Legwork and Life, week of 3/6/19

Posted on by Realistic Autistic
This is Legwork and Life, where I track the legwork and opportunities in my career as an autistic advocate, and also describe parts of my adult autistic life, including my perspectives on everyday problems and situations.

Hello from surprisingly low-pain town.  I had a wisdom tooth removed.  My first such surgery, and only one I\’ll need.  My dad is a mutant and had no wisdom teeth, and I got most of his lucky genes for this particular aspect of development.  To add to my luck, the tooth that had to come out was an upper tooth, and wasn\’t impacted or otherwise complicated.  Very much a grab and yank situation, whereas with the lower jaw, you kind of have to chisel the teeth out.  Funnily enough, the doctor did grumble a bit about how tough my bones are.  I guess that gave him some annoyance while trying to extract the tooth.  Still funny to me.  

I do have a really nice bruise on my face from the local anesthesia injections.  It was relatively faint for a couple days but appears to be getting darker and more visible despite my yellow-toned skin.  I\’m guessing that\’s because I\’m insisting on using my jaw now.  The recovery and care instructions insist that I brush my teeth and such, and I\’ve been wanting to eat more than pudding and very soft foods, so I\’ve needed to open my jaw wider than a half-inch to accommodate that.  Hopefully that\’ll go away soon.

I was awake for the surgery, and it actually taught me something kind of interesting about my system.  You see, when they administered the local anesthesia, it came mixed with epinephrine… also known as adrenaline.  The helper person warned me I might feel my heart race, and not to worry.  I did not feel my heart race or my mind try to panic.  In fact, the only major difference I could detect was the shaking of my hands.  I had serious trouble completing my Picross puzzle.  I normally have some shake in my hands, but it gets markedly worse if something is immediately panicking me.  

This reminded me of a theory I read years ago regarding deer, humans, and human society.  Deer have two modes: calm and upset.  They mainly live in calm, unless predators or some kind of threat occurs.  At which point they switch to upset, and fight or flight their way through the situation until they\’re out of it.  After which they switch back to calm.  

Humans used to work similarly.  When threats occurred, we fight/flighted to deal with them and then returned to being calm.  The theory goes that as human society developed, we also developed things that register as a threat but can\’t be dealt with appropriately using fight/flight.  Money problems and angry bosses at work, for example.  These situations put us into fight or flight mode, but because they can\’t be dealt with so simply, we can get stuck in fight/flight instead of returning to calm.  

The theory posits that this is part of where depression and anxiety come from, and possibly other forms of mental illness as well.  Heart disease, poor sleep, and other physical symptoms follow as well.  Living \”on edge\” all the time has costs to your mental and emotional health, after all.  

This is the basis of many mindfulness programs.  The idea is to bring yourself back to the calm state, into the present where your boss isn\’t immediately angry at you, and your money problems can wait to be handled until you get home.  It\’s not that you start ignoring the past and the future, so much as that you take time sometimes to be in the present.  A reasonable number of people swear by meditation and various forms of mindfulness.  

The fact that I barely noticed the effects of medically administered adrenaline, other than in regards to how well I could play a puzzle game on my tablet, strongly suggests to me that I might be stuck in fight/flight more often than not.  

I have had a very hard time with meditation in the past, to the point where it kind of felt like my thoughts were just bouncing around inside my skull, screaming to get out.  Finding calm and quiet inside myself has always been easiest for me when actively engaged in something, whether that\’s reading, writing, doing puzzles, or playing a video game.  I struggle with it otherwise.  

Unfortunately, \”otherwise\” might well be what I need to be healthier.  It\’d be rather notable if I managed to learn and practice meditation and found that it made my hands stop shaking entirely.  

Reading the Research: Thought-To-Speech

Posted on by Realistic Autistic
Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.

Today\’s article describes a really exciting potential breakthrough in assistive technology: thought-to-speech interfaces.  I\’ve seen various forms of this over the last few years, which is good.  I\’d actually theorized, back in college, that something similar could be done, but wasn\’t really in a place in my life where it was feasible to research it.  Essentially, the person is hooked up to a computer, which has been taught how to recognize the approximate \”sound\” of a word or number, in brainwaves.  You can thusly think a word, and have the computer say it for you.  

