Goats prefer happy people

Credit: Alan McElligott.  

Dr Alan McElligott with a goat.  The goat likes him.  Dr McElligott is happy.

I love science.  You never know what type of earthshaking factoid may rear its weird head on any given day. 

Like two days ago.

When it was announced that goats like happy people.

And since goats don't appear to be following me around, I must not be happy.

Go figure.

I thought I was.

Here's the report.  It explains why goats may or may not be following you around.

*  *  *  *  *

Goats prefer happy people

Goats can differentiate between human facial expressions and prefer to interact with happy people, according to a new study led by scientists at Queen Mary University of London.  The study, which provides the first evidence of how goats read human emotional expressions, implies that the ability of animals to perceive human facial cues is not limited to those with a long history of domestication as companions, such as dogs and horses.

Writing in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the team describe how 20 goats interacted with images of positive (happy) and negative (angry) human facial expressions and found that they preferred to look and interact with the happy faces.

Dr Alan McElligott who led the study at Queen Mary University of London and is now based at the University of Roehampton, said: "The study has important implications for how we interact with livestock and other species, because the abilities of animals to perceive human emotions might be widespread and not just limited to pets."

The study, which was carried out at Buttercups Sanctuary for Goats in Kent, involved the researchers showing goats pairs of unfamiliar grey-scale static human faces of the same individual showing happy and angry facial expressions.

The team found that images of happy faces elicited greater interaction in the goats who looked at the images, approached them and explored them with their snouts. This was particularly the case when the happy faces were positioned on the right of the test arena suggesting that goats use the left hemisphere of their brains to process positive emotion.

First author Dr Christian Nawroth, who worked on the study at Queen Mary University of London but is now based at Leibniz Institute for Farm Animal Biology, said: "We already knew that goats are very attuned to human body language, but we did not know how they react to different human emotional expressions, such as anger and happiness. Here, we show for the first time that goats do not only distinguish between these expressions, but they also prefer to interact with happy ones."

The research has implications for understanding how animals process human emotions.

Co-author Natalia Albuquerque, from the University of Sao Paulo, said: "The study of emotion perception has already shown very complex abilities in dogs and horses. However, to date, there was no evidence that animals such as goats were capable of reading human facial expressions. Our results open new paths to understanding the emotional lives of all domestic animals."

Story Source:  Materials provided by Queen Mary University of London.  Christian Nawroth, Natalia Albuquerque, Carine Savalli, Marie-Sophie Single, Alan G. McElligott. Goats prefer positive human emotional facial expressions. R. Soc. open sci., 2018.

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Are Co-occurring Conditions Part of Autism?

Photo © NASA Goddard Space Flight Center | Flickr / Creative Commons
[image: Photo of two neutron stars ripping each other apart.]

Maxfield Sparrow
unstrangemind.com

Sometimes when I’m talking with someone about autism it feels like we’re talking about two different things. For example, I’ve had countless conversations that go something like this:

“You’re nothing like my child. My child has the serious kind of autism,” they might open with. 

“Autism is serious stuff,” I respond. “It’s important to take it seriously.” 

“No, I mean my child has the autism with digestive stuff and physical involvement. The severe autism.” 

“I have intermittent gastroparesis that has sent me to the hospital multiple times. I have a connective tissue disorder that has caused pelvic organ prolapse. These things aren’t autism.”

And it’s the truth: the co-occurring conditions we cope with are not autism; they are the “genetic hitchhikers” that love to travel with autism. Even being non-speaking—a trait that some people view as the true core of autism—is due to conditions that more frequently occur among those of us with developmental disabilities such as autism or cerebral palsy. However it is not autism itself that prevents speech, but rather these “hitchhikers” like apraxia and extreme sensory processing issues.

Questions immediately arise: how many of these commonly co-occurring conditions are there? How prevalent are the conditions that tend to accompany autism? And if autism is not simply a cluster of co-occurring conditions, then what is it?

The August 2018 issue of The Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders is publishing a paper called Prevalence of Co-occurring Medical and Behavioral Conditions/Symptoms Among 4- and 8-Year-Old Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder in Selected Areas of the United States in 2010, written by researchers from the Center for Disease Control and the University of Arizona.

