Yogurt is yummy, because it has honey (modulation, part 2)

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The other day, I was feeding my two children some goat yogurt with honey. I told them: "Yogurt is yummy, because it has honey."

Realizing there was something unusual about my sentence, I paused, and asked my daughter: "Do you think yummy rhymes with honey?"

My daughter pulled me towards her and whispered: "Daddy is a poet, and he doesn't even know it!"

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I had to google to find out that “he is a poet, and he doesn’t even know it” is a well-known joke in English, for this type of occasions. It’s used because “poet” rhymes with “know it.” All the same. I cherish each one of these priceless moments. And lately there have been quite some of those moments. My children have come a long way, from the days that they were non-verbal.

We took our children to San Francisco area for vacation recently. They had a blast. Strangely, none of the famous places, such as Monterey Aquarium, Exploratorium, Cable Car, Golden Gate Bridge, Lombard Street, or Chinatown, was their favorite place. Instead, for Mindy, her favorite place was Rain Forest Café near Fisherman’s Wharf. For Ivan, his favorite place was a 100-year-old elevator. That being said, Ivan did have fun tinkering with various electronic circuits in Exploratorium, and also had fun playing a multiplication game with Mindy and with us during the entire road trip. The game went like: “One times four is…Ivan!” and then someone would say “No no no no no, the right answer is…” followed by Ivan saying “one time four is four!” My wife started to replace our names with food items, like “two times four is…French fries!” and Ivan would just giggle to no end. Mindy held onto her Pikachu Pokémon, and had fun making up stories with Ivan during the long road trip.




When I made the circuit video and multiplication video for Ivan, I did not expect connections with outside the family. But things did get connected. My wife told me my time spent on the multiplication video was well worth it. You spend a few minutes of your life, and your children have fun and achieve learning, for many days of their lives. Very trivial investment of your time, but the return was tremendous. When I came back home, Ivan asked to play with the circuit again. And all of a sudden I realized that he has memorized all the details about the electronic components. He would tell me that the buzzer actually had polarities. He knew that the red wire was the positive terminal and that the black wire was the negative terminal. He even knew that the round side of a LED was positive, and that the flat side was negative. Furthermore, he was able to point to the Pokémon and say: “there is a circuit inside.” I asked him what kind of battery is inside the Pokémon, and he would say a “three-volt battery.” I challenged him: “is it a 9-volt battery” and he replied: “no, it’s a three-volt battery.” He asked me: “what’s inside the hair dryer?” I told him: “there is a motor inside.” He then added: “and the motor is on a circuit.” So, it was not just memorization: he had true apprehension of electronic circuits, at age 5. A few weeks after the vacation, he was already assembling fairly complicated circuits, using a snap circuit kit. And that was not all. The other day I was teaching my 7-year-old daughter about the Python programming language. My son jumped in and wanted to learn Python programming as well. He had fun printing out “ice cream cone” by concatenating single-word strings (“ice”, “cream” and “cone”) and multiplying the strings by an integer. Yeap, at age 5, he is already doing Python programming, and having fun and giggling with it.



Neither of my children is a “savant.” They are just your regular, happy, autistic children. When Ivan was 2.5 years old, he was non-verbal, couldn’t stay still for 2 seconds and couldn’t pay attention to anything static. No eye contact. After I realized that Ivan was the “Fourier Transform” of Mindy, things cleared up in my head about how autism and human brain worked. During the span of just a few weeks, Ivan learned to focus on static stick figure drawings, learned to read, and learned to call me Papa. I told my wife: “autism is solved.” I ask myself: who else in the world is daring enough to claim “autism is solved,” based on just a few observations, and when the child is still barely 2.5 years old? Ha. Theoretical physicists do this type of things all the time. Quarks were predicted based purely on some symmetrical observations. Existence of Higgs boson was predicted in 1964, but verified only in 2013, that’s almost 50 years later. People just don’t understand how modern theoretical physics works. There was a shift in paradigm in the 1920s. With relativity and quantum theory, particular quantum field theory, theoretical physicists no longer worked from bottom up, but from top down: you are inspired by the symmetries in the nature, formulate your Lagrangian to incorporate these symmetries, and then derive all the consequences and predictions from there. In a sense, I have found some sort of a “Lagrangian” for autism in my mind already, when Ivan was 2.5 years old. That was what allowed me to understand autism, from first principles, instead of doing the single-bit machines reflexes typical of social scientists out there. So when I discuss autism from the perspective of Quantum Fields and Fourier Transforms, and people refer me to some trivial social science arguments, I can only shake my head. It’s not me who needs to get down to other people’s level. It is the other people that need adapt and learn how scientific theories work today. Anyway, with the arrival of the robotic era and the Technological Singularity, tomorrow’s children will grow up to be better parents and educators. I tend to believe that soon enough every single high school student will learn about quantum field theory. Not the details, but about how to discover the underlying mechanisms of nature, and from there make seemingly outrageous predictions. We have come a long way from our animal ancestors. So why keep doing single-bit machine reflexes?

At the end of our vacation I just talked to a family friend with a child on the spectrum. I haven’t seen them for some time. Because they had quite some family issues (being non-native to US was one of the factors), the 15-years-old boy only started to receive ABA services recently. They told me the boy is doing all right in his special-needs class, and that teachers do try to make them participate in socialization activities. At that moment I just shook my head. “No socialization, please, it’s a waste of time, and it ruins these children’s lives.” For 70+ years, we as a society just applied our blind single-bit machines to our children. We don’t behave like humans: we behave like animals. Autistic children are not good at socialization, so our instinct is to overwhelm them with socialization activities, and hope that by over-inundating our children with socialization activities we can somehow pull them back into the “normal” world. What kind of sick animals have we been in these 70+ years?

