Eustacia Cutler Presents
Several years ago Eustacia Cutler, Temple Grandin‘s mother, was asked to do a presentation for lluminemos de Azul, an advocacy organization in Mexico directed by Gerardo Gaya. Here are some excerpts from that presentation.
“Thank you for inviting me to join you. It’s an honor and privilege. I am, in a sense, where you will be many years from now—when you know how it all played out and you will have come to terms with it. Right now you’re caught in the daily contradictions of autism, and you’re looking for answers as I did when I was raising Temple. It took me a long time to learn that there are no answers. There are only choices. But choices can be changed, and you will change them—and you will be changed by them. As we understand more, we grow more insightful, make wiser choices and gain the courage to carry them out.
It also took me a long time to realize that autism is not so much a disorder as a disconnection. We’re social creatures, incomplete without each other. In 1908 the Swiss doctor Eugen Bleuler coined the word “autism” from the Greek word “autos” meaning “self”. He used it to describe a patient of his who was socially isolated, disconnected from his family. The question was, and still is: what’s happening —or not happening—that’s causing the disconnection?
The story of Nicholas
Twenty years ago when Nicholas, my youngest grandson, was a baby starting to talk, the first word I heard him say wasn’t “Mama” or “Dada” but “Oreo”. He looked at us, pointed to the cookie jar and said “Oreo”. We all laughed. It was so unexpected; but I knew that the 4 vital steps in the bio-neurological gift of social connection were fully developed in this baby before he could talk.
# Step 1: Conceptual Thinking. Nicholas understood the idea of a cookie: what it is, and what it’s for. A cookie is a sweet crunchy thing that’s delicious to eat. Conceptual thinking eludes those with autism. For example: you can ask an autistic kid to point to a shovel and he can point to it; he knows its name. But if you ask him to point to the thing you dig with, he’s lost. He doesn’t get the idea of what a shovel is and what it’s for. That means he has no way to understand that his little sand shovel and his father’s snow shovel are both shovels– that the backhoe digging a hole in the garden for a swimming pool is also a shovel. The result is he can’t generalize.
Understanding shovels doesn’t matter much, but here’s a generalization that I ran into in New York City that matters a lot. An autistic man of 30 has finally learned that he can cross the street only when the traffic light is green. When it’s red, he must wait till it turns green again. Since he can’t generalize he doesn’t understand that this rule applies to all traffic lights. Though he’s highly intelligent, nobody helped him to understand generalizing when he was a child. Autistics learn best when they’re young and their neurology is still growing. To this day the man only crosses the streets where he’s memorized the lights.
# Step 2: Context. Nicholas also understood that he was sitting in his high chair, the place where he got things to eat. If he wanted a cookie, he better ask for it quick before somebody took him out of that place. He understood location and how it relates to what’s happening. Temple had trouble with context. She couldn’t understand “over”, “under”, “around”: words that relate to the position of one object or person to another. It took the physical act of getting under a table before she could grasp the meaning of the word “under”.
# Step 3: Shared Information. When Nicholas pointed to the cookie jar he looked at us not at the cookie jar. He understood that we had a different mind from his and he wanted to get the idea of a cookie from his mind into ours. Many autistics don’t understand that others have thoughts that differ from theirs. Though they know their own mind, they are unaware of ours. Basic to shared information is eye contact. Though autistics can describe every detail they see in the room, they don’t look at us when we look at them. The social connection of eye contact escapes them.
# Step 4: Executive Function. Even though Nicholas was still a baby, he could put these three steps together and act on them. Sounds easy? Not really. Think of it like a basketball player getting the ball into the basket. He has to coordinate his intention (concept) and the place where he is on the basketball court (context) with his eye/hand coordination. At the same time he must use his body to dodge his opponents, signal his team mates (shared information) and get to the spot where he can toss the ball into the basket. Putting all that together and acting on it is no slam dunk. Now think of those who don’t fully grasp the concept of a basketball court: how its physical lay-out (context) connects to the action of the players. Nor do they understand team work as a form of shared information. Given these lacks, what do they have to put together and act on? Not what Nicholas has, that’s for sure. What they do have is good memory and logic. But memory and logic only connect to what has already happened. The information Nicholas is sharing with us is in the process of happening– and it isn’t necessarily logical. It’s a social connection. Nevertheless, armed with today’s neurological knowledge and social insight, we can teach our autistic children how to use memory and logic to climb out of their disconnection and into the world with us. It’s how Temple learned.”