While this paper barely brushes on that third question: what is autism really? (“Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a group of neurodevelopmental disorders characterized by deficits in social communication and interaction and the presence of restricted and repetitive patterns of behaviors, interests, and activities (American Psychiatric Association 2013).”), it does go a long way toward addressing the first two questions about the number and prevalence of co-occurring conditions in autistic children.

How the Study was Conducted

The study collected information in the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network (ADDM) from the calendar year 2010. ADDM is a project that has been tracking eight-year-old autistic children since 2000, and added four-year-old children, starting in select areas, in 2010.

The researchers collected their data by looking only at the five sites that had included data from four-year-old autistic children that year (Arizona, Missouri, New Jersey, Utah, and Wisconsin). They pulled all the records of children diagnosed autistic and verified the diagnoses using DSM-IV-TR criteria (that being the standard diagnostic criteria used in 2010).

The paper claims this study is the first one to look at two age groups of autistic children using a large sample and studying a diverse group of co-occurring conditions. One of the biggest things the researchers discovered was that eight-year-olds had more co-occurring conditions than four-year-olds, and more than 95% of the children had at least one co-occurring condition.

The researchers report that the wide variety of co-occurring conditions and the great diversity among the children, as far as what patterns of co-occurring conditions each child exhibited, often contributed to difficulties in accessing autism diagnoses. They noted that a very small fraction of children had no co-occurring conditions. While they could not explain why autism tends to come along with so many, varied co-occurring conditions, the researchers noted that the varying patterns of co-occurring conditions make autism very heterogeneous—that is to say, each autistic person has a specific pattern of strengths and weaknesses that is often quite different from other autistic people.

This pronounced variety can make it harder for people to get diagnosed as autistic, especially early in life when there is no single marker of autism or autistic behavior. The authors suggested including co-occurring conditions in the autism screening procedures, in order to catch more autistic children who are slipping through the diagnostic cracks. The variety also cautions against seeking one-size-fits-all systems to address autistic needs.

Some Statistics From the Study

The data was analyzed statistically and measures were taken to mathematically account for the following factors: sex, race-ethnicity, maternal education, and geographical location of the study. All statistics I am mentioning in this article are ones that were statistically significant—that is, the differences were large enough for the researchers to pay attention to them as actual signals, rather than just random differences that don’t mean much.

The researchers looked at the following eighteen items that they determined to be the most common co-occurring conditions found among autistic people:

1. Developmental disability - cognitive
2. Congenital conditions (cerebral palsy, encephalopathy, vision impairment, hearing loss)
3. Self-injurious behaviors
4. Sensory integration disorder
5. Developmental regression
6. Epilepsy/seizure disorder
7. ADHD
8. Oppositional Defiant Disorder
9. Anxiety
10. Aggression
11. Language disorder
12. Sleep abnormalities
13. Developmental disability - motor
14. Genetic conditions (Down syndrome, Fragile X syndrome, Tuberous sclerosis)
15. Mood disorder
16. Developmental disability - adaptive
17. Abnormalities in eating, drinking
18. Temper tantrum

One thing they found was that some co-occurring conditions (gastrointestinal problems, sleep problems, and epilepsy) seemed to intensify the core traits of autism while others (ADHD, ODD, and aggression) appeared to “mask” autism traits, often resulting in a later diagnosis.

They also found that autistic children with intellectual disability were more likely to be diagnosed before age six than autistic children without intellectual disability.

The eight-year-olds had more cases of twelve of the above eighteen co-occurring conditions, but only eight of these were statistically significant: ADHD, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, anxiety, aggression, language disorder, sleep abnormalities, motor disability, mood problems.

The eight-year-olds had an average of 4.9 co-occurring conditions, and 98% of them had at least one co-occurring condition.  The four-year-olds had an average of 3.8 co-occurring conditions, and 96% of them had at least one co-occurring condition.

The statistically significant conditions that caused children to be diagnosed earlier were: Developmental regression, developmental disability - adaptive, abnormalities in eating and drinking, developmental disability - cognitive, temper tantrums, developmental disability - motor, and self-injurious behaviors. Those conditions that caused children to be diagnosed autistic later were: ADHD, oppositional defiant disorder, and anxiety.

