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March 2016

BrainBow

Issue 2
Authored by:
Diane P. Zimmerman, Ph.D.

Everything brain related

Brainbow, an e-letter, is dedicated to summarizing

brain developments from the popular press. Like
brainbows, captivating ideas have the potential to
expand common understandings about the brain. The
name, Brainbow, draws inspiration from images.
Originally developed in 2007, the brainbow is a
staining process that colors individual neurons using
florescent proteins. Currently, brainbows are limited
to images taken from organisms with less complex
brains such as mice and drosophila.

Silbermans book, NeuroTribes, Explains Autism in a new way

This issue of Brainbow pulls me back 40
years to when I was hired to start a new
program to meet the dictates of PL 94142the mandate for a free, appropriate
education for all. I spent my first 4 years
working with preschool students, all
severely delayed in language development. Reading Silbermans Neurotribes and
writing this issue has been cathartic; and it
has reshaped my consciousness about my
early years as a teacher. I now understand
that at least one-third of the children
assigned to me would be diagnosed with
autism spectrum disorder by todays
standards.
While in those years I found great success
working on language development, I often
wondered about these childrens unusual,
and often atypical behaviors. As a language
specialist, I expected these children to
follow normal developmental sequences.
Yet, I puzzled about how often they
deviated from the normexhibiting
behaviors not found in the normal
developmental charts.

Cavendish Balance

There was Eddie who spent his recess

peering through the cracks in the fence,
making truck noises when running, and
avoiding eye contact; yet, he was a
bright and learned quickly. There was
Hank who smelled everything, needed
to repeat the schedule over and over,
and could answer any math fact. I was
so challenged by Beckys low
functioning, I pulled out all my
Piagetian books and tried to find some
normal sequence to her behavior, only
to find that her echolalia slowed
learning at every turn.
By far the most interesting case, was a 5
year old girl who spontaneously learned
to read the chemical names that were
printed on the back of Celestial
Seasoning tea boxes at that time.
Unfortunately, her name, Wednesday
evoked an echolalia sequence. When her
name was called, she would dutifully
parrot in a high-pitched voice,
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday,

Saturday, Sunday. At 5 years old she

could decode anything, yet had no ability
to interact with people. It was this little
girl, with her hypolexia, that taught me to
honor neuro-diversity, to follow
developmental dictates when helpful, and
when stumped to marvel at the flexibility
of the human brain.
After reading Neurotribes, what surprises
me even more is, while sitting through
over 100 Individual Education Plan (IEP)
meetings, we never once used the terms
childhood schizophrenia or autism or
considered the newer term Asperger,
which were all terms used by researchers
in those years. In fact, I had been taught
that all of these disorders were rare; my
textbooks showed institutionalized
children spinning, rocking and stimming.
I wish now that history had taken a
different path, with less
institutionalization and more empathy.
Perhaps with better knowledge I could
have reached more of these children.

Complex inventions shaped by neurodiversity: In 1797, Cavendish set an elaborate system of
weights and rods swinging, and using this contraption accurately estimated the mass of the Earth. There
was the protg of Nikola Tesla who pioneered mail-order gadgetry and science-fiction publishing, and
the visionary computer scientist who gave us the term artificial intelligence, as well many of the fields
tools. As Silberman collects these compelling figures, he makes a quiet argument that autism has always
been among us, that its features define one of the many dimensions of human potential. His book is never
far from a human face, from a personal story that reminds the reader how much is at stake. From
Neurotribes Book Review by Steve Phelps, The Atlantic, August 24, 2015
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/08/steve-silberman-neurotribes-autism/400346/

Tesla Induction
Motor

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Neurodiversity-In Their
Lorem Ipsum
own Words
Twenty years ago Temple Grandin, known
for her heighted ability to describe what
was going on in her mind described what is
now pictured to the right: Being autistic, I
dont naturally assimilate information that most
people take for granted. Instead, I store
information in my head as if it were a CD-ROM
disc. When I recall something I have learned, I
replay the video in my imagination. The videos
in my memory are always specific.I
remember exactly how the animals behaved in a
specific situation p. 8 and 9 Thinking in

