Being Asperger / Some Reactions

Feeling time after time that you need to say "I'm sorry", and not knowing what it is you did. 
  
Being abandoned by a person whom you thought was a friend, when he or she realizes that you are really different, and not pretending.

Being treated like an object, and wanting to yell, "I'm human."

Being referred to as 'quirky' 'eccentric' 'our favorite weirdo' or 'strange, but harmless' when being introduced to someone new, as if the person speaking anticipates that you will do something wrong, and apologizes beforehand.

Being told that you don't care about people, nor do you want friends: that you are incapable of love and affection - by people who claim to care about people, but either they don't, or they don't consider you to be a person. 

Being told that because you are intelligent, well-spoken and an attractive female that you can't possibly be suffering. Your life is perfect.

The instinctive hurt of social lies, especially the big ones, about justice, equality, and fair play; the pervasive disrespect for people of 'lesser' value, by so-called 'normal' people. 

F. Nietzsche, a smart guy!

People criticize your desire and need to spend time alone, but at the same time they want you to go away. In fact, they want anyone who isn't like them to vanish from the universe.

People who think that they own the universe, and go on trashing a planet to which all people belong, but is owned by no one. 

Living in a social world in which 90% of what humans need and value is missing. 

The constant awareness of an invisible cage of words and looks and expectations that social people accept without being aware that it limits or controls them, but which for an Asperger individual is like being locked in a nightmare. 
 
Knowing that a touch of Asperger's would result in a happier and healthier human population, better distribution of resources, effective problem-solving and greater equality in society, but that nothing we can do or say convince social people that we have a contribution to make.

Divide and Profit: Extinction of the Individual

We must look to the wisdom of the past when so little can be found in our contemporary world. I'm old now; I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, supposedly a less free, more conservative time in the United States. But, I have never felt so confined, defined, categorized, unhinged from history, from common humanity, from belonging, from kindness, from the "values" of a democratic society than I do now. The individual has been erased and replaced by stock characters in a game of ‘diversity-demographics’: Divide and profit. This ongoing process of extinction of the individual is critical to those FKAA(Formerly Known As Asperger) for whom individuality and its correlates, Honesty, Justice, and Equality are essential.

The very act of 'doing away with' the Asperger's diagnosis demonstrates the willful 'doing away with' our personalities, preference and voices - we are subsumed into a 'spectrum' of socially undesirable persons, classed with psychopaths, but grudgingly said to have some usefulness to society, which is a very narrow and easily removed permission to exist.

Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900
“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”

“It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations -- past and present -- are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millennia.”

_Eric Hoffer, 1902-1983

“The larger the group, the more toxic, the more of your beauty as an individual you have to surrender for the sake of group thought. And when you suspend your individual beauty you also give up a lot of your humanity. You will do things in the name of a group that you would never do on your own. Injuring, hurting, killing, drinking are all part of it, because you've lost your identity, because you now owe your allegiance to this thing that's bigger than you are and that controls you.” _George Carlin, Last Words  

 

For those who would have Asperger children 'ape' so-called normal behavior: "Imitation cannot go above its model.”

“The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.” _Ralph Waldo Emerson, Divinity School Address
 

And from old school psychology and psychiatry: “Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally short-sighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations...” _C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self, 1875-1961 

“The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.” Sigmund Freud, 1846-1949

 

What Asperger children are doing with their brains when regular people think we are standing around being defective.

I was an uncomfortable child. I didn’t like the world much, and it didn’t like me. The world was confusing - disturbing, jarring, and alarming. I was frightened most of the time and most everything frightened me. Within my mind I was adventuresome and fearless, but people and their invasive habits and their intrusive rules and demands, scared the shit out of me. I didn’t know it, I instincted it. They wanted to keep me from adventure, from thought, and from truth. I hid. I still hide, because I was right. Social people confine and limit each other in terrible ways.

Women are confident that the man they live with is a nice guy and a good father. He’s just an average man, not a leader. Leaders know how to bring out the killer in every man. That’s why they are leaders. Men were a giant intellectual obstacle when I was a child. In their estimation of how things work, I was an insatiable little monster whose curiosity, hidden passion, obstinacy, questions, and rational seeking would be fine…if only I had been born a boy. How I learned to hate that pejorative and final indictment. 