The most prevalent co-occurring conditions according to the study were: Mood disorder (75.4%), Anomalies in eating and drinking (61%), Temper tantrums (56.5%), Aggression (55.40%), and Sleep abnormalities (40.7%).

Something that surprised me about the study were the co-occurring conditions with prevalence far lower than I had expected to see. These include: Developmental disability - cognitive (present in 15.6% of the autistic children in the study), Self-injurious behaviors (27.3%), Sensory integration disorder (10.1%), Language disorder (35.5%), Epilepsy (3.6%), and Anxiety (12%).

Analysis and Discussion of the Implications of the Study

The findings of this study could change the way autism is understood and diagnosed, which is important. While other researchers have looked at co-occurring conditions in autism, this is the first thorough survey of them, even though it is not entirely representative of the entire United States since the sample was not chosen completely randomly.

Before this study, the only academic writing I was aware of that looked at co-occurring conditions in such depth is Polly Samuel/Donna William’s work on the “Fruit Salad Theory of Autism” which is found in detail in her book The Jumbled Jigsaw, or in summary in her blog post “What is Autism?”

Many Autistic activists express the importance of viewing co-occurring conditions as something separate from autism itself. As I mentioned above, I sometimes call them “genetic hitchhikers” because the anxiety, stomach problems, sleep issues, etc. are not autism, and are found among people who are not autistic, though we seem to have them with more intensity and/or higher frequency than the general population. These co-occurring complications can make the overall picture of autism look very different from person to person, and may necessitate a lot of support, accommodation, and assistance for us to navigate and manage.

People who have a hard time understanding why we say we are proud to be Autistic and don’t want or need our autism to be taken away often feel that way because they have defined “autism” as “the cluster of co-occurring conditions experienced by the autistic people I know or have heard of.” Research like this new study important for the implications in the medical world, with respect to diagnosis and therapies, but it’s equally important for those of us in the lay community who are trying to communicate across a gap of understanding—a gap caused by people defining autism in radically different ways.

Hopefully this research and similar research that will follow and build upon this foundation will help those of us in the Autism community (that community made up of everyone from Autistic people to our families to therapists to researchers and beyond) to agree upon shared definitions of autism. This will be a necessary first step, before we can really get down to meaningful dialogue across the gaps in our lived experiences: the lived experience of being autistic and the experience of loving or working with someone who is. We in one or more of those groups can and very much should seek to unite with the others because we are stronger together. Coming to a place of mutual understanding of the foundational nature of autism will start us down that path, toward joining our forces to change the world.

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International Day of the Stim: The Worry Stone

Photo © the author
[image: Close up of fingertips grasping
a worn black pottery shard.]

Hannah King
mystinkybackpack.blogspot.ca

September 17, 2018 is International Day of the Stim! For more articles and information, see dayofthestim.blogspot.com.

I found this old piece of pottery at the beach. It’s been worn smooth from the waves, and it fits perfectly in my hand. My thumb rub it over and over and over and over—it feels great.

My thumbs are major in my stimming, always have been. I think one reason my thumb stims survived the years of stim-suppression I underwent at school and home is that I could stim—surreptitiously—with my thumbs. It was easy to tuck my hand into the folds of a cardigan sweater and reach for the nubby underside of a button, or to slide my thumbs and fingers quietly along the coolness beneath a school desk. And while I loved to glide my hands across a tree trunk with abandon when no one was watching, I could also quietly pinch a piece of moss-eaten bark between my thumb and forefinger, anytime.

I was told that stims were bad at a young age, and was shamed for them. It has taken me half a lifetime of learning to realize that my stims never should have been pathologized, to realize that no one should have been making a big deal about my stims, and that my stims have in fact been a helpful way for me to stay grounded—and also to cope in intense sensory situations.

Some of my early stims (such as walking in circles) have been extinguished, but many remain, though in modified form. I no longer tend to jump when I’m happy they way I did as a child, but I rock up and down at the knees. And though I used to flap my hands when I got excited, I now only flap when I’m very agitated: my hands fly around my head like a flock of birds, which is a way to get settled but is also a warning flare. If you see me flapping my hands, please give me some space!

