Autism - Extreme Strengths and Weaknesses
This page discusses how this model could explain why people with autism are similar in broad ways, but differ in so many specific ways. It could also explain some quirky aspects of autism such as why children with regressive autism are better babblers than other babies, and how someone with autism who uses facilitated communication could be described as a drama queen.
Harvard educated Charles Hart (1989) wrote about his life in Without Reason: A Family Copes with Two Generations of Autism. He wrote about his autistic brother, and his father, an alcoholic engineer. He wrote about his autistic son and his relief when his second son showed signs of giftedness. This model of intelligence, disorders, and autism would explain why these people are all connected.
All of the things that were written in this document about developmental disorders would apply to autism, but it is hypothesized that autism is caused by larger imbalance in brain development. From this, it would follow that people with autism have very great strengths and very great deficits in particular functions. One aspect in support of this is that it is difficult to tell if a young child has autism. This is consistent with the idea that the difference between autistic children and other children is a matter of degree and not of kind.
One parent of an autistic child, Joanna Edgar (1999), wrote:
I think that it is very hard to accept autism in the very young because, unless you live with these children, often the only real sign others would see would be the lack of speech and, perhaps in the more perceptive, the lack of eye contact. The tantrums, not wanting to play with other children and the many other signs we come to realize as being due to the autism are not so very different to those ‘sometimes’ displayed in other children the same age. (p. 22)
Another parent, Karen Siff Exkorn (2005), wrote:
Behaviors that appear typical in most children can be atypical in children with ASDs [Autism Spectrum Disorders]. What distinguishes these children’s behaviors is often a matter of severity. For example, many children, both typical and with ASDs, engage in spinning. A typical child may spin around and fall to the ground laughing before switching to another form of play. A child with ASD may spin for hours. Typical children who eat only chicken nuggets for every meal are considered to be picky eaters. Children with ASDs who eat chicken nuggets for every meal are considered to be engaging in an idiosyncratic behavior characteristic of an ASD. Why the distinction? The crucial difference lies in the intensity, frequency, duration and nature of the behavior; children with ASDs exhibit these behaviors along with a cluster of other behaviors that are symptomatic of ASDs. (pp. 38-39)
Another aspect of autism is that relatives often have similar symptoms, different in degree, and are not necessarily diagnosed with autism. Susan Senator (2005), her oldest son diagnosed with autism, said of her third son:
Today I sometimes think of Ben as being “dusted” with autism spectrum disorder, a light, fairy’s sprinkling, just enough to make him extremely focused, wildly creative, and an early reader, but not enough for a psychologist to detect, or to cause learning problems in school. (p. 136)
Christina Adams (2005) wrote about her son Jonah and herself:
I have the single-minded, perhaps discomfiting focus on saving my child and helping other families to do the same. Whatever causes Jonah to talk over and over again of drains, of read and green traffic lights, of power poles, of the latest emotional incident in his dramatic young life, is similar to the thing that drives me. (p. 191)
Lise Pyles (2002) wrote about herself and her husband:
I do not feel that my husband and I have Asperger Syndrome, but the shadows are there. As a young child I had quite a wild flappy dance when I was excited, I was miserable at team sports and had few friends. I have waxing and waning compulsive tendencies (counting, checking, list-making), have mild face blindness, and have always had difficulty dealing with anything new. My husband is extremely logical, black and white in his thinking, and he has a great need for order. (p. 102)
One expectation of this model which I am confident of matching in autism is that they have great strengths along with their obvious weaknesses. They may not always be able to combine these strengths into behaviors that society sees as useful, but the strengths are there even when others don’t see them. Naomi Meyer (1994) wrote about her autistic son Joshua:
I tried my best to give an accurate picture, mentioning, among other things, that my husband and I considered him unusually intelligent. Dr. D. disagreed, saying that he saw in Joshua no signs of any special brightness. (p. 162-163)
When someone with autism is seen as having strengths, their problems can be underappreciated. Clare Sainsbury (2000) wrote about her life on the autistic spectrum:
For children with Asperger’s, our achievements often seem to work against us. The more we succeed in certain areas, the less our teachers are willing to believe that we may be genuinely disabled in other areas. Any achievements are interpreted as proof that we never had any problems in the first place. (p. 95)
This quadrant view is also consistent with different children benefiting from different therapies, and that some children can seem to stop having autism. In this model, this change in autism-status would mean that the child was able to develop compensations for deficits, naturally continue to develop other quadrants, and some therapies may influence the brain to change the balance between those quadrants. This would occur to the point that it would be difficult to recognize the unbalanced use of the brain from outward appearances, that deficits are lessoned or hidden, and the person’s strengths become more obvious.
