Welcome to From the Spectrum Podcast. This is a podcast about autism. It is my goal to explain what is autism.
I plan to use a mixture of scientific literature, personal experience, and opinion. With opinion, I will explain why. I will fill the way I do and give examples.
I will provide links to various references for each episode. For each episode, we will discuss various aspects of autism.
Erwin Schrodinger on Canner said,
Canner thought what nobody has yet thought about that which everybody sees.
This quote is fascinating in several ways.
One, it's true, autism broke away eventually from schizophrenia and Canner saw that.
But two, Schrodinger also saw what people are currently overlooking in health and autism.
That is, quantum theory, thermodynamics, entropy, and so forth, and cell biology, including the mitochondria.
This connection of Canner, Schrodinger and autism is amazing to me.
And please note, to my knowledge, was not directly involved with studying autism.
Yet, Schrodinger's work is along the lines that autism research avoids, and modern health and medicine avoids.
Big problems. And you know it to be big problems because everything we're doing in health and autism research, everything is kind of stuck.
Nothing's changing. Yet, the only change is it's negative, it's worsening.
However, the light and Earth's electromagnetic fields and cell biology sell respiration and development.
Much of what Schrodinger studies is the missing link.
In addition, Schrodinger called out theories on genetics early on.
I think because he knew the environmental signals of the living organisms are superior to those genetic make-ups.
For today's episode, we will cover Canner's case studies and the earliest autistic phenotypes from autistic disturbances of effective contact.
Basic demographics of the case studies.
11 children were studied, 8 male and 3 girls, so very similar representation of autism in 2024.
Mean age, just under 5 years old, 4 years and just into the 11th month, so a couple of weeks shy of exactly 5 years old, further average.
The youngest was John F. at 2 years and 4 months, and the oldest was Virginia S. at 11 years old.
Here's something very fascinating to me.
Mean age of the 3 girls is 8 years and about 9 months.
The mean age of the 8 boys is 3 and a half years old.
Big difference here.
8 of the 11 had typical or a slight delay, at worst, with their ability to speak.
There are 3 total nonverbal.
Ecolalia, present in most speaking autistics in the study.
Their vocabulary lacked, and it appears that it, largely based on how the children repeated words and phrases.
Some family history.
This is an interesting consideration.
First, Leo Canner was at John Hopkins.
All children came from highly intelligent and successful families.
The fathers of the children include 4 psychiatrists, 1 lawyer, 1 chemist, that is a law school graduate as well,
1 plant pathologist, 1 professor of forestry,
1 advertising copywriter that has connections to 3 universities and attended law school,
and a mining engineer, and 1 successful businessman.
In addition, 9 of the 11 mothers were college graduates.
The 2 without college degrees had successful jobs in their communities.
1 mother was a freelance writer, 1 a physician, 1 a psychologist, 1 a graduate nurse,
and 1 purchasing agent and director of a girl school and a teacher of history.
To no surprise, the grandparents had tremendous success too, as physicians, scientists, writers, and artists.
All but 3 of the families were featured in Husu and America, or in American Men of Science, or even both.
I say the family history to say this.
This is why I want to bring up this family history.
You know my direction with artificial light as the cause of autism.
These families had generations deep, were capable to equip their homes with plenty of electricity and modern accommodations,
modern for that era.
Non-native EMF, such as artificial light, must be involved with these families as early as it became available.
We will never really know. However, we do know how human biology, how living organisms use light for life, undisputed.
And finally, for the family history, there were various religions and birthing orders exist for these children and their families.
Some general observations. From the start, from birth, or from the earliest recognition from the parents,
there is an extreme autistic aloneness that, whenever possible, disregards, ignores, and shuts out anything that comes to the child from the outside.
Common observations and descriptions from parents include, they're self-sufficient, like in a shell, happiest when left alone, acting as if people weren't there,
perfectly oblivious to everything around them, giving the impression of silent wisdom,
failing to develop the usual amount of social awareness, acting as if hypnotized.