Unbelievably, it was adult women who were most often the delivers of this life sentence of inferiority; women whose natural grace was replaced by restrictive clothing, rock hard hairstyles and icing-like make up, until nothing original remained. It was the 1950s and rigid sex rules demanded rigid bodies. Underwear was compiled in layers of girdles, brassieres, slips and garter belts, and stockings with seams that must be straight. Our mothers were Virgin priestesses who had been ceremoniously demoted by marriage, shamed and gagged by the function of their sex. I horrified my mother. I was not what she wanted in a child. My very existence challenged her acceptance of marriage as a woman’s inevitable defeat. My lively mind was a reminder of a dark female presence that she had murdered within herself.

The game unfolded: little girls were soon tamed. Female society ground on like a glacier that rolled over and pulverized every female that resisted its relentless power.

My father was a traitor to his gender. In matters of the mind he never slighted me. He was a mechanical engineer with wide interests, but his knowledge had one boundary, the artificial gulf between the priestly triumvirate of science, technology, and mathematics, the intellectual activities that divided the real world from everything else. He had an eidetic memory (he claimed) and rather than deflect my questions as unladylike annoyances, he fed me information about astronomy, geology, physics, chemistry, history, exploration and industry. He was not a creative person, but populated his mind with wonderful facts and figures in order to keep the world and his unhappy childhood at bay. He told me this, and let me know, without providing details, that he had idolized his father, a strict man who had used corporal punishment to toughen him up. 

Inexplicably, he hated his mother, whose sole flaw, as far as I could understand, was being a woman. His sister was also an object of his rage. He refused to provide any cause for his extreme feelings, and if my questions ventured to close to his wall of secrecy, he would turn on me. The experience was like that of trying to retrieve a bone from an ill-tempered dog that growls menacingly, curls its lip and commits a warning bite. Warning given: warning taken. I had to set aside this mystery concerning his female family members as a contradiction to the father I knew.

 

Sensory Diversity, Brains, and Judeo-Christian Myth

Does the Autism Spectrum make any sense?

I want to spend some time on sensory sensitivities, because I believe that the myriad confusing symptoms that are considered to be diagnostic of Asperger's are the RESULT of a different sensory reception and processing scheme than is present in so-called normal people. The unusually broad array of behaviors and thought processes used to diagnose Asperger people is internally contradictory and inconsistent. Also, these symptoms are unequally distributed among individuals diagnosed as Asperger. A grab bag of 'suspicious' or unwanted behaviors is being used to diagnose an increasing array of new disorders without looking deeply into the origin of such disparate symptoms. Dozens of characteristics are  grouped as a spectrum more from convenience than evidence. The range of possible drivers of behavior is left unknown, and therefore facts that might untangle the mess and lead to a better understanding of developmental diversity in our species remain hidden.

An analogy: A panel of experts decides that having a pain in the neck is pretty much the same as having a headache, so neck pain is swept into a Headache Disorder spectrum. Regardless of how many, or which symptoms the individual may or may not exhibit along this spectrum, he or she is then told that the problem is a defective brain. There is no cure or treatment, but a person can be trained to act is if no pain exists. The CAUSE of the headache (or neck pain) is ignored. The pain might be traced to a brain tumor, allergies, or whiplash, but no differentiation is made.  

The sweeping conclusion that diverse humans can be categorically removed to a "disordered" space reflects a dominant religious attitude that a male god made man in His likeness, therefore there is only ONE God-given correct set of thoughts and behaviors acceptable in human beings. Note that the "disordered space" by definition includes females, and any person authorities designate.  Too many experts and scientists have this conceptual structure embedded in their work and don't even realize it, but cultural ideas taint their assumptions and therefore their conclusions. The insistence that Homo sapiens is the ultimate human, divinely inspired and separated from the animals by a towering barrier of supernatural origin, is only recently being challenged in anthropology and evolutionary science. The supposedly rock-solid line that was drawn by religious males over two millennia ago, which divides "sub-humans" from a self-designated Supreme Man has wrecked the lives of millions of human beings. 

Possible Asperger Sensitivity to Infrasound

Infrasound is sound waves below the normal range of human hearing. Infrasound is common in nature, but additionally the environment is flooded with manmade low and high frequency sound. You know those industrial strength subwoofers that cause some of us severe pain, anger, irritation, and the urge to run away? Those effects are real.