Catherine Maurice (1993), who is the parent of two children whom some would consider recovered, wrote:
But there comes a time when the distinction between “residual autism” and normal personality variation becomes quite fuzzy. In our experience, there has been no line of demarcation, clear and precise, denoting on the one side “autistic” and on the other side “totally normal.” Rather, what we have seen is a gradual fading out of autistic symptoms, a gradual increase in social and linguistic competence, a gradual acceleration in our children’s ability to learn normally from the environment. (p. 288)
One could argue against this quadrant-view by saying that all people with autism share specific traits. This quadrant theory assumes that people with autism won’t necessarily have the same strong quadrants; that will clearly make their specific symptoms different. Secondly, since each quadrant only has functions, parts of abilities, it assumes that even people with the same strong quadrants can have very different abilities depending on what other functions they can access in other quadrants.
It is true that the literature that describes autism has many statements about specific traits which are said to be true of all people with autism, such as “People with autism are innately gentle beings” (Stillman, 2003, p. 197) or “Appearing conceited is an autistic trait.” (Ronan, 2003, p. 90) I could fill this page with examples of these sorts of statements and counter-examples of people with autism who do not have that trait. “Autistic babies are good babies” (Johnson, 1992, p. v) wrote one mother of an autistic child, but the father of another autistic child wrote “there were frequent times when, despite being well fed, dry and winded, he still wanted to cry. What we learnt from our next two children made us feel that he cried a lot more than other babies.” (Rowlands, 1972, p. 8).
One mother of an autistic child wrote “No child models more than a child with autism spectrum disorder.” (Elliot, 2002, p. 1) Contradicting this was a research article “EEG Evidence for Mirror Neuron Dysfunction in Autism Spectrum Disorders” (Oberman et al., 2005) which suggested mirror neuron dysfunction as the cause of impaired imitation in people with autism. In discussing this article, one parent stated “My son is a seven year old boy who was diagnosed with Autism at the age of two. He has no verbal communications, and is constantly watching us to figure out "how" to do things. He copies us completely!” (Robinson, 2005) Another parent was in agreement with the research and wrote “It amazes me how similar and different our ASD children are. The story on Mirror Neuron Dysfunction fit my son perfectly.” (Dunning, 2005)
Sometimes there is an acknowledgment of this issue. “Some of us hate to be hugged; some love it. Some of us won’t look at people in the eye. Others stare. Some of us are nonverbal. Some never shut up. Some of us are picky eaters. Some of us, like me, will eat cement with the right fork.” (p. 109) wrote Jerry Newport (2001) who has Asperger’s Syndrome. “They [people with autism] can have exceptionally good balance (although, confusingly, the opposite can also be true)” (p. 54) wrote Charlotte Moore (2004), the mother of two austistic children.
Researcher Tony Attwood (1998), in his book Asperger’s Syndrome, wrote:
A significant proportion of children with Asperger’s Syndrome tend to be at the extremes of ability in the areas of reading, spelling and numbers. Some develop hyperlexia, that is, highly developed word recognition, but very poor comprehension of the words or storyline (Tirosh and Canby 1993), while others have considerable difficulty cracking the code of reading. Hans Asperger (1944) referred to how his original group of children included those with signs of dyslexia and difficulty learning to spell. In contrast, some were fascinated by numbers from an early age and were extraordinarily precocious in their ability to count. (p. 118)
Researcher Lorna Wing (2001), in her book The Autistic Spectrum, wrote:
Attempts to delineate specific sub-groups of autistic spectrum disorders are confounded by the considerable overlap among the suggested syndromes. The clinical picture of every type of autistic disorder is made up of a large number of features. In clinical practice the more you see of these conditions, the more it appears that any combination of the features is possible. (p. 9-10)
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association, 2000) stated “The essential features of Autistic Disorder are the presence of markedly abnormal or impaired development in social interaction and communication and a markedly restricted repertoire of activity and interests.” (p. 70) This description fits perfectly with autism being created from imbalanced development of the brain. Restricted activities and interests would be the natural result of being able to access a sub-set of the functions that people typically use. Social interaction will be influenced by a person’s empathy and their ability to communicate; in the next section, I will discuss why I believe empathy to be a whole-brain activity.