For someone my age (40), the idea of stim toys, designed and made by autistics and for sale online, is totally amazing. (Way to win, Neurodiversity Movement!) All my life, I’ve just been grabbing at things that feel good and making use of them.

The closest thing I had to a stimmie toy when I was a child was a gift from my father’s fishing buddy, Uncle Scott, who handed a soft piece of marble to me one day, like an afterthought. “It’s a worry stone,” he said. I realize now that it was quite intentional, and also kind, when he gave me that gift. He somehow knew that would be the thing I liked the most: with one pointed edge, and a silky indentation just perfect for my thumb.

I wasn’t able to thank him at the time, but he was one of those special people who didn’t need a thank you to understand gratitude. We should all feel so comforted, understood, and validated for the beautiful forms of comfort we forge from the ordinary.

My new piece of pottery is a lot like the worry stone Uncle Scott gave me all those years ago. I’ll use it when I’m thinking hard, especially if I’m communicating—or when I’m just relaxing. Claiming it as a stim is part of healing from the abuse and suppression I faced as a kid.

Stimming shouldn’t have to be secret. NO ONE has the right to suppress an autistic person from stimming. Our hands were not meant to be quiet. Stim on!

----

This essay was originally featured at dayofthestim.blogspot.com.

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Laziness helped lead to extinction of Homo erectus

I am a great fan of laziness in all its many forms. 

An enthusiastic practitioner of lethargy and ennui. 

Sloth becomes me.

Always looking for the easiest way to avoid anything remotely like effort or expending energy.

Now it turns out that while this may a personally gratifying life strategy for the individual, it does not bode well for the species. 

Rats.

So it's not survival of the fattest.

Who knew? 

Too late to change now.

Here's the report:

*  *  *  *  *

An archaeological excavation of ancient human populations in the Arabian Peninsula during the Early Stone Age, found that Homo erectus used 'least-effort strategies' for tool making and collecting resources.  This 'laziness' paired with an inability to adapt to a changing climate likely played a role in the species going extinct, according to lead researcher Dr Ceri Shipton of the ANU School of Culture, History and Language.

"They really don't seem to have been pushing themselves," Dr Shipton said.

"I don't get the sense they were explorers looking over the horizon. They didn't have that same sense of wonder that we have."

Dr Shipton said this was evident in the way the species made their stone tools and collected resources.

"To make their stone tools they would use whatever rocks they could find lying around their camp, which were mostly of comparatively low quality to what later stone tool makers used," he said.

"At the site we looked at there was a big rocky outcrop of quality stone just a short distance away up a small hill.

"But rather than walk up the hill they would just use whatever bits had rolled down and were lying at the bottom.

"When we looked at the rocky outcrop there were no signs of any activity, no artefacts and no quarrying of the stone.

"They knew it was there, but because they had enough adequate resources they seem to have thought, 'why bother?'."

This is in contrast to the stone tool makers of later periods, including early Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, who were climbing mountains to find good quality stone and transporting it over long distances.

Dr Shipton said a failure to progress technologically, as their environment dried out into a desert, also contributed to the population's demise.

"Not only were they lazy, but they were also very conservative," Dr Shipton said.

"The sediment samples showed the environment around them was changing, but they were doing the exact same things with their tools.

"There was no progression at all, and their tools are never very far from these now dry river beds. I think in the end the environment just got too dry for them."

The excavation and survey work was undertaken in 2014 at the site of Saffaqah near Dawadmi in central Saudi Arabia.

Story Source:  Materials provided by Australian National University.  Ceri Shipton, James Blinkhorn, Paul S. Breeze, Patrick Cuthbertson, Nick Drake, Huw S. Groucutt, Richard P. Jennings, Ash Parton, Eleanor M. L. Scerri, Abdullah Alsharekh, Michael D. Petraglia. Acheulean technology and landscape use at Dawadmi, central Arabia. PLOS ONE, 2018.

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Eat Crickets? Good For You, Safe In High Doses, and Yummy.

Source: Worlds Fair Nano

They're especially good for you if you catch your own.  Which means running around like a head with its chicken cut off, in the back yard, like Rocky trying to catch a chicken to improve his footwork. trying to snare them using chopsticks like Mr. Muyagi in The Karate Kid.

