Understanding the way your child's brain works is crucial to being able to furnish an optimal learning environment. Below is a brief summary of some of the investigate about the brains of citizen with autism. Then you'll find easy, practical ways to implement this knowledge and generate an optimal learning environment at home.
The Science
Autism is referred to as a "spectrum disorder" because there is such a wide unlikeness among citizen with the diagnosis. Researchers using technology that allows them to be able to see how our brains are structured also see that the brains of citizen with the label 'Autism' are vastly distinct from one another. Because of this, some scientists have recommend we need to look below the level of the brain's structure to the way individual neurons (brain cells) are wired to find the "miss-wiring" that affects all citizen with autism. Researchers have found evidence that the way some neurons are related in the brain of citizen with autism may lead to a low signal-to-noise ratio. This means that many of the signals brain cells are sending to each other may be accompanied by "noise", like static in a radio signal. This is one explanation for why children with autism come to be hyper-aroused (overwhelmed) by sensory facts and why they may find it more sharp to pick between two distinct sources of information. For example, it is often more difficult for a child with autism to be able to listen to the educator when other children in the class are making noise. Studies recording brain electricity in autistic citizen have shown that even when they are trying to ignore distinct aspects of their environment (such as noise in the classroom) their brains retort to this facts in the same way they retort to the facts the child is trying to attend to (the teachers voice). The question for many children with autism seems to be one of "filtering", that is, they are less able than typical children to filter out sensory facts that is irrelevant to what they are trying to focus on.
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The consequent of this is that all stimuli are given equal priority by the brains of those with autism, causing an astonishing flood of sensory facts that the child must handle. The brains of typical children learn to filter out irrelevant stimuli early on in life, so by the time that they go to school, children are able to focus their attention on what they are asked to focus on. It is very hard for many children with autism to learn in environments where there is a lot of competing sensory facts (including noises, sights, touches, smells, etc.) such as a classroom.
Children with autism are taking in a lot of facts all the time; this means that at some stage, they have to sort straight through this facts to see what they unquestionably need. Studies have seen that citizen with autism tend to do the sorting straight through at a much later stage in processing than neurologically typical people. This is like going down the aisles in the supermarket and putting one of all things into your cart, then arriving at the checkout and discarding what you do not want to buy. This causes a "processing bottleneck". Studies using technology that allows us to see which parts of the brain are being used in single tasks help us to see that this is what is happening inside the brains of citizen with autism. There is more performance in the brain regions designed for lower-order processing (going straight through the supermarket aisles) than in brain regions for high-order processing (moving straight through the checkout and going home with the items on your list). This may expound why children with autism often show vital challenges in areas of high-order processing (e.g. Memory, attention, organization, language, etc.), because they spend so much time trying to deal with the basic incoming sensory facts that they don't get time to practice the high-order mental processing other children their age are practicing. Thus the brain of the child with autism starts to create differently than the brain of his typical brother. There is some evidence that this processing style is already present when children with autism are born, even though the concurrent behaviors may not be recognized until 18-24 months later.
Psychologists call this style of processing (over-relying on lower-order processing) "weak central coherence." Central coherence describes the ability to process incoming facts in context, pulling facts together for higher-level meaning often at the expense of memory for detail. Weak central coherence then is the tendency of those with autism to rely on local feature processing (the details) rather than taking in the global nature of the situation. For instance after viewing selfsame pictures and then being asked to remember what was in the photograph a typical man might recite the scene as "a forest at sunset" while a man with autism might remember "shiny leaves, orange light and a subject you could hang a swing from". This processing style is the calculate citizen with autism outperform citizen without autism on specific tasks. One of these tasks is The Embedded Figures task. In this task, citizen might be shown a line drawing of a car which everyone can identify as such. When asked to point out the three triangles in the picture, citizen without autism are much slower than those with autism. This is because the typical citizen can not see "past" the car to label all it's constituent parts. The citizen with autism will identify the three triangles quickly because this is how they are practiced at looking the world.
Research sharp citizen with autism ranging from studies of how individual brain cells are related to how citizen perform in psychological tests paints a photograph of the world occupied by those with autism as fragmented, astonishing and filled with "noise". This is corroborated by autobiographical reports from citizen with autism. Comprehension the autistic child's fragmented and astonishing world shows how important a child's external environment is when designing treatment and schooling for children with autism. It also explains why children with autism crave order and predictability in their corporal environments.
Physical environments with higher amounts of sensory stimulation (e.g. sharp visual displays, background noise, etc.) will add to the "noise" in an already overloaded sensory system making any new learning extremely challenging--like trying to learn Japanese in a shopping mall. The extent to which rooms can be tailored to meet the needs of these children is extremely little in a typical classroom setting, mainly due to the nearnessy of other children and the subsequent size of the room. Even fluorescent lighting has been shown to sway the behavior of children with autism. These environmental considerations are whether overlooked and their importance underestimated when placements are recommend for children with autism or it is beyond the scope of the school district to furnish any other type of corporal environment.
The Easy Part
The First Step along the road to construction a widespread treatment program for your child is providing him or her with an acceptable environment in which to learn. Ordinarily this means Simplify! Here's what to do:
1. Dedicate one room in your house to you child with autism. It could be your child's bedroom or other room (not too big, 12' x 12' is plenty, and smaller is fine depending on the age of your child). The room might even only be dedicated to your child with autism for part of the day (for instance if he or she shares a bedroom with a sibling) this is Ok too. Do the best you can with the situation you have.
2. Take off all electronic toys from the dedicated room. This includes televisions, video-games, and whatever battery powered (including singing / talking books and things that flash!) These toys can be over-stimulating for a child with autism and do not encourage social interaction.
3. Make sure you have incandescent light bulbs not fluorescent one. Fluorescent light bulbs flicker at a rate most of use tune out but that can be extremely over-stimulating for citizen with autism.
4. Clear some space. Ideally you want the floor to be a free, clear open space on which you can play with your child. Have the minimal whole of furniture you can in the special room. Also simplify the whole of toys you have in the room and if possible put them all on shelves or in a closet.
These are the first step towards creating an optimal learning environment in which to work with your child. Parents running a home-based Son-Rise Programs are coached additional on how to generate a customized learning environment and Son-Rise program playroom. The straightforward measures described here will aid in soothing your autistic child's over-active nervous system by making the world digestible and manageable and set the stage for social interaction and subsequent learning.
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