AUTISM

From la Recherche

AUTISM

By the way, autists have another type of intelligence (visual, verbal), intensely studied, at present. Einstein (virtual experiment of the elevator), Schrödinger (virtual experiment of the live-dead cat), Tesla (mentally designed machines and then built them as soon as possible), Bobby Fischer (mobilized imaginary pieces of chess, on an ad hoc board painted in the roof of his bedroom) and other prominent famous men of science, are remembered for their mental-visual experiments. Einstein's story is famous describing a fictional-visual journey mounted on a ray of light, trying to understand what was happening in his environment as he progressed. Were autistic, some of the geniuses mentioned? Maybe, maybe not; but that they had almost autistic visual minds, no doubt about it. Much progress has been made in the knowledge of autism: from considering it a mental disability to valuing it as another type of mind. Currently, accelerated progress towards learning sort of visual-virtual type is visible, one capable of simplifying the teaching-learning to seconds or simple hits. It is known that autists have very developed functionalities in the occipital and prefrontal brain lobes associated with peculiar processes for reasoning and processing information, and it is expected that some of these (especially visual ones) will be incorporated into the baggage of future learning-teaching generations of children with standard (normal) minds. Teaching-learning will give a big turn of the screw based on autistic visual principles because their procedures are more accurate and real. Not all autistics exercise their intelligence in the same domains (visual, language) and each autistic has a different intelligence with different brain bases. Leo Kanner in 1940, described children who, beyond their apparent disinterest in their human environment, presented significant delay in oral language: they began to speak using a particular language: seemingly non-communicative repetitions, great verbal memory (remember bus schemes, read with ease historical and musical facts).  Alternatively, Hans Asperger described children with understandable initial language, normal intelligence or above average, intense interest in a particular area, original intelligence above the ordinary, albeit with certain inability to adapt to their environment to the point that some spoke little, nothing or atypically, while others were totally dependent on their environment, to survive. However, almost all exhibited cognitive tasks at a high level in a particular area: knowledge of letters and numbers from 2-3 years old, or execution from the 3 years of puzzles, usually solved by children of 5 years. It is known that in some autistic type Kanner or Asperger, there are no genetic anomalies other than those observed in the general population, however some genetic anomalies have been identified in fraternal brothers, with autism. It is also known the syndromic autism (deletion in multiple parts of the genome, affecting a 1/10 of people with autism). Autistics without delay in the initial oral language will be excellent in verbal reasoning, vocabulary and general verbal knowledge. Beyond these differences the activated occipital lobe, in autistic is apt to develop a particular expertise in certain fields to which they dedicate considerable time and energy. When the brain activity is recorded in normal volunteers, doing tasks, the activity is distributed in a vast brain neural network, mainly in the parietal and occipital lobes, activating in autistic and non-autistic, the same brain network of reasoning. When autistic people are compared with non-autistic people, while they solve reasoning problems, autistic people have a higher level of activity in the occipital lobe and less in the cortex of the prefrontal lobe. However, the most active areas of the autistic are the visuals associated with the development, maintenance and manipulation of mental images. The most active areas of the non-autistic are those associated with work and verbal memory and the generation of hypotheses. It is assumed that the modes of reasoning differ between autistic and non-autistic, with visual perception being more related to reasoning and intelligence in autistics. On the other hand, we know that complex reasoning and the capacity for abstraction are based on good communication between brain regions associated with reasoning and that the complexity of reasoning is associated with greater activity in the brain areas of reasoning. In autistic people there seems to be less communication between the different regions of reasoning and that a lesser modulation of this communication depends on a lower complexity of the reasoning. However, in autistic people, communication in the occipital cortex is more active during reasoning. However, in autistic patients, communication between the occipital cortex and other regions is greater if the complexity of the reasoning is greater. They confirm the increased role of visual perception in the processes of fluid reasoning in people with autism, which diminish the need to use well-adapted tests to measure autistic intelligence. So, it would not be appropriate to present blind visual sequences to evaluate their intellectual performance. Therefore, people with autism look disadvantaged by the type of equipment and tools used to assess their intelligence. When we present them open oral questions, without visual aids and no choice of answers for them to organize, we are underestimating the intellectual capacity of people with autism. When one asks complex and abstract, written or graphic questions with choice of answers to guide thought, one can highlight much higher reasoning skills. In a test like the Raven matrices, to measure fluid intelligence (reasoning, thinking logically, inferring solutions to new problems) or, in similar tasks, autistic people are good or excellent. It is good to adopt this statement to promote learning, in autistics, presenting information in a comprehensive and organized way, allowing them to organize, manipulate and classify it, making it easy to learn, by making it correspond more to their spontaneous learning. What agrees with the information collected in many cases of autistic children, who learned to read, work on computers or play the piano, by themselves, using abundant material identifying patterns and the underlying structure of arrangements, letters, numbers or notes. Experimentally, children with autism learn better to distinguish 2 groups of stimuli: a) if they are shown all the stimuli at the same time, observing differences and similarities. b) The learning is less significant if they are presented with a stimulus at the same time (previous classical path, for autistic). Present only one item at a time, deprive autists of the information they need to learn optimally.