A Sense of self

Self-satisfied, self-absorbed, egocentric. It is sometimes disturbing to hear these adjectives being used to describe a child with autism, as they are used in Leo Kanner's groundbreaking paper, published in 1943. Kanner surmised that because children with autism show little interest in other people, they must be overly concerned with themselves.

In fact, individuals with autism struggle with their sense of self, according to a review published in January in Neurocase.

Adults with autism are less likely to remember autobiographical details about their childhood compared with typical controls, according to a 2009 study summarised in the review.

Biologically, this could be the result of less activity in the brain's default network i.e. connections that are active when people are at rest, and believed to be involved in daydreaming and self-reflection. Individuals with autism show weaker connections between regions of the default network.

In another study, people with autism show less activity in one of these regions, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, when replying 'true' or 'false' to statements about both themselves and others. They also show fewer connections between this region and others in the default network.

By contrast, they are able to grasp the concept of their physical selves, and have no problem recognising their own faces or describing their involvement in various activities.

Still, some studies have suggested that children with autism are only able to recognise themselves in mirrors, later in their lives. To put it another way, they are older than typically developing controls before they can identify themselves in mirrors.

Studies have shown that people with autism are just as interested in objects as they are in people. These and other findings suggest that people with autism have a unique way of viewing the world and themselves, one that doesn't fit neatly into the usual labels.

As we understand more about this worldview, we hope judgments like those made by Kanner will become a rarity.

Dyslexia Untied: Perception of Reality and the Reality of Perception

We have long since been aware that our version of the truth and reality is based on our view and perception of the world, and that this can vary from person to person. The Present day philosopher Thomas Nagel states;

"For many men and philosophers alike, the exemplary case of reality is the world described by physics, the science in which we have achieved our greatest detachment from a specifically human perspective on the world.

But for precisely that same reason, physics is bound to leave undescribed, the subjective character of conscious mental processes, whatever may be their intimate relation to the physical operation of the brain.

The subjectivity of consciousness is a feature of reality, without which we could not do physics or anything else, and it must occupy as fundamental a place in any credible world view as does matter, energy, space, time and numbers."

Is it so difficult to understand that the dyslexic person is experiencing a different perception of this world and does not share our rather simplistic and static view. Perhaps we adults are just better at suppressing our visions and have long since learned to prevent them intruding into our fixed view of reality. We left that behind when we moved from being a child to a scholar, a receptive pupil in a class of excited minds.

But we left someone behind. Someone who could not quiet their busy imagination or stop the images dancing around in their vision. When the teacher stated that "A is for Apple", not everyone saw a single apple. Someone saw an avalanche of apples and some were green and some were red and some hung in the trees and the trees swayed in the wind and the leaves were also green and the leaves blew across the blue sky and ......

"Please miss, I am confused! Where do I put this symbol you call 'A' and why will it not stay still?" To this someone, 'A' was for chaos! They do not perceive your reality. Can you perceive their dyslexia?