NY Times: "The Little Professor Syndrome" – Kids With Asperger’s

"They talk like adults and often have sky-high I.Q.'s, but their social skills are nonexistent. Can kids with Asperger's syndrome, a recently diagnosed form of autism, harvest their strange talents in adulthood?" See this piece plucked from the prestigious Sunday NY Times Magazine by Lawrence Osborne. Thanks to Monica Moshenko and Arlene Minkoff.]

http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20000618mag-asperger.html

 A round a circular classroom table, five 6-year-old boys are drawing pictures of blue whales with crayons. Mozart's "Requiem" pipes away on a nearby cassette player; by the window, a group of sunlit bean-bag chairs looks inviting. One of the children, Asa, is turning out a waxy masterpiece with the meticulous care of a jeweler. The fins and tail of Asa's whale, who is jumping out of the water, have been drawn with striking precision; a dialogue bubble percolates from its mouth. "Wow!" the whale is shouting. "Look at him -- he's psyched," the bespectacled Asa says in a curiously expressionless voice. " He's so happy to be out of the water and turning double somersaults that he can't stop talking." The teacher, Lauren Cacciabaudo, asks each boy how he has managed his day.

"How was your sitting, Henry?" she says to one boy.

"Three," little Henry says, giving himself a grade from 1 to 3.

"Nice sitting, Henry! How about focusing, Jean Paul?"

"Three."

"Nice focusing, Jean Paul. What about looking in the eye, Asa?"

"Three."

"Nice eye contact, Asa!"

Glued onto the surface of the classroom table are pairs of cut-out handprints. Frequently, Cacciabaudo asks the boys to put their hands on these prints and keep them still. For there is a flitting energy of restless birds about these boys, even though not one of them looks up to inspect the stranger sitting in their midst. Instead, they fixate on a colorful pencil I have just bought at the Guggenheim gift shop. Bright green, it sports an elephant's head with felt ears on a mountable spring. The boys are mesmerized.

"Where did you get that?"

"How old is that elephant?"

They bounce the elephant's head back and forth, sticking their fingers into its grasping mouth.

"It's prehensile!" Asa coos.

At first glance, this brightly decorated room is no different from that of any other elementary school. Shelves are filled with storybooks; on the chalkboard, a vertical line of words reads "prudence," "pretzel," "prairie," "purple." But the nervous agitation of the boys' hands, punctuated by occasional odd flapping gestures, betrays the fact that something is off kilter. There is also a curious poster on one of the walls with a circle of human faces annotated with words like "sad," "proud" and "lonely." When I ask Cacciabaudo about it, she explains that her students do not know how to read the basic expressions of the human face. Instead, they must learn them by rote.

The boys in this Manhattan classroom, part of a special education school run in association with the New York League for Early Learning, all have a mysterious condition known as Asperger's syndrome -- a neurological disorder that disproportionately affects males and is often connected to a striking precosity with language. The Learning Disabilities Association of America defines Asperger's syndrome as "a severe developmental disorder characterized by major difficulties in social interaction and restricted and unusual patterns of interest and behavior." Although sufferers display behaviors associated with autism -- monotonic speech, social isolation, a paucity of empathy -- they are not mute or incapacitated. Indeed, the outsize vocabularies of children with Asperger's often make them seem less disabled than gifted. In the United States, the syndrome was only made official among psychologists by entry into the D.S.M.-IV, or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, in 1994.

The precise relationship between Asperger's and autism remains to be untangled. Dr. Richard Perry, a child psychiatrist at N.Y.U. Medical Center, argues that Asperger's syndrome shares a basic triad of dysfunctions with autism: problems with social interaction, with communication and with play.

Both types of children, he says, have perplexing difficulties in "reading" human social signals like facial expressions and dealing with the nuanced to-and-fro of ordinary conversations. "For some reason we don't yet fully understand," he explains, "Asperger's kids cannot decipher basic visual social signals. This leads people to see them as emotionally disturbed."

Or brilliant. For the flip side of this somber picture is a recognition that Asperger's sufferers may also have extraordinary gifts. Consider Glenn Gould. The eccentric Canadian pianist, who died in 1982 and who retired from the concert circuit at age 31, was notorious for his bizarre behavior: he had a phobia about shaking hands, ate nothing but scrambled eggs and arrowroot biscuits and rocked incessantly at the keyboard. At the same time, Gould's obsessive focus and prodigious memory helped give his legendary renderings of Bach their burning intensity. Might Gould have been an Asperger's sufferer? Timothy Maloney, a musicologist who manages the Gould archives, suggested precisely that at a recent academic conference.

Others scholars have retroactively applied the Asperger's label to oddball intellectuals ranging from Vladimir Nabokov to Béla Bartok to Ludwig Wittgenstein. Nabokov's hypertrophied vocabulary and obsession with butterflies, some say, may qualify him for the disorder (though an equally focused obsession with nymphs seems somewhat less incriminating). Such claims may be dubious, and probably infuriating to lepidopterists, but the argument is seductive to many: could the very qualities that make Asperger's people so strange lie at the root of their peculiar talents?

This sense of potential explains why kids with Asperger's are being grouped together in special-ed classrooms. "If you look at these children, you can see at once that they don't have classical autism," says Jeanne Angus, director of the New York League school, who stops by Cacciabaudo's class for a visit. "They're normal in so many ways. They're often very sweet. And they're often amazingly precocious, with sky-high I.Q.'s. But look closer and you'll see cracks. Many of them have had appalling difficulties in the regular school system."