As to whether communication requires whole-brain thinking, I think that researchers have shown that there are functions throughout the brain that are typically used in communication. It is clear that key functions for speech are located in the left hemisphere.
At this point, there is no doubt that the left hemisphere is typically dominant for a number of important aspects of language: overt speech, phonetic decoding, syntactic and semantic processing – although with the exception of overt speech there is little evidence that the right hemisphere is completely without ability. (Hellige, 1993, p. 38)
About right hemisphere functions, “The question, then, is not whether the right hemisphere can process language, but how and when it does so.” (Chiarello, 1988, p. v) Researchers have found that the right hemisphere is involved in understanding metaphoric meaning, understanding and producing inflections in speech, and using emotional speech such as swear words and exclamations.
Brownell demonstrates a deficit in the appreciation of metaphoric alternative word meanings following right hemisphere damage and relates this to previous work, showing impairments among patients in understanding nonliteral, connotative aspects of meaning. (Chiarello, 1988, p. v-vi)
Ross (1984) hypothesized that prosody is the right hemisphere’s contribution to language. Prosody, by definition, involves a variation in emotional intonation when communicating a particular utterance (e.g., a rising inflection when using the questioning “yes”). Ross’s (1984) patients who had right-hemispheric (as opposed to left-hemispheric) anterior lesions often spoke with a flattened intonation, whereas those who had right posterior lesions typically experienced more problems in determining the emotional tone of speech produced by others. (Iaccino, 1993, p. 9)
In addition to performing better on narrative-level linguistic tasks, the right hemisphere appears to be dominant for the processing of intonation and prosody. For example, injury to the right more than the left hemisphere disrupts the use of inflections in speech, both in output and in perception (e.g., Ross, 1985). (Hellige, 1993, p. 39)
In a series of articles published over half a century he [J.H. Jackson] documented evidence of the type of mental disorder experienced by patients with right-hemisphere damage. He believed that such patients encountered problems in ‘expressing emotional speech – swear words, exclamations’. (Cutting, 1997, p. 62-63)
I am claiming that deficits in any of the quadrants – left or right, limbic system or neocortex – could diminish the ability to communicate, in ways that are sometimes dramatic and sometimes more subtle. It is in these sorts of whole-brain activities that I believe every person with autism will have impairments.
It is often said that people with autism have no empathy, but the word empathy does not always mean the same thing when used by different people. I am going to argue that all people with autism lack empathy only when the word is used in its fullest sense, and that this is true because empathy requires the use of the whole brain.
The first time I understood that empathy is a complex topic was when reading Hanging by a Twig by Carol Wren (2000). She wrote:
Empathy is the “feeling for” another person, knowing how someone feels based on what we pick up, glean, or intuit. It is to be distinguished from sympathy, which is estimating how someone might be feeling based on what one has observed of his or her circumstances. Empathy is primarily a perceptual and intuitive process, while sympathy is mainly a logical one. (p. 171)
The definition of empathy is this intuitive understanding of how others are feeling. You might say that empathy, in its classic definition, is a neutral concept – understanding someone’s feelings can be used for both good and bad purposes. It is more obvious that someone has empathy when you see that person choose to use their empathy for good purposes.
I think that the evidence points to some people with autism being extremely good at empathy, in this narrow sense. Jasmine O’Neil (1999), who has autism, claimed “autistics can sense other people’s emotions” (p. 57). I found it very easy to find examples of people with autism who are extremely strong in this ability; the following are from biographies of people with autism.