Mr. Miyagi is a fictional karate

master played by Japanese-

American actor Pat Morita.

No, Seriously.

Crickets are great protein.

It appears you cannot overeat them.

They're great for your gut.

They reduce inflammation.

They may even reduce depression and help prevent cancer.

What more do you want??

*  *  *  *  *

Eating crickets can be good for your gut

A new clinical trial shows that consuming crickets can help support the growth of beneficial gut bacteria and that eating crickets is not only safe at high doses but may also reduce inflammation in the body.

Researcher Valerie Stull was 12 when she ate her first insect.  "I was on a trip with my parents in Central America and we were served fried ants," she says. "I remember being so grossed out initially, but when I put the ant in my mouth, I was really surprised because it tasted like food -- and it was good!"

Today, Stull, a recent doctoral graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, is the lead author of a new pilot clinical trial published in the journal Scientific Reports that looks at what eating crickets does to the human microbiome.

It shows that consuming crickets can help support the growth of beneficial gut bacteria and that eating crickets is not only safe at high doses but may also reduce inflammation in the body.

"There is a lot of interest right now in edible insects," Stull says. "It's gaining traction in Europe and in the U.S. as a sustainable, environmentally friendly protein source compared to traditional livestock."

More than 2 billion people around the world regularly consume insects, which are also a good source of protein, vitamins, minerals and healthy fats. The research team was interested in documenting for the first time via clinical trial the health effects of eating them.

"This study is important because insects represent a novel component in Western diets and their health effects in human populations haven't really been studied," says co-corresponding author Tiffany Weir, a professor of food science and human nutrition at Colorado State University. "With what we now know about the gut microbiota and its relationship to human health, it's important to establish how a novel food might affect gut microbial populations. We found that cricket consumption may actually offer benefits beyond nutrition."

Raising insects for protein not only helps protect the environment, but also offers a more healthful option than meat in many wealthy countries with high-meat diets, says co-author Jonathan Patz, director of the UW-Madison Global Health Institute, where Stull will begin a postdoctoral research position in the fall.

Crickets, like other insects, contain fibers, such as chitin, that are different from the dietary fiber found in foods like fruits and vegetables. Fiber serves as a microbial food source and some fiber types promote the growth of beneficial bacteria, also known as probiotics. The small trial probed whether insect fibers might influence the bacteria found in the gastrointestinal tract.

For two weeks, 20 healthy men and women between the ages of 18 and 48 ate either a control breakfast or a breakfast containing 25 grams of powdered cricket meal made into muffins and shakes. Each participant then ate a normal diet for a two-week "washout period." For the following two weeks, those who started on the cricket diet consumed a control breakfast and those who started on the control diet consumed a cricket breakfast.

Every participant served as their own control for the study and the researchers were blinded with respect to which diet each participant was on at any given time.

The researchers collected blood samples, stool samples and answers to gastrointestinal questionnaires immediately before the study began, immediately following the first two-week diet period and immediately after the second two-week diet period.

Participants' blood samples were tested for a host of health measures, like blood glucose and enzymes associated with liver function, and also for levels of a protein associated with inflammation. The fecal samples were tested for the byproducts of microbial metabolism in the human gut, inflammatory chemicals associated with the gastrointestinal tract, and the overall makeup of the microbial communities present in the stools.

Participants reported no significant gastrointestinal changes or side effects and the researchers found no evidence of changes to overall microbial composition or changes to gut inflammation. They did see an increase in a metabolic enzyme associated with gut health, and a decrease in an inflammatory protein in the blood called TNF-alpha, which has been linked to other measures of well-being, like depression and cancer.

Additionally, the team saw an increase in the abundance of beneficial gut bacteria like Bifidobacterium animalis, a strain that has been linked to improved gastrointestinal function and other measures of health in studies of a commercially available strain called BB-12.

But, the researchers say, more and larger studies are needed to replicate these findings and determine what components of crickets may contribute to improved gut health. "This very small study shows that this is something worth looking at in the future when promoting insects as a sustainable food source," says Stull.

