Tinfoil + Raccoon

House an Aspie?

(This is one of those limited audience posts--it assumes a familiarity with autism spectrum disorders AND the TV show House.)

So, we, the three raccoon damsels, have been loopy in our love of the TV show House ever since Juniorette discovered it last year in its second season.  Missing a new episode is cause for much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and the discs for season 1 and 2 are in our Netflix queue. When they arrive, we watch them 2-3 times before sending them back. We study those things.   

Sure, it's one of the hottest shows on TV, and Hugh Laurie's disheveled, abrasive character, Gregory House, is swoon bait for millions of us.  I can't speak for my girls, but one of the reasons I love the show is watching how House's character solves problems (I even looked for a white board for my office last week, but had to settle for a pad of those poster-sized Post-its.  Since then, I've been playing House.). 

It's been clear to me from the start that House's character is not neurotypical.  There've been hints that he's damaged goods, a wounded beast. But tonight, there was an attempt to out him as having Asperger Syndrome, something I'd suspected all along.  Juniorette, who is somewhere on the autism spectrum, and I were watching together tonight, and as the autism plot came to a climax and Wilson read the DMS IV for Asperger Syndrome, we were actually whooping and high-fiving.  "Yess!"  Even when Wilson reversed himself and said to House, "you don't have Asperger Syndrome, you're just a jerk,"  House's Aspie status had already firmly cemented in our minds.  I'm not entirely sure why it's such a big deal to us. I mean, he's a fictional character.  But, to this spectrum family, it seemed like some sort of victory.   And besides, House is a much more palatable Aspie poster boy than Bill Gates.
I'll be interested to read what other folks in the autism community have to say about the episode.

(EDIT:  Here is a detailed review of the episode, from Blogcritics, called Lines in the Sand.  And here is a link to a monster discussion about the episode from Television Without Pity. Looks like the house is split on the is he/isn't he question.)

Junkie Librarians

Here's a bit from Mind Hacks, pointing to a "highly speculative" article about information-seeking behavior. Professor Irving Biederman (University of Southern California) posits that

the moment of finally understanding something causes a release of natural endorphins in the brain, providing a response to knowledge acquisition that conditions us to want more.

In other words, intellectual curiosity may be driven by an addiction to an opioid high.

Hey, don't bogart that encyclopedia dude!

Neurodiversity and Autistic Pride

Mind Hacks points to several sites/articles about neurodiversity and the Autistic Pride movement, including the tongue-in-cheek Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical (ISNT), which has been on my radar screen since I started educating myself about Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) about eight years ago. If nothing else, read the faux DSM criteria for "Normal Disorders," in which  behavior that is seen as normal or typical by most people is pathologized.  It's a brilliant and thought-provoking turn-about.  I haven't kept up with what's going on in the ASD community, since Juniorette doesn't identify heavily as an Aspie, but I'd like to express my thankfulness for finding information and  a supportive online community when I desperately needed help at a time when I had to educate our family physician and  teachers about Aspergers. 

Brain Differences in Relatives of Autistic People

Here's a write up from Nature highlighting two studies about similarities between the brains of autistic people and close relatives who aren't diagnosable with autism. (Via Mind Hacks--lots of good links this week)

People can have physical brain abnormalities similar to those found in autistic individuals without having the disorder themselves. These results come from two studies, which were presented at a conference over the weekend. Brain scans show striking similarities between the brains of autistic patients and those of their non-autistic parents and siblings.

Incentive-based Learning: Does it Work?

Quinn Anya Carey has a guest post over at Teleread, blasting incentive-based learning programs, such as Pizza Hut's Book It! program, in which kids are doled out Pizza Hut coupons for reading x of books. She is writing in response to Ken Komoski's essay, No (Child) Consumer Left Behind. Komoski is the driving force behind an incentives-based technology tutoring program, eLearningSpace, in which students earn "time dollars" that serve to encourage them to use time more efficiently, and earn credit toward computers or other desireable items.  David Rothman (Mr. Teleread) responds to Carey's post about why he's "pro-bribe" and he and Carey have a decent back-and-forth in the comments in which Carey is able to tease Komoski's project away from Book It! type programs.

I've long been a critic of the sorts of programs mentioned by Carey, angered that my kids are marketed to in school by multi-national corporations.  I've even ranted about marketing to kids through summer reading programs using premiums, but heard compelling compelling arguments to make me (mostly) shut my mouth about the value of reading programs. Please, though, keep that damn yellow-shoed, french-fry smelling clown away from my kids!   

I had the pleasure of meeting with Ken Komoski this past weekend, and having him take me through eLearningSpace. While I feel a bit bristly about using the word "consumers" in referring to learners (it's the hippie in me), Komoski makes very compelling arguments.

This ‘full attention’ should include engaging tweens-teens as savvy consumers, capable of helping themselves to become more discriminating consumers of learning. By failing to engage them in a process that improves the amount and the quality of the intellectual capital they currently are developing, we will continue sending an extremely risk-laden message: “Whatever you’re doing with your media time is just fine by us.”

I'm looking forward to learning more about eLearningSpace, and talking further with Ken. I'm also trying to convince the Raccoons, Jr. to have a go at the math module on ELS, since we're a math-deficient family, but I think I'm going to have to resort to bribery. 