Those difficulties include temper tantrums and erratic behavior that can unnerve the most strong-willed teacher. Angus nods toward Asa. "When he first came here, he would roll around the floor all the time, just to get a feel for its texture." The boy had no idea that this was inappropriate. "The thing is," she goes on, "everything has to be taught to them -- everything.

When you ask them at first, 'How do you do?' they will say something like, 'Why do you want to know?' They simply don't understand social games." It is an impression of anarchic solitude that is often reinforced by the tendency of Asperger's children to have obsessional interests. Angus tells me that Michael, one of the boys in the class, had a fixation with tornados when he first arrived at the school. "He knew everything about them. The statistics, the G forces, the wind velocities. He was like a videocassette about tornados, which he could rewind and play over and over. He was using technical terms I've never even heard of. And he was 5!" Michael also behaved like a tornado, whirling round the room and tearing everything up.

Other children have sometimes bizarre fixations. They will memorize entire TV shows and recite them over and over (an ability known as perseverative scripting). Other times, they specialize in memorizing everything there is to know about the oddest things: deep-fat fryers, telephone cable insulating companies, the passengers on the Titanic, exotic species of cicadas, the provincial capitals of Brazil. In one documented case, a child memorized the birthdays of every member of Congress.

Needless to say, these obsessions are deeply unsettling to parents.

"Just imagine," says Fred Volkmar, a child psychiatrist at the Yale Child Study Center, which is conducting the nation's largest research project on Asperger's syndrome. "You walk into a hamburger joint and your 5-year-old suddenly points at the fryer machine and cries, 'That's a Sigma Model 3000!'

What do you say?" It is a confusion that is compounded by the linguistic precosity of Asperger's children. "Up to the age of 3," Richard Perry says, "Asperger's syndrome and autism are very similar. But then the former begin to talk. And how!"

Unlike the linguistically impaired autistics of the type depicted in the movie "Rain Man," Asperger's children talk like little professors. "They seem brilliant because they have this language," Volkmar says. "But in reality, it's fact-obsessed, fact-oriented. It's rigid and insular. It's not a social brilliance. Usually, their social interactions are a disaster."

And according to Perry, this has been precisely the predicament of Asperger's children in the past. "Frequently," he says, "they have been misdiagnosed because they're almost normal. They almost blend in, but not quite. That's their tragedy." "They are," says one parent at the Manhattan school, "perfect counterfeit bills."

This baffling syndrome was originally diagnosed a half-century ago by the Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger. In 1944, Asperger published his postgraduate thesis, "Autistic Psychopathy' in Childhood," which described many of the symptoms of the syndrome and ascribed a genetic basis for them. But Asperger refused to label children with a heavy psychiatric hand. Autism, he argued, was not a straightforward fate; the condition could be ameliorated through "pedagogical methods." 

~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~
Our POSTER is ANITA SANDS HERNANDEZ, Los Angeles Writer, Futurist and Astrologer. Catch up with her websites  TRUTHS GOV WILL HIDE & NEVER TELL YOU, also The  FUTURE, WHAT'S COMIN' AT YA! & HOW TO SURVIVE the COMING GREAT DEPRESSION, and Secrets of Nature, HOLISTIC, AFFORDABLE HEALING. Also HOW TO LIVE on A NICKLE, The FRUGAL PAGE.  * Anita is at astrology@earthlink.net ). Get a 35$ natal horoscope "my money/future life" reading now + copy horoscope as a Gif file graphic!

<=== BACK TO TRACKING THE ECONOMY, an INDEX PAGE

<===BACK TO MONEY SECRETS ONLY THE EXPERTS KNOW

<=== BACK TO SECRETS THE GOV DOES NOT WANT YOU TO KNOW

<------ BACK TO THE COMING EVEN BIGGER MELTDOWN INDEX.

<=== SHOW ME THE FIX INDEX PAGE.

 <== SHOW ME THE HAPPY R)EVOLUTION PAGE

<=== BACK TO "GUERILLA CAPITALISM" -- THE SOLUTION!

<=== BACK TO REAL CAUSES OF THE MELTDOWN -- a WEBPAGE

<------BACK TO THE VULTURE SANDWICH, WORLD STARVATION INDEX PAGE

<===BACK TO THE TAXES WE SEE AND THE TAXES WE DON'T SEE INDEX

<------ BACK TO HOW TO STEAL A CORPORATION FROM THE STOCKHOLDERS

<===BACK TO HOW TO GARDEN to SURVIVE

<=== BACK TO THE AMBITION INDEX PAGE

<==  BACK TO THE FRUGAL LIFESTYLE TIPS INDEX

           <=== HOW TO START YOUR OWN CHARITY & FUNDRAISE with a FUN PARTY!

            <=== BACK TO ACTIVIST HEROES -- the WEBSITE

            <=== THE VULTURE SANDWICH, HOW TO START A CHARITY, GET YOURSELF AN ANNUAL SALARY FOR IT!

<=== BACK TO THE SECRETS OLIGARCHS HIDE FROM YOU

<== BACK TO THE SNOOKERED INDEX, HOW NOT TO BE ROBBED AND WHO WILL TRY!!

* * * * * * * *