 

Natural sources of infrasound - many animals can detect these low frequency sounds; a few, such as elephants, can also generate infrasound. Humans can't HEAR these long wavelengths, but they do have effects on the human nervous system and organs.

"Oobleck" is the now famous non-Newtonian fluid composed of cornstarch and water. Shown here is the Oobleck "dance" produced by infrasound from a subwoofer. I'm not claiming that infrasound has the same effect on any part of the human body. I'm using the photo to show that infrasound, even though humans can't "hear" it, has a physical existence and is part of our environment, from both natural and manmade sources. 

For a look at non-Newtonian liquids:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN2D5y-AxIY

Are Asperger's Individuals the Canaries of Toxic Human Environments?

The sensitivity of Asperger children and adults to specific sound frequencies, noise levels, chemicals, pollution and chaotic human activity is labeled a symptom of a defective brain. Really? Do dogs and cats run away at the sound of drills, saws and vacuum cleaners because their brains are defective? Do pets sneeze and hide when household cleaners are sprayed in the air because their brains are defective? Are cigarettes banned in many public places because toxic smoke is good for people? Do fish die off when fertilizer concentrations in rivers and lakes cause algal blooms that deplete oxygen in the water because fish are developmentally retarded? Do sea birds that consume plastic trash that blocks their digestive system die because they are stupid? Do turtles get caught in fishing nets and die because their brains don't 'get' human indifference to the survival of other species? Do wild animals flee humans because they just don't understand that cruelty is empathy in disguise?

Are Asperger people averse to social environments because their brain-sensory system is broken, or is it because we have more acute sensory perception, and toxic environments make us sick? 

A Link to Basic Genetics and Environment

Both Environment and Genetic Makeup Influence Behavior

By: Michael D. Breed (Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado at Boulder) & Leticia Sanchez (Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado at Boulder) © 2010 Nature Education 

http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/both-environment-and-genetic-makeup-influence-behavior-13907840

Good grief!Advice on dealing with sensory sensitivity? Have your Asperger child wear earmuffs to dampen noises that cause distress. Better stock up - you'll need these for a lifetime of environmentally induced pain!

A characteristic common to many Asperger individuals is sensory sensitivity. The link above goes to a clear and simple discussion on how genetic make up and the environment affect animal behavior. It's a good place to begin understanding our sensory differences.

Although these sensory sensitivities are noted in articles on Asperger symptoms, there is little apparent interest in research on the actual source and nature of these noteworthy physical experiences, which Asperger individuals frequently describe. Instead, these differences are commonly written off as defects in the Asberger brain, an astounding attribution that like too many assumptions about Asperger symptoms is accepted merely on repetition.

Wrong Answers Cause Wrong Behavior in Neurotypicals

Social conflict makes me ill. Literally.

Asperger people often find themselves in the awkward position shown by this graphic. Two groups of socially typical people fight over control of The Answer and neither group has a clue that The Answer they are fighting over is no answer at all; each group merely wants control.

The unfortunate Aspie (2) may or may not have the correct answer, but he or she knows that The Answer being fought over is simply not correct: the fight isn't about facts, but about which group is Right.

Asperger individuals are obsessed with problem-solving and want to get everyone on track toward finding a solution. The result is that both groups will turn on the Asperger and attack, often viciously, the one person who might be able to help.

Asperger people need to learn that Neurotypicals aren't looking for solutions at all! They love to fight, and are addicted to negative emotions, aggression and above all Winning, and they will argue unsuccessfully over the same topics again and again.  

Asperger's: An Unsought Individuality

Being diagnosed as Asberger's confers a strange unsought individuality.

We exist at the edge of the human domain, not looking inward to an anthropocentric land of incessant squabbles and breathtaking cruelty, but deeply, into the complex manifestation of matter and energy that is our earth. We also look outward to the inhuman universe, whatever it may be. We see what social humans refuse to see. Humans are not the summation of evolution, but one flicker in an emerging image.

 

 

A Highly Recommended Website: Empathy Quotient Test Critiqued

The question of empathy - Who has it, who doesn't? is vital to the diagnosis that currently segregates autistic individuals, well as Asperger people, into a "developmentally defective" sub class of humans. 