While this sounds like a fun party trick for most people, it\’s life-changing for people with cerebral palsy and epilepsy.  Nonspeaking autistic people, and those with difficulty forming words due to muscle control issues, might be able to harness this as well.  Instead of struggling to form words using their vocal cords, a person might don an apparatus (or have an implant installed) and simply make their smartphone talk for them.   We already have text-to-speech apps.  If the words could be inputted via thought, it\’s a very simple matter to have a program read the words aloud.  All without requiring the fine motor coordination to use a keyboard or some other specialized input system.

I was talking about this with a friend of mine, and he noted that such a thing would probably need some kind of push-to-talk option.  Otherwise the device is likely to try to translate random brain noise and or even thoughts not meant to be read aloud.  I\’m not 100% sure how big an issue that would be for everyone, due to differences in the way people think.

I\’ve noted before that I don\’t think in words, but rather some mixture of images, short video clips, sensations, and music.  I somehow don\’t think that\’ll translate into words very well.  At least not immediately.  Possibly someday we could picture something in our minds and have it show up on a screen.  Whole diagrams and such could be made much quicker that way.  I expect using such an interface would a skill in its own right.  Still, it\’d replace CAD software, and people train to use that.

Honestly, even as a person without speech impediments and physical disabilities, I\’d probably try to learn this software.  I actually can\’t stand to physically write my thoughts down on paper because of how long it takes to shape each word legibly.  I loved having access to a keyboard and word processing program because it allowed me to write my thoughts so much faster.  Imagine if I could simply write my blog posts as fast as I could think them!  It\’s a technology I\’d love to have.

(Pst! If you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, visit my Twitter, which has links and brief comments on studies that were interesting, but didn\’t get a whole Reading the Research article about them.)

Worth Your Read/Watch: Deej

Posted on by Realistic Autistic
http://bloom-parentingkidswithdisabilities.blogspot.com/2018/05/deej-upends-what-you-think-you-know.html

Lacking speech does not mean lacking intelligence, or capability, or humanity.

This seems like such an obvious thing to say.  Thing is, it’s not.  Speech is the single most common communication method for humans.  It’s taken for granted that you can and will communicate via speech at a moment’s notice.  If you can’t express yourself “normally” via speech, people automatically relegate you to a rung normally occupied by pets and very small children.

Deej, the interviewee in this article, knows this far better than anyone I’ve ever met.  He suggests, in the article, asking neurotypical people why it is that speech is associated with humanity.

I’m not NT, and never will be… but I would guess that it’s because it’s one of the things we as a species think separates us from other animals.  It’s one of those age-old assumptions, that speech is what makes for sentience, and therefore because humans have speech and language, we are superior to all other animals.  (Also unstated, therefore humans lacking speech aren’t sentient and therefore aren’t human.)

It’s false, of course.  Language as we recognize it may be a specifically human form of communication, but it doesn’t make or break a person’s humanity.  Deej shows us this clearly, in this interview and in his movie.  He is fully human.  No ifs, ands, or buts about it.

I have never been physically disabled or had any extended period of time where I couldn’t speak.  But a few lines from a YA science fiction series comes to mind.  A character in the story has a pretty severe case of cerebral palsy.  He generally can’t speak a single word without a lot of effort.  In the story, he gains the ability to communicate using telepathy.  While using this ability, he comments, “You know what hell on Earth is?  Having a large vocabulary, an encyclopedic knowledge of musical theater, and a speech impediment.”

I kind of wish telepathy was a real thing, or that we had two or even three primary communication forms instead of just speech, so that people like Deej, and this character, could express themselves freely.

Communication is important.  Speech, though, is only one form of communication.  It’s time we recognize and prioritize other forms of it as well, so people like Deej aren’t told, by our words and our actions, that they are less than human.  We have so much to learn from him, and from people like him.

Find Deej’s website here, and his movie’s website here.