AMoRe: Autism, Modulation, Renormalization

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I have been talking many times regarding autism, modulation and renormalization. I just realized that if I join the first few letters from each word, they will form the AMORE acronym, which means "love" in Italian, ha!

Renormalization is a very technical subject. There have been several Nobel Prizes awarded to this subject. One was in 1974 to Ken Wilson, for his work on critical phenomena using the renormalization group. Another one was in 1999, to Gerardus 't Hooft and Martinus Veltman, for proving that the electroweak field theory is renormalizable.

The closest analogy I have came up with is the "Central Limit Theorem" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem, whereby all probability distributions converge towards the "Normal" distribution (also known as the Gaussian distribution, or the "bell curve"), upon self-interaction, in the sense of taking the average of multiple copies of the original distribution. If you google for "renormalization and Central Limit Theorem," you will see that I am not the only one that have found this analogy.

But still, for people not familiar with statistics, they won't be able to understand the "Central Limit Theorem" and what the universality is all about. So I racked my head on how to find a day-to-day example that the average person could understand.

Richard Feynman is known to have replied to "explaining to the average person" with this quote: "Hell, if I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel prize." https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman. The honest way of understanding renormalization is to learn about it and to work on it. Anything else is just a fake substitute. I've tried to explain the Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle by borrowing an analogy from linguistics by comparing nouns to adjectives. However, I don't think people will really be able to understand the Uncertainty Principle unless they truly take a course in calculus and learn about Fourier Transforms.

With that caveat said, I've found that the "Dewdrops on a Leaf" model helps to illustrate the renormalization that happens inside the autistic brain quite well. So, let me dive a bit more into the details.

Here is the situation of a neurotypical brain. The neurotypical brain is like a leaf in a cold winter's early morning, when the moisture from the air has condensed into tiny water droplets all over the leaf.

Now, from very general arguments, we know that, for the survival of a human being, the visual skills are more important than verbal skills, and the verbal skills are more important than social skills. All this has been discussed before and it's also on my website. That means that there is an intrinsic slope to the leaf: the leaf is tilted in such a way that the social of the brain is at a higher position than the verbal part, and the verbal part is at a higher position than the visual part, so that, if there were no adhesion force, the water droplets would flow downwards, towards the visual part.

For the neurotypical brain, because the water droplets are so tiny, there is not much interaction between them. So, even though there is a natural slope to the leaf, the distribution of water droplets throughout the leaf is pretty much constant. That is, the adhesion force is stronger than gravity. The even distribution of droplets means that the neurotypical person can communicate easily through all channels.

Now let's take a look at the case of the autistic brain. The autistic brain is like the leaf with droplets, but somewhat later into the morning. By then, there might have been some breeze that has shaken the leaf a little bit, there might have been a bit more moisture gathered between the droplets. What happens is the original droplets then make contact with their neighboring droplets, and most droplets start to coalesce into larger and larger droplets. Unlike the case of the neurotypical brain, now the droplets start to gain weight and volume, and gravity eventually overcomes the adhesion force, so the larger droplets tend to roll towards the bottom side of the leaf, which is the visual cortex of the brain.

So, what's the "universality" that I often mention about the autistic brain? The universality is, for ALL autistic children, their visual attention/focus/capability overwhelms their verbal and social counterparts. In fact, the leaf has a lot of "dry spots" on their verbal and social parts. That is why these kids have problems in verbal and social communication. That's the universality part: ALL autistic children are visual, period. They must ALL be developed visual-manually, otherwise you are almost certainly doomed to failure.

That being said, the locations of those gigantic droplets vary from child to child. The locations of those big droplets follow what's known as the "Chaos Theory" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory, popularly summarized into the expression as "The Butterfly Effect" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect. That is, no two children are identical, each child has his/her own interest/pickiness/sensory issues, etc. The uniqueness of each child (the locations of the drops inside their brains) is not an autistic phenomenon, the "Chaos Theory" applies to both neurotypical and autistic children. So when people tell me that each autistic child is different and need to be approached differently, my answer would be: "duh?!" The chaotic locations of the droplets have nothing to do with autism. That's not the universality that I am talking about.

The universality I am talking about is the visual nature of these children. It comes from the inherent slope of the leaf, the inherent difference in important the visual, verbal and social skills inside the human brain. To most people, they see the autistic children as all being different. To me, I see ALL autistic children as being the same. They are ALL visual to me, no exception. The fact that I see ALL of them as being visual, does not mean that I approach them all the same way. Nope, I approach my son very differently from my daughter. However, I develop both of them the same way in the sense that I let both of them develop in the visual-manual direction. My daughter loves to draw pictures, loves to read, l let her draw pictures and let her read a lot of books. She is much better in drawing pictures or in reading than my son. On the other hands, my son loves to play with 3D building blocks, he likes elevators and everything mechanical, he also like to assemble electronic circuits. My son is much better than my daughter in building 3D structures or robots or circuits. I take my son to elevator rides, I don't take my daughter to elevator rides. They are different, I develop them differently. Yet, I develop them BOTH in the visual-manual direction. To most people, they see me doing things differently for my son and my daughter. To me, I am applying the same exact technique: visual-manual development through modulation.

