A St. Paul family is suing after the school district decided to bar Newman, their son’s service dog, from his public school, Como Park Elementary. Newman, a Golden Retriever, is connected to 8-year-old Wally LaBerge throughout the day via a harness, yesterday’s WCCO notes. While service dogs have been more and more widely used to assist autistic children, there’s been more than a little disagreement about their presence in public places, from schools to airplanes to apartments. It’s noted that the dogs are calming and help to allay anxieties: Until it’s widely understood how much a service dog can help an autistic child, they’ll be more of these sorts of disputes, and more anxiety, and antagonism.

And not enough learning on either side.

I first heard about training dogs specially for autistic children years ago through a friend of a friend; since then, there have been frequent reports about “four-footed therapists.” An organization called 4 Paws for Ability has placed more than 200 service dogs with autistic children, today’s Star-Ledger (NJ). The parents of 7-year-old Will Polak are trying to raise $11,000 for a service dog; so far they’ve raised $3500 through fundraising letters and a garage sale. Dogs need to receive some 500 hours of training from inmates at a local correctional facility first, then from professional trainers and then the family.

A recent article in Scientific America asked about the long-term efficacy of therapy animals in particular, and whether they might only provide “short-term changes in mood, such as pleasure, relaxation or excitement.” While it’s service dogs that are sought for autistic children, I suspect they’ll be a call for studies about how useful the animals are and about their presence in public places: At least one autistic child and his dog have not been allowed into a school, due to concerns about the dog. The Star-Ledger also refers to John McEachin, the co-director of the California-based Autism Partnership (an ABA agency), who

….worries that a service dog may become a crutch. Children with autism “have a great deal of ability that can be developed,” he said.

We’re not at all thinking of a dog for Charlie (for a start, no pets allowed in our condo—-our downstairs neighbor would not be happy about more noise). I could see Charlie having a pet one day and I can also see him getting very attached to it and losing the animal when it passed on would be very difficult (as it is for anyone). Imagine the discussions that might arise if, when, an autistic child tries to board a airplane with a dog who would most likely be a golden retriever or a German shepherd mix?

Can you imagine having this said to you?

“One family I met took their child to the doctor and the doctor said: ‘If he was a dog you would put him down.’”

As quoted in the February 7 Campbelltown-McArthur Advertiser (Australia).

Is animal assisted therapy really the cat’s meow? asks the June 2008 Scientific American and takes a hard look at the use of dolphins, dogs (whose benefits as therapy animals for autistic children have been more and more noted), and other animals (a topic also under discussion with the US Department of Justice):

To show that AATs [animal assisted therapy] work, however, researchers must demonstrate that animals produce enduring effects on people’s psychological health, not merely short-term changes in mood, such as pleasure, relaxation or excitement.

So if school districts can just approve therapy/service animals being allowed in the classroom with autistic students for long enough, maybe it’ll be possible to demonstrate and document such “enduring effects”……

In the past year, there have been more and more reports about the benefits of therapy dogs for autistic children at home and at school. There’s also been at least one instance in which a therapy dog was excluded from the schoolbus and a preschool, as happened to 4-year-old Jayden Qualis in Manteca, California.

Currently, Congress is considering the ADA Restoration Act (HR 3195 and S 1881), which defines disabilities more broadly than some other recent court decisions, and therefore has higher education officials concerned. HR 3195 amends

……the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 to: (1) redefine “disability” as a physical or mental impairment, a record of a such impairment, or being regarded as having a such impairment; and (2) define additional terms, including “mental impairment” and “physical impairment.”

At the same time, the Department of Justice is proposing new regulations that would “limit the accommodations universities and other entities must provide under the existing law,” according to the June 17th Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only). The new regulations call for:

(1) A decrease in the proportion of seats that an “assembly area”—such as a stadium or sports arena—has to make accessible to people who use wheelchairs:

“Now that figure is about 1 percent, with the exact proportion depending on the size of the venue. A stadium of 5,000 seats, for example, must provide space for 51 wheelchairs. Stadiums larger than that must provide one more space for every 100 additional seats. Under the proposed new regulations, a stadium of 5,001 seats would have to provide space for 36 wheelchairs. One more space would be required for every 200 additional seats a stadium has. For a stadium with a 50,000-person capacity, that would mean 261-as opposed to 501-handicapped-accessible spots.”

(2) Limits on service animals, which are to be distinguished from “emotional support animals”; the latter are not covered under federal law:

“Animals whose sole function is to provide emotional support, comfort, therapy, companionship, therapeutic benefits, or promote emotional well-being are not service animals,” the Justice Department said in an early copy of the proposed regulations posted online.

