The Geek Theory of Autism

[Guest guest]

The Geek Theory of Autism

At university, K. met for the first time people with exceptional

skills like his own

Brad Evenson

National Post

Glenn Gould may have had Asperger's syndrome. He disliked human contact and

could only maintain relationships when he was in total control. He was an

inspiration for K., who has a mild form of autism.

CREDIT: CBC, The Canadian Press

Millions of people have mild versions of autism, depression and attention

deficit disorder. They are doctors, neighbours, even the pilot of your

plane. Without a diagnosis, these " shadow syndromes " can ruin lives, yet

with insight and understanding, they can be a gift. The first of a

four-part series on hidden mental disorders.

- - -

OTTAWA - 'I'm in the closet, " says K., his eyes darting around the

Starbucks coffee shop, avoiding contact. " Some people at work may suspect,

but nobody knows. I don't talk about it. There are a few others, too, I

think. You can sort of tell. They're different. "

grew up with a smothering mother and a distant father, in a

childhood of isolation. He met his share of bullies. He spent his first 18

years struggling with his identity, unaware of others just like himself. At

34, he has never kissed a girl.

But his " closet " doesn't hide his sexuality -- he's a different invisible

minority. Autistic. Not the unyielding, world-of-his-own kind of autism

most of us know about. Not the cute, movie autism of Rain Man. did

well at a regular high school, attended university and found a good job.

Like the mixed-blood blacks of the American South who used to pretend to be

white, he has " passed. "

He is a kind of shadow.

" Florid, full-colour mental illnesses like major depression and

manic-depressive illness come trailed by grey and silver shadow versions of

themselves, the same thing in outline, but indistinct in detail; not easy

to recognize for what they are, " Ratey, a professor of psychiatry at

Harvard Medical School, wrote in his landmark book, Shadow Syndromes.

Millions of people have some of the biological and personality

characteristics of autism. " In some people, it might show up as a strong

need for structure and order in their lives, " says , a

developmental pediatrician at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, who is

collaborating on a hunt for autism genes.

As scientists peel back the layers of autism, attention deficit disorder

and other mental disorders, they are discovering that millions of healthy,

functioning people have shadows of these disorders. Such hidden traits may

not be crippling, but they can drive behaviour and silently chart the

course of our lives. Sometimes, they are even blessings.

" I think it's very true that the flip side of a disability is often a

gift, " says Szatmari, a psychiatrist who is the author of A Mind

Apart: Understanding Autism and Asperger's Syndrome, to be published in May.

" What people with autism-spectrum disorders have is a gift in perception

and attentiveness. They can see the world in a way that you and I don't see

it. They notice patterns; they notice colours; they notice shapes; they

appreciate that perceptual architecture....

" I think the other gift that they have is they are without guile. They

don't lie. They aren't deceitful. They don't tease and bully; they're not

manipulative. "

K. shifts in his seat and opens his cloth briefcase. He is prepared

for questions. He pulls out a dark green notebook.

" Here, " he says, taking off his glasses. " I brought my diary. "

Many people know autism as a disorder characterized by withdrawal,

repetitive behaviours and obsessions with bizarre topics. In severe cases,

parents may watch powerless, feeling unloved, as their children grow into

strangers. But like most disorders, autism is a spectrum that ranges from

severe to mild, as with K.

" [Mental illness] is seen as a black and white situation, but human beings

don't follow these rules and regulations, " says Doug Saunders, a past

president of the Canadian Psychological Association. " They follow their own

biological ebbs and flows. "

Over the past 20 years, the diagnosis of autism has risen with mystifying

speed. In California, where the increase was first noted, cases tripled

from 1987 to 1998 and have doubled since then. Canadian figures tell a

similar tale.

Theories for the rise range from pollution to the use of mercury in

childhood vaccines. Nothing sticks. Studies have largely ruled out the

latter possibility -- the rate of autism is the same in vaccinated and

unvaccinated children.

Another intriguing notion is the " geek theory, " which posits that autistic

men and women, who often thrive in the high-tech industry, meet and have

autistic children.

This isn't as far-fetched as it sounds.

In the late 1980s, Ritvo, a California researcher, began to look

more closely at the parents of some severely autistic children. They looked

a bit autistic themselves. Many of them walked with an odd tiptoe gait,

flapped their hands and rocked in their chairs. A few were social loners.

Other experts confirmed Dr. Ritvo's cautious suspicions -- at least 11 of

the parents in his study were autistic. He later remarked, " If you had told

me 10 years ago that there were autistics who were married and had kids, I

would have said, 'You're crazy.' "

" As with most diseases there appears to be a mild form of autism that is

compatible in adulthood with marriage, parenting, satisfactory heterosexual

performance and gainful employment, " he wrote in a landmark 1988 article.

