Lego Therapy

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Lego Therapy

http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Cambridge-expert-launches-courses-Lego-therapy/story-27968208-detail/story.html

So playing with building blocks has a name, it's called "Lego Therapy." And the purpose there is to teach children to collaborate and socialize.

Of course, all that, is from the point of view of neurotypical people. Yes, somehow they cannot get over the idea that socialization can and should be postponed, for children on the spectrum.

Building blocks are great for pro-video children, because it offers a way for these children to complete their "outer feedback loop." Humans are humans because we acquire deep reasoning skills. And in order for children to develop deep reasoning skills, they need to be able to produce and re-capture information signals. For neurotypical children, this is easy, since they can hear their own speech. For non-verbal autistic children, they instead need to produce manual output. For children that can draw pictures (pro-picture), drawing allows them to complete this outer feedback loop. For children that cannot draw (pro-video), play with building blocks is an excellent alternative. Pro-video children store information in the form of processes. And the visualization of 3-dimensional objects is process-based: you need to move your head and body to capture the 3-dimensionality of the objects. So building blocks are essential for the development of pro-video children.



From there, jumping to socialization is too soon. For children that are verbally proficient, sure, collaborative playing with building blocks is good. BUT, that's not the only collaborative activity they can do. Going with friends to elevator rides would be just as good. And there are a large number of after-school programs, too. So Lego clubs are by no means the only choice. Besides, some children are really not receptive to group Lego playing: they do not want other children to interfere with their own creativity and thinking process. So, building block playing is best left to each child alone, with at most an adult's input.

To me, the value of building-block playing is to develop the deep reasoning skills of these children, which is essential for their development of verbal skills later. Introducing socialization skills while the children are playing building blocks is jumping the gun. Too early. These children still have so many other foundational skills they need to develop. In particular, verbalizing, reading, writing and drawing. You neglect to develop the foundational skills of these children and only pay attention to socialization activities, you end up with underdeveloped children, not only handicapped intellectually and emotionally, but also lacking in social skills.

The children are fine. They will let you know when they are ready to socialize. Our problem as a society is we choose to believe that the children are sick, when they are not. We choose to believe that there is a problem if children don't socialize early on, when there is no problem whatsoever. Because of our wrong belief, we neglect to develop the very skills that will ultimately allow these children to socialize later. Constant and persistent visual communication through pictures/images/videos and putting things down in writing next to pictures, is what really helps these children to develop. It's what helps them to connect the dots in their life experiences.

When my wife pointed the Cambridge News article to me, and told me that she found it odd that people would combine building block playing with socialization, I immediately suspected that the so called "Lego Therapy" must have very mixed results. A little bit of Googling confirmed my suspicion. Yes, there is no evidence of Lego Therapy as being effective for social skills.

https://www.uwo.ca/fhs/lwm/ebp/reviews/2009-10/Strath.pdf

Building-block playing's value is mostly on the side of closing the outer feedback loop, which lays the foundation for verbal skills, for non-verbal pro-video children. If verbal skills are the Hallelujah Mountain peaks, playing with building blocks is part of the foundation that will lead to these peaks. (Other parts include: reading, stick figures with speech bubbles, etc.)

I played with blocks and drew pictures a lot when I was a kid, from age 3 or so.
Before I got my blocks and drew pictures, I played with piles of dirt and made beautiful structures and arrangements of them, this was around age 2.
I didn't develop spontaneous language from these activities, I got language skills from learning to read, then from learning to use language explicitly.
Implicit learning of language wouldn't have got me anywhere.

Anyone that has followed my postings knows about my position on reading. Matter of fact, here is one paragraph from the Q&A of my website http://www.eikonabridge.com/qna

Q: My child has autism, is over 24 months old, and is non-verbal. What should I do?

A: The brains of children with autism are not damaged. They have all the wiring in place for verbal skills. However, they belong to a different species and have a different path of development. Teach them to read first. Talking can wait. We should not turn the lives of these children upside down, just because we want them to follow the development paradigm of typical children. By leveraging their reading skills, children with autism will talk sooner, and better.