Rafael and I became more and more agitated. When Nic senses that, it’s like throwing gasoline on the fire. I always think about how they say horses can sense when they have an inexperienced rider. I’d like to know what kind of wave transmits this data to horses and to kids like Nic. (Sharp, 2003, p.59)
I also observed from the first day that Sara was aware of what pushed Bob’s buttons. The things that annoyed him the most were behaviors she reserved for visits to our house. (Desorgher, 2002, p. 26)
Sometimes when we were out he would roll his head about with his mouth open, looking completely idiotic. He would watch me out of the corner of his eye while he did this, no doubt noting with glee my acute discomfort and repressed fury. His development may have been retarded but he certainly knew how to manipulate people, often without them even realizing it. (Hocking, 1990, pp. 132-133)
“It’s far out,” Laura added. “He’s a mirror. He hears what you really say. You know, like when you tell someone ‘oh no, I’m not angry’ when you are. Robertito knows; he hears the real part and he reflects where you’re really at. If you don’t mean it, he’ll know that, too.” (Kaufman, 1981, p. 288)
Raun would know [about their nonjudgmental attitude]. He seemed almost telepathic in his ability to detect the discomforts and moods of those around him. He moved away from people who appeared distressed by his actions. (Kaufman, 1994, p. 81)
Personally and practically, I found it very hard to feel happy at the time. I could pretend to be happy because I adored Alexander. He could spot from a mile away when I was pretending. (Stone, 2004, p. 19)
To Mother, Jules was simply a sensitive child with his own quirks and oddities that he was entitled to, picking up negative and positive vibrations around him like most children, only in his case more so. (Wheatley, 2005, p. 30)
It is rare that I [Thomas McKean] know what anyone is actually thinking, but concurrent emotions are very common. … Eye contact seems to be the key for me. Almost like there is a sequence written on the eyes of the other person that tells my brain and my emotions exactly how they should be feeling at that point. These feelings are inevitably always what that other person happens to be feeling at the time. And I have noticed that the link is much stronger if I am actually touching the person. (McKean, 1994, p. 54)
The mergence I [Donna Williams] had with objects, I had also with certain people. I would call this an intense, uncontrollable empathy. Many people confuse empathy with sympathy. Sympathy is almost the antithesis of empathy. Sympathy involves a simultaneous sense of self and other. Empathy involves feeling for the person deeply as though you were that person. (Williams, 1998, p. 59)
Researcher Simon Baron-Cohen (2003) sees lack of empathy as a key characteristic of people with autism. He wrote:
Empathizing is the drive to identify another person’s emotions and thoughts, and to respond to them with an appropriate emotion. Empathizing does not entail just the cold calculation of what someone else thinks and feels (or what is sometimes called mind reading). Psychopaths can do that much. Empathizing occurs when we feel an appropriate emotional reaction, an emotion triggered by the other person’s emotion, and it is done in order to understand another person, to predict their behavior, and to connect or resonate with them emotionally. (p. 2)
I would argue that Baron-Cohen’s definition of empathy is a broader one, and closer to how the word is commonly used. It is empathy in this broader definition that I am claiming that we may find is impaired in all people with autism.
A possibly related topic is the claim that people with autism lack something which is labeled a ‘theory of mind’. Uta Frith (1989) explains this in Autism: Explaining the Enigma. She says about this ability that it “provides us with the ability to predict relationships between external states of affairs and internal states of mind” (pp. 156-157). Many of the examples show that often children with autism don’t understand that when someone sees something happen then that person then knows what happened.
I think that a ‘theory of mind’ would be a complex enough ability that it could be compromised by a lack in a number of components, but I will note that autistic Donna Williams (2003) wrote about her memory “I have very little short-term memory. Everything becomes part of serial memory as though all I have is mostly long-term memory covering in the absence of short-term.” (p. 48) It may be that for some people with autism, to see doesn’t necessarily mean that they know, and therefore, it may be difficult for them to understand that this is so for others.
I believe that the word empathy is commonly used to convey more than its scientific, narrow meaning. I think people use it to mean that someone can feel with others, sympathize with them, restrain themselves from hurting others when desirable, and are able to use these abilities to act kindly to others. Given that definition, I think it makes sense that this would require the use of the whole brain, and based on the Brain-Quadrant Integration model, we could expect that large imbalances in brain-use would compromise that ability.