Stull is co-founder of an award-winning startup and research collaboration called MIGHTi, the Mission to Improve Global Health Through Insects. In the future, MIGHTi hopes to provide home-use insect-farming kits to communities that already consume insects, including many in southern Africa. Insects require far less water to farm than traditional livestock and can help improve food security in impoverished communities while providing economic opportunities to women.

"Most of the insects consumed around the world are wild-harvested where they are and when they are available," says Stull, who has eaten insects -- including caterpillars, cicadas, grasshoppers and beetle larvae -- all over the world. "People love flying termites in Zambia, which come out only once or twice a year and are really good; they taste like popcorn and are a crunchy, oily snack."

She hopes to promote insects as a more mainstream food in the United States, and though the industry is currently small, the rise of edible insect producers and companies using insects in their food products may make this possible.

"Food is very tied to culture, and 20 or 30 years ago, no one in the U.S. was eating sushi because we thought it was disgusting, but now you can get it at a gas station in Nebraska," she says.

The study was funded by a multistate Hatch project (W3122: Beneficial and Adverse Effects of Natural Chemicals on Human Heath and Food Safety), the Karen Morris-Fine New Investigator Success Fund, the Climate Quest competition, and the Clinical and Translational Science Award program of the NIH National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (UL1TR000427). Entomo Farms donated a portion of the cricket powder used in the study.

Story Source:  Materials provided by University of Wisconsin-Madison, original by Kelly April Tyrrell.  Valerie J. Stull, Elijah Finer, Rachel S. Bergmans, Hallie P. Febvre, Colin Longhurst, Daniel K. Manter, Jonathan A. Patz, Tiffany L. Weir. Impact of Edible Cricket Consumption on Gut Microbiota in Healthy Adults, a Double-blind, Randomized Crossover Trial. Scientific Reports, 2018; 

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Mom was Right: Sit Up Straight. You'll Perform Better.

Mom knows.

When she says you'll do better if you mind your posture and sit up straight. you will do better.  Recently published research shows that if you mind your posture and sit up straight, you will do better.

Really.

Would you rather hear that from someone in a white coat with a clipboard, or from mom?

Here's the report.

*  *  *  *  *

Math with good posture means better scores

Sitting up straight aids performance

A new study finds that students perform better at math while sitting with good posture.

If you've ever felt like a deer in the headlights before taking a math test or speaking before a large group of people, you could benefit from a simple change in posture. As part of a new study by researchers at San Francisco State University, 125 college students were tested to see how well they could perform simple math -- subtracting 7 from 843 sequentially for 15 seconds -- while either slumped over or sitting up straight with shoulders back and relaxed. Fifty-six percent of the students reported finding it easier to perform the math in the upright position.

"For people who are anxious about math, posture makes a giant difference," said Professor of Health Education Erik Peper. "The slumped-over position shuts them down and their brains do not work as well. They cannot think as clearly." Before the study began, students filled out an anonymous questionnaire asking them to rate their anxiety levels while taking exams and performing math; they also described any physical symptoms of stress they experienced during test taking.

According to co-author Associate Professor of Health Education Richard Harvey, slumping over is a defensive posture that can trigger old negative memories in the body and brain. While the students without math anxiety did not report as great a benefit from better posture, they did find that doing math while slumped over was somewhat more difficult.

Peper and Harvey say these findings about body position can help people prepare for many different types of performance under stress, not just math tests. Athletes, musicians and public speakers can all benefit from better posture prior to and during their performance. "You have a choice," said Peper. "It's about using an empowered position to optimize your focus."

That empowerment could be particularly helpful to students facing the challenge called "stereotype threat," said Lauren Mason, one of the paper's authors and a recent SF State graduate. A first-generation college student, Mason can identify with such students, who experience fear and insecurity because of a belief by others -- which can become internalized -- that they won't do as well at math. Mason said she has benefitted personally from using a more empowered posture before taking difficult tests, including math. She believes that adopting a more confident posture could help other first-generation students as well as women entering science and math, who often battle stereotype threat, too.

"I always felt insecure about my math abilities even though I excelled at other subjects," said Mason, who helped design the experiment in the study. "You build a relationship with [math] so early -- as early as elementary school. You can carry that negative self-talk throughout your life, impacting your perception of yourself."

