Five Corners of Autism?

There is the saying that “If you have met one person with autism, you have met one person with autism.” This means that even if you have an in depth understanding of one autistic person, you still do not understand autism as a whole because each autistic person is different - often very different.

This is why you should be wary of both a parent claiming to be able to help autistic children because they helped their child, or an autistic adult who claims to understand autism simply because they have a diagnosis of autism. Instead, it is essential to ensure that anyone offering support has studied autism more widely and appreciates that autism is an extremely broad condition. What helps one person may well not help the next autistic person you meet.

The logical conclusion of this is that the stereotypes like ‘autistic people are good at computer coding’, or ‘autistic people have superpowers’, or ‘autistic people think logically’ or ‘autistic people are hyper-sensitive to noise’ or ‘autistic people have processing issues’ are all incorrect. Because autism is so complex and multi-faceted, there there is very little you can say about any particular autistic person before you get to know them. In other words, there are no one-size fits all accommodations for autism.

If autism is so broad how can you help any autistic person

The first step is to engage in a fascinating exploration of the autisms of autistic people whose autisms are very different from each other. That means distilling out all the different underlying issues that can underpin the autistic symptoms of an individual. One way to do this is to read biographies of autistic people - ideally people with widely varying autisms. Some autistic people are able to explain their difficulties in terms of some key difficulties that underpin their symptoms. For example, Donna Williams through both her own experiences and through observing children with similar autisms to her own, has come up with a schema that includes information processing difficulties and exposure anxiety. Ido Kedar and Naoki Higashida have explained their autisms in terms of sensory-motor difficulties. Temple Grandin talks about thinking in pictures - something that she has managed to use to her advantage.

With this we have the beginnings of a different way of thinking and talking about autism. If we could find some people whose autisms could be mixed and matched to explain the experiences of other autistic people, then we start to have a better way of helping more autistic people.

Five Corners of Autism?

Each of the individuals briefly described below can attribute most of their autism to just one or two key issues. This can help us separate out the specific effects of particular underlying issues.

So for 5 corners of autism we could have:

Donna Williams

For Donna Williams, autism is primarily about information processing issues and exposure anxiety. Donna has great difficulty integrating information from her senses. This leads to overload, which in turn can lead to senses shutting down so that she has only one sensory channel that is taking in information: mono-processing. For Donna Williams, sensory issues includes synesthesia where sensory channels combined. So, for Donna Williams, people have tastes.

Donna invented the term ‘exposure anxiety’ to describe often extreme anxiety responses to interacting with the world. Even something as simple as saying your name or being praised can trigger exposure anxiety. This is much more than social anxiety. Instead it is an anxiety about exposing something about yourself.

Donna Williams describes a memory that is triggered rather than consciously recalled. When she starts typing the knowledge comes out, but she did not know she had that knowledge. She has a photographic memory so can ‘read’ books very quickly. Her brain processes the information and then all this information is triggered when it is needed.

Temple Grandin

Temple Grandin’s autism is characterised by thinking in pictures - literally. Temple finds solutions to problems by playing images or a video through her brain. If she is asked to describe a certain animal, a series of pictures of that animal flit through her brain. Temple has turned this to her advantage with her choice of career of designing cattle slaughtering facilities. Temple can play a video of how the facility will work through her brain.

However, this way of thinking caused problems for Temple at high school because her way of thinking cannot cope with subjects like algebra where there is nothing to visualise. In contrast, geometry caused no problems for Temple.

Daniel Tammet

Daniel Tammet is famous for being able to memorise and recite pi to 22 514 decimal places. He did this by means of his synesthesia which means that numbers have colours and shapes. For Daniel, a sequence of numbers makes a landscape. This makes arithmetic easy for Daniel. But he struggles with other aspects of Maths because his synesthesia gets in the way. It is Daniel’s synesthesia has led to a love and fascination with numbers that nobody else can share. This has made making and sustaining friendships difficult, which in turn has led to poor social skills.

Wenn Lawson

Wenn (formerly Wendy) Lawson did his PhD on his own autism. The focus in his PhD (published for the general reader as “The Passionate Mind”) is that autistic symptoms can be described by ‘Monotropism’ which is a kind of ‘tunnel focus’. The idea is that non autistic people find it easy to switch between tasks and topics, but autistic people don’t. A particularly memorable description is Wenn attempting to cross the road. The focus is on the first car to come. Once that car has gone, it is safe. Wenn has had near accidents by not then focusing on the next car and is not safe to cross the road on his own.

Many autistic people identify with difficulty switching between topics or tasks and difficulty with change because of difficulties with switching focus.

Ido Kedar and Naoki Higashida

The autism of two autistic authors, Ido Kedar and Naoki Higashida form the basis of an important sub-category of autism. Contrary to what is normally expected in autism, both have a very good understanding of people and social interaction. They just cannot take part. In many ways, they are cognitively intact with no processing issues nor different ways of thinking.

They both have sensory-motor issues which means that their body appears to have a mind of its own and often does things outside their control. In addition, it does not do what they want it to do but often something else instead. When Ido does speak, it is often not what he wants to say.

Both Ido and Naoki have benefited from a technique that first taught them to point to a letter board and then progressed to typing. This gave them a means of communication. Both can now show off their knowledge (instead of being labelled as unable to learn) and are accomplished writers. As such they can explain their difficulties and express sadness when children who have similar difficulties are not given the same opportunities to learn to communicate as they have.

Note that the letter board technique (The Rapid Prompting Method) is not suitable for all autistic people who cannot communicate via speaking.

Important Note

Note that as well as writing about their autism, most of the above are authors with several books to their name. In many ways, although their descriptions of autism are valuable in aiding understanding of the breadth of autism, they are not representative of autistic people in general. Their ability to write has given them a voice. We should be very aware that there are many many autistic people who cannot or who struggle to write and who therefore do not have a voice. These people need a voice too.

The Integrative Cognitive Profiling Framework

The above, along with other resources, such as Olga Bogdashina’s sensory framework form the basis of our Integrative Cognitive Profiling Framework. This is used to profile the autism of an individual by identifying the underlying issues and explaining how these issues combine to create the autistic symptoms of that individual. Just as the individuals above have discovered, understanding what is going on helps with creating appropriate interventions that maximise life potential and satisfaction.

Understanding the underlying causes of behaviours is key to providing effective support.

We are now offering training to parents on the Integrative Cognitive Profiling Framework via our membership site. You can sign up for your Free Membership and explore what the community has to offer at mindsindepth.com. We are planning more In-depth courses that will be available soon, requiring a very affordable subscription. Our goal is to help parents work out and understand the underlying issues behind their child’s autistic symptoms so they can devise effective, personalised interventions—without the expense of an autism profile.