AANE conference and reflections

I attended day one of the Asperger's Association of New England conference today in Boston. The speaker was Kari Dunn Buron, author of The Incredible 5-Point Scale. She had a lot of good things to say about Asperger's, about anxiety, and, in particular, about social cognition as a part of human development that is missing or impaired in people with ASDs.

Much of Buron's morning presentation was derived from the research of Simon Baron-Cohen at Cambridge University in England. He is at the forefront of social cognition research, and coined the term "mindblindness" to explain the delayed development of theory of mind, which, simplistically defined, is the ability to take another person's perspective.

(It has always struck me as odd that Simon Baron-Cohen and Sacha Baron-Cohen could be related, yet they are. Cousins, to be exact. Theory of mind and Borat, from the same family. Wild.)

Back to the conference: this wasn't my first exposure to the 5-point scale. My dear friend, Kathleen, introduced it to me a couple of years ago, when I wasn't really ready to do anything with it. Then Abby's therapist used a similar tool last year, but it seemed kind of complicated, and I didn't really understand it.

Now I understand it better. It's a way of systematically teaching social and emotional concepts. Typically developing people generally absorb social and emotional knowledge from infancy. Generally, people with ASDs don't. Furthermore, people with ASDs generally learn best from a systemized, logical, rules-based approach. The 5-point scale applies this approach to social and emotional learning, making the unwritten "rules" of social interaction more manageable and easier to understand, and therefore, to learn.

I need to reflect and talk with Abby's therapist on how to use the scale at home for Abby, perhaps with regard to improving her willingness to do homework or around her difficulties with changes in routine.

***
Another thing I learned from going to this conference today is that I am profoundly grateful that I don't have to go into Boston for work. I used to do it every day, and tonight, at the end of the day, I had that old familiar feeling of my ears ringing and my eyes bugging out and my scalp feeling like it needed to stretch to make room for the buzzing discomfort inside my head.

People familiar with ASDs and Asperger's in particular will undoubtedly see the irony in my description of sensory overload, an issue that many people with ASDs struggle with. But seriously -- so many people on the trains, so close, with so much music spilling out from so many earbuds, the fluorescent lights, the squeaks as the trains went down the tracks, the jostling and going around curves -- the whole experience just overloaded me, not to the point of meltdown, but definitely past the point of comfort. I am so thankful that I work mostly from home. Not to offend people who rely on public transportation, but I found the entire experience dehumanizing.

In general, I am a huge fan of the concept of public transportation. I'm just grateful I don't have to commute anywhere.

East, west, (working from) home is best.