Fun and Facts

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I summarized my last few postings into a PDF article. Here it is:
http://www.eikonabridge.com/fun_and_facts.pdf

Here are the drawings illustrating the analogy between

1+2+4+8+... = -1

and the way how to develop autistic children.

Linear Space: the neurotypical perspective gives the illusion that the shortest path between start (0) and finish (-1) is the straight line segment in red.


Dyadic Space: the autistic reality shows that the shortest path is totally opposite to the neurotypical intuition. The right path is the green path.

Thanks Jason. Good stuff as always. I need to get your book but was looking for an electronic copy and didn't see a kindle version. Is there a way to get one?

I continue to be amazed how some of the professionals that work with my 6 yo son continue to push the traditional development path of speech first, then communication which in their minds enables him to learn social skills. He has shown them over and over again that he learns the skills almost immediately and puts them in practice if he is simply given a story to read with pictures. They just don't get it.

The big issue I see is that inexperienced parents with an autistic toddler will almost always believe the professionals who falsely tell them the most important thing is to quickly get the child speaking if they want a 'optimal outcome.' All that approach does is frustrate the child which leads to anxiety and poor behavior which the professionals then try to correct with behavioral therapy. It's very sad.

Yeah, good point. I need to get around making it into an eBook. Let's see if I can make that happen this summer. Anyway, WrongPlanet still has most of my updated articles. See, when I wrote the book, I used a copy-editor. I made a lot of compromises she suggested, softened the tone, eliminated most of the theoretical explanations. I even changed "being autistic" into "having autism." It was the first book I've ever written. Looking back at it all, those were all wrong decisions. Trust me, in the future it won't be like that.


It's a somewhat lonely path. I just feel bad for autistic children out there. No one understands them.

See, I still get shocked sometimes on how lonely I am in this world. Recently, I participated in a team-building event (in the guise of "leadership training"), where we were asked about drawing down pictures on the sequence of steps "to make toast." Everyone was given 3 minutes to do this task. The idea was to consolidated different people's ideas and build consensus on a final sequence of steps. (We never got that far, by the way. Still, people had fun with the exercise.) Here was my drawing:

Now, if I showed this picture to anyone in the world, they'd probably take a look, perhaps say "hmm.. hmm..." and that's probably it. They probably wouldn't think much of the picture. Nothing out of ordinary, right? But do you know what? I took the time to look at other people's drawings. I looked through about 85 people's drawings. Here is what I saw:

(a) Because everyone was from technology field, everyone drew stick figures, on the spot. No whining. Everyone did it. Some drew beautifully. This is much in contrast with the parents of autistic children that I have met out there.
(b) So, in a sense, I was in a friendly territory. I would even call it my home territory.
(c) Some people did scribble a few words here and there. BUT, out of the 85 pictures or so, only my drawing came with full instructions, written down.

When I went through the 85 pictures or so, my heart just sank. To everyone else, picture drawing was an aid. They fully assumed that the verbal explanation will come later. Pictures, to them, were just a device to help communication, to illustrate a point. Everyone else assumed that the verbal communication was the primary channel. The visual part was just an aide. But in my case, it was totally the opposite: the visual part was the primary channel. The verbal part, to me, was secondary: like icing on the cake.

So, even within my home territory, I was still 100% alone. That was a very poignant and sobering experience.

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My son's got a new ABA therapist recently. I had to explain to her a bit what we do at home and in school. I told her that everyone (parents, teachers, babysitters, other therapists) all drew pictures and communicated to my son through pictures. She told me, no problem, her Mom was an artist, that she learned to draw and paint early on from her mom.

Then one day I saw her bring in an oil painting set, full with two blank canvases. She then taught my son and my daughter to do oil painting. I look at the painting and I just had to smile. Obviously there was a misunderstanding. To me, drawing is a way of communicating, a way to develop children's deep-thinking skills. To me, visual communication serves as a language. To me, the purpose was not art, but language. Anyway, I was not critical. It was manual work, after all. It was good experience for the children. And for my daughter, it was the right age to get into some techniques in painting. For my son, I'd say it was a bit too early to explore oil painting.

I never taught my children how to draw picture. I never gave them one single instruction on how to draw pictures. Their drawings are their sovereign expression. They drew their pictures, I drew my pictures. It was the way how we communicated. I think that's what I mean by drawing as language, as compared to drawing as art. I don't interfere on my children's sovereign expressions. We just used pictures to communicate, to think. Sure, my children developed fondness for drawing because they grew up watching me drawing. But they both started to draw pictures without me having to tell them to.

Here is a side-by-side comparison of what I mean by "drawing as language" vs. "drawing as art."

My son's drawings:


My daughter's drawings:


(I altered the images slightly to change the names of my children, as usual.)