Those are lacking and even caring about adaptive responses. Something inside of us is more important, likely safer and more interesting, and so forth.
So some sensory observations from the 11 children. Direct physical contact or motion or noise as threats to disrupt the aloneliness is either treated as if it weren't there, or, if this is no longer sufficient,
resented painfully as distressing interference. Autistics, these children, and it's still true today, we don't like things interrupting, interfering.
Don't interrupt or interfere with aloneness. Something called anticipatory motor adjustment.
Okay, this isn't my thing. Can you're highlighted? It seems to be part of the medical paradigm as a developmental milestone.
Maybe it still is. Again, this is not my area. I do know we have unique and incredible reflexes. Of course, these are innate.
For instance, humans, when they turn their heads to the side, only the head turns.
Let's say, turn it to the left or to the right. Your eyes turn the opposite way.
Turn your head to the right. The eyes move to the left or vice versa. It intends to stabilize the visual inputs.
I learned this from David Berson, who is part of the melanopsin and rabbidomeric opsin sequencing.
This opposite movement with our heads and eyes is the same thing that pigeons do when they ambulate, when they move their head back as they move forward.
This is what pigeons are doing. They're stabilizing their visual inputs.
Okay, that was a side track, but valuable information and too incredible not to mention. Back to this so-called anticipatory motor adjustment.
Autistics could not do this until ages two or three. Typical age for this, this occurs at four months.
It is when the infant makes motor adjustments in anticipation of being picked up or while being picked up and transitioned into being held and so forth.
And the infants make bodily adjustments while being held.
For the autistics, this occurred about at 38 months on average. Big difference.
Loud noises and moving objects. It is not so much the external happenings in the environment.
The vacuum cleaner, running water, elevators, escalators. My son was terrified of escalators.
Other examples, mechanical toys. It is though things interfering with the child's internal world and the aloneness of that internal world.
Meaning the autistic infant or child. It's more of how are those things being entangled into the autistic's world.
Space and time or spatial temporal is fascinating.
With those noises and motions. More on these adaptive responses that we discuss so frequently.
Remember the altered brain connectivity to the medial prefrontal cortex and in and out of the medial.
And lacking that ability to adaptive respond to society as the living organism navigates their world.
This is a big flaw. Disfunction and autism.
Just a brief way to describe autistic phenotype is a lack of adaptive responses.
These noises and motions are similar to our speech and language.
And something labeled monotonously repetitions.
A lot of limited adaptive responses lacking skills for responding.
Everything stays the same.
A significant part of this paper is sameness. Aloneness and sameness.
Remember inflexibility through rules. Rules are rules. And don't limit this with deliberate rule breaking.
But add and consider accidents or indirect or naturally occurring phenomena that catches the autistic phenotypes attention.
Naturally occurring human nature items. For instance a child noticed a crack in an office ceiling.
And got hitched with asking anxiously and repeatedly what happened to the ceiling.
The child couldn't make sense of it happening.
The drywall becoming worn and damaged.
Canary labeled a phenomenon as limitation in the variety of spontaneous activity.
Physical phenomena is the outside world. Must be congruent with the experience and memory stored in the autistic.
More and more explanation of adaptive responses.
Here canner also captures an interesting phenomena with autism.
The conundrum of language and spelling.
These things have unusual rules. Many autistics have this phenotype.
Why is there a W and not a double N?
For Donald Triplett, young Donald had excellent observations such as being disturbed with spelling light L I G H T and bite B I T.
I remember move and movie in the third grades were very confusing to me.
Spelling is very difficult. I confuse spell checker a lot.
The red dotted lines will say no replacement found.
The sameness phenomena is B2.
My belief is B2. This is so strong.
This anxiously obsessive desire for the maintenance of sameness.
As canner described.
This barricades our B3. Restricted fixated interest.
It protects this and allows that abnormal intensity or focus.
We very much want to be here in the world, in our world.
The children had difficulties with unlearning incorrect language associations.
They would learn a word by associating it with something in the environment.
Canner described language as parrot like repetitions and described immediate and delayed echolalia.
