"Stimming time is learning time"

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Found this piece of material where stimming is discussed. I find it interesting that this idea supports eikonabridge's philosophy of promoting stimming as a window for children to take in/process information (if I'm not mistaken).

Today we had a short ABA-session with our contact person, and she is quite strict with "hands still". It really got me thinking one more time why it's so important to stop something that the child might not even be aware of that he's doing. I don't bother with his hands being still when I perform ABA, I just try to arrange things as fast as I can and keep my boy in the moment by constant talking - like they say in the video. The stimming is something that signals happiness for my boy. He's often very excited about the exercises and loves the challenge of a puzzle or matching/sorting. So when he's stimming I know he's in a good mood.

That hypothesis makes sense to me. For one, I can't pay so much attention if my brain is too busy trying to self-censor my behaviour. Secondly, it provides something to do for those parts of my brain that would otherwise be distracting me from the learning task.

A similar thing can be seen even for non-autistic people. People who are allowed to draw doodles when they are in a boring meeting or lecture often retain more of the information than people who attempt to display obvious signs of attention. According to psychologist Jackie Andrade of Plymouth University...

ABA therapy can be a great tool when used properly. For me it was little more than torture. I learned that self-soothing was bad and to shut up and sit still no matter what I was feeling of if something was wrong...as and adult, I am in therapy now struggling with PTSD, self-regulation, depression, anxiety and self-esteem issues.

Jon81,

I would immediately go to the leader of your ABA team and make it clear that you don't wanted stimming limited in any way. Further, any activity that seems like torture for your child should end in my opinion. I'm not sure about the age of your child but for mine when he was young (2-5 years old) things like speech therapy, social activities and feeding therapy were tortuous and counterproductive. He made no progress in those areas.

I helped refocus our ABA team on visual learning -- letters, phonics, math, drawing, reading, puzzles etc. He also worked with the therapist on physical activities like bike/scooter riding, soccer, basketball and swimming. He loved to imitate dancers and learn songs from an website and app called "GoNoodle." We made GoNoodle an ongoing ABA program and the therapist made flashcards with the words to the songs and danced side by side with him. As long as my child was comfortable and happy, he could attend to a therapist or a parent for short periods of time and he progressed quickly.

At age 4, he could read but could communicate very little verbally. Because he was already reading, verbal communication later came very quickly for him.

Autistic kids just usually have a different development path that is not verbal. We need to help them learn in the manner that best suits them.

I tend to think this is correct, "Stimming time is learning time". I seem to recall that when instructor was discussing dyslexia, they would say that stimming was a way a dyslexic enhanced their focus. Every time they moved it was like shooting a jolt of electricity into their bodies. It kept them wide awake and focused.

Well as someone who does do some stimming I can say....it's either listen while stimming. Or try not to stim and as a result be focusing on not stimming rather than paying attention.

I have a stim when I read, I rustle around the pages I am not reading with my hand(I am not even aware when it starts) I only notice if I pause reading and realize I've been doing it or if someone says something.

But yeah if I tried reading without stimming, chances are I'd end up concentrating on that and end up auto-reading instead of paying attention, so I have to go back and read it again to comprehend it.


I mean I think it may actually be detrimental to try to stop stimming. Unless of course the stim involves the person hurting them-self but it does not sound like this is the case here. It might not be a bad idea to look around for if there is any less intensive ABA therapy where they may be more willing to let things like stimming be and focus on other more problematic issues.

Stimming time of course is learning time. Something so obvious, yet it has eluded the so-called "autism experts" for 76 years by now. I can only shake my head. There is a reason why my children are so well developed. I don't want to make long comments. But if you understand Fourier Transforms and the Hamiltonian approach of physics, and view stimming behaviors as eigenstates in the momentum space, of course stimming time is learning time. As I always say, autism is all about seeing things that no one else can see, and solving problems that no one else can solve. (Go ahead, google for "stimming time is learning time" with the double quotes. Yep, I am the one that said it.) That's the fun part of it. It's like when G.H. Hardy told Srinivasa Ramanujan that 1729 was a rather dull number, Ramanujan immediately replied that, no, it was actually a very interesting number, and that 1729 was the smallest natural number that could be written as the sum of two cubes in two different ways!

I want to talk about something else here, too. Last night, I went to sleep after browsing on my phone a bit. I turned off the lights. Strangely, I saw some light in the corner of my eye. It came from one of the windows of the room. I looked at the window, and it was dark. Weird. I told myself. Then I looked up the ceiling, and wow, there was that light in the corner of my eye again, coming from the window. I looked at the window, and ... nope, the window was dark. I repeated the experiment. Each time I looked up the ceiling, I could see a bright light coming from the window. Each time I looked at the window, it was dark. How come?

Then I figured it out. Because I was using the phone, my frontal vision was blinded. It usually takes a few minutes for the eyes to recover and switch to the night vision mode (where the rods in the retina dominate over the cones, basically, viewing in black and white). So, my frontal vision was suppressed: I couldn't detect the light from the window in direct view. It would take me several minutes before my frontal vision was fully recovered and shifted to night vision. However, because my peripheral vision was not affected by the phone's screen, I was able to detect the light outside the window in the corner of my eye.

