occurs right after the individual is moved to a new environment. The fear of getting one's ears blasted by the smoke alarm can trigger a tantrum. If a smoke alarm has previously gone off in the room, the individual may be afraid to go back into that room. The sight of a mobile phone may cause panic because it can ring at any time. Changing the ring tone may help. Fluorescent lights or some other stimuli that the person cannot tolerate are other possibilities.
Troubleshooting Guide for Challenging Behavior in Nonverbal Individuals
Step 1. Look for a painful, hidden medical problem.
Step 2. Look for a sensory reason.
Step 3. If 1 and 2 can be ruled out, look for the behavioral reasons for the challenging behavior.
There are three major behavioral motivators.
1. The person is attempting to communicate.
2. He/she is trying to get attention.
3. The person wants to escape from a task that he/she dislikes.
There are many good books available to help remedy problems with challenging behavior such as the Treasure Chest of Behavioral Strategies. Once you have figured out the motivation, you can develop a behavioral program. If communication is a problem, then the individual may need a communication system such as «Picture Exchange» or a picture board. If a desire for attention is the cause, then ignoring the behavior sometimes works. If the individual is attempting to escape from a task, you must make sure that a sensory sensitivity issue is not the true cause. If there is no sensory issue, then try quietly to direct the person back to the task or change the task to make it more appealing.
Other interventions that can be used are working with an occupational therapist to calm the nervous system and special diets and supplements. Some teenagers and adult individuals will need medication. Doctors must not make the mistake of giving more and more medication every time there is a crisis. A program of vigorous exercise also helps to calm the nervous system. A combination of medical, behavioral, and nutritional/biomedical approaches is usually best.
Fear Associations
A person with autism may panic when he/she sees some common, ordinary thing. Maybe a blue coat evokes fear because the fire alarm went off at the exact moment the blue coat was being put on. The coat then becomes associated with the fire alarm. Sensory-based fear associations are common in animals. I saw a horse that was afraid of black cowboy hats. White cowboy hats and ball caps caused no reactions. The horse feared black hats because he was looking at a black hat when he was abused. Another animal became afraid of the sound of a nylon jacket because it was associated with abuse. These fear memories are stored as pictures, sounds, smells, or touches. Since nonverbal people with autism are sensitive to smells, it is likely that a smell could become associated with an aversive stimulus such as sensory overload at a supermarket. The smell of a new detergent brought into the home could possibly become associated with a «meltdown» in the detergent aisle of a local supermarket.
The problem with severe fear memories is that they can never be erased from the person's memory. A person or animal can learn to overcome a fear. The brain does this by sending a signal down to the amygdale (emotion center) to close the «computer file» of the memory. The file can be closed but it cannot be deleted. In animals, fear memories have a nasty habit of popping back even after the animal has learned to get over its fear. This is especially a problem in high-strung, nervous animals. Sensitive nervous animals that get frightened easily such as Arabian horses can become so traumatized by severe abuse that they may never completely learn to get over their fears. Animals with calmer genetics have an easier time learning to close the file on a fear memory. Making fear memories permanent helps animals to survive in the wild. The ones that forget where they met a lion will not survive.
9
Artists and Accountants
Many people have been fascinated by the terrific feats of memorization of savants. According to Bernard Rimland, of the Autism Research Institute in San Diego, approximately 9 or 10 percent of people with autism have savant skills. Some are like calendar calculators who can tell you the day of the year for any date; others can perfectly play a piece of music they have heard only once. Another type can memorize every street in a city or every book in a library. There are also savants who can rapidly identify all the prime numbers in a list of numbers, even though they are incapable of doing basic arithmetic calculations. Hans Welling, a researcher in Portugal, speculates that mathematically weak savants may have a method for visually analyzing the symmetry of numbers, which would enable them to distinguish prime from nonprime numbers.
Savants are usually very impaired in learning other skills, such as socializing. One mother told me about her teenage savant son, who could do extraordinary computer programming but simply could not learn the meaning of money. Savants memorize huge amounts of information but have difficulty manipulating the material in meaningful ways. Their memory skills far exceed those of normal people, but their cognitive deficits are great. Some are incapable of making simple generalizations that cattle and other animals make easily.
It is no mystery how the autistic savant depicted in the movie Rain Man beat the casinos in Las Vegas and counted cards in the game of twenty-one. It was simply intense visualization and concentration. The only reason I can't count cards is that I can no longer concentrate intensely enough. My visualization skill has not changed, but I can no longer hold a single image steady for a long enough period of time. When I visualize equipment, I edit the images like a feature movie. I may visualize the system from a vantage point on the ground, but in the next instant I see it from another perspective. I am no longer able to hold a continuous video in my imagination. I would speculate that the true card-counting savant mind works like a video camera that is fixed to a tripod and continuously records the same scene. The vantage point of the savant's mind camera remains fixed for relatively long intervals. When the savant's concentration is locked onto one thing, it is difficult for him to shift attention. If a VCR could be plugged into his brain and his visual memories could be played on a TV, his memory would likely resemble a very long home movie taken from a single, stationary vantage point. This intense ability to hold an image constant may also contribute to the rigid and inflexible behavior of most savants.
What interests me most about autistic savants of the extreme type is that they do not satisfy one of Marian Stamp Dawkins's chief criteria for thinking. Dawkins, a researcher at the University of Oxford, is one of the few specialists who studies thinking in animals. She makes a clear distinction between instinctual behavior and true thinking. Similar to the main operating programs of a computer, instincts are behavior patterns that are programmed in the animal. Some instincts are hard-wired like computer hardware, and others can be modified by experience. An example of instinctual behavior is a calf following its mother. Animals are also capable of learning behavior that is not governed by instincts. For example, cows can quickly learn to line up for milking at 4:00 P.M.But cows lining up at milking time or running after a feed truck are simply responding to straightforward stimulus conditioning. Animals are also capable of learning simple rules of thumb. An animal can remember that he gets food when a green light turns on or he must jump a barrier to avoid a shock when a red light turns on. But to determine whether or not the animal is really thinking requires testing under novel conditions where he cannot use a simple rule of thumb. Numerous studies reviewed by Dawkins clearly indicate that animals can think and are capable of using previously learned information to solve problems presented under novel conditions. Animals have the ability to
