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?” In
the Sunday NY Times Magazine by Lawrence Osborne.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."Continued at:
http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20000618mag-asperger.htmlTake the Mystery out of Autism
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