Autism for Trekkers

A lot of people I know just can't seem to fathom what Autism is all about... it's not an easy subject to explain. A lot of people I know are also heavily into Star Trek. So please forgive me as I try to sort things out for my Trek loving friends in the Autism department. What follows is an explanation of Autism as seen from my own viewpoint as a father of 3 boys who are on the Spectrum, but with a twist. I'll be doing a lot of comparisons to a certain fictitious starship and its fictitious crew. If you know a bit about Autism, then you may learn a bit about the Star Trek universe. If you know a bit about the Star Trek universe, then you may learn a bit about Autism. If you know nothing about either subject then you will either be educated or completely and utterly confused. Autism... Google it. Star Trek... YouTube it. Lets see how confused I can get the world on both subjects then.

So lets take a good close look at the original Starship Enterprise and its crew. The ship is made up of various components all stuck together to form some sort of purpose. The large circular saucer section with the bridge on top, the engine room, the transporter room, the cargo bay, the torpedo bay etc, etc... Most people know what the thing looks like. If it's important to you and you don't know what it looks like, just google a picture of it. There should be a multitude of images to look at.

Now that we have our empty starship lets fill it with some raw cadets, all eager to learn and ready to find their place on board this wonderful new spacecraft. Starfleet Academy will need to look after this job themselves. Each section of the ship will be allocated a certain number of people who will need to learn their roles on board. Some will form bonds with others and will make a nice career for themselves in their own specialist field, while others will be deemed not suitable for service and might eventually be removed from the ship.

OK, so we have all these eager young cadets on board. They are all allocated to the area of the ship that they are showing a talent for. The cadets in engineering are learning everything they can about the warp drives. The cadets in the transporter room are discovering how to move molecules from one spot to the next. The medical students are playing with their antibodies and nanites.

Now lets compare all this to a developing brain. As a baby grows in the womb, the DNA strands are busy like Starfleet. But instead of allocating a set number of cadets, the DNA allocates a set number of brain cells. Like the cadets, the brain cells will all have to find their purpose. As a person grows and learns, some of the brain cells will make permanent links with each other to form memories. The brain hardwires itself over its lifetime by figuring out which cells work best together and which cells are just a waste of time. This is the process of learning. As we learn, our brains create connections between all the little squidgy bits that live inside our scones. In the case of the Starship Enterprise, the brain cells are represented by the cadets. Eventually the starship will be a finely tuned instrument, run efficiently by all these "eventually" well trained cadets.

So now our starship has all of its allocated cadets, all set to excel in their own special areas. The science team is to be run by Mr Spock. Mr Spock as most of you will know is the Vulcan Science officer on board the ship. He spends most of his time on the bridge, and the science team need to report directly to him. Down in the bowels of Engineering we have Mr Scott. Again, his team needs to report to him. Dr McCoy is in the sick bay with his own team of experts. Uhura is in charge of communications. Mr Sulu gets to play with the steering wheel, while Chekov keeps track of the weapons systems.

If we get back to our developing brain, we can use all these people in charge to represent the different areas of the brain itself. Spock is the section of our brain in charge of the scientific and mathematical bits, but he has no understanding of emotions. Dr McCoy is an expert in empathy however and is raw with emotion and his little outbursts of rage. They all have their places on the Enterprise. In the brain we also have specialised areas. There's a whole section of our brain that looks after maths, another section to look after emotions, another for communications. It has all been pre-allocated by the DNA strands from the point of our conception.

Back to our starship now. Let's say Mr Spock and his science team are busy doing their scientific analysis and they come across some problem that requires some form of human emotion to understand further.... Whoops! Mr Spock is from the planet Vulcan. Vulcans are taught to repress their emotions from birth. So he's suddenly at a loss. Dr McCoy however, is full of all that emotional crap. Perhaps he could help. But its a bit hard for Mr Spock to see Dr McCoy with both of their busy schedules. There must be an easy way to pass the information from one officer to the next.... hmmm????...... Oh look! Starfleet command put someone in charge of the whole ship. Captain Kirk. He's not allocated to any specific area of the ship at all. He's just plonked smack in the middle of the saucer section up on top in the bridge. Mr Spock can take his silly emotional problems to the captain, and then good old Kirk can allocate it to Dr McCoy! Woohoo!!! Problem solved. In fact, if any officer has a problem, all he or she has to do is take it to the captain, and then anyone else on board who might be of assistance can be told to get in and help out. What a marvelous Idea. If only the brain could function in the same way.