The website www.autismandempathy.com which is edited and published by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg, provides an excellent and extensive critique of the Simon Baron-Cohen Empathy Quotient test, and the human rights implications presented by invalid assumptions behind the test. 

Rather than attempting to duplicate the wealth of information at this site,
I will, in the next post, present the Empathy Quotient test itself, complete with answers that I would supply, if given the opportunity to honestly and thoroughly do so, and with annotations regarding my reaction to the questions.  
 
Links to some additional articles:
On Not Being Human by Morton Ann Gernsbacher
Thinking About The Unthinkable by Lynne Soraya
The Empathy Issue is a Human Rights Issue by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg
Unwarranted Conclusions and the Potential for Harm: My Reply to Simon Baron-Cohen by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg
Deconstructing Autism as an Empathy Disorder: A Literature Review by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg
 
 

Boston Children's Hospital: Autism and Asperger's are Different

from: VECTOR Boston Children’s Hospital’s science and clinical innovation blog.

Autism and Asperger’s are different… at least on EEG by Nancy Fliesler on August 15, 2013

Asperger’s syndrome vs. autism spectrum disorders:
This histogram separates children with Asperger’s (in red) from those with autism spectrum disorders (green) based on EEG coherence variables. Although there is overlap with high-functioning autism, the Asperger’s children clearly form a distinct group. (Courtesy BMC Medicine)

Is it Asperger’s syndrome or is it autism? Since there are no objective diagnostic measures, the diagnosis is often rather squishy, based on how individual clinicians interpret a child’s behavior. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, fourth edition (DSM-IV), early problems with language development are an indicator of autism; if there are behavioral symptoms but no early language problems, the child has Asperger’s. However, if the diagnosis is made late, parents’ recall of early language development may be fuzzy.

Under the new DSM-V, published in May, Asperger’s is included under the general “autism spectrum disorders (ASD)” umbrella. This has raised concerns among families who feel their children with Asperger’s have unique needs that won’t be met in classroom programs designed for autism.

Frank Duffy, MD, a neurologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, believes it’s possible to objectively differentiate Asperger’s from ASDs using a new wrinkle on an old technology. Originally trained as an engineer, Duffy is expert at interpreting electroencephalography (EEG) signals—the wiggly lines that represent electrical activity in the brain.

He’s devised computational techniques that measure the degree of synchrony among signals gathered from 24 different electrodes on different parts of the scalp.

These “coherence” patterns, though not evident to the eye, reflect how the brain is wired, and how it processes and integrates information. And they clearly reveal different patterns of brain connections in children with Asperger’s as compared to children with autism.

“It’s very easy to separate Asperger’s from autism patients by EEG measures,” Duffy asserts. “We could eventually come to the point where diagnostic differences are defined directly by differences in brain activity.”

First, we need to rewind to last year, when Duffy presented results from studying 430 children, ages 2 to 12, with “classic” autism and comparing them with 554 neurotypical controls. The autism diagnoses relied upon the DSM-IV, the Autism Diagnostic Interview, Revised and/or the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule. Children with Asperger’s syndrome or very low or high-functioning autism were excluded. In the end, Duffy computed EEG coherence readings for more than 4,000 possible combinations of electrodes.

In the autism group, coherence tended to be reduced in brain areas at short distances from each other, while long-distance coherence was sometimes reduced, sometimes increased. Ultimately, Duffy found several dozen coherence factors that consistently distinguished the children with autism from the controls with more than 90 percent sensitivity. 

BMC Medicine: Autism and Aspergers are Different on EEG

Autism and Asperger’s are different… at least on EEG by Nancy Fliesler on August 15, 2013

The Asperger’s difference

In the new study, published July 31 in the open-access journal BMC Medicine, Duffy compared these two groups with an additional 26 children meeting behavioral criteria for Asperger’s.

Using 40 coherence factors, Duffy’s algorithm classified 25 of the 26—96 percent—as belonging to the autism sample. So clearly, the children with Asperger’s were closer to the autism profile than to the neurotypical controls. However, further coherence analysis correctly classified 24 of the 26 children—92 percent—as having clinical Asperger’s syndrome as distinct from ASDs. These classifications held up on repeated analyses.

