Donna William's and her fruit salad approach!
The more I learn the more I realise that all the behaviours, the quirks and symptoms that are used to diagnose ASCs are only the outward signs of brain difference.
Brain structure determines sensory development and processing, sensory processing differences create different strengths and weaknesses such as hypersensitivity, mono-processing, poor processing speed and accuracy for certain things and exceptional processing speed for others, determine how we behave - for example, if we can't process speech and vision at the same time we will obviously not use eye contact when we're concentrating on a conversation, if we can't tell where our bodies are in space we will need extra sensory stimulus so we might spin, or rock or demand way too many hugs for other people's comfort. If you look at almost any ASC typical behaviour you can figure out a sensory reason behind it.
I was reading a book called Brain Sex a while ago, old but a seminal work on the difference between male and female brains, and just a couple of chapters in I read a paragraph that struck me as completely familiar - it was detailing the impact of sensory differences between male and female on behaviour and was so similar to the way I have heard it expressed in books on autism and AS that I felt like I had read those exact same words before. It confirmed for me that brain structure determines behaviour whether you are male, female, ASC or something else. Downs people have "typical" behaviour patterns, ADHD people too, even dyslexic people develop specific patterns that can be recognised in more severely affected people, all these people process data from the world around them in a different way from people who do not have developmental conditions and it affects the way they interact with the world.
27 Jul 2012, 4:39 am
