The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum (25 page)

For me, autism is secondary. My primary identity is as an expert on livestock—a professor, a scientist, a consultant. To keep that part of my identity intact, I regularly block out chunks of the calendar for “cattle time.” The month of June? That’s cattle time. The first part of January? That’s cattle time. I don’t take speaking engagements during those periods. Autism is certainly part of who I am, but I won’t allow it to define me.

The same is true of all the undiagnosed Asperger’s cases in Silicon Valley. Being on the spectrum isn’t what defines them. Their jobs define them. (That’s why I call them Happy Aspies.)

Some people, of course, will never have that opportunity. Their difficulties are too severe for them to cope without constant care, no matter how hard we try.

But what about those who can cope? And what about those who can’t cope but who
can
lead more productive lives if we can identify and cultivate their strengths? How can we turn the plasticity of the brain to our advantage?

Okay, let’s take it one step at a time. First things first: How do we identify strengths?

One way is to apply the three-ways-of-thinking model that I discussed earlier: picture thinker, pattern thinker, word-fact thinker. That model, I believe, can help fundamentally change education and employment opportunities for persons with autism.

Education

When I give lectures in Silicon Valley, I see a lot of people who are solidly on the autistic spectrum, and then when I travel around the country and speak at schools, I see a lot of similar kids who will never get the chance to work in Silicon Valley. Why? Because their schools are trying to treat the kids like they’re all the same.

Putting kids who are on the spectrum in the same classroom as their nonautistic peers and treating them the same way is a mistake. For elementary school children, being in the same classroom with their normal peers is good for socialization. The teacher can bring in higher level work in subjects the child excels at. But if a school treats everyone the same, guess what: The person who’s not the same is going to stand alone. That person will be marginalized in the classroom. And once that happens, it won’t be long before that student is marginalized for good—sent to a separate classroom or even a separate school. And suddenly the Asperger’s kid might find himself in the same program as a bunch of nonverbal kids.

If you’ve read some of my other books or seen the HBO movie of my life, then you know the tremendous debt I owe Mr. Carlock, my high-school science teacher. He changed my life in many ways by identifying my strengths—mechanics and engineering—and helping me explore them. He ran the model rocket club, which I loved. He got me interested in all sorts of electronics experiments.

But in one crucial respect, his thinking probably held me back.

When Mr. Carlock saw that I couldn’t do algebra—just could not do it—he redoubled his efforts to make me learn it. He didn’t understand that my brain doesn’t work in the abstract, symbolic way that solving for
x
requires. Mr. Carlock wasn’t someone who liked to give up on a student, and I’m sure he thought that by pushing me hard on algebra, he was helping me. But what he could have done instead is recognize my limitation in that area and play to my strength in another area.

My engineering talent should have been a clue. Engineering isn’t abstract; it’s concrete. It’s about shapes. It’s about angles. It’s about
geometry.

But no. The standard high-school curriculum says algebra comes before geometry, and geometry comes before trigonometry, and trigonometry comes before calculus, and that’s that. Never mind that you don’t need to know how to do algebra in order to study geometry. Mr. Carlock, like a lot of educators, was stuck in a curriculum rut and didn’t even realize it.

When I bring up this anecdote at my public appearances, I ask if anybody else had a similar experience. Always, four or five hands will go up. If an autistic fourteen-year-old can’t handle algebra because it’s too abstract, you don’t say, “Do algebra anyway.” You try moving him to geometry! If another kid can’t handle algebra or geometry or any other kind of math, you don’t say, “You have to do math before you can do anything else.” Instead, try turning her loose in the lab! If a kid can’t handle handwriting, let him type. If a kid like me invents something like the squeeze machine, you don’t say, “That kid should be like other students” and then destroy the machine; you say, “That kid isn’t like the other students, and that’s a fact.” The educator’s job—the role of education in society—is to ask, “Well, what
is
she like?” Instead of ignoring deficits, you have to accommodate them.

Just the other day, I heard from a mother that her daughter couldn’t handle the noise of the lunchroom, so the principal let her eat in the faculty lounge. The mother was upset that the principal had segregated her daughter. But I told her that no, this is a perfect solution to her daughter’s problem. The principal was sensitive enough to recognize what her daughter could and could not handle and to find a creative way to accommodate her deficit.

But if you really want to prepare kids to participate in the mainstream of life, then you have to do more than accommodate their deficits. You have to figure out ways to exploit their strengths.

How do you do that? How do you recognize a strength when you see it? This is where the three ways of thinking—picture, pattern, and word-fact—come in handy.

I recently had a conversation with a parent whose fourth-grader was exceptional at art, but the school wanted to discourage him because his extreme devotion to drawing was “not normal.”
He’s a picture thinker!
I thought.
Work with it!
Don’t try to make him into something he’s not or, worse, into something he can’t be. What you want to do instead is encourage his art—but broaden what his art encompasses. If he’s drawing pictures of racecars all the time, ask him to draw the racetrack too. Then ask him to draw the streets and buildings around the racetrack. If he can do that, then you’ve taken his weakness (obsessional thinking about an object) and turned it into a strength (a way to understand the relationship between something as simple as a racecar and the rest of society).

Unless the child is a true prodigy or a savant, you’re not going to be able to tell what kind of thinker she is at the age of two. In my experience, evidence of a predisposition toward picture, pattern, or word-fact thinking doesn’t emerge until second, third, fourth grade.

Kids who are
picture thinkers
are the ones who like hands-on activities. They like building with Legos, or painting, or cooking, or woodworking, or sewing. They might not be good at algebra or other forms of math, but that’s fine. You can work math into their hands-on activities. If the kid is into cooking, for instance, you can work fractions into the lesson—half a cup of this, a quarter cup of that. You can teach geometric shapes through origami. I would have understood trigonometry from building model bridges and destructively testing them—trying spans of different lengths, putting them at different angles, and seeing how much weight I needed to break the bridge. (Remember, concrete is just grown-up cardboard.)