Pictures
Grandin describes how she learns: To have
feelings of gentleness, one must experience
gentle bodily comfort. As my nervous system
learned to tolerate the soothing pressure from
my squeeze machine, I discovered that the
comforting feeling made me a kinder and
gentler person.It wasnt until after I had used
the modified squeeze machine that I learned
how to pet a cat gently. He used to run away
from me because I held him too tightly. P. 82
Thinking in Pictures
Daniel Tammet describes how he thinks in
numbers using somesthesia: I was born on
January 31, 1979 -- a Wednesday. I know it
was a Wednesday, because the date is blue in
my mind and Wednesdays are always blue, like
the number 9 or the sound of loud voices
arguing. I like my birth date, because of the way
I'm able to visualize most of the numbers in it as
smooth and round shapes, similar to pebbles on
a beach. That's because they are prime
numbers: 31, 19, 197, 97, 79 and 1979 are all
divisible only by themselves and 1. I can
recognize every prime up to 9,973 by their
"pebble-like" quality. It's just the way my brain
works. Page 1 Born on a Blue Day
Numbers are my first language, one I often
think and feel in. Emotions can be hard for me
to understand or know how to react to, so I
often use numbers to help me. If a friend says
they feel sad or depressed, I picture myself
sitting in the dark hollowness of number 6 to
help me experience the same sort of feeling and
understand it. If I read in an article that a person
felt intimidated by something, I imagine myself
standing next to the number 9. Whenever
someone describes visiting a beautiful place, I
recall my numerical landscapes and how happy
they make me feel inside. By doing this,
numbers actually help me get closer to understanding other people. P 7 Born on a Blue Day

Continued page 3

Brain scan of Temple Grandin, left,

compared to someone without autism
doing the same task. Grandin's visual
output area is much larger than a
typical person.

Seventy Years of Autism Research

Reading NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism
and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve
Silberman opens a Pandoras box of
surprises. In the first half of this book, he
convincingly argues that two forces, the
geopolitics of World War II and the
publication in the US Leo Kanners
ground breaking book on child
psychiatry, severely limited the understanding of autism spectrum disorder.
He delves into history to answer the
question: After 70 years of research on
autism, why do we still seem to know so
little about it? p. 15
Silberman challenges the assumption that
autism is an historical anomaly and a
distinctive problem of the 21st century.
He tells a tale, which one could not
invent, about how the prevalence of
autism in central Europe contributed to
the identification and purging by Nazi
Germany of the feebleminded. By the
end of the World War II, the Nazis had
murdered more than 200,000 disabled
children and adults for fear that their
diseases might have been heritable and
would impact a diminished gene pool
created by the great losses of men in
World War I.
Like so many great discoveries, it turns
out that the first documented cases of
autism were simultaneous. Hans
Asperger of Vienna published his thesis
on autistic intelligences one year after Leo
Kanner of Baltimore identified autistic
disturbances. While the behaviors
described were often similar, Asperger
saw autism to be a continuum, which,
included genius, and that once you
understood, you saw it everywhere. In
contrast, Kanner described autism as a
rare and severe form of childhood
disturbance.

Not only did the war leave Aspergers

clinic in ruins, but also the tragedy of
German-Austrian genocide doomed
Aspergers work to obscurity. Across
the Atlantic Leo Kanner, with his overly
ambitious assertions about childhood
disturbances, became the world expert
in child psychiatry. So convinced was
Kanner of is own discoveries, he
ignored any mention of the ground
breaking work going on in Vienna at the
beginning of the war. As a consequence
Hans Aspergers research was not taken
seriously in the US until 1981, and even
then it took 10 years for it to be used
for diagnosis of a broader range of
abilities under the continuum of autism.
Now Asperger seems prescient with his
1940s descriptions of autistic
intelligences, which he described as
bundles of paradoxes on continuums
from tenacious to obstreperous, from
insensitive to highly sensitive, and from
precocious to nave. Over ten years
Asperger and his colleagues worked in a
ground-breaking clinic in Vienna to
study these children, which he found
recognizable and common in the clinics
population. Silberman asserts that
because of Aspergers public emphasis
on the more promising children, as an
antidote to the radical Nazi trajectory,
his theories and name became associated
with high functioning children even
though he reported a much broader
band of human ability.

Hans AspergerVienna

Stephen WhiltshireThe Human Camera

This amazing young man sets himself a challenge, to draw 4 meter
panoramas of large cities from memory in five days after a 15 minute
helicopter ride. Above is one of his images for sale on his web site:
http://www.stephenwiltshire.co.uk/Stephen_Wiltshire_city_panorama_drawings.aspx See him in action on videos posted on his web site:
http://www.stephenwiltshire.co.uk/videos.aspx

And in person in Houston, TX 4/19-23/2016

https://www.facebook.com/elevatehou

An entire chapter of Neurotribes is dedicated

to the 1988 movie featuring Dustin Hoffman
as Rain Man. While in 1987 the DSM had
finally identified autism disorder, it would
take another 6 years for them to list the
higher functioning condition of Aspergers.
It is now commonly accepted that this
movie, coming out of Hollywood,
established a new standard for the realistic
representation of autism.
I recently saw John Steinbecks, Of Mice and
Men in a small, intimate theater, which made
6-foot Lenny even more imposing as he
loomed over us talking about his pet mice, I
pet em, and pretty soon they bit my fingers
and I pinched their heads a little and they
was deadbecause they was so little.
After the play, I couldnt help but think of
how Temple Grandin had described her
inability to be gentle with the family cat and
compare it to Lenny. (See Side Bar page 2.)

