temple grandin made me think

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i just watched a tv show about savants it featured temple grandin among others, now on the show they were saying how temple thinks like an animal and then she was saying how the main emotion of animals is fear and that she sees things that other people dont see, well this got me thinking about myself. if i take out the social issues and stick with the sensory for a moment , this is where the problem lies. i see everything, however there seems to be no distinction between what important and what isnt , ive learned from experience that things like roads and cars are dangerous but when i walk my eyes constantly move from one thing to the next with none of it going in a logical way for example if im walking down a busy street its really hard for me to navigate and i feel threatened all the time and little things like an old tissue on the path will catch my eye and divert my attention away from what really matters ( navigating through people). its not something i do consciously , i cant control what im looking at and i spook easily at things coming past me or things right infront of me, the other weird thing is like if im walking down a paved street my eyes are automatically drawn to the cracks between the slabs , again its not a choice it just happens , the whole thing is really unnerving its like im overwhelmed with sensory stuff which logically has no purpose, consequently i feel sick when i go out and so rarely go out . so back to my original question how does an animal think and view the world and do you think that ,that hypersensitivity visually and auditory could actually be what they mean when thinking like an animal , in real terms i do feel like a frightened animal , like something is after me but then i just put that down to anxiety , but then maybe thats why im anxious.

Umm, yes, aspies behave like frightened animals, except that animals behave like that when they're scared, we behave like that all the time... unless another emotion takes control, like anger.

what was your question again?

How interesting to read about your experiences. I wonder if Irlen lenses would help you. A cheap sorta way to do Irlen lenses on your own would be to go to a discount store and try on different color sunglasses and see if wearing blue or pink glasses makes a difference when walking around. My autistic daughter is calmer in blue light (which drives me nuts) but I can't get her to wear the blue glasses. Oh well.

I think you'd like this this song
of course if you knew Spanish.

lucha de gigantes
by Nacha POP

lucha de gigantes
convierte,
el aire en gas natural.
un duelo salvaje
advierte,
lo cerca que ando de entrar
en un mundo descomunal
siento mi fragilidad.

vaya pesadilla
corriendo,
con una bestia detrás.
dime que es mentira todo,
un sueño tonto y no más.
me da miedo la enormidad
donde nadie oye mi voz.

deja de engañar.
no quieras ocultar
que has pasado sin tropezar.
monstruo de papel,
no sé contra quién voy.
¿o es que acaso hay alguien más aquí?

creo en los fantasmas terribles
de algún extraño lugar
y en mis tonterías
para hacer tu risa estallar.

en un mundo descomunal
siento tu fragilidad.

deja de engañar.
no quieras ocultar
que has pasado sin tropezar.
monstruo de papel
no sé contra quién voy.
¿o es que acaso hay alguien más aquí?

deja que pasemos sin miedo.
sin miedo.

~lucha de gigantes
by antonio vega (nacha pop)
Labels: lyrics

I searched for info on Irlen at wrongplanet and found this interesting critical post:

Regarding the Irlen Institute company you refer to, the colored lenses were, first, designed for those with dyslexia to assist with reading text on a book and text on a chalk board in school. Initially there were only colored overlays - plastic layers of color to be placed over the text books, and the colored lenses were devised so any writing could be read where it wasn't possible to put a colored overlay.

Then, Donna Williams, in seeking a treatment for her dyslexia, said she noticed that Helen Irlen's lenses helped her with her "fragmented perception" and "light sensitivity", and Donna boasted about this and promoted Irlen for some time. Later, as now seen on her website http://www.donnawilliams.net/tintedlenses.0.html, scroll down quite a bit, Donna rejects Irlen, makes a point to say that she doesn't use their lenses any more, and instead uses another companies (BPI) in Florida, and says she regrets that Irlen has used her name to promote the lenses. And, in any case, she switches from one color to another at random times and random days.

I contacted Donna in the past, and she said she contacted Helen Irlen herself and demanded that she remove all mention of her name on the website, and to stop using excerpted portions of her past book where she comments on Irlen lenses. Helen Irlen has refused, as her website is full of a multitude of uses of Donna's name and quotes. In short, Donna changed her mind about Irlen lenses, and Helen Irlen doesn't care and leads the public to believe Donna is still using Irlen lenses. Dishonest, misleading, fradulent.

Helen Irlen pounced on Williams first testimony, and despite the updates of Donna over the last 10 years or so, including direct requests for Helen to remove all mention of Donna from her website, Irlen has persisted in advertising her lenses as having helped Donna immensely, and has used outdated written testimonies of Donna to advertise the lenses.

Also, Irlen conjured this condition Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome (SSS) (also called Irlen Syndrome), and it is not recognized in medicine or science. Though still, many believe it is so, and many with and without autism spectrum disorder have accepted it rather uncritically, especially those people who enjoy considering themselves as having this and that diagnosis - they like the long and growing list of their diagnoses.

Irlen is a typical crafty advertising professional, and has targeted the autism community, which is reprehensible.

Irlen goes so far to provide her own diagnosis rating scale, to be given to those with autism spectrum to see if they have SSS. And she charges for this assessment. The diagnosis rating scale is not recognized by medicine or science.