Sure, socialization is important. But when your children cannot even make eye contact, cannot even talk, has not developed deep-thinking skills, cannot read and cannot draw pictures, and all you do is to dump incomprehensible noise (socialization in this case) to them, day after day, week after week, year after year, that’s not teaching: that’s child abuse. That’s a criminal act. The lives of millions of perfectly fine, smart children get destroyed by our society’s animal-style instincts. Single-bit machines are not science. They are child abuse.

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Nowadays everybody carries a smartphone, yet most people don’t understand what “modulation” means or how it works. They are probably not even aware that all forms of modern telecommunication function based on modulation. If you look up any device specification, you will find some numbers about the carrier frequencies. For instance, for WiFi, it’s typically around 2.4 GHz. A pure carrier signal at 2.4 GHz is useless: it conveys no information. However, you tweak the carrier signal ever so slightly, wonderful things happen.

Interacting with autistic children is no different. Due to the over-connection in the brains of these children, a mathematical “fixed point” surges, pretty much like how single-frequency carrier signals are generated in an Armstrong oscillator circuit. This does not mean these children won’t be able to learn, or that we won’t be able to communicate with them. These children are perfectly fine. They are even smarter than we are. But they need to be approached through the modulation technique. You modulate your signals properly, and wonderful things will happen. That’s all.

Because of signal amplification and maximization of contrast, the brain activities of these children latch onto single processes. I compare it to superhighways without exit ramps. I have given the talk a few times, and somehow many mothers loved this diagram. So here it is. Our children’s pristine brain have many of these unconnected superhighways. And it’s our job to make the exit ramps to connect these superhighways to other parts of our children’s brains.



There is one additional detail, though. Auto-feedback processes in human brains come in two flavors. I call them “attractive” and “repulsive.” This dichotomy in the central nerve system is long established in most animals, through evolution. Physiologically, in the human brain, the nucleus accumbens seems to be correlated to addiction/pleasure/reward/reinforcement, hence to “attraction/attachment.” On the other hand, the basolateral amygdala seems to be correlated to “fear” and hence “repulsion/aversion.” Other animals may implement their “attraction” and “repulsion” mechanisms differently.

I always find it fascinating how much some eastern religions have understood the human brain already thousands of years ago. The other day I was reading about the so-called “Three Poisons” of human suffering: “ignorance,” “attachment,” and “aversion.” Interestingly, attachment and aversion issues are explained to be ultimately coming from ignorance. That seemed odd to me. If ignorance is the ultimate evil, why was it necessary to place attachment and aversion on equal footing as ignorance? It was only after I linked these three concepts to my own understanding of autism, that I came to realize that, wow, those guys surely understood everything, thousands of years ago. Here is the parallelism:

- Ignorance: lack of information modulation
- Attachment: attractive center of the brain
- Aversion: repulsive center of the brain

Yeap. We cannot just talk about modulation in isolation. Yes, modulation is everything, but before we talk about it, we need to point out the difference between attraction and repulsion.

What we call autistic manifestations are classified into these two categories.
(a) Attractive loops: stimming
(b) Repulsive loops: tantrums, anxiety, sensory problems
Modulation works in opposite directions for these two categories of issues. Let’s start with stimming behavior.

ATTRACTIVE LOOPS: OUTWARD MODULATION
MANTRA: Stimming time is learning time.



When your children are doing something, and you want them to do something else, usually you would tell them: “OK, 5 more minutes, and we will take a bath.” “OK, 5 more minutes, and everybody goes to bed.” Sometimes you would remind them a few more times before actually giving them a bath, or taking them to bed. This type of heads ups are known as “transitions.” Transitions are the simplest type of modulation: they introduces messages about activities that the children are not precisely thrilled to do, in the middle of the activities that the children like to do. You peg your messages onto the backbone of the children’s main interest, much like how TV stations run commercials in the middle of a TV program.

Modulation goes beyond just transitions. Let us talk about harmless stimming behaviors first. My son used to stim with a vacuum cleaner. Nowadays he stims with elevators. Other children may stim with physical activities such as rocking or spinning.

You see again, and again, and again, parents asking about what to do with their children’s stimming behavior. On the other hand, you see parents worrying that their children are behind, that their children are not learning. I see an obvious contradiction here: you are not teaching your children when they are stimming, so of course they are not learning. Smart children become underdeveloped, simply because their parents never realize that stimming and learning must go together, hand-in-hand. Traditionally many parents view stimming as something detrimental. Their logic goes like: we should get rid of our children’s stimming behavior, so that they can have a chance to learn. If we have learned something in these 70+ years after the discovery of Child Autism, it’s precisely that suppressing stimming behaviors is the wrong way to go. It’s very sad to see parents create problems, where there was none.
Stimming time is learning time. You modulate in teaching moments into their favorite activities. That’s how they learn.