Challenge from Daniel Tammet from his web page:

Have a look at this amazing webpage where it is
possible to visualise the first 4 million digits of Pi as
a multi-coloured mural: http://two-n.com/pi/ Not
sure how they came up with the colours for each
digit (5 light blue? For me, fives are definitely
yellow!). Draw your mouse across the page to pick
out all kinds of number sequences. What's the most
beautiful pattern you can find?
http://optimnemblog.blogspot.com/2012_07_01_archive.html

The Autistic Aesthetic

Silberman would argue that inventions by
people with autism created our networked
world, and that through this networked
world the autistic aesthetic has and will
have an expanding impact. He states that in
making the world more comfortable for
themselves, these neurotribes create things
that are useful for all of us. As I pulled
references from the Internet, it became
clear to me just how much they are driving
the creation of alternative forms of
expression and cutting-edge technologies.

(Continued from page ) In Their Words

That night it dawned on me that Lenny,

based on a real man who was put in an
insane asylum, probably was on the autism
spectrum disorder. After reading
Neurotribes, I pulled out the late Leonard
Shlains 1991 book, Art & Physics, in which
he proposed that the visionary artist often
interprets the world in a new ways and that
foreshadow scientific discoveries. I was
fascinated to find that Steinbecks 1937
book predated Kanner and Aspergers work
by 5 years. Lenny, like the Rain Man years
later, served to humanize those with mental
disabilities.
Asperger too had highlighted the hyperactive imaginations of his little professors,
who often anticipated developments in
science. Silberman describes how science
fiction writing both drew from and
supported the feeling of cognitive
estrangement by creating a world that was
both safe and extraordinary. It was possible
through this genre to express relationships
in neuro-diverse ways.
Some of the creative talents that are said to
have been autistic and contributed to the
current aesthetic are: Stanley Kubrick,
Andy Warhol, David Byrne, Brian Eno, and
Statoshi Tajiri (Pokman). Certainly we all
benefit when we have alternative
psychological modalities as part of life
experiences.

Amelia Baggs takes us into her first language, a

world of stimming, in a 2 part video in which the
first 4 minutes show her stimming and the
remainder explains her personal language: My
language is not about designing words or even
visual symbols for people to interpret. It is about
being in constant conversation with every aspect of
my environment, reacting physically to all parts of
my surroundings. Far from being purposeless, the
way that I move is an ongoing response to what is
around me. Neurotribes p. 16 Experience this
viscerally at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnylM1hI2jc

Daniel Tammet: Ted Talk Different Ways of

Knowing
https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_tammet_different_ways_
of_knowing?language=en

Temple Grandin TED Talk: The world needs all

kinds of minds
https://www.ted.com/talks/temple_grandin_the_world_nee

Laser Beak Man--A Double Shot of

Happiness By Tim Sharp
http://www.laserbeakman.com

DATA IS BOTH CLEAR AND

CONFUSING!

History of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

(DSM)

http://spreadsheets.latimes.com/autism-california-elementary-schools/

1980: Infantile autism is listed in DSM

1987: DSM replaces infantile autism with autism disorder
1991: Federal government makes autism a special education category. Public schools start identifying and offering services.
1994: Aspergers syndrome is added to DSM to include milder, high functioning cases
2013: DSM Folds all subcategories of the condition into the umbrella diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder
2014: CDC reports 1 in 68 children were identified with autism spectrum disorder
Neurotribes awarded the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction: Already lauded on both sides of the Atlantic, the book was
also last night (11/3/15) awarded the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. Its success is a triumph not just for popular
science Silbermans book is intelligent, incisive and accessible, and is the first popular science book to win the Samuel
Johnson Prize in its 17 year history but also for autism awareness. Rebecca Wait, Independent (UK).
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/steve-silberman-s-neurotribes-is-changing-the-way-we-understand-autism-a6719516.html

Words of Wisdom from Pat Wolfe: For more on neurodiversity she

recommends Tom Armstrongs books listed on his web site:
http://www.institute4learning.com/neurodiversity.php

Download a Neurodiversity Strengths Checklist here:

http://www.slideshare.net/drthomasarmstrong/neurodiversity-strengths-checklist-regular-and-earlychildhood?qid=2c8dd078-a23e-4617-8371-6f3614c13fe4&v=default&b=&from_search=3

Read about positive and negative niche construction at:

http://web.uvic.ca/~gtreloar/20%20Latest%20Research%20Articles/First,%20Discover%20Their%
20Strengths.pdf

Brainbow Update:

Issues of Brainbow will be out around the 15th of each month. I am working on three themes, and am not sure
which one will be first, so send anything you think relates to these three themes so that I can continue to organize
and grow our data bases around these themes.
Upcoming Themes: Wired for Learning in the Classroom, The Musical Brain, and Sleep.
Diane P. Zimmerman, Ph.D, authors this e-letter. It represents her summaries of recent information about the brain.
Permission is granted to share this e-letter with others interested in everything brain related. Excerpts from it must cite
original authorship as noted. For more information or to start a conversation e-mail dpzimmer@gmail.com