She also has you first go to a "screener" for about $80+ dollars I believe, for initial testing to further determine if you can benefit from her lenses. Then the later appointment with a "diagnostician" costs up to $300.

She portrays her Irlen Lenses as being specially colored lenses, when in fact they are, simply, the standard primary colors, and some secondary colors, and a standard ultra-violet lens. She and her staff will often tell her clients that they are proprietary lenses protected by trademark, but I've had each tested by spectrum analysis, and they are, simply, the primary colors and some secondary colors. I believe she would admit to this if you contacted her office directly.

She boasts about her "patented Irlen Method" and leads people to believe that the whole of her business is patented (lenses, diagnosis, methods, rating scales, etc). However, the Irlen Method is, simply, the method of lens selection: the lighter intensities of the colors are tried first, and of those that seem helpful, others are then added in an order of lighter to darker, and narrowed down in this way.

Most importantly, science and medicine do not recognize her lenses, diagnosis, rating scale, etc.

Note on her website the ever growing list of indications she believes her lenses have:
Reading Problems, Dyslexia and Learning Difficulties:
Gifted and Average Students with Good Reading Skills:
Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD/HD):
Headaches, Migraines and Other Physical Symptoms:
Light Sensitivity
Autism and Asperger Syndrome:
Traumatic Brain Injuries, Head Injuries, Concussions and Whiplash:
* Low Vision/Visually Impaired
* Light-Induced Epilepsy
* Depression
* Anxiety
* Strokes
* Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
* Auto Immune Diseases
* Multiple Sclerosis
* Cerebral Palsy
* Fibromyalgia
* Viral Illnesses
* Tourette Syndrome
* Lyme Disease
* Reading. Problems reading because of a change in clarity or stability of the print.
* Sustained Attention and Concentration. Problems with ease and comfort reading and doing other visual activities
* Light Sensitivity. Individuals become light sensitive. This makes going outside, being in bright lighting or fluorescent lighting, and driving at night uncomfortable or stressful.
* Physical Symptoms. Experience headaches, nausea, dizziness, anxiety, irritability, or stomachaches. The severity of these physical symptoms is often increased by sunlight, bright lighting, reading, and other visually-intensive activities.
* Depth Perception. Problems with activities that require the ability to judge depth or spatial relationships.
* Fatigue. General sense of being tired and fatigued.
* Neurological Problems. Light-induced seizures, tremors, or other similar problems.

I find this to clearly indicate that she is market oriented and profit oriented.

I myself met with 3 different Irlen diagnosticians separately, and each came up with an entirely different color combination, yet, Helen Irlen claims that the diagnosticians find exactly the right color or color combination for each person, that is, finds the right light wavelengths to filter out. In the end, after using the lenses for several days at home, for the purpose of fully determining if they were helpful to any degree, I found than none of the three color combinations was helpful, after spending about $800 total, including the $75 or so cost for getting plastic lenses dyed in her factory in California.

Last edited by frields on 13 Feb 2008, 12:13 am, edited 1 time in total.

frields, Wow. I'm glad I never took my daughter to see one of her practitioners.
You went three times? Are you a professional investigator?

I found this on Wrong Planet from searching the name Irlen. It's in a recent thread.

natty i'm impressed at your observations, very cool.

I have sight problems with light i dont know if its common but it causes me problems as well.I have nearly been ran over just because i cant see and i panic alot.When it gets bright i can no longer see through my right eye and it hurts when i try to look with it.My other eye hurts less but its a big strain looking through one eye all the time while the other is shut.I get teloscopic vision in town ive noticed that night time is a totally new bearable world.Problem is im a parent so i have to live by day time.
I am going to try and get colored glasses i think any will do as long as they are not cheep ones.I think a great invention would be glasses that look darker when your the one looking through them but other people just see clear glass.

mmmm ... all very interesting but back on TOPIC ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Grandin



She is really a very interesting person.

I thought this post was about visual problems because of all the posts and the first one being about vision as well

Fernando
i just wanted to know wether maybe this is a key to my problems, maybe the answer is that i think like an animal or at least see like an animal.

lelia
i read up on irlen lenses a while back, but im still a little unconvinced , part of that is because i wear the darkest sunglasses i could find and light still seems bright so i find it hard to comprehend how a lighter colour could actually help reduce brightness better than dark lenses. ive had light brown tinted lenses on my reading glasses for many years now but really i see very little difference when wearing them .

caramateo
can you translate the song for me please?

freilds
i have read lots of conflickting views on the value of irlen lenses. ive been tempted. one thing that holds me back is that surely if irlen lenses were so great at curing so many different problems wouldnt they be mainstream and available at opticions and opthamologists ? after all it is non invasive and pretty simple.
i looked up the scotopic sensitivity syndrome once before and it really did fit with me so again , i just dont know , but going back to my original post about thinking like animals, dont they see colours differently than we do so surely they would be calmer than i am if its the colour thing, of course thats very non scientific it just something i wondered about.
maybe one day i might try the irlens lenses but right now they are too expensive and im a little worried its the snake oil type thing , and in the past ive been very naive and fallen for those sales pitches.

cataspie
im in the same situation , i have only one eye that works, the other is blind and a lot of the time i just cant see anything when the light is in a certain way and like you im a parent so i have to collect my kids from school , they are very resentfull to me because i dont take them out hardly at all because i just cant stand the visual and auditory problems associated with walking out.

zincubus
thanks for the link im going to read it now.

cataspie

it is about visual stuff, the theories of temple grandin could apply to people like me , you know the being scared of everything, sudden movements especialy things in peripheral movement etc

I don’t want to go off topic so I will keep this very brief, but I feel that while Frields’ post was interesting, it was quite unfair.