What should they learn? Due to maximization of contrast, these children are not good with their social and verbal skills. But that in turn means they are good with their visual skills. These children learn well from visual-manual activities. I have seen exactly zero child on the spectrum that cannot focus on cartoonish video clips. If your children can spend hours on tablets/smartphones, they are visual. Start from there. Start with whatever their interest might be, modulate in stick figures. Stick figures are crucial. People don’t realize how important stick figures are. When autistic children look at real-world objects, such as people’s faces, every single pixel of the image in their eye’s retina is amplified, the signals are too strong and too confusing, and of course they can’t make eye contacts. Stick figures solves this problem: stick figure drawings are simple. On the faces of stick figures, there is not much you can focus on: only the characters’ eyes, and their mouths. Voilà, those are the precise two spots on people’s faces that you want your children to pay attention to. Once they get used to focus on the eyes and on the mouth of stick figures, this skill is automatically transferred to when they look at real people’s eyes and mouths. Parents have no right to complain about their children’s lack of eye contact, when parents have never drawn stick figure characters to their children.

Many parents and aides are very hard headed. So many parents think that there is alternative to stick figures. They can’t see things from their children’s eyes. It is kind of frustrating for me to see how little they understand their own children. Even when someone shows me things along the line of “social stories,” I just have to shake my head. First of all, photo images are virtually useless for many of these children: how do you expect them to focus their eyes, when there are a gazillion colorful pixels on a photo image? Secondly, third-party drawn stick figures are unrelated to the children’s own experience, how do you expect them to have any connection?

People always think there is alternative to stick figures. There is not. They are surprised at how I can make such a claim. The problem is that my whole way of thinking is just at a different level. If you understand quantum fields and renormalization, you would know that there is structural simplicity when contrasts are maximized. For instance, in the so-called Phi-4 scalar field theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalar_fi ... 864_theory), the allowed interaction terms are just a small handful (actually only 1, if you disregard the free-particle quadratic terms). That’s right: out of a gazillion possibilities, only one single type of interaction is relevant. Even without going to quantum field theory and renormalization, it should be clear from Armstrong oscillator that repeated feedback of multiple frequencies in a resonant circuit would lead to the selection of just one single frequency. People always think that there are more possibilities, but in the case of autism, people have to realize that signal amplification and contrast maximization in an auto-feedback loop will lead to structural simplicity. There is really no viable alternative to stick figures, that’s what I can say both theoretically (already explained many times and can be found on my website) and empirically, throughout all these years interacting with children on the spectrum. So, refusing to draw stick figures for your children, is equivalent to leaving them underdeveloped. As simple as that. It’s a parent’s choice, and your children pay the price.

No wonder my son talks, laughs, has good eye contact, draws pictures, writes, types on computers, and is already programming in Python and building complex circuits, while many of his autistic peers are stuck behind. Hard headed parents with their own choices, ruining their own children’s lives. What’s the fun in that?

Some autistic children are born to understand pictures, I call them pro-picture. Others (like my son) are born to understand videos, I call them pro-video. This is not some arbitrary classification. I believe there is a deeper explanation about why such a dichotomy exists, and it’s related to how human brain stores information. I believe a full understanding of the origin of this dichotomy will help us understand what “Intelligent Life” is all about. For pro-video children, they do not automatically understand static drawings. You must use the modulation technique to introduce static-drawing frames into some of their favorite video clips, and teach them to recognize that static drawings do have meanings. I use several metamorphosis video clip to teach my son to recognize the stick figure representation of himself and of other family members.



I also inserted static frames of family members into a dinosaur video that Ivan liked. And that was the way how he learned to call me Papa.

Here is another important point: due to the visual nature of these children, reading MUST precede talking. Both of my children learned to read before they learned to talk. I still remember the surprise on the face of my sister (who lives in another country) when she visited our children some time ago. Back then, Ivan still did not talk much. Yet when I drew some pictures on the magnetic drawing board and wrote down some very advanced sentences, Ivan read out them without any trouble. Although my sister knew that Ivan could read, she was shocked at seeing the advanced level of Ivan’s reading skills. Yeah, these kids develop differently from normal kids. Written English was our children’s first language. Spoken English was their second language. Of course they were ahead of their neurotypical peers, when it came to reading.
Stimming time is learning time. No matter whether it’s stimming with video clips, or static images, or just rocking and spinning, when your children are stimming, that’s the moment for them to learn. My son stims with elevators, I use that to teach him to talk, to teach him new vocabulary, to teach him math addition/subtraction skills, recognition of symbols, electronic circuits, etc. etc.

Stimming is perfectly OK. Not teaching your children during their stimming, that’s not OK.

Now let us talk about harmful/dangerous/inappropriate stimming behaviors as well. Harmful/dangerous/inappropriate stimming behaviors may include climbing into dangerous settings, licking unsanitary surfaces, touching/exposing private parts, pushing other children, or adults, slamming doors, etc.

Again, stimming time is learning time. In this case, you want your children to learn that their actions are not OK. Because usually there is no time for in-length discussion (like when children are pushing other children), often only verbal and physical communication channels are available at the heat of the moment. BUT, these are precisely the channels that autistic children DON’T tune into: your message are noise to them.

Let me give two examples: once, my son Ivan was riding tricycle inside the house of his uncle. The kitchen area was just remodeled, and there was now a sliding glass door to the backyard. Ivan liked to bump his tricycle into the glass door, which was obviously a disaster in the making. What everyone else saw was this: at one point Ivan bumped again his tricycle into the glass door, then I shouted a deafening: “NO!” Everyone in the house jumped, because I used my loudest possible volume. Everyone expected Ivan to cry. He did not. He smiled back at me, and then rode the tricycle away from the glass door, and never did it again. A few days later at home, he pointed to our own home’s glass door, and said: “Tricycle, door, no no no” and giggled.