Painting

Well, I've started my bedroom painting project. Roofers are supposed to start sometime, so I figured I could get going on the non-drippy/moldy side of my bedroom and work my way over to the bad side. It's interesting to note my approach to projects like this before and after ADHD medication.  I used to just rip into stuff without a plan, and finish it in fits and starts (if at all), and never according to tried and true methods.  Today, I started out with washing walls and trim, and sanding the trim. As I should, I will use primer on the exiting semi-gloss trim, and do it right, rather than dive right with the colorful stuff just so I can see results.  Not that I'm this methodical and thoughtful all the time (note dining room ceiling with cracks and hanging wallpaper that I started 2 years ago), but the improvement is noteable.

Full disclosure: I should note that the rest of my house is in chaos. It's hard to do any sort of home improvement project in an 1100 sq ft. house.  Since my bedroom serves as an archive for adorable baby clothes, report cards, art projects, library-related magazines and writings, family history stuff and other ephemera, my living and dining room are now off-site storage, filled with huge Rubbermaid containers and milk crates.  I can't even empty out the bedroom for the project, since there's really no place to put a queen-sized bed and monster dresser.  Also not helpful: being married to someone who is only home on weekends.

Educational Computing a Faustian Bargain?

Educator Lowell Monke expresses his considerable reservations about the oft-heard notion that computers are "jut another tool" to be used in educating young children.

If we look through that lens, I think we will see that educational computing is neither a revolution nor a passing fad, but a Faustian bargain. Children gain unprecedented power to control their external world, but at the cost of internal growth. During the two decades that I taught young people with and about digital technology, I came to realize that the power of computers can lead children into deadened, alienated, and manipulative relationships with the world, that children's increasingly pervasive use of computers jeopardizes their ability to belong fully to human and biological communities—ultimately jeopardizing the communities themselves.

The rest of Monke's article is at Orion Magazine. I'm still chewing on it. (Via Mind Hacks, my favorite non-library blog). Whatchy'all think?

Death Penalty Based on (Fluctuating) IQ

This from my favorite new blog, Mind Hacks.

The BBC are reporting that convicted murderer Daryl Atkins may be executed by the state of Virginia, based on a recent IQ test where he scored 74, four points above the legal definition of retardation, which had previously excluded him from the death penalty.

This is of personal interest to me because Arthur Faulkner, the man who was convicted of murdering my friend, Clarice Dorner (and another woman, Annaliese Killoran), had his death sentence changed to life without parole, based on the Supreme Court decision, Atkins v. Virginia which ruled that "Executions of mentally retarded criminals are "cruel and unusual punishments" prohibited by the Eighth Amendment."

After Clarice died, I remember saying "I've always been against the death penalty, but I think this guy should fry."  Ever since then, it's been difficult to separate feelings about my personal loss from my bleeding heart instincts and intellectual knowledge about the inequitable administration of the death penalty.  Her death served to release some base and Old Testament instincts that I carry and which still surprise and horrify me to this day, more than fifteen years later.  I still have enough conflict about it, that I probably should go re-read Steven J. Gould's The Mismeasure of Man.

Connecting Sleep Paralysis with the Supernatural

Something which I've not written about here is my sleep life,  partly out of fear of being labled a flake. I've always had a rather rich, dramatic, dysfunctional sleep life, including lush technicolor dreams, lucid dreams, exquisite nightmares, sleep paralysis, and what my physician recently told me are out-of-body experiences.  Up until about a year ago, my associated emotion with most of this was fear.  But, after talking to my physician, I've tried to view it differently and go with the flow, especially the experiences I identify as out-of-body. 

Anyway, I was pleased to come across this article from Science Weekly about sleep paralysis, titled Night of the Crusher, which connects the clinical phenomenon with what many people describe as a supernatural and, mostly terrifying, phenomenon.  There's a lot in the article that made me say, "oh yeah...I've had that happen a million times."

Sleep paralysis embodies a universal, biologically based explanation for pervasive beliefs in spirits and supernatural beings, even in the United States, Hufford argues. The experience thrusts mentally healthy people into a bizarre, alternative world that they frequently find difficult to chalk up to a temporary brain glitch.

This is an area of study I've often wished I had more time to pursue.  My senior capstone paper in anthropology was titled A Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Near-Death Experience, and at the time, was a fairly fresh topic.  A few years after that,  there was a lot more main stream information on NDE's and OBE's. Maybe I'll dig it out and post it here. 

I'd welcome hearing from others about this, or about being pointed to well-researched resources (please--no websites with pictures of dream-catchers). 

ADHD: "Coming up to Fitting Me"

The title of this CNN/AP article, "ADHD Adults Struggle to Focus," is pretty typical for mainstream articles on the subject, but what's different about this one is that it suggests that those of us with ADHD are actually adapting better to our increasingly busy lives, something I've known, personally, for a long time.

Barbara Eddy is used to swiftly "spinning" from task to task, from tending to her twisn, to her work, to her husband. It's in her nature as someone diagnosed with an attention deficit disorder.

So she feels right at home in this fast and fragmented age of cell phones, Googling, and hand-held e-mail.  "Society is finally coming up to fitting me" (says Eddings).