People often ask me if I have any idea why autism seems more common today than before. It is a fair question. After all, I am someone living with the form of autism that was known as Asperger’s Syndrome until diagnostic criteria were changed in 2013.
Just yesterday a friend asked me that exact question. And I gave my usual answer that Autism Spectrum Disorder, as it is known today, always has been with us. Society just tended to call it something else in prior centuries. And that may be true enough.
But it may not be the whole story.
Just yesterday evening another thought crept into the picture as I finished a new book on the subject published two months ago. It is called “The Boy Who Felt Too Much,” by Lorenz Wagner. The subject of the book is neuroscientist Henry Markram, his new theory of autism, and his autistic son Kai.
Early reviews of this book had grabbed my attention with their suggestions about what autism really is. And I was even more intrigued when I found that Amazon had sold out of its copies, forcing me to find the book elsewhere.
They touched on an intriguing question. Have we done something in our culture over the last few decades that has made autism worse? Something other than the now debunked idea that vaccines might have played a role?
Perhaps we have. And it might have nothing to do with public health or vaccination programs and everything to do with how we have restructured our lives and our entire culture since the invention of mass electronic media like television.
When I first heard about “The Boy Who Felt Too Much,” I knew this was a book I had to read. The early reviews alone had taken my breath away.
They suggested that people with ASD have brain structures that leave them too open to the world. This situation likely causes the sensory overload that many think lies at the root of autism’s most obvious symptoms, which can include meltdowns and desperate efforts to blot out the world’s “noise.”
This theory matches my own personal experience. There are some days when the world and all of its sensations are coming at me in such a fast and chaotic way that I cannot organize them in my head. They overwhelm me. Unlike so-called neurotypicals, there are neurodiverse people like me whose ASD deprives us of at least some of the ability to filter out this kind of overload.
Yesterday, reading the book from cover to cover took my breath away yet again. I was gripped by its suggestion as to why autism rates may be increasing.
The book quotes Professor Markram on this subject. “One reason, surely, is that doctors have a better idea of what they’re looking for,” he says. “But the rise is too steep for this to account for it alone.”
What other reason might exist? — Markram suggests it could be all the “noise” our culture has introduced into our lives through things like television, the Web, and social media, combined with a fast-paced lifestyle that mirrors them.
The book describes Markram’s “Intense World” theory of autism. His idea is that a predisposition to autism is widespread in people, perhaps even linked to highly desirable traits that enable higher intelligence, artistic skills, and stronger memories.
Yet in many predisposed people, Markram suggests, autism still must have an environmental trigger to cause its most devastating result — the well-documented withdrawal from the world among those most severely impacted. Some autistic children are simply lost to us in this way, and lost forever.
That trigger might be our increasingly noisy and intense world, Markram suggests. “This may be enriching for ordinary people,” he says in the book, “but it is tragic for autistic children, who absorb everything until it all gives way.”
Based on this theory, Markram has suggested a new approach to treating autism. In the past, the accepted model was to stimulate the minds of symptomatic children through education programs or even drugs. But Markram notes that stimulation techniques have a high failure rate, including with his own autistic son, Kai, who is the namesake “boy who felt too much” in the book.
Instead, Markram believes that the world already is too stimulating for children with ASD. So his idea is to carefully control the stimulation received by children who show early signs of autism. Their exposure to television, computer games, bright colors and lights, and noisy situations should be limited to what their brains can handle, he thinks. The hope is to stop their young minds from “giving way” under the onslaught and then sinking into an irreversible state of withdrawal.
His theory is not without detractors. Some have characterized it as a movement back toward past programs of institutionalization or confinement. But in the book, Markram says this is not the case. He simply wants to recreate something more like the conditions of earlier times, when constant stimulation was more rare and parents felt stricter limits should be placed on what their children’s minds were exposed to.
My own case is consistent with his theory. I never “withdrew” from the world, though I certainly felt the temptation in my teen years when my sensory overload was at its worst. Perhaps it is telling that my teen years also coincided with the late 1960s and early 1970s — a time when the United States truly began ramping up its intense cultural drumbeat, creating an American scene that was constantly in overdrive.
Perhaps I also was partially shielded because my earliest years fell in the quieter time that came before. If so, that would explain why I never succumbed to the worst.
It cannot be mere coincidence that, after my own ASD was discovered late in life, I found a need to address it by making my life quieter. One of the most effective ways of controlling my own sensory overload has been eliminating television from my life and placing limits on the hubbub of the social and professional pressures of my career.
Is Markram’s Intense World theory the final word on autism? No. The subject is too complex, as human life tends to be. But it is obvious that his theory describes my own struggles better than any of the theories that came before, when physicians and others spun elaborate notions based on ideas of fault.
It was my fault, they said. Or it was my parents’ fault.
Yet, focusing on fault may be missing the point entirely. Perhaps all of this is something inherent in the nature of being human. And it also may have a lot to do with the Twenty-First Century world we have created without due mindfulness of the less hectic world in which our species lived for eons.
Markram’s theory at least hints that there may be better ways. There may be gentler ways to meld our past with our chaotic present. There may be kinder ways to treat a substantial number of children born genetically predisposed to autism, but who often are some of our most gifted and creative people.
And in doing so, perhaps we can make a better life for anyone who may be needlessly harmed by a culture stuck in overdrive.
© Robert Craig Waters 2020. For this and other writings: http://www.robertcraigwaters.com
Robert Craig Waters 