I assure you that Ivan was fully autistic, no different than other autistic children that you might have encountered. How was it possible for me to shout at him, yet he not only did not cry, but obeyed my command?

What no one else in Ivan’s uncle’s house saw was this. When I first noticed Ivan was bumping into the glass door, I used a magnetic drawing board, and showed him a stick figure of him bumping into the glass door. I added a stick figure of myself, with the texts “Tricycle” “Door” and “No, no, no.” I showed the picture to him, and explained to him that he shouldn’t do it. All four components of the LIVE communication were there: Letters, Images, Voice, and Experience (of the moment). In a sense, the visual communication was already accomplished. By the time I shouted “NO!” it was a surprise to everyone else, but it was not a surprise to Ivan. No surprise, hence no tantrum. Ivan was simply trying to push the envelope and test whether his interpretation of my message was correct, and I let him know that I meant business. After he confirmed his interpretation of my message, he stopped bumping the tricycle into the glass door.



Another example: Ivan couldn’t sit or wait in line for his turn, in his gymnastics class. Two teachers, plus my wife, couldn’t make him wait in line like other kids. Worse, instead of waiting in line or sitting still for his turn, he would run around and roll on the grass. It was all fun for him, but frustrating for the teachers and for my wife. I simply made a fun cartoonish video clip of Ivan’s gymnastics class activities, and towards the end I showed five little kids lining up, and then five little cars lining up, or five little frogs lining up. And in the last two frames of the video clip, I had a picture of Ivan rolling on the green grass, with a cartoon bubble of myself popping up, waving my finger to Ivan with the text “No No No”. The voice-overs were like: “Lining up is like…five little cars” “Lining up is like…five little speckled frogs” “Rolling on grass is like… Not Nice. Papa says: No No No.” Ivan had fun watching the video at home. I went to the school and played the video for him right before the gymnastics class. His behavior improved right away. I had to remind him a few times verbally that rolling on grass was not nice and that Papa said no no no. About 2 class sessions after the video communication, he was able to line up or sit and wait for his turn, and no rolling on grass anymore.

These two examples show that autistic children CAN understand your message and obey your commands, when they are really communicated to, visually. The mistake of most parents is to rely exclusively on verbal and physical forms of communication, which are essential meaningless to these children.

My drawing and video clip not only taught Ivan about appropriate behavior, but also taught him other visual and reading skills. For instance, he learned that a red cross meant No.

Stimming time is learning time.

Visual communication is the best route to go, if you have time. But parents have responsibilities, and in many cases there is just not enough time for a quick visual communication. For instance, if your children are pushing/harming some other children, or say, your children are climbing out of windows or balcony. At those emergency situations, parents must do whatever is necessary at the moment, even if that means making their children cry.

All that is normal and expected from parents. Yet that is not sufficient to prevent your children from repeating the same dangerous activities again, and again. Why? Because you have not properly communicated your message to them, yet.

I can assure you my children don’t have pending negative points in the double-entry ledger inside their brains, even if sometime I need to do what a parent is supposed to do to get them out of dangerous situations. That is, even when I make them cry. Parents’ actions at the heat of the moment is basically irrelevant. What matters is what parents do after the heat of the moment.

I do bedtime picture-aided talking with my children. At bedtime, I would review the good or bad events that happened in the day. If there was an incident, I would draw pictures and explain to them what happened, why I had to do what I did, and give them the full rationale behind my actions. Mind you, earlier in their lives, neither of my children was verbal. Children don’t need to understand your full verbal explanation, but they need to SEE you addressing their concerns with their eyes. You don’t need to please your children all the time and let them do what they want: you can be an authoritative parent, but let them know the rationale behind your actions. Once they see you are making an effort to communicate with them, they will erase the day’s negative points from their double-entry ledger.

I just don’t see how I could possibly raise my children without a magnetic drawing board. For parents with autistic children that don’t have a magnetic drawing board at home, I would say: “You’ve got to be kidding me.” You let negative points pile up in their double-entry ledger, day after day, week after week, and year after year, and you expect your children to be OK?

Granted, if your child is pro-video, you have the extra hurdle of needing to teach them to focus on static 2-D drawings first. They need to learn that 2-D stick figures carry meanings. But that is doable. I just don’t see any other viable alternatives to magnetic drawing board. Sure, there are tons of other choices, but none of them is as viable: dry erase boards, paper, tablet computers, smartphones, fluorescent pens and boards, paper notebooks, etc. Magnetic drawing board is unique in the sense that the pen is tightly attached to the board, so it’s impossible to lose the pen. Unlike all other devices, magnetic drawing boards are also built kid-tough. (The magnetic drawing boards available in the USA suck. We have 4 magnetic drawing boards at home, so trust me, we know well about these boards. If you live in the USA, you may want to buy a better quality magnetic drawing board from UK. Search for the keyword “TOMY Megasketcher” on Amazon.com. The price plus shipping is no more expensive than regular magnetic drawing boards available in the US. It takes several weeks for the shipping across the Atlantic Ocean, but it’s well worth the wait.)

Today, if I see a family with young autistic children without a magnetic drawing board, that immediately tells me the children have been mistreated and that have suffered underdevelopment. As simple as that.
Magnetic drawing board is not only used at bedtime. At any moment you feel like you have a message to communicate to your children, you can use it. Because my regular drawings are always fun and entertaining, my children have developed a positive/receptive feeling towards the magnetic drawing board. So, even when I tell them serious messages in my drawings, they would still pay full attention.