Personal pronoun use was difficult.
Example, the children would often call themselves your.
Your is what the speaker would use during conveying speech and language to the child.
This would last until about six years old. The children would refer to themselves as you.
Not I or me.
Here is a big one for me. Something society confuses itself with.
Often it took many repeats, reiterations of a question or command before the autistic child would even echo a slight response.
Seven, seven of the eleven were considered deaf or hard of hearing.
The verbal conveyance into the child's inner world is often considered a dreadful intrusion.
Now, one, think ADHD in today's society.
It's not autism and ADHD.
It's just the autism.
And two, I have this phenomenon and it is an intrusion.
As far back as I could remember, this has implicated me.
The competing factors of sensory processing, those external cues.
The interference of those intense internal fixations, thinking in pictures.
The clashing of the so-called default mode networks.
The ringing of the ears.
If you want to imagine throbbing in your ears, that's the physical phenomenon I would describe.
It's frustrating, interfering, mostly uninteresting.
An effort is given to avoid that, to minimize that.
The biggest question and consideration ought to be this.
Not.
Not that this does not happen, but is one thing cause or implicate other behaviors.
It is the intense fixations and we learn to stay here.
We learn to stay in our exciting and safe inner world.
Remember the default mode network episode?
This is innate from birth or learned.
Is it a connectivity problem?
On a timeline, when do these separate phenomena occur?
This is a prominent question of mine.
Disruption to sameness, no matter how trivial, invite distress and even tantrums.
Relation to objects, objects must do what they are intended to do.
Objects are far superior as a source of attention than people.
The relation to people is no surprise, different from objects.
All 11 children preferred objects over human interaction.
The adults had to repeat insistently as Kenner used and the child then participated with getting it over with.
Just go ahead and answer and respond, participate in the social interaction to get it over with.
The children would return and the humans and their conversations were no different than the furniture in the room.
The children had no interest.
For people, the autistic children show different behaviors and abilities between real people and interaction versus pictures of people.
Meaning pictures of people could elicit interest.
Our conversations about the differences in oxytocin could be involved here.
Remember the differences of oxytocin, biosynthesis, the differences of magnosecular and parvocellular.
Plus the obvious sensory and prediction, those social implications common with autism and understanding autism.
Okay, interference and forced interaction gave a response of outbursts and frustration.
This helps explain my words on B2 that same this and B3, the restricted fixated interest that are abnormal in intensity and focus.
That schedule, disruption and interference cause great frustration.
An interesting observation noted in Kenner from the parents and this is me, I share this and I've mentioned it in previous episodes.
Children were oblivious to others in the area.
Okay, so this is not news. This is well recognized and understood.
The children would drift away from the group, leaving the area and navigate towards more seclusion and isolation.
Recently, it's becoming almost more and more, it seems like, that little autistic children in 2024 are just drifting off, going missing.
This is a very serious situation.
Remember my comments on just leaving family gatherings or social events? I just want to go.
Another interesting component is, despite little to no interaction or involvement and seemingly being distant to others,
seemingly based on other people's perceptions, their thoughts of the autistic children,
despite little interaction and social awareness, autistic children still knew names and details of others.
A couple of hard stops here, we don't need the so-called social norms to be paying attention.
Our attention methods are just different, perhaps even more efficient but different.
Certainly not lacking, so know this, know that.
Second, modern humans, adults and children, especially children, this is considered inattentive.
ADHD or ADD, wrong, it is autism.
Stop this madness of diagnosing smorgasbord, it is harmful and inaccurate.
Modern humans try to make sense of things, well all humans do and this probably always happened.
We try to make sense of something and then get hitched on it. This prevents our critical thinking.
We see somebody not paying attention, oh so they're inattentive so they have ADHD or ADD.
This is false.
At times this could just be the autism.
That is as complicated for you to understand, maybe. But critical thinking and comfort are anti-correlated.
Just because it might offend your beliefs, just because you might need something more than somebody not paying attention in social settings
or not paying attention to you directly, you might think or you might need to attach, oh that's ADHD for the comfort of yourself.