Reading by itself is not enough for talking. I work in the field of machine learning, and have used artificial neural networks extensively, so I know a thing or two about how our brain cells work. Humans are humans because of our deep thinking skills. Our brain has limited number of neurons. What makes us intelligent is the ability to "factorize" and re-use the algorithms stored inside our brain. The sub-algorithms of the thinking process are the same, whether for visual thinking processing or language thinking processing. By completing the manual-visual feedback loop, you train the children's brain and get them ready for deep thinking skills, without that, you can't possibly talk to people and have a conversation.

I spoke 3 languages when I was a teenager. (Today I speak 5 and 1/2.) One day some classmates asked me: "So, in what language do you think?" and I was totally surprised by their question. I found it odd. Why would anybody need a language to think? I did not think in any particular language, at all, when I was a teenager. I did not use verbal thinking, at all. I could assemble sentences on the fly, in all three languages, but there was no voice inside my head.

Verbal thinking did creep in later in my life. Today, my brain is not silent anymore. I think in sentences, in this or that language.

So, I know very well that thinking is one thing, verbalizing is another thing altogether. I also know that you can't verbalize and converse, unless you are able to think. And I also know that, to be able to think, you don't need to be able to talk. I also know exactly that inside my daughter's brain, there is no voice. When she was 4 years old (if I recall correctly), she once said something to me that I did not understand, so she spelled the word out for me, at age 4. No normal child would do that. It's kind of scary how well I understand my daughter. We are like mirror copies of each other, with some differences: she is younger and cuter.

Knowing how each autistic child think is important. Nowadays I am starting to teach my daughter to take "picture notes." Sure, they don't teach this skill in school. But I instinctively know exactly what my daughter needs, because she shares the exact same type of autism as mine. "Picture notes" are a way to take notes when you hear people talking, or when you read books. It's a very fast way of writing down notes (only a few strokes and letter acronyms to represent what you hear or read, a bit like flowcharts in software programming), so you can recall the whole story later. Why do I teach my daughter to take picture notes? That's right, I want to improve her recalling ability, and from there, improve her writing skills, too. Again, to most other people, they won't be able to see the connection between drawing pictures and writing skills. But between my daughter and myself, we have a superhighway of communication that no one else in the world will ever comprehend.

This is the newest video I just made. My daughter helped out with the script. From her voice you can probably tell she is a fully social girl. (Last week, I just received feedback from school's speech teacher as well, and she was impressed how much progress my daughter has made in this last year.) People probably won't believe me if I tell them that I put zero emphasis on developing my daughter's social skills when she was younger, and that instead of teaching my daughter to talk, I taught her to read first.



Yeap, my children will just keep plowing forward. For people that choose not to develop their children through personalized video clips, that's their choice. We are in 21st century, with robotic era coming upon us. I just can't understand what excuse there is for parents not to make cartoonish video clips for their children.

Eh, I find your thoughts interesting but I cannot say that I agree. You talk about your type of autism regarding picture notes, but refer to all autism in other places (or at least don't explicitly state that you don't mean that).

(As an aside, my school did teach what you call 'picture notes' as it's useful for taking notes at speed. Indeed, there are courses on how to take short form notes - indeed, there are entire 'shorthand' systems).

I find it frustrating that you criticise mixed evidence for a study, but then present no evidence whatsoever for your own hypotheses.

I also find it frustrating that you persistently add in little quips about how you disagree with the actions of other parents based on your own unevidence based practice.

Consider, for example, the differences in visual sensitivity that some children with ASD have and I think it is not difficult to see that there would be variation in ability to learn effectively from video-based materials.

Indeed, checking your website you say 'It's about raising children with autism, particular in their early childhood stage. However, the book also serves as a 360-degree understanding of autistic people's mind.' and 'No, it is not. Behavioral problems are manifestations of communication problems. If you solve the communication problems, the behavioral problems will go away, by themselves.' 'Best of all, their behavioral and sensory problems will subside and eventually go away, by themselves.'

The first is an example of overgeneralisation that I am surprised to see from a scientist. It is very clear from existing research that there are significant differences across individuals with autism. While I am as much an annecdote as your theory, I do not feel I see things the way you do which rather throws a spanner in your 360-degree understanding of my mind.