Support animals, like ferrets and snakes, have been a sticking point for colleges, where students have asked to keep them in residence halls and take them to class.

“The arguments have been made with increasing frequency in recent years that lots of animals other than traditional service animals should qualify,” said Michael R. Masinter, a professor of law at Nova Southeastern University. The new regulations would define service animals as those that are specially trained to perform a demonstrable task. That definition may still include “psychiatric-service animals” that remind their owners to take medication or that interrupt incidents of cutting or other self-mutilation.”

The decrease in the proportion of seats for people with wheelchairs does not directly affect autistic individuals, but it certainly affects individuals with disabilities. A literal decrease in the numbers of places for disabled individuals in a public setting is a change in the wrong direction.

The proposed regulations about service animals vs. “emotional support animals” need to be considered as there is more interest for autistic children to be accompanied by therapy dogs in public settings, such as schools. Will arguments be made distinguishing a visually impaired person’s need for a seeing eye dog, in contrast to an autistic child’s need for a therapy dog to calm and lessen her or his anxiety?

And, there is generally a lot of hesitation to referring to autism and autism spectrum disorders in the category of “mental disability/impairment/health, etc.” But what if recourse to such categories is necessary to ensure that an autistic child can have a therapy dog in school with them?

There’s been more and more stories about therapy dogs for autistic children (indeed. here’s an organization called Autism Service Dogs of America. But what about a seal?—–a therapeutic robot seal named Paro, that is?

Paro is $5000: Personally, I think I’ll stick to providing Charlie with fleece blankets and jackets, and hats and gloves for their soft feel. And to the cello for good vibrations. He’s been learning to play the different strings—plucking A and D, and bowing G and C, and something about pulling the bow over those deep and low strings always makes Charlie smile.

(And me too, but you knew that.)

Neurobiologists from Duke University have found that, in birds who are able to learn songs—parrots, songbirds and hummingbirds—the brain structures involved in singing are connected to those that control movement. Further the brain areas that control movement “share many functional similarities with the brain areas for singing. This suggests that the brain pathways used for vocal learning evolved out of the brain pathways used for motor control,” according to Science Daily. That is, the ability to control movement is linked to vocal learning; the researchers also suggest that the same holds for humans:

Human brain structures for speech also lie adjacent to, and even within, areas that control movement. “We can make a plausible argument that in humans, our spoken language areas also evolved out of pre-existing motor pathways,” he said. These pathways, he believes, date back to the common ancestor of reptiles, birds and mammals, creatures called stem amniotes that lived about 300 million years ago.

The results from birds are consistent with the hypothesis that spoken language was preceded by gestural language, or communication based on movements (one of several competing explanations for the origin of spoken language), [associate professor of neurobiology Erich] Jarvis adds. Both humans and chimps gesture with the limbs while communicating, and young children gesture even before they begin talking. “Gesturing is something that goes along naturally with speech. The brain areas used for gesturing may have been co-opted and used for speech,” Jarvis said.

My son Charlie first learned to communicate—to “talk”—via sign language taught to him by a speech therapy graduate student who first taught him to imitate simple gestures and then linked those to specific things (”cracker” and “chip”; I’ve written about this in a post entitled What If My Child Never Talks?). Somehow having to do some physical action (shaking his elbow, tapping the back of his hand—these aren’t the signs for “cracker” or “chip,” but modified signs the therapist made up for Charlie) helped Charlie to start communicating and expressing himself on his own, at a time when he was not able to say most of the sounds of English (at that time, the only sound Charlie said was “duh”). Just learning those few signs seemed to give Charlie a kind of confidence and peace and he slowly moved on to saying sounds and learning to link those to specific objects and things he wanted, like being carried.

And the experience taught me that, when it comes to communicating, there’s more than one way to do it (our then ABA consultant was against teaching Charlie sign language)—that words don’t say it all. Charlie talks in short sentences and phrases now; I still rely on his non-verbal sounds (like his warbling and humming and on his singing to communicate and “converse,” and to get a sense of how Charlie is feeling. Perhaps there’s more to being “bird brained” than ’tis thought.

A few weeks ago I posted about Trapper Leeth, whose parents have gotten approval to get him a therapy dog and now need to raise the funds. In Minnesota, 9-year-old Reece Trahan’s therapy dog, Pudge, just started to go to school with him, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports: He’s a school “aide” of a different, and essential (to Reece, who is non-verbal) kind.

Genetic and environmental factors are frequently cited as causes for autism (and, just to be upfront about it, the genetic studies best explain why my son is autistic). Three recent studies suggest that immunological factors ought also to be considered.