I experienced and continue to experience massive visual/sensory relief since getting the lenses, and, while certainly not perfect or a miracle cure, they have played a critical role in me being able to read efficiently. I was given no false promises by anyone and I returned to the same colour combination each separate time I was tested.

The fact that the person in the post that frield made didn’t benefit from the lenses doesn’t mean that the tests/lenses are completely ineffective for everyone. I'll happily go into more detail about both the pros and cons of my experience if you are ever interested, Natty.

I could be completely wrong, but I had always taken it to mean that animals experience certain things “literally”, and that this serves as a comparison for certain sensory differences found in people. For example, I assume that most animals don’t recognise a bin as a “bin” (somewhere to put rubbish), but take it in a more literal sense, with less interpretation – the bin's size, smell and shape, for instance.

I suppose that an animal that interprets its environment in a very literal way may not be able to predict/mentally organise things in their environment very easily. When dealing with a road, I’d imagine that a cat would experience a lot of sensory “noise” without being able to predict getting run over very accurately. It probably has no concept of what a “car” or “road” actually is, aside from the immediate shapes, sounds, movements, etc.

I’d imagine that this would probably put the cat (or other animal) into a state of misplaced confidence in it’s ability to get across the road (unaware of the severity of the danger, and unlike humans, unable to learn from other people informing it of the danger) and/or possibly cause the cat to feel stressed, because it cannot grapple with it’s chaotic environment, which would appear to correlate with what you have written (and my own experiences, too).

im really glad the lenses have helped you march violets, have they helped you with the outside things like crowds traffic sun etc or just inside with reading? id like to hear about the pros and cons or the irlen lenses please.

Thank you, and I’m glad you didn’t take my response to be off topic. =) I will write about my experience, rather than in response to the post from Frield, but if anything in that post concerns you feel free to bring it up.

The following section is about the test itself, feel free to scroll to the pros and cons if you already know about the tests.

I had the Irlen tests done a couple of years ago on the recommendation of a specialist doctor who recognised that I have severe sensory difficulties (that had lead to me not being able to attend school, suffer from sensory overload, etc.).

At this time I was unsure of what “sensory problems” or the autistic spectrum (that I had just been diagnosed as being a part of) actually was. Due to this, I went to have the Irlen tests completely clueless – both as to the Irlen tests themselves and to the nature of my own difficulties.

The tests were straightforward. First, they showed me some images that were black and white. They were the sorts of images that are meant to “flicker” like an optical illusion. These were unbearable for me to look at, and I was surprised to see that other people in the room (my mum and uncle) could look at them with ease.

They then turned out all of the lights, and put a sheet with writing on under their test lamp. I was told to turn dials which each changed the light to a different colour, and tell them if any particular colour combination made the writing easier to read. I had no idea what they were talking about (to be blunt) but when I turned the dials to a dim blue the paper suddenly stopped “flickering” and “buzzing”, a variety of really horrible visual sensations stopped. I realised that ordinarily, everything I look at is filled with an almost holographic flickering, which I hadn’t recognised was there until I saw the paper without the disturbance.

I then did the test again, to see if I would set the light to the same colour combination (there are no numbers etc. on the dials to guide you). The computer the light is attached to confirmed that it was the same combination.

After having these tests, they ordered me lenses of the same colour as the settings I tuned the lamp to.
There were pros and cons:

The glasses were helpful for being outside (I’ve become housebound since I got them, though). The main problem with them outside is the glare around the rims, however.

During the testing process the only light in the room is the one you are using for the test. When you wear glasses, there is ordinary light/glare around the rims. If you select a particularly dark lens colour (as I did) the contrast between your lenses and the surrounding daylight can be quite distracting. No one mentioned this while I was being tested.

For the above reason, I have found that a light/lamp of a specific, helpful colour/tint (I was given one by the RNIB) is preferable to using lenses. The one I have is designed for the visually impaired. It might be worth contacting/visiting your local RNIB centre in order to look at various lamps, etc.

I have noticed that some days the lenses do a far better job of cutting down on visual noise than other days, and I suspect that this is because (like all of my other sensory problems) the sensory problem itself fluctuates (so perhaps, on certain days, a different colour, etc. would be preferable over the lenses I have been given).

Having said all that, the glasses have been absolutely essential to me for reading. I also use them to calm down my environment when I have conversations with people.

Anyway, sorry for such a lengthy post, but I hope perhaps some of that was helpful. =)