Mason said the study results demonstrate a simple way to improve many aspects of life, especially when stress is involved: "The way we carry ourselves and interact in space influences not only how others perceive us but also how we perceive ourselves."

Story Source:  Materials provided by San Francisco State University.  Erik Peper, Richard Harvey, Lauren Mason, I-Mei Lin. Do Better in Math: How Your Body Posture May Change Stereotype Threat Response. NeuroRegulation, 2018; 

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The Protective Gift of Meltdowns

Maxfield Sparrow
unstrangemind.com

Photo © 2017, Maxfield Sparrow
[image description: a turtle in the middle of the road on a hot, sunny day.
His skin is dark with bright yellow stripes and his shell is ornate,
covered with swirls of dark brown against a honey-yellow background.
The turtle is rushing to get across the street and his back leg
is extended from the speed and force of his dash toward freedom.]

I hate meltdowns. I hate the way they take over my entire body. I hate the sick way I feel during a meltdown and I hate the long recovery time—sometimes minutes, but just as often entire days—afterward, when everything is too intense, and I am overwhelmed and exhausted and have to put my life on hold while I recover.

I hate the embarrassment that comes from a meltdown in front of others. I hate the fear that bubbles up with every meltdown. Will this be the one that gets me arrested? Committed? Killed?

Meltdowns, Like Shutdowns, Are Harmful But Necessary

We Autistic adults and teens put a lot of energy into figuring out what will lead to a meltdown and working to avoid those things whenever possible. Parents of younger Autistics also put a lot of energy and work into figuring these things out, both to try to keep triggering events out of their child’s life, and to try to help their child learn how to recognize and steer around those triggers themselves. Outsiders who don’t understand autism will make accusations of being overly avoidant and self-indulgent, and accuse our parents of spoiling and coddling us.

I have written about how shutdown can alter brain function in unwanted ways. Meltdowns also have their dangers, and can alter brain function over time. A meltdown is an extreme stress reaction, and chronic stress can damage brain structure and connectivity.

But meltdowns serve a purpose, just as another unpleasant experience that can also re-wire the brain if it continues chronically and unabated—pain—also serves an important and very necessary purpose.

Pain is an alarm system that helps us avoid bodily damage, and urges us to try to change something to protect our body. While pain is usually unwanted and something we seek to avoid, without pain we would not live very long because we would not have such a strong drive to eliminate sources of damage to our bodies.

Meltdowns are alarm systems to protect our brains.

That idea is so important I gave it its own paragraph. And I’ll say it again: without meltdowns, we autistics would have nothing to protect our neurology from the very real damage that it can accumulate.

So often, I see researchers and other writers talking about meltdowns as if they were a malfunction or manifestation of damage. I strongly disagree. It is easy for an outsider to view a meltdown that way, because all they see is an unpleasant outburst that makes their lives more unpleasant or difficult. They see someone who appears to be over-reacting to something that they don't consider such a big deal. They see someone "immature," someone who needs to grow up, snap out of it, or get a “good spanking” to teach them to behave.

When a person doesn’t themselves experience the hell of having a meltdown, that person can easily misunderstand and misjudge what it actually happening.

Meltdowns Are A Normal Response To Sensitivities

Let me ask you something (this is a thought experiment and you don’t have to actually do this, but you might understand me better if you follow along physically): Take your finger and poke the softer flesh on the inside of your thigh with it so that you are pressing the tip of your fingernail into your thigh. Don’t actually damage yourself! You’re just looking for a reference sensation. Poke it about as hard as you might press a button to ring someone’s doorbell.

If you have long, sharp fingernails that might have hurt a little bit (I hope you were careful. The goal here is not to injure yourself—just to create a physical sensation.) It was a quick poke, so it probably didn’t even leave a mark behind, no matter how long your fingernails are.

Now do the same thing to your gums, either above or below your teeth, in that area between your teeth and the inside of your lips. Oh! You couldn’t even poke it as hard, could you? (Do be gentle with your gums, please. I repeat, this is not about harming yourself. You don’t even have to poke yourself at all if you don’t want to. You know your thighs and gums.) You know, without lifting a finger, that I am telling you the truth when I say your gums are much more sensitive than your inner thigh.