The second, I support the sentiment of BUT I disagree. Behaviour can be communication, yes, but it can also be a manifestation of other things. Autism is not solely a communication disorder. I, and many others on the ASD spectrum, have difficulties with sensory issues which cannot be resolved by communication alone. Now, communication can help others understand what can help me but it doesn't mean that all difficulties can be resolved with any degree of ease or practicality. It is, therefore, a separate issue. I can communicate and my sensory issues have not 'gone away'. That is wishful albeit reductionist thinking.

Infact, there are other areas of your Q&A that I disagree with - I do not 'throw tantrums' because I keep a ledger of things people have done to me. I have meltdowns because I cannot cope with routine changes or sensory difficulties.

How can you know the cause of slurred speech you've only observed your children?

' I see only two types: pro-picture, and pro-video. Pro-picture children tend to be on the quiet side, and they are good with pictures and phonics. Pro-video children tend to be hyperactive, and often cannot focus on pictures during their early childhood. Pro-picture children are concept-oriented, pro-video children are process-oriented. From my personal observation, these two types of autism are equally prevalent.'

I learnt how to read early, but have always been poor at phonics. I am not good with pictures. I am hyperactive. Don't really fit your box at all.

For some autistic children, they may learn to talk from learning to read.
In my case, I learned to read early, then talk much later from being taught how to talk, specifically.
It probably depends on severity of autistic traits.
Milder children will learn speaking more implicitly.

My position on the evidence-based approach is fully described in my book, and throughout my postings here in the forum. Basically, social sciences is at least one century behind physical sciences, so they have some catch up work to do.

Let me tell you some stories about physics in these last 100 years, since it's the 100th anniversay of Eistein's invention/discovery of general relativity.

There are two famous cases of Nobel prizes that were never awarded. It may surprise you, but there was never a Nobel Prize for Relativity. Einstein never received a Nobel Prize for his work on Relativity. Another case is for quarks. Murray Gell-Mann never received a Nobel Prize for the formulation of his quark theory.

Albert Einstein instead received his Nobel Prize for photoelectric effects.

Murray Gell-Mann received his Nobel Prize "for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions".

Controversy is a given, it's daily bread and butter in science. It's just all some interesting stories to tell your grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, if one ever lives that long (as Leonard Susskind does, ha ha. He is usually called the "father of string theory".)

Relativity and quarks were never awarded Nobel Prizes, because these theories were too controversial. Hindsight is always 20/20, sure, these two cases will forever remain as regrets. In the case of Relativity, ugly politics and antisemitism played a role, at the height of Nazi Germany.

The case of quarks is even more interesting. Gell-Mann's paper was rejected by Physical Review Letters. He had to resubmit it to Physics Letters, the European journal. One day in the future, the name of the referee will become known, so you younger people can just sit back and enjoy that moment, and see who the infamous referee was. Even more interesting is the case of George Zweig. Let me tell you his story, which you can find by Googling.

George Zweig never received any Nobel Prize, despite that he formulated quarks (which he called "aces") around the same time as Gell-Mann, and despite the fact that Richard Feynman pushed hard for Zweig's case to the Nobel Prize committee. Today, Zweig is always mentioned as co-inventor of quarks, within the physics circle. What happened? Well, George Zweig was a young American scientist, and was visiting CERN (the European lab) at the moment when he worked on his quark theory. Somehow he got into personal argument with the then director-general of CERN: Leon Van Hove. Guess what happened? Leon Van Hove became personal. He told George Zweig that he shouldn't publish his paper. Furthermore, Leon Van Hove instructed the lab's secretary not to type the paper for George Zweig for publication. George Zweig couldn't type. As if all this was not enough, Zweig originally had a seminar scheduled at CERN to talk about his work on quarks. Leon Van Hove made sure that the seminar was cancelled.

Today, if you mention the name of "Leon Van Hove", nobody remembers him. But if you tell people that he was the CERN director-general that censored the work of George Zweig on quarks, people would say: "oh, that guy." If you search for "Leon Van Hove" on Google, you can't avoid seeing the name of "George Zweig" popping up. This is very much like the case of John Sculley. Nobody remembers him. Nobody remembers him as the president of Pepsico or chairman/CEO of Apple. But if you mention that he was the one that fired Steve Jobs from Apple, people would say: "oh, that guy."

