Autism Affects 1 In 68 Children, Exciting New Info Available

It crossed my mind that I might have high-functioning autism, because I think exclusively in pictures ? moving pictures. Everything I found on the internet led me back to Dr. Temple Grandin, the woman?HBO based an award-winning movie?upon in 2010.

HBO Movie Temple Grandin Starring Claire Danes. Credit: ScarletBoulevard.com.
HBO Movie Temple Grandin Starring Claire Danes. Credit: ScarletBoulevard.com.

So I emailed Grandin to ask her if people think in pictures, does that mean they have autism? Imagine my surprise when she called me! After all she is a world-famous expert on autism and animal rights.

Grandin told me no, that families can have characteristics of autism without making it onto the autism scale (autism spectrum disorders or ASD). I have sensitivity to sound, light, and crowds. Each of these causes me actual pain.

Thinking In Pictures

When you think in pictures, it is a bit like speaking a different language. I have to translate what people say from the movie inside my head into English. That’s why math is so hard for me. I don’t have any translation for numbers.

My daughter also had trouble with math. So I told her that we just think differently from other people. If there were more people like us, they would be the ones having trouble with a subject.

When her high school algebra teacher handed her an exam with a ?B? on it, he said:

?See you aren’t so dumb after all!?

My daughter replied that she never thought she was dumb. And she graduated magna cum laude from university.

Are More Kids Getting Autism?

Yes. The number of boys and girls with autism is jumping by leaps and bounds. At least one little kid getting off of a full-size school bus will have autism.

Autism Now 1 In 68 Kids. Credit: deviantart starchild96
Autism Now 1 In 68 Kids. Credit: deviantart starchild96

The number of?children with autism?is increasing dramatically.

  • Born in 1992: One in 150 children
  • Born in 1996: One in 125 children
  • Born in 1998: One in 110 children
  • Born in 2000: One in 88 children
  • Born in 2002: One in 68 children (last year CDC collected data)

So What Is Autism?

There are four basic?autism traits. You can have some of the traits and not have autism. You can have autism and not have many traits. A few of them are :

Behavior:

  • Difficulty changing
  • Interest in only a few toys

Social Interactions:

  • Trouble making eye contact
  • Little body language, few facial expressions

Communication:

  • Trouble understanding what others are saying
  • Difficulty beginning or continuing a conversation

Sensory:

  • Well, like me, sensitivity to noise, light, and crowds

Imagine how painful and overwhelming a house full of digital noise is to a kid with autism. That little high-pitched whine the TV makes drives me right up the wall.

Natural Autism

A solution for severe continuous epilepsy seizures is to cut the right and left halves of the brain apart. Usually that helps. But in rare instances, it really screws up the person. I believe that exception happens when a person interactively uses both sides of the brain to think.

My theory is that people always came in two flavors: those who are concrete thinkers and those who are more intuitive. Between 40,000 and?50,000 years ago trading?increased among our ancestors. So traders needed a way to track their inventories and profits in a concrete way. That’s what?I call ?split-brain thinking.? The others continued thinking in pictures or in a more intuitive way. This is what I call ?cross-brain thinking.?

As profits increased in importance, there was a greater demand for people with split-brain thinking. And school systems perpetuate concrete thinking. Intuitive thinking declined until it has very limited value now.

Cross-Brain Thinking In Autism

A team from the Israeli Weizmann Institute of Science scanned the?brain of people with autism and this is what they found:

“Scans reveal autistic brains contain unique and highly idiosyncratic connections.”

“When it comes to connectivity, unlike the fairly uniform brains of people without autism, the brains of people with autism are entirely unique. Each one functions with an idiosyncratic array of increased and reduced levels of connectivity, depending on where you look.”

It’s All In The Genes

Now researchers have found?gene mutations linked to autism:

“? siblings that carried the same mutations had similar autism symptoms, the researchers reported in Nature Medicine.”?

?…some of the genes involved in the core features of autism, we target to develop new drugs and that is ongoing mainly in biotech companies and pharmaceutical companies.??

A person with autism is like that snowflake:

“There are so many different?genetic forms of autism?that using the singular term, autism, is misleading, researchers say.”

?We believe a better term to use is ?the autisms,? (that is, plural),? Dr. Stephen W. Scherer told Reuters Health by email. ?There are many different forms of autism…that have a common clinical manifestation.?

So now we must ask what if some forms of autistic thinking are natural and quite valuable? After all sensory sensitivity could explain a number of autism traits. And what if the alarming increases in autism are environmentally caused?

?Featured image courtesy of?North Dakota State University