If autism were caused by imbalanced development of the brain, one might ask how this could account for regressive autism where development is claimed to be occurring normally at first. The most likely explanation, given this four-part model, is that the imbalanced development was present at birth, but that the parent only later realizes that there is any problem. One aspect is that if there were imbalanced development, the child would have great strengths that could mask problems. Charles Hart (1989) wrote about his autistic son:
Ted began using simple one-word statements to label items or to ask for things as a toddler, so we had no way of realizing that he would one day show severe problems in communication. Hearing, “mamma,” “dada,” “cookie,” and appum” (apple) at an early age and witnessing him recite the alphabet correctly by age two, we didn’t understand that these functions of language simply displayed his rote memory ability and camouflaged a profound language problem that would reveal itself only after he failed to grasp rules of logic and grammar. (p. 276)
Many parents, though, are adamant that their children have regressed, and a study by researchers Werner and Dawson (2005) “Validation of the Phenomenon of Autistic Regression Using Home Videotapes” seems to support this. In fact, the children were judged as more communicative than typical children. “Regressed infants used complex babble or words nearly twice as frequently as typical infants.” (p. 892) This surprising finding makes perfect sense in the context of the Brain-Quadrant Integration theory because we would expect these children to have strengths compared to other children. This narrow strength in babbling wouldn’t necessarily translate into a larger ability, though parents could understandably think that it would.
Researchers Hiscock and Kinsbourne (1995) wrote that early babbling and pointing are not communicative.
At first babbling neither conveys external reference nor expresses the emotional state. Emotional vocalizations of limbic origin, which humans have in common with nonhuman primates (and which remain intact even in global aphasia), are quite distinct, and not related to ongoing speech (Myers, 1976). (p. 560)
This is because early emerging pointing is devoid of communicative intent (Lempert and Kinsbourne, 1985). For the 9- to 12-month-old infant, pointing is not indicating, at least not to another, and occurs regardless of whether another is even present. Early pointing is a component of a selective orienting response to a salient (bright, moving, novel) stimulus. Early naming is similarly communicatively neutral. It too refers to salient stimuli and is coordinated with the pointing movement. If another person is present, he or she may derive signaling value from these actions, but this is not their purpose. Only after the age of 13 months do infants point things out to others, by gesture and name. This is now incipient speech as communication (Lancaster, 1975). (p. 561)
Therefore, I believe that it is possible to see a strength in a young child and to misunderstand its scope. The regression that a parent sees would then be in part the difference between the child’s behavior and an imagined future based on this assumed giftedness.
As to when a child’s deficits would become more apparent, Charlotte Moore (2004), parent of autistic children, suggests that at the ages of two or three, the demands on a child increase.
George and Sam were born autistic. It’s just that nobody noticed. And nobody can be blamed for not noticing, because the signs were so subtle. I have an idea that the regression often observed in autistic children of two or three years is something to do with what’s expected of them; their brains are struggling and failing to cope. (p. 51)
So, it may be that regressive autism is a situation that a child is autistic at birth, but that the characteristics don’t become apparent until they are older. The child’s obvious abilities obscure their deficits, and lead others to miss subtle signs of imbalanced brain-use. Parents who notice above-average qualities in their children may be reasonably surprised when those children start to have problems, and this could lead them to believe that there has been some fundamental change in their child.
I believe that it is fair to say that the history of Facilitated Communication is a story that doesn’t make sense. It is claimed that some autistic people are able, with support, to type their thoughts though unable to speak them. Scientific experiments haven’t corroborated these claims. I’ve read many biographies written through this method, and they don’t reflect classic autistic symptoms such as emotional deficits and difficulty with non-literal language. Though all these things would point to Facilitated Communication being a fraud, some people go on to type independently, telling us that they were really doing the typing.
Kristi Jorde (Rocha and Jorde, 1995) wrote about using Facilitated Communication (FC) with her daughter.
The fear that this wasn’t real was so strong – even though I could feel her pressing the keys. Even though she talked to me about things I didn’t know. Even though she’d refuse to type when she didn’t want to no matter what I wanted. Even though she said some amazing things, in amazing ways, that went far beyond my own thinking. Even though I had all this evidence, it was still hard to believe because appearances and reality were so much at odds. (pp. 108-109)
One aspect that I like about the Brain-Quadrant Integration idea is that it provides a possible answer to explain the story of Facilitated Communication. One part is that the people who use FC could have very different personalities from those with classic autism – a different set of strengths and weaknesses. Since people who successfully use Facilitated Communication all have trouble controlling their bodies, and are able to easily learn to read, one hypothesis is that this is a group of people with similar strengths and weaknesses, similar personalities. Is there any evidence that this is true?