Was does all this mean for autism? Autism is all about amplified signals inside the brain. Autistic children may not have good frontal vision, because the signal might be too intense and too confusing. But their peripheral vision may still work OK.

Both at home, and from comments from teachers in school, we've long known that our son does have peripheral vision. Very often you think he was not paying attention or not looking at things you want him to look at. But again and again we've been surprised that he did learn about things that we thought he wasn't paying attention to. This is both at home and in school.

That is why it bugged me, big time, when I went visit other families and drew pictures for the other kids. The parents always wanted to force the kids to look at what I have drawn. To me, there was absolutely no need to force these children to look at things. I knew when they glimpse for a tiny fraction of a second, the information was already taken in. These kids have peripheral vision. Parents shouldn't underestimate the ability of their children.

Similarly, for the auditory part you also have the "peripheral hearing." See, when I told my son's teacher that my son calculated 6x7=42 by remembering "chicks times chicks is thirty chicks" and by adding 7 to 36, the teacher got very excited because when she said that in the classroom, my son was walking around the classroom and apparently was not paying attention (but the teacher knew very well that my son was still absorbing information.) She got so excited and told me other mnemonics that she has used in classroom. But I soon forgot about those mnemonics.

A few days later, I asked my son whether he remembered about the mnemonic for 6x8. He giggled, and said: "six and eight went on a date, so six times eight is forty eight." I was surprised that he understood the word "mnemonic." He added: "Mrs. K. told us we are not allowed to go on a date until we are forty eight." Ha ha. That's right. And you think he was not paying attention in class? It's not just peripheral vision, it's also peripheral hearing. These kids do learn, even if you think they are not paying attention. I would recommend people to read the book "Carly's Voice." And it's not just her case. Very often autistic children shock their parents by starting to talk in full sentences. Carly often tells people: "You know how people talk behind people's back? With me they talk in front of my back."

I also remember a classroom party in first grade, the teacher gave instructions for children rotate in groups and move to the next table. She further explained kids in such and such tables should move to such and such tables. I was with my son and thought he wasn't paying attention at all to his teacher's instructions. But, miraculously, he moved to the correct table, all by himself.

This is what my son's teacher told me: even though sometimes my son didn't seem to pay attention in class, she has realized that he was actually absorbing information, like a sponge.

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I don't put much faith in RPM. I have watched some of the live interviews with Tito Mukhopadhyay, I feel uncomfortable. For one thing, he was never alone. His mother was always there. Also, very often Tito's answers were non-sequitur. I have seen other people trying the RPM approach, I haven't seen success.

I remember I had a teacher that talked to my mom about me, because he was perplexed...he thought it seemed like sometimes I was not paying attention, which maybe I wasn't my mind does wander sometimes. But I still was doing alright on tests and things so he figured I must still be getting the information still....

I think he tried to say maybe I was a little different than the other kids, but my parents were not receptive to that kind of thing when I was growing up.

My "more NT" kid has this issue - her teachers say she never sits still but she knows everything that has been said. They aren't worried about it, they rather see her as "gifted" for her bare IQ is obviously very high and she learns easily. So as long as she doesn't disrupt the class, she is allowed to fidget.
As I have said, she's the "more NT" child, the extroverted and social one. I suppose the need for fidgeting / stimming / doodling is not exactly connected to the spectrum, maybe just more visible with other autism traits.

Stimming time is thinking time (for me). It may appear random & non-purposeful to others but it’s actively rhythmic & it mitigates the background stimuli.

My thoughts can then synchronize with the rhythm without being scattered by distraction into the roaring vortex.

The "Wrong Planet" feeling is quite universal. This is the picture I drew in my PhD thesis in theoretical physics in 1992. (Back then I did not know anything about autism, nor have I read "The Little Prince".)



This is the picture that my daughter drew two years ago, right after she watched "The Little Prince" movie on Netflix. She was very emotional after watching the movie. She was 9 years old. (I've enhanced the borderlines in the drawing. The original image was a bit hard to see.)

Interesting to hear all this coming from people who actually do stim as well as parents with experience from the ride.

Regarding the ABA I will bring this idea up and see if we could get learning and stimming to go hand in hand. I don't find it natural to have a small child to sit completely still, autistic or NT.

Eikona, I'm not doubting you're the one who first mentioned the stimming/learning theory, I was mainly pointing out some support for your texts I don't understand where your ideas and theories about autism all come from. You see a light in the corner of your eye and you somehow draw a parallel to autism Good read. And yeah, I read that stuff about Ramanujan and the number 1729. I don't even know what the sum of two cubes mean

Daddy63, my kid is also loving the video songs. He's really into music and I hope it will help him develop language. He's just started to access youtube on his own now and he's discovering different languages. He's already bilingual, we know that as he can understand ABA-sessions in both languages. I just hope he will chose Swedish as his first language so that I don't need to struggle so much with understanding him It's not uncommon for swedish autistic kids to choose english as their first language as they are exposed to it so much on tv/youtube. I am very impressed with all these kids who learn to read at such a young age. I have mentioned before that I don't think I even knew letters before the age of 6 when we started school.