In 1994, psychiatrists added Asperger's syndrome to the ever-growing menu

of mental illness to include the estimated 75% of people with autism who

have normal or better IQs.

Dr. Szatmari, who is head of child psychiatry at McMaster University in

Hamilton, Ont., says not only has the definition of autism broadened,

doctors are better at detecting it. At the same time, similar disorders

such as pervasive development disorder have been lumped together as " autism

spectrum disorders. "

" When I started working here in Chedoke Child and Family Centre in 1981,

there weren't people with autism here, " he says. " And now we've got more

than 300. It's because people who were getting a different diagnosis in the

past -- a development disability, a learning, disability -- we now

recognize have autism spectrum disorders. "

's mother threw herself into his childhood. She read and sang to him

constantly, believing it would bolster his communication skills. She read

books about left-brain, right-brain thinking. Nothing fit. " Doctors told me

he was just a bit slow, " says Mildred Sullivan, who remarried.

But wasn't slow. On his eighth birthday, he built a working clock

out of an Erector set. " It kept perfect time, " Mrs. Sullivan says.

Friendless, sitting at the front of the class -- he's nearsighted -- he

passed all his grades in primary school. " Arithmetic and science came to

him easily, " she says. " He laboured over English composition and grammar. I

remember one poem just threw him. 'The fog comes on little cat feet,' by

Carl Sandburg. Metaphors really threw him. "

Researchers say autism can be characterized by a deficit or delay in

understanding social cues. " What you often hear is, 'I just don't get it,'

" says Dr. in Toronto.

Imaging studies show certain brain regions are enlarged in people with

autism, which may affect the speed at which they process some things, such

as dialogue. In the hurly-burly of conversation, they are always a few

steps behind, a little bewildered. Another social function, the ability to

read faces, is also impaired.

" Children with autism often don't make much eye contact with other people

and have little experience in learning to recognize faces, " said

Aylward, a professor of radiology at the University of Washington.

Dr. Aylward told a recent meeting of the Association for the Advancement of

Science that in autistic children, the fusiform gyrus -- the brain's

face-recognition area -- often fails to activate when viewing faces. To

them, human faces are no different than toy trucks, with one exception:

their mother's face.

" This does suggest that this part of the brain is not broken, " says

Geraldine Dawson, the psychiatrist who directed the research. With

training, people with autism can learn to recognize faces and develop

coping strategies, such as laughing when other people laugh, even when they

don't really get the joke.

- - -

" Ask him about Glenn Gould, " says 's stepfather, Terry Sullivan. Ten

years ago, while attending the University of Waterloo, read that

the Canadian virtuoso pianist may have had Asperger's syndrome. Gould was

uncomfortable with audiences, disliked human contact and could only

maintain relationships when he was in total control.

" A light went on in my head when I read that, " says. " Growing up,

kids in school used to joke that I was autistic because I rocked in my

chair sometimes and I was good at math. But I thought autism meant you were

retarded. And I am not. "

During university, listened to Gould's most famous recording,

Bach's Goldberg Variations, thousands of times on his Sony Walkman. He

found it soothing. Rocking back and forth in his chair, he built

conceptually upon his Erector set creation, writing software codes to make

sophisticated clocks for computer programs. He also found some self-esteem.

He needed it.

" When I was growing up, I got teased a lot for being different, " he says.

Once, some schoolboys changed the number on his locker, believing it would

confuse him. They didn't realize how 's mind worked in patterns and

sequences. " My locker was the 37th one, " he says. " Changing the number

didn't fool me. But it was cruel. And it hurt my feelings. " Ironically,

children with severe autism -- the most " different " ones --don't notice

teasing. People like are stricken by it. Indeed, surveys show about

40% of people with autism suffer mood and anxiety disorders -- about four

times the general average.

At Waterloo, met other people like himself who were different. He

learned that Albert Einstein and Bill Gates are both suspected cases of

Asperger's syndrome. He discovered people with the syndrome, which may also

include Sir Isaac Newton, often have unusual skills. does. He

knows, without consulting his watch, what time it is. Not just on Earth. On

other planets. " A Martian day is 24 hours and 37 minutes long in Earth

time, " he says. With practised ease, he adds, " At El Capatan [on Mars] it's

20 after three. "

As disorders go, he decided, his could be worse. Still, he keeps it to

himself. Too many bruises in his past.

- - -

Steve Scherer, a University of Toronto geneticist, has collected the DNA

from more than 100 families with more than one autistic child. He works

with Dr. Szatmari and Dr. , trying to pinpoint the genes that give

rise to the disorder. But unlike single-gene diseases such as cystic

fibrosis, autism is very complex.