Seriously, parents have zero right to complain about their children’s behavior, when they don’t use a magnetic drawing boards to erase the negative points from the double-entry ledger of these children. That is also why I shake my head at “social stories.” Come on, it’s not about “social stories,” it’s about having a tool that you can use, to talk to your children through their eyes, at any moment, about any subject. Each frame should take you only a few seconds: you talk as you draw, you draw as you talk. It’s all real time, it’s all spontaneous.

So, summarizing, for attractive loops, the strategies is clear: start from what the children like to do, and introduce to them something that they are not familiar with. Expand the connections inside their brains, introduce them to new interests. Make connections after connections, and help them grow.

REPUSLIVE LOOPS: INWARD MODULATION
MANTRA: modulation goes in the other direction



Tantrums are perhaps one of the easiest topics for me to deal with autistic children. For me, tantrums are trivial issues. I have always been able to make my children happy again.

I think the failure of most parents and educators is that they want to solve tantrums at the heat of the moment. Frankly, whatever you do at the heat of the moment of your children’s tantrum is essentially irrelevant. Time is essence, and parents have responsibilities. Your choices of actions at the moment of crisis are limited.

Instead, I solve tantrums issues when the children are happy, giggling and laughing. That’s the secret. I am just sad that the lives of millions of these children are ruined, because their parents never learned this simple approach.

Autism means unconnected highways inside the brains of these children. When children throw tantrums, their minds are latched onto one single issue. Their minds are running within the same negative loop, again and again, like the resonance frequency in the Armstrong oscillator circuit. If there are no exit ramps, good luck for those who try to break this loop.
For this type of negative loops, the modulation goes in the other direction. Your starting point should never be the moment of negativity.

Instead, you should start the modulation process, when the children are doing something else. The best moment to start is when your children are having fun, laughing and giggling. Or at least, when they are doing something else.

For tantrums with a known cause, usually I am able to remove them from the “double-entry ledger” of my children, by simply drawing pictures and making explanations, at bedtime. Bedtime is one of most relaxing moments. And I frankly wonder what those parents that refuse to draw pictures to their children can do otherwise to remove those negative points. What I see is that these parents keep piling up negative points in the double-entry ledger of their children, day after day, week after week, year after year, simply because they haven’t even tried to draw pictures for their children, at bedtime. (Sure, some of these children can’t focus on static drawings, my son was there. But I’ve explained that part earlier. One can introduce stick figures to their children via video clips.)

For tantrums with an unknown cause, I start with the happiest moments of my children. For instance, my son was mad for a certain period of time, and frankly we just never knew the cause. It could be something that happened in school. But because we were not there when it happened, and because my son could not describe verbally, or in pictures, what bothered him, it was impossible to solve the issue by picture talking at bedtime. When he was mad like that, I simply asked him: “Ivan, are you mad, or are you OK?” And he would tell me that he was mad. An innocent question like that, actually has a purpose. It establishes a “hook” that I will explore later. One day, after he threw a tantrum, I took him to the playground, and then took him to one of his favorite activities: riding elevators in the shopping plaza near our home. He had fun and basically has all but forgotten his tantrums. It was only at the moment of his maximum happiness, that I asked him again: “Ivan, are you mad, or are you OK?” He said: “I am OK.” Voilà, a connection has now been established. An exit ramp has now been built to his negative superhighway. From then on, when he threw tantrum again, I could remind him about the fun he had had in the playground and in the elevator ride. I would also lift him up and down to simulate the elevator ride. And then he would giggle and have fun. His tantrum disappeared.

In this case, I made the tantrum disappear, even when I had absolutely no idea what caused the tantrum in the first place. That’s the power of inward modulation.

I always tell parents: to eliminate tantrum problems, kids need to be happy first. They should have happy moments in their lives. Happy moments don’t need to be expensive. My son is happy when I take him to elevator rides. He is happy when I play imaginary elevator with him using our closet’s door. He is happy when I draw pictures for him on the magnetic drawing board. He is happy when I make video clips for him. He is happy when I rub his face with Cetaphil after bath each day. He is happy when I wrap a towel around him to make him into a human burrito. He is happy when we play the silly multiplication game with him. He is happy when we go swim in the ocean, or in the swimming pool. He is happy when I draw pictures for him on paper napkins, when we go out to restaurants. He is happy recently when I buy some dirt-cheap pushbutton switches for him from an electronic component store. He is happy when my wife builds a wood-craft doll-house with elevators for him. You don’t need expensive toys or vacations to make your children happy. Each one of these happy experiences then can then serve as “anchor points” for modulate in the bad experiences, and help my son to get out of his negative loops.

I solve my children’s tantrums problems when they are happy, not when they are mad. I guess the mothers that attend my talks were right, the diagram with the unconnected superhighway is a very intuitive way of understanding all issues regarding autism. You build connections after connections, and your children will reward you with their smile, and will surprise you with their talents.

If your child is still non-verbal, a visual representation can be drawn and shown to them at the moment of their negativity, then shown to them at the moment of their happiness. You will require a piece of paper, or a notebook, or a smartphone (with stylus) for that. The last resort is to capture the moment of negativity first on smartphone, and then shown to them at the moment of their happiness. I never use this last choice, since it could be too traumatic for the children and can break the parent-child bonding.