Well,... there is one part of the brain that works a bit like the captain. It's called the corpus callosum. You see, the brain is divided into two hemispheres: left and right. On one side we have all the emotional crap and creativity. On the other side we have all the mathematical and serious stuff.... well, that's a simple view of it all but for this analogy it's close enough. And stuck slap bang in the middle of the two hemispheres, we have the corpus callosum. It's the soft connecting tissue that allows contact between the two halves of the brain. So if the mathematical side of our brain requires a little emotional input to help understand something that would otherwise be logical, it can communicate via the corpus callosum with the emotional side to help understand things a little better, and visa-versa. So in our brains, we have all our separate areas doing their own things, just like on the Enterprise, but also getting help from other areas, via the captain of the bridge, the corpus callosum.

So our Enterprise is now a perfectly working brain. End of non-Autistic story.

Now.... lets view this same scenario, but change a few things to make things fit in better with the Autistic Spectrum.

Imagine, back when Starfleet was allocating its cadets, that it allocated way too many people in some areas, and not enough people in others? On the one hand, for each menial job there are now 3, 4 or 5 cadets more than is actually necessary to get things done, yet on the other hand there is only 1 or 2 cadets in places where 3, 4 or 5 cadets would normally be allocated. The ship is now overloaded in some areas with cadets who are all fighting to work out who's going to be the best person for the job. Mr Spock surely doesn't need this many people to make up his science team... and they're all equally qualified... so how's he going to decide who to keep and who to get rid of? This could take a while longer than expected. Dr McCoy is busy losing his mind with all his extra nurses and interns. He's going to have to weed out the best from the rest too. The whole ship is working on overload.... well, that is except for the understaffed areas. The galley is now run by only a few people who need to feed the entire crew. Dinner's going to be a bit late. Instead of the whole crew learning how to run the ship efficiently in the space of a few years, all this confusion is going to cause massive delays before each section is ironed out and working at its best.

Well, guess what?... people who are on the Autistic Spectrum have to go through just this exact same thing. For some unknown reason, the Autistic brain develops with far too much grey matter in some areas, and not enough grey matter in others. There are sections that have a perfect count of brain cells, but the areas that are excessive and the areas that are lacking are going to cause some issues. There are so many more possible ways for all these cells to be connected. Just like the confusion on the overcrowded Enterprise, the Autistic brain is going to take longer to figure out how to hardwire these extra cells, and which combos are going to produce the most efficient results. This could therefore explain why so many kids with Autism take longer to hit their milestones. Theoretically, the sections with the extra grey matter will have to compromise for the sections with the lack of grey matter, so not only do the excessive areas need extra time to work out how to work most efficiently, but they also have to do more than their fare share of the workload. While a non-autistic person might be toilet trained at an early age, an Autistic person might still require toileting assistance throughout their childhood, sometimes even into adulthood. A non-autistic kid might be walking and talking before they get to pre-school. An Autistic person might not have these skills developed until much later in life. The extra crew on the Enterprise slows down the selection process for deciding which crew members can responsibly restock the replicators, and the extra brain cells in an Autistic brain slows down the selection process for efficiently learning how to tie your own shoe laces.

Not every person on the Autism Spectrum faces these challenges. Every person on the Spectrum has their own individual brain and personality, just like non-Autistic people do. Some have bigger challenges and hurdles than others. That's why Autism is classed as a spectrum. There are so many different ways for any brain to develop, Autistic or not. So some people on the Spectrum will find life a bit easier than others who are also on the Spectrum, just the same as anyone else. People with Autism just have extra challenges to face as they grow and learn and try to weed out all those extra brain cells.

OK, so let's get back to our overcrowded Enterprise. Starfleet Command has already made one big stuff up with the cadet allocations, How much worse could it be?... Whoops! They just made another silly mistake. They forgot to allocate a captain. Sorry Kirk. You're no longer in the picture. I suppose he could still sit on the bridge, but Starfleet hasn't given him all his training. So even if he is present, he just doesn't know how to allocate to other sections. Kirk, is either away on permanent shore leave, or he's decided to sit in a warm chair in the middle of the bridge. Either way you look at it, he's not there to do his job. So if Spock has some emotional issues, he's not going to be able to get it sorted out by Dr McCoy. McCoy's still there, but he's just too busy, and no one is there who knows enough to allocate him the job. The ship is not only running with a badly allocated bunch of cadets, it's now also being run by different sections that are failing to communicate together. It's not looking too hopeful for the Enterprise in the efficiency department now!