Now, let's see the difference between the autistic brain and the neurotypical brain. Sure, the autistic brain has plenty of dry, arid spots, but that is not necessarily a shortcoming. Let me explain. Each droplet represents the energy that can used towards growing the network of connections inside the brain. For neurotypical children, they have a dense distribution of droplets, but each droplet has only a limited amount of energy. What develops from each of the tiny droplets becomes largely unconnected. Sure, these children will grow into versatile adults, they will be able to multitask, but they are not capable of performing truly deep thinking skills. Their brains have been developed into a dense field of alfalfa grass (image from Wikipedia). Sure, each strand of grass makes contact with the strands from neighboring grass plants, but the connection is weak.

On the other hand, the droplets in the autistic brain have enough energy to grow into Giant Seqouia trees (image from Wikipedia).

You shake any branch of the tree, and the entire tree feels it. Unlike that alfalfa grass, in the giant trees everything is connected. That means, when autistic people see something, it triggers correlation in so many other experiences in their lives, and then it launches a parallel processing of all the correlated nodes inside their brain. The autistic is a powerful brain. That is why autistic people can see things that neurotypical people cannot see, and solve problems that neurotypical people cannot solve.

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To me, if you do not develop your autistic child in the visual-manual direction, you are committing child abuse. That's my opinion. I see so many parents refusing to draw pictures for their children, for no reason. On the other hand, I have met a Mexican lady that did not even need to ask questions: she started to draw pictures for her daughter. And now her daughter is thriving. The lady always proudly pulls out her smartphone and shows me the drawings of her daughter, whenever I see her.

Tons of parents will tell me, but their children are not visual. Yeah, right, you mean your children are verbal and social? There are not many ways we humans communicate. Autistic children are all visual. What may happen is, they all have different interests. Let me cite an example.

One day, a mom with an autistic child came to visit us. I tried to see if the child can understand stick figure drawings. I drew picture of people, no reaction. The son was as hyper as he could be. I drew pictures of animals...no reaction. I then drew pictures of toys, like cars...no reaction. At that point anyone would reasonably conclude that the child was not visual, right? The mom saw me try so many things unsuccessfully, at one point she said: "could you draw a xylophone?" I drew a xylophone and the boy's eyes just lit up and he got all excited: "Xylophone!" he said. What happened was he was having music therapy sessions, where the therapist would be playing guitar and he would hit along his toy xylophone at home. I managed to find a toy xylophone and also pull out a small guitar that no one uses at home, and drew the picture of the guitar next to the xylophone, and then played guitar while the boy played the xylophone. By the time they left, the boy was still holding on tightly to the card that I drew for him, where I drew the xylophone and the guitar.

Each of these children's interests is a hook you can use, to develop them in the visual-manual direction, and grow a gigantic tree out of it. That part is called modulation. My son wasn't able to look at any static pictures when he was 2.5 years old. However, I knew he liked to watch a dinosaur cartoon video clips. I inserted static frames of stick figure drawings. And that was how he learned to call me "Papa." Sure, if I had stopped and given up when my son wasn't responding to static images, my son would still be just as hyper like so many other autistic children from his preschool days (many of whom are still stuck with hyperactivity and have made almost no progress, after 5 years.)

Worse of all, I saw other parents going crazy. Some have to take medications. Some of their children are violent. Some families have since become broken. I ask myself: WHY?

All those healthcare professionals invent an illness that is not even there. They brainwash our parents and educators into believing that autism is a mental disorder, that autism is a medical issue. Countless parents then go on a wild goose chase for miracle food, alternative medicine solutions. Meanwhile, no one, not parents, not therapists, not schools, does a damn thing to develop these children in the visual-manual direction. Everyone just keeps pounding on the dry spots on the leaf of these children. Not one soul manages to see the gigantic dew drop at the bottom side of the leaf. Tell me, which one of you regularly draws pictures for your children instead of just talking to them?

It is really hard for me to understand why people don't draw pictures. There is a true problem there. I still remember when my daughter was younger, probably around age 3. One day, my parents were visiting us. I had to run a chore, so I gave the magnetic drawing board to my parents, and told them: "I'll be back in another hour and a half, could you please draw some pictures for Mindy? Thanks!" I then rushed out of home. By the time I came back, I saw Mindy there, as cute as ever, and my parents next to her. I took a look at the magnetic drawing board, and it was BLANK. I asked my parents what happened, and my Dad said he had no idea what to draw, so he did not draw anything. This was the sentence that went through my head: "Houston, we've got a problem."

My wife was like that at the beginning, too. However, she finally overcame her fear and started to draw pictures for Mindy when our daughter was 3 years old or so. Nowadays my wife draws better pictures than I do. (Frankly, now everyone at home draws better pictures than I do.) I asked her, how did it feel after she started to draw pictures for Mindy. She told me, it was an empowering experience. She all of sudden realized that, as long as she put herself into it, she could accomplish anything she wanted. She told me, she never even realized that she had so much untapped power at her disposal, and she wasn't talking about drawing pictures.

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The autistic brain is a powerful brain. Because it's all connected, because it's better "factorized." The smartest person is not the person that holds the most information. The smarted person is the person that can factorize and organize information the best. That's how autistic people find correlations where other people miss. Why are all geniuses weird? Where do they draw all their intellectual power from? That's another subject for the future.

Happy New Year!