It’s back-to-school season, and all too many parents are asking what to do with their children, when they throw tantrums in new school environment. I think this problem is artificially created by our current educational system, especially in our public school system. Open-school policy really makes a differences here, as it allows parents to be present in the classroom to see what causes the problems. The main issue here is that parents have no connection to the moment of their children’s tantrums in school, hence it is hard to connect the positive moments of the children to their negative moments. Sure, most schools allow aides, but we have the opposite problem there: while the aides may be present at the negative moments of the children, the aides are not present at the positive moments of the children (when parents take their children to fun activities, or at the moment of bedtime.) The disconnection between family and school is an artificially-created problem, and it will take an educational reform for changes to happen. Since we don’t have an educational reform in place, a few words of advice: (a) seek out schools that have open-school policy, (b) ask for parent presence in classroom, if at all possible, at least at the beginning, (c) if there is an aide, explain to the aide how to keep visual records (drawings) of the moment of negativity, and show to the children when they are not mad (e.g.: outside school setting). Pass those visual records to the parents. (d) If none of the above is possible, and if the children are verbal, try the same thing I have done: ask the children whether they are mad or OK. Then take them to fun activities, and then ask them again whether they are mad or OK. (e) If public school is too overwhelming or too rigid, private school may be a good idea. With sufficient evidences, many school districts actually can pay for the tuition of private schools. And if all else fails, homeschooling is a possibility. (f) Communication is the key: there should be efficient communication between teachers, aides and parents. It’s a bit hopeless in some cases with some adults, but some teachers are actually good at drawing pictures. In the case of aides, they really should draw pictures and keep visual records to pass onto parents. So, in the case of autistic children, parents/teachers/aides not only need to communicate, but need to pass along and share their visual records. Otherwise it would be hard to connect the negative experiences of the child in school, to the positive experiences of the child at home. It’s just sad that out there no one understands these children, and no one knows the importance about drawing pictures for these children. Parents themselves are clueless already, let alone aides and teachers. It irks me that parents prefer to deal with all these problems later in life, instead of introducing visual skills to their children at an earlier age. Refusal of parents to communicate with their children visually, to me, is the root of so many evils in these children’s lives. What’s the fun in ruining so many children’s lives, for the sake of the ego of the adults?

From the point of the view of the children, a new school environment is just too overwhelming: they don’t have any “anchor point” that they can hold on. Frankly, this type of training (familiarizing with a new environment) should have been done already at their pre-school age, where it is easier for parents to stay in school, at least for some initial days. Presence of parents, or an aide that the children are already familiar with, helps a lot.

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For older children or even adults, tantrums are not the main issue. Instead, anxiety, including fear and embarrassment, tend to be the main issues. These negative moments just never seem to go away, because we only deal with them when they happen, which is not the right moment to solve the issue. The right moment to solve these issues is when they are not happening, at all. The problem is, when we are happy, we never recall our negative moments, so our positive world is never connected to our negative world, and we will keep suffering from the same anxiety/fear/embarrassment issues. There is a simple solution to all this. Some devices help: (a) a small packet notebook or a piece of paper, (b) a voice recorder, or (c) a smartphone. You record the negative feelings when they happen, so that you don’t forget. And then, you replay those notes from the negative moments, when you are doing something else. I would say a voice recorder is the best alternative. It allows you to build a cross-temporal bridge, a sort of a “wormhole tunnel,” to connect your good moments to your bad moment. Remember now your positive moments and your new thoughts. Then, the next time you have a negativity attack, you will be able to channel your attention away from the negative loop, and solve problems from a newer perspective. All that is needed is a “wormhole tunnel,” and you will be able to solve your anxiety issues. A voice recorder comes in handy for that purpose.

Sensory issues goes the same way. Like tantrums, these negative things are best handled not at the moment when they happen, but at the moment when they DON'T happen. When the children are happy and doing something else, that's the moment to handle sensory issues. Unfortunately, when children are happy, adults tend to forget about all the negative moments! So the children’s negative world is never connected to their positive world, and that's the problem.

It's normal for children to have sensory issues, that's expected, because they are not fully developed. I hate to see parents and educators spending time teaching their children to “handle” sensory issues. Sensory issues are not solved when they happen. Sensory issues are solve at the moment when they DON'T happen. The modulation goes in the opposite direction. It must always go in the direction of:

positive ---> negative
fun ---> not fun
known ---> unknown

Children need to be happy first. My daughter was afraid of noise. But when a classmate threw a birthday party at Chuck-E-Cheese’s (a children’s arcade game and food place), she learned to love the games and the noise. Same with her Halloween parties. As for food, what my wife does is to give to our children a glass of some green fruit/vegetable juice every day. The good thing about juice is that it is liquid: you can mix in any proportion of any ingredient, any time. So our children learned to adapt to all kinds of flavors and textures, and now virtually have no food choice issues. Again, it’s all about modulation: you modulate in new things into something that they are already familiar with. Liquid diet allows you that flexibility. We started early with the daily green juice habit, since our children’s early childhood.

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All autism issues are life-style issues. These children can be developed into happy, smart adults. They will be able to socialize, make solid eye contacts, be successful in life, and take up leadership roles. What happens today is that people don’t distinguish between autism and underdevelopment. To me, autism and underdevelopment are two totally different issues: the one has nothing to do with the other.

The principle of modulation is very simple: it always goes from things that the children like or are familiar with, into things that the children don’t like or are unfamiliar with. You build connections after connections inside the brains of these children, enable the flow between the positive experiences and negative experiences, and then these children can learn and grow, and do wonderful things to the world. The autistic brain is a powerful brain: it has all the excess synaptic connections. These children are born with a mission. They can solve problems that nobody else can solve. It’s our job as parents to enable their extraordinary abilities, so they can help humanity get out of the big mess and impending disasters that we are causing to ourselves.