So how does this compare with an Autistic brain? Well, studies have shown that in Autistic people, the corpus callosum is either non-existent, or has at least some part of it smaller than would otherwise be considered normal. This would either cause the two hemispheres of the brain to have no communication between them at all, or perhaps only a reduced flow of information trickling through the smaller pieces of tissue. So just like Spock would no longer be able to get McCoy to handle the emotional details, the section of the brain in charge of logic wouldn't be able to turn to the section in charge of emotions if the need was to arise. It is also known, that the corpus callosum is usually smaller in boys than girls anyway, which can explain why there are a greater number of boys with Autism than girls. The girls have the advantage in the corpus callosum department, so a reduced size might not make such a noticable effect on them.

So now you know about all this Autism stuff in a bit more detail, if you were a bit bewildered by my earlier blogs but this made a bit more sense to you, try reading the older blogs again. You might understand what I've been saying for a change.

Classic, Vanilla and Cherry Autism.

I have been in discussion lately with a great number of people from the Facebook Autism community with in-depth chats about what is currently known to be true, what is currently known to be mythical and what is currently speculation. For a minority of the population mythical speculation seems to be the popular recurring flavour of the month. In fact, a lot of the minority just simply aren't interested in the cold hard facts. But now I find myself thinking, what if some of this speculation has just a smidgen of credibility? Everybody is so busy jumping up and down in the air that there can only be one cause for Autism based on their own experiences.... maybe there are a number of different factors that could individually cause the brain to have the same conditions necessary for Autism? What if the corpus callosum was the key factor in Autism? You remember the corpus callosum? That's our neurotypical friend that acts like an information superhighway, bridging the gap between the left and right hemispheres of the brain.

Just to refresh your memories, numerous studies have shown that people on the Autistic Spectrum frequently have either smaller parts of their corpus callosum when compared to the neurotypical, or sometimes have no corpus callosum at all. This would all suggest a lack of communication between the two hemispheres. Left side brain therefore will have difficulty holding all it's chatroom discussions with right side brain and vica-versa. Hence the difficulty processing thoughts or socialising. The two halves can't help each other with life's little problems.

So lets say Autism starts with a developing fetus. Something goes a bit awry during the initial forming of the brain and the corpus callosum is facing a bleak future. We also know that the Autistic brain creates far more brain cells for the left and right sides in certain areas than would otherwise be normal too, as well as too few brain cells in other areas, perhaps to compensate for the lack of connection between the two halves, the brain cells get re-allocated to a common area in the hopes of finding a solution to the lack of internal communication. Initial testing shows the two halves don't get on with each other, so the DNA strands compensate by trying to give certain parts of the brain a little bit extra to work with to see if the two sides can't eventually figure things out by themselves. This would therefore be Autism Classic. Which I for one have been arguing in favour of myself.

Now, lets say that an otherwise healthy brain has a slightly reduced corpus callosum. Not enough to worry about, and not nearly enough that the original testing showed any problems in the womb. So the brain has the normal count of brain cells in the usual places. This baby then grows happily for the first two years of life on the outside world and then BAM! Why is this baby suddenly showing signs of Autism? Well maybe something was introduced to the infant that blocked or slowed down the communication centre, the corpus callosum!!!! Maybe some children are more susceptible to vaccines. Maybe something about the corpus callosum gets damaged or blocked by trace elements of whatever the manufacturers put in these things. Maybe the corpus callosum was just slightly mal-formed.... not enough to worry about initially, but with the right conditions, maybe it can be pushed over the edge and cause a communication blockage? This therefore would be Autism Vanilla. The flavouring tipped the scales and now the child is suddenly Autistic.

So Autism Vanilla and Autism Classic... Classic cases would show the child to have developmental delays due to the extra brain cells pockets confusing everything. The developing brain has more cells to sort through and hardwire as the child grows and learns, while other sections of the brain have to deal with a reduced compliment of grey matter to try to sort lifes little mysteries out of. Vanilla cases would show the child to be developing normally due to a normal amount of brain cells in all the right places to play around with before suddenly being transformed into a member of the Spectrum overnight.