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What's the point? The point is that, I've given up a long time ago that people can understand my message. It's for the same reason that people can't understand autistic children out there. It's the same reason that people can't understand 1+2+3+4+...=-1/12. It's a very small minority in the world that can understand all these things. Even for people on the spectrum, they have all grown up "brainwashed" (that's an expression from my wife, and she is neurotpyical) by our neurotypical society. Go through the postings in the General forum in WrongPlanet and you will see how many people have developed self-pitty and blame every mishap in their lives on autism, even for medical conditions obviously unrelated to autism (and shared by many people in the world, most neurotypical people.) People blame their anxiety level on autism, not realizing that 1/4 of adults in the USA in the last 10 years have used anti-anxiety drugs. And most of these adults are neurotypical. People have developed a habit of looking for excuses, and dump everything on autism.

Meanwhile, I live a happy life. I have two extremely happy children, darlings of everyone. I mean, I know people are suffering out there. But trust me, it's a path that they have chosen. You can't save people when they don't want to save themselves. It's their choice. I can only sit back and watch. I simply leave my opinion written. Perhaps in another 40, 50 years, people will wake up. It took 377 years between Galileo's inquisition (he said the earth goes around the sun, remember?) and the Church's apology. It took 63 years between homosexuality being classified as a mental disorder in DSM and the legalization of gay marriage in the USA. It took 74 years between Bolshevik revolution and collapse of Soviet Union for people to realize that communism did not work. See, things take time, especially in social science. Meanwhile, millions of children will continue to perish, millions of family will be broken. But hey, we've being through this before. Millions of lives really don't make much difference, in the big scheme of things.

I had to laugh when I saw your son's drawing. It looks exactly like what my six year old would draw. He doesn't care about what color he uses and will never use multiple colors unless the marker/pencil/crayon he is using breaks or runs out of ink. He just doesn't care about color or "art" as you would describe it. He loves to draw trains, bridges, construction equipment etc and does it with impressive detail for his age. I don't think I've ever seen him draw something that would be considered "art" like what you show from your children.

Other kids at his school have made fun of him because he doesn't color. If the teacher gives everyone a picture to color, he will pick one color and scribble a bit (of course never between the lines) and then turn the page over and draw something like an excavator or a maglev train freehand with lots of detail purely from his memory.

Relax and stay positive. Things do change slowly as you state but it is change. Your posts have certainly impacted me and helped me understand how to support the development of my ASD son. Big change often happens at the grassroots level and that's why it can be slow.

The internet and other new technologies offer so much opportunity for our children who are visual communicators and great readers. I think the future will be theirs.

My personal experience leads me to believe that children who must struggle the most ultimately can and do succeed in life. These bright ASD children who succeed will have overcome so much and really learned how to persevere. They will be tenacious, intelligent, highly successful adults.

Thanks for staying positive. The thing is, my life with my children is so full of laughter and fun that I feel sorry for other children on the spectrum. Here is just another example. A few days ago, my daughter tripped while racing with my son in an open field, and got hurt on her knee. My son later drew this picture.

It said: "Food allergy, hurt or pregnant? Contact us for help or call 911 for (assistance). THANK YOU!" I showed the picture to all the adults (my wife, my kids' grandparents and uncle/auntie), and everyone had a good laugh. Calling 911 (emergency assistance phone number in the USA) because of pregnancy, or putting it at par with food allergy and being injured? That is just too funny! My son surely realized that people had fun with his drawing/writing. So, now, every time I showed him his drawing again or just mentioned about it, he would cover his ears in embarrassment. Ha ha, really cute. (Image blurred intentonally.)

Drawing pictures is how the brains of my children got developed. Each picture comes with its own story. If you think about it, how can anyone ever learn about 1+2+3+4+... = -1/12, verbally? There are things that just cannot be explained through a radio talk show / interview. Visual communication is a much higher-lever way of communicating and developing ideas.

Oh, regarding the single-color. Yes, I've explained about that before. In the retina of these children, every pixel's signal is amplified. It leads to maximization of contrasts, just like everything else with an autistic child's sensory signals. (This corresponds also to the "renormalization" observed in quantum fields or in critical phenomena in physics.) So, the best way of communicating with young autistic children is simple stick figures with just one color. They like simplicity. I get dismayed at adults not understanding this point. I see saw many adults using colorful, real-life photo pictures, instead of stick figures. And they then get surprised why sometimes photo pictures just don't work. See the example of the yellow bus at the bottom of this thread.
http://wrongplanet.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=309507

(original source: http://infiniteach.com/autism-behavior-visual-schedule/)
You think you are showing playground to the boy, but he only sees the yellow bus. See, it takes adults a long time to learn a simple thing like this. You tell adults to draw stick figures, and 95% of them would go and be creative and say: "I have a better idea, let me use a photo picture, it's more realistic." Duh?! The problem with autism is not on the side of children. It's on the side of adults. Adults are very hard-headed, and prefer to repeat all the mistakes that millions of parents/researchers have already gone through.