I would say that though the writing of those people with autism who write through Facilitated Communication doesn’t sound like the voices of other autistics, they are more similar in tone to one another. Charles Hale (1999) wrote:
I have longed to help others from the time I was a youngster. I have much love in my heart. I feel that if one has love to share with others, that is perhaps the greatest gift that one could give in life. (p. 86)
I would say that they share a great focus on other human beings. Birger Sellin (1995) wrote through FC, “a lonely and mute person depends on encouragement / a single word said in love can heal any number of wounds”. (p. 123) Lucy Blackman (1999) wrote about having “luxuriated in the sheer pleasure of being the centre of attention” (p. 93). Charles Hale (1999) wrote “I am a very people oriented person” (p. 86). Thomas Page (2003) wrote “I have grown to enjoy the social aspect of this [FC] and can’t possibly imagine life without it now. It is what I live for.” (p. 106-107)
About the “Social Butterfly” David Eastham:
Some of his friends and acquaintances at the college would use his memowriter to chat or simply call out to him. At the class party of Christmas ’86 Justine described him as a “Social Butterfly, talking to everyone”. (Eastham and Eastham, 1990, p. 129)
Rosemary Crossley, who started Facilitated Communication therapy, discussed her facilitation of Jill, an autistic girl (1997, pp. 207-232). One issue was that “Jill was obviously very good indeed at picking out signals.” (p. 222) “she was picking up physical cues” (p. 224) In fact, some people thought that Jill had telepathy.
Firstly, she liked being a drama queen and center of attention – she enjoyed the notoriety of being “telepathic.” Secondly, she wanted to get things right, and she didn’t mind sacrificing her individuality to do so. (p. 230)
Those autistics who have written through FC also seem to have good self-esteem and are generally positive about what they can accomplish. They wrote about themselves in a very positive manner, using descriptions like “I am smart” (Hundal & Lukey, 2003, p. 54) ”SMART” (Eastham and Eastham, 1990, p. 66) “intelligent” (Hale & Hale, 1999, p. 83) “BRAINY” (Blackman, 1999, p. 91) “clever” (Sellin, 1995, p. 59) “WISE” (Rocha and Jorde, 1995, p. 173) “spoke of wisdom, as it was easy” (Mukhopadhyay, 2002, p. 27-28) ”my special gifts” (Page, 2003, p. 125).
If Facilitated Communication can work, why might it be difficult to confirm that scientifically? Mary Jane Hale (1999), whose son uses facilitated communication, wrote “For many reasons, not all of these attempts at validation were successful, due to the emotional and physical vulnerability of these motor impaired people who, in many cases, resented having to prove themselves in the first place.” (p. 2) Resenting having to prove themselves doesn’t sound like a logical or plausible response if we assume that they are only motor impaired. If we believe that they are at the extreme of their personality type then they may have issues with logical thinking, or unusually strong feelings of resentment, or a compelling desire to hide deficiencies from others, or some other unusual response to the situation – then this may make sense.
Rosemary Crossley (1997) in her book Speechless wrote about this issue.
The naive view held by both critics and supporters was that if these people really were spelling then they should have all the other skills of people who can spell. In effect, this view saw starting to communicate as equivalent to getting the telephone connected, as if all that had been missing from the non-speaker’s life was a technology. (p. 261)
Many people seemed to believe that everything typed with facilitation was true, however far-fetched, up to and including claims of guidance by the divinity in person. This willingness to believe may have been bound up with a stereotype of people with disabilities – innocents, “holy fools,” people who did not participate in the wickedness of the world and who therefore could not be telling lies. (p. 255)
This quadrant-view of intelligence can explain the high IQ scores of some people who use FC. Sue Rubin (1998) wrote:
I admit that I was not able to process directions well or think clearly, but is that mental retardation? If it is, how could it change so drastically in one year. When I was retested with facilitated communication after I had been typing several months, I tested at an I.Q. of 130. In addition, even after my mind became organized and I could think, the tests were measuring my ability to coordinate my awful body with my mind. (p. 2-3)
A drastic change in IQ score could occur with only a small change in supporting abilities. The abilities that she has that create the ability to score high on an IQ test would be created at the expense of other brain areas.
In general, this quadrant-model suggests a different way to look at a puzzling situation. People who are successful with Facilitated Communication may have a specific kind of autism. They may have very different strengths and weaknesses from other autistics. We would not expect them to be just regular people with a movement problem, and they would likely share similar psychological issues. I think that this view may allow us to explore and eventually explain a situation that is currently inexplicable.
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