5:08pm October 25, 2014

“It appears that at one end of the spectrum, autism is primarily a cognitive disorder, and at the other end, it is primarily a sensory processing disorder. At the severely impaired sensory processing end, many children may be diagnosed as having disintegrative disorderl At a midpoint along the spectrum, autistic symptoms appear to be caused by equal amounts of cognitive and sensory problems. There can be mild and severe cases at all points along the continuum Both the severity and the ratio of these two components are variable, and each case of autism is different. When a person with autism improves because of either educational or medical intervention, the severity of a cognitive or sensory problem may diminish, but the ratio between the two seems to stay the same. What remains inexplicable, however, are rigid thinking patterns and lack of eotional affect in many high-functioning people. One of the perplexing things about autism is that it is almost impossible to predict which toddler will become high-functioning. The severity of the symptoms at age two or three is often not correlated with the prognosis.”

—

Temple Grandin, from Thinking In Pictures, 2006 edition.

So that’s a direct quote about her idea that there’s a spectrum between what I’d call Cognitive Autism or Cognitive-Emotional Autism, and Sensory Autism or Sensory-Motor Autism, depending on the context. As usual, I’m not big on the functioning labels and think they’re a distraction from the more interesting realities of the situation. Although I would be interested in which traits are likely to get a person labeled high or low functioning – but that as a study in how people see us, not in whether high or low functioning are accurate ways of describing a complex set of abiliities and difficulties.

I wonder if there is something specific that causes cognitive and emotional differences to cluster together, and sensory and motor differences to cluster together. Or whether they do actually cluster together like that, or if that’s just how Temple has arranged things for the convenience of her own brain. (She does that sometimes, everyone does that sometimes, but she does it a lot… it’s worth watching out for.)

If what I’m assuming are the four areas affected in autism (cognitive, emotional, sensory, motor) are really the four areas mostly affected in autism, then I wonder if they cluster together more frequently in some combinations than others. Because there would be:

Cognitive

Cognitive-Sensory

Cognitive-Emotional

Cognitive-Motor

Cognitive-Sensory-Emotional

Cognitive-Sensory-Motor

Cognitive-Emotional-Motor

Cognitive-Sensory-Emotional-Motor

Sensory

Sensory-Emotional

Sensory-Motor

Sensory-Emotional-Motor

Emotional

Emotional-Motor

Motor

But some of those may not exist at all. And some of them may be way more common than others. I do get the feeling that Temple is right about Cognitive/Emotional and Sensory/Motor being common pairings. One affects your inner state, one affects the interactions between your inner self and the world. And I also get the sense that she’s right that all of these areas are affected in most autistic people, it’s just a matter of degree – which ones are affected more in which person.

Unfortunately, instead of looking into things like this, autism researchers are too busy looking into our social skills. And instead of looking into how we differ from the norm, they are too busy looking for ways we are worse than the norm, even to the point where we can perform better than nonautistic people on a task in a study and get written up as if we performed better because we were worse at something. It’s ridiculous. Until we get rid of that kind of thinking, it will be very difficult to even look at which parts of autistic cognition are which, and how they interact.

Because I see autism as involving: 1. Thinking. 2. Emotions. 3. Sensory-perceptual processing. 4. Motor skills and motor planning. Not necessarily in that order, not necessarily all at once. And then in addition to those four areas, there are the ways that they interact. For instance, anxiety affects motor skills, thinking and emotions aren’t as separate as you’d think, the difficulties initiating and stopping and combining movements also affect things like thinking and memory, and so you can’t pretend all of these things are totallly separate.

Anyway, as I read through Thinking In Pictures, expect more quotes and commentary, even if it gets rather repetitive at times.