And what of the sudden increase in the number of Autistic people in recent years? Here again we have two arguments. The Classic version is that there were always people with Autism. It just wasn't diagnosed as Autism so much until recently due to better informed professionals who are more happy to give the diagnoses now. The Vanilla version is that all these vaccinations are to blame.... maybe it's both of these, depending on whether you're talking about Classic or Vanilla? I'd like to add a Cherry version to all of this too. What if all these people over all the years, be they Classic or Vanilla, had babies? Back in the olden days of throwing these people into asylums and most probably sterilising them too, there wouldn't have been so many people on the Spectrum being able to have families of their own. But nowadays society in some part is at least a little more understanding and lets Classic and Vanilla grow up as a part of society. Heck, they're probably even allowed to have their own families now!!! So do you know what the most important ingredient is in evolution? Genetics breed true. Maybe we're slowly evolving a new species of humans? Classic Vanilla humans? Doesn't mean we'll be replaced. The human species has shown itself to be diverse. Just take a look at all the different types of people there are in the world! Asian, Caucasian, African, Pygmy.... no one human species has been replaced by another, some may have become extinct over the millions of years, but I think we're talking cavemen and pre-cavemen in the extinction line here. So maybe we'll eventually need to add a new species to our encyclopeodias. Classic Vanilla humans, living side by side with Asians and Caucasians and Africans and Pigmys. I'm sure they'll find a nicer name to call themselves by the time they're recognised as an official human race though. So wow, maybe there is an upsurge in the number of people on the Spectrum? Classical reasons, Vanilla reasons, and even Cherry reasons! Why is everyone so hung up on there only ever being one reason for anything? Doesn't anyone ever watch House M.D? Every week they look so surprised that something was caused by two separate conditions. You think they would have figured it out after all these years.

Maybe this new race of people will help us to evolve a new version of society too? One where it's not rude if you don't look at someone while you're talking.

Now you watch, all the bigots, racists and scare-mongers will use this type of argument to validate the need to sterilise all people on the Autistic Spectrum to ensure we don't all evolve into Classic Vanilla humans too.... The way I see it, we should sterilise the bigots, racists and scare-mongers instead.

Some of the nicest and most intelligent people I know are already on the Spectrum. Vanilla, Classic and Cherry!

Two halves don't always make a whole!

I had an interesting day chatting with all kinds of intelligent people on the Autism Awareness group today at Facebook. It was all about the differences in all the different types of brains in all the different types of people in the world. For instance, did you know that a male brain naturally has a smaller corpus callosum than a female brain? That's the squidgy part that connects the left and right hemispheres and allows the two sides to communicate with each other. And did you also know that the late Kim Peek, the Autistic guy who inspired the Rain Man movie with his gift for remembering stuff had no noticeable corpus callosum at all? His left and right brain hemispheres worked in harmony but completely separated from each other communication wise. This got me curious, and I did some searching on the Internet to see if there had been any studies on the size of an Autistic person's corpus callosum compared to the size of one in a non-Autistic person. Well guess what? There is an abundance of studies published on the Internet from various parts of the world. And the one thing they all had in common, was that in all the Autistic people always had a noticeably reduced corpus callosum or part thereof compared to the non-Autistic people.

So now I know a bit more about the inner workings of an Autistic persons brain. I discovered a few days ago that in Autistic people there are pockets of extra brain cells that need to be sorted out before all the correct cells can be hardwired as the child grows and learns, as well as pockets with fewer braincells, so that explains the reason why Autistic kids take longer to reach their milestones. And now I find that the left hemisphere of their brain barely knows what the right hemisphere is doing and visa-versa!!! So the two sides can't balance themselves out evenly with all the maths and logic on one side and the music and pretty colours on the other. No wonder Autistic kids get so confused on how to cope with life's obstacles! It's like they have two half brains trying to figure it all out at the same time but without asking each other for assistance!!!! Personally I think life's confusing enough with two halves helping each other, so imagine what it's like for these Autistic kids!!! I'd be rocking back and forth too with that much confusion going on in my head. No wonder they rely on routines so much. It helps to bring a bit of order to their environment.

So now, people are asking 'Why are these kids being born with so many extra braincells and such a small corpus callosum?' And of course we are getting people jumping up and down saying it has to be mercury in vaccines, or metals in the air, or botched up ultrasounds on the mother while she's pregnant..... these people never want to listen to the thought that it might have something to do with genetics and possibly the occasional mutation of cells during initial growth in the womb. There are so many forms of Autism, perhaps there are various causes that lead to the Autism variants, be they genetic, chemical, mutation or some other as yet unknown reason. We have more boys in the world with Autism than girls,... maybe that's because boys have a smaller corpus callosum to start with? There's not so much left for a boy if it doesn't grow and form properly.... the girls might be able to get away with it because they have just that little bit of extra leftover to use as a backup.

Think I'll go back and watch episode 11 of the COSMOS series by Carl Sagan. It's a fascinating insite into the human brain and how it's evolved over a gazillion years.