing." All that sentence needed to say is "Children with autism engage in obsessive, repetitive behavior and have trouble communicating and socializing." Given the broad spectrum of autism, it would have been better for it to refer to " many children with autism" instead of all such children. That autistic children are "emotionless" is not only false, it's ridiculous. And if there are people who "often" use the adjective "robotic" to describe autistic children they should, in my opinion, be ashamed of themselves. That said -- and I feel a little better for having said it -- the rest of the article is worth discussing. The more I think about it, the less I like it. But maybe I'm wrong... Over to you... |
| 1:40p |
Book Review: Finding You Finding Me...
In response to my posted link this morning, Meg Umans commented:
"I'm so grateful that you recommended Finding You Finding Me by Phoebe Caldwell some time back. Anyone who missed the recommendation -- I've found the book very helpful. It outlines a way of communicating with people who have severe learning disabilites and a spectrum disorder. More important for me, it explains some of how having autistic wiring feels, how the things I do with good will can cause discomfort or even pain for people with autism I love."
I tried, and failed, to find my recommendation for the book in this journal (using the Google search string); but I was reasonably sure I had reviewed it in one of my newsletters at some point, so I looked there -- and I found the review. Here it is, FYI, from the March/April 2006 issue of The Verbal Self-Defense Newsletter.
BOOK REVIEW
Finding You Finding Me, by Phoebe Caldwell; London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers 2006. ISBN 1-84310-399-0; $19.95. 174 pages, with bibliography, subject index, and author index.
Diana Cook was kind enough to send me this book, which I read straight through from beginning to end without a break; I simply could not put it down. It's the first book that has affected me that way in many years; ordinarily, no matter how impressed I am by a book, I'm able to set it aside. Not this one. I've been putting off reviewing it, hoping that before I did so I'd have an opportunity to read at least a few reviews by Caldwell's colleagues in the field of autism and autistic spectrum disorders, but nothing has appeared, and I've decided not to wait any longer. I'll remind you, therefore, that I have absolutely no expertise in the field of autistic communication, and what I have to say here is nothing more than my opinion. However, I am much encouraged by the fact that Caldwell subscribes to what I have always taught as the most important principle for dealing with disordered communication of any kind whatsoever: Assume that the speaker's intention is always to communicate coherent meaning.
Caldwell's patient population is "people whose severe learning disabilities are combined with autistic spectrum disorder," and she has developed a strategic method called "Intensive Interaction" for communicating with them. She suggests on pp. 26-27 that we think of the way these people have to deal with their perceptions of the world using the metaphor of "a busy airport where more airplanes come in than there is space for them to land on the runway, so they stack up." Very quickly the system is overloaded, and eventually there will be a crash. "All the sensory images will start to break up, a process known as 'fragmentation'." According to Caldwell (backed up by a number of quoted statements from sufferers), both overload and fragmentation are not just frightening and confusing but literally the source of physical pain. On page 28: "Because of the terrifying sensations they will be subject to, the one thing that people with ASD want to avoid at any cost is moving from overload to fragmentation. In order to avoid this, they tend to develop coping strategies..." And those coping strategies tend to be perceived by NTs ("neurotypicals") as undesirable and as "difficult behavior."
Caldwell's method for establishing communication with these patients is to join them where they are and speak their language. The simplest and quickest way I know to explain this is by quoting from one of her own practice anecdotes, on pp. 70-71, as she works with a patient named Pranve that she has been warned may attack her:
"He is in another room and is making soft sounds to himself. I want to make contact with him without triggering his fight/flight system so... I join him in his sounds. He comes out at once to see who it is that is speaking his language, the sounds that have meaning for him. By continuing to reply to his sounds in this way I confirm that I will talk to him in a way he finds non-threatening, since it will not overload his brain. He leads me at once into the sitting room and sits down beside me. We start to interact. At first he sits with his body turned away from mine but within a few minutes he has turned towards me. He is smiling and giving me his hand."
I strongly recommend this book, although it's clear to me that many parts of it are sure to be controversial. You don't have to agree with everything Caldwell says to profit by those parts you can agree with, and the information she provides has applications well beyond the world of autistic spectrum disorder. |