Unfortunately, today’s educational system is letting these kids down. It’s phasing out hands-on classes, like shop—precisely the kind of class where geeky kids can feel at home and let their imaginations roam. I was at a processing plant recently to see a demonstration of robots that do some of the difficult, dangerous jobs. I asked who programmed the robots, and I was told it was done by five people from China and India. So I asked why they didn’t use people from the United States. Because, I was told, our educational system doesn’t produce bright young minds with the right combination of electrical engineering and computer engineering.

It’s as if the word-fact thinkers have taken over the educational system. I know that the economy can be difficult and money is always tight, but we’re talking about the future of a generation—or more.

Like picture thinkers,
pattern thinkers
tend to love Legos and other construction toys, but in a different way. Picture thinkers want to create objects that match what they see in their imagination, whereas pattern thinkers think about the ways the parts of the object fit together.

I was horrible at understanding word problems in physics. I couldn’t even figure out how to put the problems together, because they placed too heavy a burden on my working memory. But if I had to solve a physics problem now, I would know what to do. I’d get five textbooks, sit down with a tutor and a spreadsheet, identify specific examples of problems that use one formula and specific examples of problems that use another formula, and eventually I would recognize the patterns in the problems.

A pattern thinker, however, would see the patterns a lot earlier. That’s what makes pattern thinkers good at math and music: They
get
the form behind the function.

Many pattern thinkers, though not all, gravitate toward music. Pattern thinkers might find reading a challenge, but they’ll be miles ahead of their classmates in algebra, as well as in geometry and trigonometry. It’s important for schools to let them work at math at their own pace. If they’re ready for a math text that’s two grades away, give them that math text. Jacob Barnett, at the time a preteen autistic living in suburban Indianapolis, was so bored in grade-school math class that he started to hate math. Finally, out of frustration, he sat down with a bunch of textbooks and taught himself the entire high-school math curriculum in two weeks. Then he went to college—at the age of twelve.

It’s also important for schools to let math whizzes do math in their own style. If they can do math in their heads, don’t tell them, “You have to show your work.” Let them do it in their heads. (Though you have to make sure that they’re not cheating somehow. A simple electronic devices–free test in an empty classroom will answer that question.)

You’ll know who these
word-fact thinkers
are because they’ll tell you. They’ll recite all the dialogue from a movie. They’ll rattle off endless statistics about baseball. They’ll calmly recall all the important dates in the history of the Iberian Peninsula. Their math skills will be only average, they won’t bother with the Legos and building blocks, and they won’t be all that interested in drawing. In fact, there might well be little point in forcing them to sit through art class.

One way to help this kind of thinker learn to engage with the world is to encourage writing. Give them assignments. Let them post on the Internet. (Word-fact thinkers tend to have strong opinions, in my experience, so just make sure to monitor their Internet use for safety—which is good advice when supervising any child.)

Employment

About fifty thousand people diagnosed with ASD turn eighteen every year in the United States alone.
That’s a little late to be thinking about adulthood. I tell parents that by the time their ASD kids are eleven or twelve, the parents should be thinking about what the kids are going to do when they grow up. Nobody needs to make a final decision at that point, but the parents should start considering the possibilities so that they have time to help prepare the child.

I’ve said it before, but I can’t say it enough: Parents and caregivers need to get the kids out into the world, because kids are not going to get interested in things they don’t come into contact with. This point might seem obvious, but I am constantly meeting individuals with Asperger’s or high-functioning autistics who are graduating from high school and college with no job skills. Their parents have let them fall into a routine that never varies and that offers no new experiences. I didn’t become interested in cattle until I went to my aunt’s ranch. A high-school experimental-psychology class that featured lots of fascinating optical illusions stimulated my interest in both psychology and cattle behavior. The world is full of fascinating and potentially life-altering things, but kids aren’t going to adopt them if they don’t know about them. (Even autistic people with severe problems need to see the world. See chapter 4 for desensitizing tips.)

Of course, an ASD kid doesn’t have to go visit an aunt in another state for inspiration. Sticking close to home will do just fine too. Not
at
home, but close to home. It’s essential for him or her to get outside the house and accept responsibility for tasks that other people want done—and that need to be done on
their
schedule. Because that’s how
work
works in the real world.

Dog-walking. Volunteering at a soup kitchen. Shoveling sidewalks, mowing lawns, selling greeting cards. When I was thirteen, Mother arranged for me to get a seamstress job for two afternoons a week, working for a dressmaker out of her home. I liked feeling useful. And I liked making money. This was the first time I had earned money at a job and I bought some crazy shirts with it, pullovers with stripes. (Unfortunately, Mother “lost” them in the laundry.) During high school I worked summers at my aunt’s ranch. Even though I talked nonstop about topics that bored people, everyone loved the horse bridles I made.

Obsessions, in fact, can be great motivators. A creative teacher or parent can channel obsessions into career-relevant skills. If a child likes trains, read a book about trains and do math with trains. My science teacher used my obsession with my squeeze machine to motivate scientific study. He told me that if I wanted to argue that physical pressure is relaxing, I had to learn how to read scientific journal articles to support my thesis.

Not all obsessions are created equal, of course. I see kids who are so addicted to video games that you can’t get them interested in anything else—though even then, I know of one parent who encouraged development of artistic ability by having her son draw pictures of video-game characters. But if you can’t turn video-gaming into a learning opportunity, you can at least restrict it to one hour per day (though career-relevant skills such as programming a game can be done for much longer periods).