Coming back to the evidence-based approach. Let's talk about Peter Higgs. In the 1960s, things start to get a tiny bit better for theoretical physicists. In a sense, Higgs was lucky. His paper went through Physical Review Letters. You can read it here:

http://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.13.508

There was one single author's name on this paper: Peter W. Higgs. It was a theory paper.

Sure, no science would be complete without verification. You want to see the verification, that is, your proof of evidence? That's where it gets interesting. Here is the paper confirmation the existence of the Higgs particle. (You can download the PDF version there.)

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037026931200857X

Yeap, the evidence came in 2012, 48 years (basically half a century) later after Higgs' work. Please take a look of the list of authors. There were so many experimentalists that their names had to occupy 9 pages. So many of them, that I can only estimate the number of names on the author list: my estimate is that there were 2,700 names.

In the 1970s, people started to get used to Lagrangian field theory, and by then string theory was also invented. Some credit it to Leonard Susskind, so Susskind is nowadays often called "the father of string theory." Supersymmetry gained ground too. If you ask for evidences, people probably just laugh. Basically, the answer is: "who knows when?"

Not only did physicists learn to accept new and creative ideas within physics, but they have learned to be open to innovative ideas from other fields. The so-called "econophysics" made its way into physics journals in 1990s. So you saw Wall-Street quant equations in Physics journals.

What I am doing today probably could be described as "Cognitive Physics". But I have a feeling that it is still too outrageous to fit into physics journals. Ha ha.

So, coming back to your question on evidences. I am trained as a theoretical physicist. It is not my job to verify my claims. Theorists are supposed to work as theorists. You start from very limited set of clues, observe the symmetries of nature, then you develop a top-down approach to your theory. And then, decades later (or centuries later, as is expected of things like string theories), thousands of people will verify your claims.

Yeap, you are very welcome to wait a few decades or a few centuries to verify whether my theory is correct.

Meanwhile, my children will just keep plowing forward. By the time you understand my words, my children will probably already have learned about quantum field theories, and perhaps may even have grand children of their own. And most importantly, they will be happy, as I am.

And that's my take. My children are my priority. Whether other people choose to listen or not? None of my business.

My job is only to write down what I think is right. Whether other people choose to look at my writings or not, that's none of my business.

That was the case of my PhD thesis as well. I left physics for the business world a long time ago. Only two weeks ago, I decided to take another look at my research on three-gluon vertex renormalization scale, whatever that may mean to you. An obsure subject, and it just sat there in obscurity. To my surprise, 12 years later, there was this dude, named Michael Binger, that took up my work, and extended it. If you google for "Michael Binger poker", you will find this guy. Yeap, after physics he became a professional poker player, and rose to number 3 in the world, and has made at least $6.5 million dollars from poker tournaments. When I found that out, I just told myself: "cute!" Not bad that my work was looked at by someone with a decent brain.

Controversy is daily bread and butter in science. People have long learned to take it easy and look at controversies simply as stories to tell their grandchildren, or great-grandchildren. In case you wonder why I keep mentioning great-grandchildren, you may want to watch this video given by a great-grandfather: Leonard Susskind, the "father of string theory", on Richard Feynman.



Here is another video. It's Murray Gell-Mann on Richard Feynman.



You wouldn't be able to tell that Susskind and Gell-Mann are talking about the same person. Susskind is all upbeat, joking and laughing, about his days with Feynman. Gell-Mann shows up as hurt, resentful about Feynman. Sure, as Susskind describes, Richard Feynman had a "gargantuan ego." But whether one chooses to laugh it all off and have fun, or be hurt and languish, it's all up to one's own choice. Which one would you choose to be?

You guys may see three old men in these three people: Susskind ("father of string theory"), Gell-Mann (Nobel Prize for quarks) and Feynman (dead a long time ago already, Nobel Prize for quantum electrodynamics, or better known for "Feynman Diagrams," which are much like the stick figures cartoons I draw for my children, ha ha.) But what I see are three 8-years-old boys. That's what I see.

Happy Thanksgiving! There is much to thank for, in life.