Windows of the Soul
March 27, 2009 by Jeff Stimpson
Filed under Health
“UW researchers have discovered that people with autism have a more intense response to looking at faces (http://uwnews.washington.edu/ni/article.asp?articleID=48118) than the average Joe. The more social impairment, in fact, the more intense the response to someone’s face. The UW Autism Center’s Natalia Kleinhans says, ‘What we are seeing is hyper-excitability or over-arousal of the amygdala, which suggests that neurons in the amygdala are firing more than expected.’ The amygdala’s emotional tagging helps you make decisions, remember things, and identify faces. Without the right emotional response, face-recognition gets a little squirrely…”
Image: sxc.hu
There’s more. Kleinhans’ research abstract is at http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/appi.ajp.2008.07101681v1?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=Kleinhans&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&sortspec=relevance&resourcetype=HWCIT.
A few years back I had the pleasure of hearing a 60-something man with autism speak at the YAI conference in New York. Since Alex was still pretty much non-verbal then (getting better now), this gentleman was a trove of insights into what I suspected was my son’s isolated world. One of the man’s comments that stood out: For many years, direct eye contact was actually physically painful to him.
“Jeff,” Jill said of Alex when he was a few months old, “he doesn’t look at me…”
Alex has a nystagmus, an involuntary rhythmic shaking or wobbling of the eyes. He has learned to compensate by looking out of the side of his eyes; when he does this, the wobble stops.
“Maybe it’s his eyes,” his pre-school teacher once said about his seeming inability to learn a certain subject. I feared the problem was not so much his eyes as where his eyes were sending their message. Besides, he could spot a 3-inch tall Elmo finger puppet from across a crowded room. Still can. He meets my eye squarely, too, when he wants to know something about writing, or wonders where I hid the pretzels.
They took to this question over on LinkedIn, so I’ll pose it out here, too: If you have a child with autism, what do you think will be the best thing about their adulthood?
From Mary Jo at the Blisstree Travel blog comes the article, “Why Autism Won’t Look You in the Eye via Seattlest