Earlier this month, two studies conducted by researchers at the University of California-Davis M.I.N.D. Institute suggested links between autism and mothers’ immune systems. According to one study, some cases of “regressive autism” (in which a child seems to be developing normally and then loses skills and becomes autistic, in contrast to “early onset autism”) may be connected to the immune systems of mothers during pregnancy; researchers hope to further study IgG antibodies as a potential factor for autism (IgG antibodies are responsible for long-term immune system responses to infection and can also contribute to autoimmune diseases such as arthritis, multiple sclerosis and lupus). Another study found that an interaction between fetal brain cells and antibodies in mothers’ blood could be linked to “stereotypies” such as flapping, toe-walking, spinning, and other repetitive behaviors often noted in autistic children.

A third study reported in the February 25th Science Daily has found that mothers of some autistic children may have produced antibodies during pregnancy that affected their fetus’ brain tissue. The antibodies crossed the placenta and may have caused changes that led to autism:

Mostly anecdotal past evidence of immune system involvement has emerged from unusual antibody levels in some autistic children and from postmortem brain tissue studies showing immune abnormalities in areas of the brain. Antibodies are proteins the body makes in response to viruses and bacteria or sometimes mistakenly against its own tissues. Yet, the majority of children with autism have no clinical evidence of autoimmune diseases, which prompted researchers to wonder whether the antibodies transferred from mother to child during pregnancy could interfere with the fetal brain directly.

To test their hypothesis, the research team used a technique called immunoblotting (or Western blot technology), in which antibodies derived from blood samples are exposed to adult and fetal brain tissue to check whether the antibodies recognize and react against specific brain proteins.

Comparing the antibody-brain interaction in samples obtained from 100 mothers of autistic children and 100 mothers of children without autism, researchers found either stronger reactivity or more areas of reactivity between antibodies and brain proteins in about 40 percent of the samples obtained from the mothers of autistic children. Further, the presence of maternal antibodies was associated with so-called developmental regression in children, increasingly immature behaviors that are a hallmark of autism.

While the findings suggest an association between autism and the presence of fetal brain antibodies, the investigators say further studies are needed to confirm that particular antibodies do indeed cross the placenta and cause damage to the fetal brain.

“The mere fact that a pregnant woman has antibodies against the fetal brain doesn’t mean she will have an autistic child,” [Harvey] Singer [M.D., director of pediatric neurology at Johns Hopkins Children's Center] says.

The new study will be published in the February issue of the Journal of Neuroimmunology.

Since these studies connecting maternal antibodies to autism are focused on the immune system of mothers, it will be interesting to see if there is a greater focus on how a mother’s health might affect her fetus and its development, and what this might have to do with autism.

Science fiction blog io9 considers what it would be like to have a Google brain implant:

In John Varley’s upcoming scifi novel Rolling Thunder, everyone has a brain implant that lets them google information constantly. And many futurists are saying this technology will become a reality long before we colonize Mars. The question isn’t whether we’ll have google brain implants (or the futuristic search engine equivalent), but how we’ll handle them. What exactly would be the plusses and minuses of being able to google information instantaneously in your head, without anybody knowing you’re doing it?

A google brain implant could work in lots of ways. With technology we have right now, people could wear a brain-computer interface helmet like the one sold by Emotiv, and use that to control the cursor on a wearable computer with a tiny monitor that’s attached to your classes. So the thing wouldn’t be implanted in your brain, but it would be responding to electrical signals from your brain. More sophisticated wearables like those described in Vernor Vinge’s novel Rainbow’s End might allow you to google via subtle movements of your body, and then display results in special contact lenses.

Animal science professor Temple Grandin has often described how she “thinks in pictures” and compared her thought processes to using Google to search the Internet the images. So perhaps the Googled, or Googling, mind already exists……

While I’m no graduate of Google U—and Google has been a helpful gateway to find information, for sure—I think there’s much to be said for the good old-fashioned skill of memorization. I do often find myself “Googling” some term or other to find out a date or some facts, but knowing that something is “stored in your brain”—”written on the soul,” as the Greek philosopher Plato puts it in the Phaedrus—-is as important as ever. I teach Latin and ancient Greek and learning both of these involves a fair amount of memorization of declensions and conjugations and grammatical rules: Surely there’s a reason we wonder at  Steven Wilshire who has a photographic memory of cityscapes, and Daniel Tammet reciting 22,514 digits of pi?

And there’s a reason I wonder about how Charlie has never forget the name or face of a teacher or therapist, and has been directing us “this way, this way” from the back seat of the car: He knows where he’s going.

Cogito ergo googlo……or maybe one ought to say, googlo ergo sum?