Be cautious of that.
Memories are strong for sameness.
An example in Kanner's case studies is John, who moved and had movers involved in the process of packing up and transitioning to the new house.
This was difficult and anxiety ridden.
As soon as the new house was furnished and arranged similarly to John's old house, it was easy to see his comfort return as he showed affection to the previous items.
However, more specifically, in data that shows more repetitions besides the one example of moving,
John had great memory for the toy arrangements.
Often immediately noticing slight nuance changes, followed by an imperative demand to return the familiar and preferred arrangement
and organization to return to John's stored memories.
So here, understanding play and social interactions are big.
And if needed, my examples of childhood also remember the relationships between B3 and B2.
It's not uncommon for you to know that autistics can capture or pick out spot some slight inaccuracies with things.
We see patterns.
This is a wonderful source of superpowers of something the autistic community can do.
Can do in their life for a profession to be a professional at this.
And as you know more and more about neuroplasticity and our memory, all humans memory, and how this is ingrained or entangled into us as we move across lifespans.
Just understand all the harms that are kind of decapitating to the autistic phenotype living decades and all their life battling these things from the outside.
Canner highlighted excellent rote memory and this is still true today. These are all autistic phenotypes from the 30s and 40s still true today.
However, how it was viewed back then versus now, I believe has changed.
Okay, so GI, this is a very interesting similarity.
Food, GI is obviously a condition always with autism and still today.
Remember the autism and gastrointestinal problems episode and all that biology we discussed and how light is driving this, driving this development of the enteric nervous system.
Those enterochromathin cells, there's a lot going on here that are very critical for human development and human well being.
One of the first so-called intrusions of the infants and the canner paper is food.
Six had severe feeding problems their first year of life.
Something to highlight and consider autism and this gastrointestinal problems or it dyspraxia or speech and language problems or whatever the cause.
All of these are just downstream phenotypes of something not developing properly.
And that brings us to something frustrating for me, something frustrating from the autistic science or this autistic research and the community that is autism and XYZ, autism and blank and blank.
Many had autism and XYZ in the canner paper and different extremes of autism.
The spectrum of obsessiveness and stereotypy and ecolalia represents modern autism.
Canner acknowledges childhood schizophrenia and various dementias based on desectus and heller.
Canner highlights the autistic children have the autistic phenotypes since birth.
Second, the autistic children were capable of establishing and maintaining purposeful and intelligent two objects.
These fixations and sources of accelerated learning is a benefit with autism.
These separated the other types of conditions or disorders of the time.
This is why canner and Asperger were able to discriminate the differences with autism or Aspergers with other conditions.
Okay, some interesting timelines kind of captured in the canner paper.
Ages five to six was ecolalia improves and the language more communicative is better.
Children, they could ask questions and answers.
They would answer questions and be able to communicate and form sentences better and food acceptance improved.
Noises and motions are less severe, more tolerated.
Panic and tantrums reduced some social interaction instead of completely avoiding and being disruptive.
The children began to learn to take care of the interaction to finish it more quickly and return to their fixations or their objects.
That is wonderful observations made in the paper and this is me as well.
This is probably 100% of autism.
I think this is a form of learning neuroplasticity seen and experienced on mass scales of autistics.
This will likely never change our purpose.
Get it over with minimize the interaction and interferences so we can carry on.
Ages six through eight children began to play within a group but not with the group but alongside a group.
In ages nine through 11 they still have a strong desire for aloneness and sameness.
Those are the two big highlights of the canner paper for autistic phenotypes.
Aloneness and sameness.
Now you can feed those into the fixated interest that are abnormal in intensity or focus.
If you are listening to the episode or listening to the podcast please feel free to leave a review or rating.
In podcast reviews, ratings and downloads are huge and I very much appreciate your feedback.
You can contact me on X at RPS 47586 or through the hop link where you have access to all the platforms and contact information.
You can email me info.fromthespectrum.com.
Thank you for listening to From the Spectrum Podcast.