What was different in the Asperger’s group? Duffy zeroed in on four EEG coherence factors (Factors 3, 15, 33 and 40) that best distinguished them from the group with ASDs. This graphic illustrates the differences in brain connectivity; imagine you’re looking down at the brain from above (see the nose at the top of each “head”):

The red and black dots indicate electrodes. Red lines between the dots indicate increased coherence between pairs of signals in the Asperger’s group, and blue-green lines indicate decreased coherence in the Asperger’s group.

So what does this mean?

Duffy hypothesizes that Factor 15, indicating reduced connectivity in the arcuate fasciculus, a brain structure involved in language, indicates a language deficiency, but that the Asperger’s brain compensates for this with increased connectivity in the left temporal region (Factor 3), allowing children to acquire language skills.

“Children with Asperger’s have very unique aspects to their language,” says Duffy. “The difference in coherence may account for their more stylized, literal use of language.”

As for Factors 33 and 40, which each show reduced coherence values in the Asperger’s group, Duffy proposes that they correspond to differences in visual-spatial functioning and in right-hemisphere areas thought to be involved in perceiving social and language nuance.

All this, of course, invites further investigation. Duffy is planning another study using coherence factors to distinguish children with autism from those with global developmental delay, which can often look like autism. With a larger sample size, he hopes to investigate whether there are differences between Asperger’s syndrome and high-functioning autism.

But in the meantime, since EEGs are relatively cheap diagnostic tools, Duffy feels they could eventually be developed to provide a diagnostic tool for autism in settings where there aren’t enough skilled behavioral clinicians, such as developing countries and certain underserved parts of the U.S.

“With some public and private support, I believe this could potentially be translated into a practical tool within my lifetime,” he says.

Citation:
Duffy FH, Shankardass A, McAnulty GB, & Als H (2013). The relationship of Asperger’s syndrome to autism: a preliminary EEG coherence study. BMC medicine, 11 PMID: 23902729

Asperger's Love Physical Reality

Asperger types are described as incapable of being social or emotional, but this is a misunderstanding on the part of the social majority. Unlike standard social interaction, which is pro forma and fleeting, successful Asperger relationships are founded on intellectual give-and-take and may take long periods of time to develop. The focus is on shared interests rather than shared emotions. Honesty and trustworthiness are prime requirements and these personal characteristics are non negotiable, hence Aspersers people may have few friends. Being social for the sake of being social holds little to no appeal; an Asperger individual may put in an appearance at a gathering if necessary, but then vanish as quickly as possible. Constructing and maintaining a socially acceptable charade, especially in which one has no interest, is exhausting. Many of us don’t bother – which earns us the wrath of the socially addicted.

The Asperger ability to experience deep emotional attachments to animals, objects, equations, theories, and classes of things like transportation, machines, space exploration or numbers may seem improbable or impossible to neurotypicals, but it’s true. Some, like myself, feel that a specific landscape, or rock formation, or river, or mountain range – indeed the whole of nature’s manifestations, ‘speak to us’ emotionally or spiritually. This intense feeling of being embedded in the environment is possibly what animism was originally, before this intense identification became blurred with the magical fear that active spirits, which are capable of conscious acts of good and evil, interfere with human lives. The Asperger’s prime attachment is to physical reality and not to a manmade ‘supernatural’ dimension. 

It takes time for the Asperger ‘get to know you’ process to work and most social people just don’t have the time or interest to wait, or to participate in growing a relationship. Asperger individuals often don’t ‘get’ that the neurotypical person isn’t interested in getting to know them or anyone else for that matter. We do see that the social person wants immediate superficial attention. Status seeking neurotypicals are out to ‘score a hit’ and the less invested in time and sincerity the better. We instinctively don’t like this shallow treatment of human beings.

Surprisingly, what neurotypicals fail to understand is that permission to lie is apportioned according to one’s location on the pyramid, with those in power having almost unlimited sanction to lie without consequence. No one should be surprised therefore by rampant social and economic inequality, but amazingly, supposedly socially savvy neurotypicals don’t have a clue. It is a given that politicians lie to get elected and then promptly do whatever their funders have paid them to do. This has been happening election after election since politics (a social endeavor) appeared, and yet neurotypicals never catch on.

One way for an Asperger to cope with the social charade is to imagine that each and every neurotypical is running for an office – even if it’s a tiny niche somewhere in the vast social hierarchy, and that each exchange with another person is only a campaign stop. Unless you have (relative) wealth or power, you aren’t worth a second handshake.