Fall is conference season, and Autism Conferences of America is holding its second New York City event Oct. 3rd and 4th. The theme is Educating and Healing Children with Autism, and featured speakers include Eustacia Cutler, mother of Temple Grandin. Cutler will speak about raising her extraordinary daughter at the opening talk on Saturday morning.
Other sessions will focus on special needs trusts, yoga for children with autism, evaluating communication skills in children with autistic spectrum disorders and biomedical treatments. Other speakers include David Kirby, author of “Evidence of Harm,” and Kim Stagliano, from the website Age of Autism, so there’s …read more

8-gold-medal swimmer Michael Phelps has ADHD: Did he succeed not so much in spite of having ADHD, but, in part, because he does?
Tara Parker-Pope on the New York Times Well blog posed this question. Allow me to rephrase it in terms of autism and (to refer to an oft-mentioned figure), animal scientist Temple Grandin.
Did Grandin succeed not so much in spite of being autistic, but because she is?
And as some will not doubt rush in to point out that Grandin is very “hfa,” I’ll note that some things that can make things very trying for more son—his intensive need for …read more

The National Institute of Mental Health calls off a study on chelation as a treatment for autistic children. Safety concerns are cited and it also needs to be noted that the reasons for using chelation to “treat” autistic children rest on an unproven hypothesis about autism causation, that autistic children have mercury and/or “heavy metals” in their body, from vaccines or something in vaccines or the environment.
Other news:

Move Over, Cupcake
The votes are in for brownies around here.
What It’s Like: Life with Charlie and a Poem (and the VICP)
“Simile” is the title of one of my favorite poems from Line …read more

Performing Arts Studio West provides training and management for developmentally disabled individuals. The September 18th KNBC features PASW and some of the actors who train there (with video, too). It’s noted that founder and director John Paizis would “like to see the industry begin to cast disabled actors in non-disabled parts, and PASW will continue to provide training and — perhaps more importantly — encouragement.” A couple of weeks ago, it was announced that actress Claire Danes is to play Temple Grandin in an HBO biopic: But maybe some other actress (an autistic actress?) ought to take the part?

Charlie and I caught the PATH train in Jersey City and got off at 23rd Street in Manhattan. We usually take it all the way to the end at 33rd Street where we catch a subway up to where Jim’s office is near Lincoln Center and get some dinner together but Friday night was different. Philosopher Ian Hacking, Professor Emeritus of the College de France, was giving a lecture on How We Have Been Learning to Talk About Autism as a keynote lecture for a conference, Cognitive Disability: A Challenge to Moral Philosophy. The conference’s stated aim was to explore
philosophical …read more

Be warned. This post contains a disparate slew of references to martial arts (kind of in a Kung Fu Panda vein); chocolate (M & M’s, even); the use of the r word in Tropic Thunder; Thailand; lots of flies. (And autism, but you knew that.)
No, we didn’t once again see Po the Panda executing his moves against an opponent to get that last pad thai noodle or chocolate bar, with insects buzzing in the background. All the items listed in the first paragraph appear in Chocolate, a martial arts movie from Thailand with an autistic heroine who really knows how …read more

First, I must confess: I was very fond of My So-Called Life, the TV show that brought actress Claire Danes to fame, and that only lasted (sigh) one season. For better and for worse, I still channel “Angela Chase” and hear that voice of teenage girl discontent on seeing Danes’s name—-so now I’m not quite sure how to think of Danes playing autistic scientist Temple Grandin in an HBO biopic. A commenter offers some leading questions about Danes in this role and the August 15th New York Magazine asks about how she’ll be “playing the autistic” in the context of …read more

HBO is planning a biopic of autistic author and animal expert Temple Grandin starring……….Claire Danes, Reuters reports, who would follow in the footsteps of Sigourney Weaver (Snowcake) and Dustin Hoffman (Rain Man) in playing an autistic character. The movie has been nine years in the making. My so-called autistic life?

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 …read more

Are animals autistic savants? ask researchers Giorgio Vallortigara et al. in the February 19th PLoS Biology. Yes, indeed says Temple Grandin in her 2005 book, Animals in Translation: Animals and autistic savants—who have extraordinary skills in certain areas, and especially in mathematics, music and drawing—both have “extreme cognitive skills” and also “think in detail” based on their processing of sensory-based data. Vallortigara et al consider these claims from the perspective of specialists in animal cognition and critique what Grandin says:
We argue that animals, like nonautistic humans, process sensory information according to rules, and that this manner of processing is …read more