" We noticed a few years back that children who were autistic had a higher

percentage of chromosome abnormalities than the general population, " he says.

As many as 20 genes could be affected. Indeed, vast numbers of people could

possess in their genome the spot mutations that lead to certain autistic

behaviours. Or perhaps not.

In 2000, Dr. Szatmari conducted a study to look at autistic traits in the

blood relatives of children with autism and in the general population. The

researchers looked for social isolation, personal rigidity and difficulty

with conversation. " We found that it occurs in about 25% of biological

relatives and that it occurs in about 10% of non-biological relatives, " he

reports. That doesn't mean one in 10 people has autism genes. It means

plenty of folks are wooden, geeky and shy.

" A lot of people are now overdiagnosing autism spectrum disorder,

particularly in kids who are a bit shy and anxious and love to hang out on

the computer, " he says.

- - -

opens his diary to Aug. 17, 2003. On that day, he recorded his

interest in a female employee at his company, a large Ottawa high-tech

firm, which designs software for satellite applications.

" She is beautiful, " he wrote.

" She likes to wear black. She changes the colour of her hair. I like it the

way it is today. "

He has not yet summoned the courage to ask her out. No longer a loner, he

has spoken of his plight with one of his work colleagues. But he gets too

anxious when he sees the woman and veers away.

It could be her loss. Dr. says mildly autistic men can make good

husbands. They certainly are not deceitful. And they are affectionate; they

love the touch of skin and strong hugs. She knows a Toronto woman who

married a highly functioning autistic man, and they have had three autistic

children together -- all boys. The woman laughs with resignation but no

bitterness about her situation. " After all, " she told Dr. . " I fell

in love with their father. "

Simon Baron-Cohen, a Cambridge University psychologist, noting that four

times as many men as women are autistic, suggests autism is an extreme form

of male intelligence. While women are better at empathizing, men are better

at systemizing.

Autism, he suggests, isn't a disease or shadow syndrome lacking a cure.

It's a guy thing. Dr. Baron-Cohen says people with autism lack a " theory of

mind. " They can't guess what other people are thinking, an essential social

skill. So they adopt coping mechanisms, turning social situations into

cognitive problems.

Hmm. This person is smiling. Maybe he told a joke. Oh yes, there's the

joke. I should respond in kind. It looks a bit stiff and formal, but it's

just a coping mechanism.

Do they get the joke?

" Eventually, " Dr. Szatmari says.

" Once they think it through, they're perfectly capable of understanding the

joke. Just as they're perfectly capable of love and affection and deep

feeling and deep emotion. "

- - -

flips his diary pages forward to Jan. 18, 2004. On that day he made

contact with the woman in his office.

" She spoke to me about the [Mars] Spirit lander. She knows I am interested

in space. I talked too much. I wish I could stop talking around her. It is

a problem. "

Perhaps. But that particular problem has nothing to do with autism or

shadow syndromes.

That's a guy thing.

On Monday: Most people know the stereotype image of a hyper child pumped

full of Ritalin, but few of us know about the millions of adults who have

symptoms of a mild " shadow " of ADD, which affects their personality. They

don't seem sick or even unusual. They are often emergency room doctors,

stockbrokers and pilots -- smart people who need stimulation to keep their

noisy, whirring brains feeling good.

© National Post 2004

________________________________

Ooops....Wrong Planet! Syndrome

Autism Spectrum Resources

www.PlanetAutism.com

jypsy@...

[Guest guest]

jypsy [ janet norman-bain ] wrote:

> The Geek Theory of Autism At university, K. met for the first

> time people with exceptional skills like his own Brad Evenson

> National Post

Do you happen to have a link to the original form of that article? I

thought that was a pretty good one.

[Guest guest]

http://www.autisticsociety.org/article509.html

Re: The Geek Theory of Autism

> At 06:26 PM 3/29/2004 -0700, you wrote:

> >jypsy [ janet norman-bain ] wrote:

> >

> > > The Geek Theory of Autism At university, K. met for the first

> > > time people with exceptional skills like his own Brad Evenson

> > > National Post

> >

> >Do you happen to have a link to the original form of that article? I

> >thought that was a pretty good one.

> >

> >

>

> sorry, it was in the national post and is no longer archived on their

> system (or I would have provided the URL) Got this from Google's cashe

>

> -jypsy

>

>

> ________________________________

> Ooops....Wrong Planet! Syndrome

> Autism Spectrum Resources

> www.PlanetAutism.com

> jypsy@...

>

>

>

>

>

>

>

[Guest guest]

Colin Wessels wrote:

> http://www.autisticsociety.org/article509.html

Thanks.