How Can I Talk if My Lips Don’t Move?: New Book by Tito Mukhopadhyay

Says Matthew Belmonte, a neuroscientist and assistant professor in the Department of Human Development at Cornell University, about Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay, a severely and minimally verbal autistic young man originally from India and now living in Austin, Texas, and the author of two books, The Mind Tree: A Miraculous Child Breaks the Silence of Autism and The Gold of the Sunbeams and Other Stories.

“In a way, Tito is unusual in that he has done so well at independent and flexible communication. But I think the whole point is in another way, he’s not unusual at all. He’s typical. You see this guy with flapping hands and having all of these impulsive and compulsive behaviors and not able to communicate on our terms and you think maybe there’s not a lot going on there. But look at any person with severe autism, and you see much the same behavior. The fact that Tito has been able to pick this up makes you think about these other cases. The more one gets to know a person with autism who may not outwardly show the signs of being a full person in ways that are interpretable to us, once we learn to interpret their actions and their language and what they are trying to say to us, it becomes very clear that there is quite a personality going on in there.” [my emphasis]

Tito and his mother, Soma Mukhopadhyay, are profiled in the January 20th Austin American-Stateman. Soma Mukhopadhyay, teaches autistic children to communicate using the Rapid Prompting Method, which she created based on the methods she first used to teach Tito to write and communicate his thoughts. Tito Mukhopadhyay’s third book, How Can I Talk if My Lips Don’t Move? Inside My Autistic Mind will be released this month by Arcade Publishing. And go here to see a video of Tito and several promient neuroscientists and researchers; here are some of my own reflections of Tito’s writings and use of language.

Charlie sometimes squints one eye shut and scrunches up his face: I’ve learned to slow myself down and wait at such moments, as he is certainly thinking, perhaps processing sights and smells and words and requests. When he says “Mom’s blue shirt green house Farmer Dell tape ee eye ee eye oh tape” he is, I think (I think), telling more about some past memory when he had that tape and we lived in our old house (and I was wearing a certain shirt?)—a memory of much importance to him.

Even a little less than six words (and sometimes many more, and whether or not your lips are moving) can get the message across.