How did my son ever develop an interest in electronic circuits? About a year ago, we bought a snap-circuit kit for his 10-year-old cousin, but got another set for our own children just in case. Ivan tinkered with the snap-circuit kit without true understanding and did not learn anything. What really made a difference was his stimming with elevators: he liked to push elevator buttons. From there, I bought him a pushbutton switch, then I made a video clip about a simple circuit with pushbutton switch. From there, he came to learn about electronic circuits. The trip to San Francisco’s Exploratorium further connected his home experience to the outside world. Everything was in baby steps, modulation after modulation. My first attempt at teaching him electronic circuits by buying him a snap-circuit kit was a failure, because it was not modulated into his personal experience or interest. So, what helped him to learn was his stimming with elevators. Who would have thought that stimming with elevators was a trigger to his learning process, right? But the fact is, from stimming with elevators, he learned to talk, to do arithmetic operations (addition and subtraction). And now, he has learned to understand electronic circuits. Who says stimming is a bad thing? The only bad thing is when parents don’t use their children’s stimming behavior to teach them new skills.

Here is the analogy. Teaching my son about electronics is like teaching him to socialize. Push him to socialize directly is like buying him a snap-circuit kit: he won’t understand it. It’s all just noise to him. It’s a waste of time. There is a gap between learning to socialize (or learning electronic circuits) and his personal interest or life experience. You must fill in the gap first. The way how you fill in the gap is not by starting from the side of your goal (socialization or circuits), but by starting to grow his skills and interests from the side of his personal favorite things (stimming behaviors). All too many parents and educators just try to suppress these children’s stimming behaviors, no wonder their children become underdeveloped. Stimming time is learning time. As simple as that.

To those parents that claim that their children are not visual and cannot learn visually, I have the same message: you give up too early, without ever even tried to fill in the gap. Do you think my son naturally came to understand stick figure drawings? Of course not. He was hyperactive and had zero interest in my drawings. I taught him to focus on stick figures because I knew about his favorite video clips. I modulated in teaching moments into his favorite video clips. Everything was in baby steps. Without being able to focus on stick figures, I would have never been able to deal with his tantrum problems, he would have piled up resentments day after day, week after week, year after year, like so many autistic children out there. Parents prefer to deal with tantrum issues for the rest of their lives, simply because they refuse to teach their children visual skills? My question is: WHY? Why do you prefer to make yourself miserable and risk underdevelopment for your children? What’s so hard about drawing pictures for your children? What’s so hard about making movies that any 7-year-old can make? Who is the one with intellectual disability and behavioral issues, after all?

You search on YouTube, and you see thousands of parents posting their children’s “autistic behaviors.” These parents think of themselves as victims. Go ahead and ask any of these parents, who amongst them has done any picture drawing for their children, who had talked to their children at bedtime by drawing pictures on a magnetic drawing board, who amongst them have done any personalized cartoonish video clips for their children. Go ahead and ask any of them, what efforts have they have they made to mitigate their children’s tantrums, not when their children are mad but when their children are happy. There is a very simple reason why my children are thriving and theirs are not. The starting points of our children are exactly the same as their children: our children had no eye contact, they were non-verbal, had sensory issues, my son was hyperactive (look how he now sits still to write Python program), and both had tantrums like all other autistic children. While other parents look at all these manifestations as “abnormal,” I take all these manifestations as natural in the development of an autistic person. We surely don’t think babies are abnormal when we feed them chili pepper and they cry, right? So why do we think sensory problems is an issue for autistic children? Children naturally react to stimuli differently from adults, simply because they are still children! Today, my daughter is at the top of her class, socializes well and makes many friends. My son is building advanced electronic circuits and writing Python programs. Both of them are genuinely cute and happy. Yeah, those other parents sit and complain and whine about being victims, sue school districts. What do I do instead? When I travel by airplane or in subway, I still use my phone to make movies to teach my son. Underdevelopment of your children is your choice. Not mine. Anybody can accuse me as being arrogant or insensitive. But ask yourselves, if I have personality issues, how is it possible at all that I have two of the world’s happiest children? Look at yourselves in the mirror, and try to understand where the problems truly lie. We already live in the Technology Singularity, if you snooze, you lose. If you can’t even handle your children’s autism, how are you ever going to survive in the Robotic Era? Your children are born specifically for tomorrow’s world. They are your best teachers. Be humble, and learn from them. Their brains are way more powerful than yours. Have some respect, please.

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I recently visited another scientist friend. We studied together in the same Engineering School. I told him that autistic children actually don’t have problems, they just need to be raised in a different way. He told me, but that is not completely true, because typical children can be left alone, and they will grow up OK.

Is it true that neurotypical children can be left alone and they will grow up OK? Let us see. The majority of states in the US have compulsory education laws. Not providing education to children is essentially considered child abuse, and parents can be sent to jail for that. Without resorting to laws, we all know that typical children don’t grow up OK, without education (homeschooling or public.) The fact is, we humans have evolved quite a bit from our animal days. We have a formal schooling system in place (homebound or public). Everyone wears shoes and clothing. We take all these things for granted. But schooling, shoes and clothing are not part of normal animal behavior. The fact is, it’s not that neurotypical children can grow up OK on their own. They grow up OK because we have arranged our society’s structure for them to grow up OK. It is just that our current structure has not been adapted to raising autistic children. Once parents and educators learn how to raise these children, the autistic way of raising children will be viewed just as normal as our neurotypical education system, or as normal as wearing shoes and clothing. No sweat.

Today, parents and educators are not sent to jail for not developing their autistic children properly. It’s not even considered child abuse. Parents/educators are relieved for their duties, because we as a society view autism as a medical problem. We always prefer to blame someone else. We blame the children, instead of owning up the responsibility of developing them.

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Many parents are aghast at my putting so much emphasis on my children’s visual-manual and technical development. Their argument goes like: why are you emphasizing their visual-manual and technical skills, when what they need the most are social skills?

Go back to the very top of my message here. “Daddy is a poet, and he doesn’t even know it.” Do your autistic children make this kind of comment to you, spontaneously? Or, recently a teacher from my daughter school told me that she was so impressed at my daughter’s social development, that she saw my daughter playing with friends every time, lately. Do your autistic children socialize at this level?

Those parents that sacrifice their children’s technical development get exactly the opposite of what they want to achieve, which is the social development of their children.

My children started exactly like their children: non-verbal, non-social. A few years later, many of those other children are still non-verbal, non-social. Whereas my children are now verbal, make excellent eye contact, and in the case of my daughter, extremely social. How is it possible that my children are more social than theirs, when I emphasized on my children’s visual and technical skills, while those other parents spend their entire time teaching their children socialization skills? How is it possible that my children are more talkative, when I emphasize on teaching my children reading skills, while those other parents spend countless hours on speech therapy?

Most importantly, why are my children seem to be always happy and smiling, and theirs are not?

Why do those parents get exactly the opposite of what they want to achieve? Whereas I go seemingly in the least reasonable direction and my children developed not only better as compared to autistic children, but are even happier and smarter than neurotypical children?

Am I just lucky? Or is it because I spent countless hours making video clips and drawing pictures for my children, and use the modulation technique to remove every single resentment they were about to accumulate in their double-entry ledger, as well as solve their anxiety and sensory issues?

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What have those other parents done in all these years?

Don’t tell me they have been working hard to raise their children, when they have not even drawn one single picture for their children.

I always thought that drawing pictures is the most natural thing: you just need to walk into any kindergarten or elementary school, and you see all school children can draw. Yet, it seems tragicomical that many adults claim they cannot possible draw, not even stick figures. You don’t believe me? Google for it. There are even research papers trying to explain why adults can’t draw. This is pathetic. Why do adults develop mental block and are unable to even pick up a marker and draw pictures? Who are the mentally ill here?

Seriously, when there is a will, there is way. Adults don’t draw, simply because they don’t have the will. They really suffer from self-inflictive mental disorder, and they don’t know how to get out of it. Similarly, making cartoonish video clips is a snap nowadays. A few strokes and a few clicks and you have a video clip. Yet adults don't seem to be able to learn any of these skills on their own. Come on, if every single 1st grader in my daughter’s school can make animation movies, it cannot be hard. Below is Mindy’s own first animated movie, made at her school (I added subtitle.)



It’s a matter of googling. There are plenty of resources out there, if you truly want to recover the ability to learn as when you were a child. For stick figure drawings, you can take a look at Dr. Lalit Kishore’s YouTube channel. Here is just one example:



They are hundreds more web links out there. You just need to google for them. By the way, that’s not my job. That’s your job.

I compare all this to my mother’s case. As a older Asian housewife, she is widely admired in her generation for being able to drive a car. The other ladies are always like: “wow, you can drive a car!” Try to tell that to the over 100 million female drivers in the USA, which by the way outnumber the number of male drivers in the same country. They probably would look at you with incredulous eyes: “what’s so hard about driving a car?” The same is true with drawing pictures or making video clips. Piece of cake. It’s just so sad to see people come up with lies and excuses not to draw pictures to their children.

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Here is an example of how I drew picture stories for my children when they were younger.



Why is it so crucial that parents draw pictures for their children? Take a look at a drawing by Mindy below, and the story behind her drawing. (Building bird nests was Mindy’s favorite activity during recess time at school.) Tell me, everything you’ve ever wanted in a child: creativity/imagination, verbal skills, eye-contact, social skills, aren’t all these things reflected in Mindy’s drawing? How did Mindy ever learn to draw pictures like that? That’s right, I drew pictures for Mindy since her very early days. I always talked to her through pictures. Pictures provide a channel for parents to communicate with their children, to establish bonding with them. Look at Mindy’s drawing, and think, as a parent of an autistic child, what you have been missing.



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Child autism has never been the issue. Inability of adults to learn and adapt, that’s the real issue. It’s funny that many adults would describe autistic children as mentally ill and intellectual disabled, when the truth lies on the opposite side.

Autism is not a disease/defect/disorder/disability. It’s simply being different. It’s a different life-style, a different way of growing up. Every single “issue” is solvable. These children have some of the finest brains of the world. These children are totally problem-free, they just need to be approached from a different route. Happy, smart children born to totally-clueless parents. That’s our real problem with autism. Only when parents recognize that the problem is on their side, will they be able to change themselves, and help their children grow.

Oh, one final note for parents. Your children will grow up, and one day, they will probably find out everything you have done trying to raise them. Autistic children are smart. Don’t ever count on they won’t find out what you have done, or not done, or what you have been hiding. Be honest, sincere, open, and treat them as equal rights fellow human beings. Be humble. Respect your children. You are your children’s role model. What goes around comes around. I guess that’s what I mean to say.