And you are not “over-reacting” when you have more pain response in your gums than in your thigh, right? It’s easier to hurt your gums, so your reaction to the same stimulus is much more intense when it is applied to your gum than to your thigh. You are not self-indulgent or spoiled. You don’t need a good spanking to get over how sensitive your gums are. You just need to take extra care that things don’t poke you in the gums.

So what’s my point? If you are not Autistic—and even more so if you are pretty close to neurotypical —your neurological wiring is more like your thigh. Life pokes at you a lot, and you don’t even notice it. Much of life’s poking is fun for you. Some pokes are less recreational, but present satisfying challenges. So when you see an Autistic person having a meltdown you might not even recognize the pokes they have been processing all day long, because you as a non-autistic person don’t even feel them.

But our Autistic neurological wiring is more like your gums, except not even that predictable. Some of our senses may be “hyporesponsive,” and we need to stimulate them to be aware that they are even functioning. Some of us spin around, or pace in circles. Some of us move our hands or fingers in ways that make us feel better. Some of us blast loud music with a heavy bass and drum component to it. Some of us rock back and forth. Our wiring demands more input than the world’s regular pokes can give us.

Some of our senses are “hyperresponsive”  and we need much less stimulation. Life’s pokes are like fingernails grinding into our gums and we need to make it stop because we cannot bear the pain. Loud sounds or high-pitched sounds get to some of us. Others are overwhelmed by the struggle to understand speech when more than one person is talking at the same time. Some can’t stand textures of fabrics, or foods.

Most Autistic people I know experience a complex mixture of hyporesponsiveness and hyperresponsiveness. Most have some senses that are both hypo and hyper responsive, changing over time. I can’t give you any single idea of a sensory pattern for an Autistic neurology, because we each have our own combinations of needs.

Normal Human Variation Includes Variant Emotional Sensitivity Levels

But when it comes to meltdowns, it’s not just sensory input (or lack thereof) that will set off an Autistic’s neurological warning system and throw us into meltdown. What inspired me to write about this topic was reading something I had written last year, after spending a few months living in an emotionally abusive situation. The man I was living with figured out very quickly how to manipulate my compliance triggers; he even commented specifically on how easy it was for him to physically subdue me once he spotted the compliance “fish-hooks” that childhood had left embedded in me.

I’m not going to go into much detail about what he did, for the same reason I shy away from going into much detail about my decade of childhood therapy: I am working on removing those hooks from my flesh. The last thing I want to do is instruct others as to where those hooks are embedded, and how to use them to steer me like a puppet.

My only point in mentioning my abuse is that I realized—after the fact—that my meltdowns had been sending me a very clear message, one I should have heeded immediately. Instead, I did what I always do: I interpreted my meltdowns as a sign of how damaged I was, and how much I needed help to gain self-control. Most of my life, I’ve allowed lovers to convince me to try to medicate my meltdowns into submission. I hated those meltdowns, because they seemed to illustrate how flawed and awful I was. My thought process went like this: I melt down because I’m Autistic and meltdowns are frightening and horrible and who would want to be my romantic partner? I can’t blame people for treating me badly and wanting to get away from me, because look at these meltdowns!

My experience last year helped me to finally realize that I was looking at things backwards.

I don’t melt down because I’m Autistic.

I melt down because something in my environment is intolerable, and I am having a normal reaction of pain and/or anxiety. That pain can be from something physical, like an intolerable temperature in the room or a sound that is piercing my eardrums and making me nauseated. Or it can be something emotional, like internal feelings of frustration or external abuse.

Everyone has meltdowns. It’s not just an Autistic thing. But our wiring is different, just like the wiring is different between your thighs and your gums. Some things that make neurotypicals meltdown don’t bother me. A whole heaping lot of things that don’t bother neurotypicals make me meltdown terribly. I’m not deficient in some way; I’m wired differently.

Meltdowns Protect Us From Harmful Situations and People

One of the things I learned last year is that, even when I can’t recognize abuse because I have alexithymia, and even when I can’t recognize abuse because my compliance training is kicking in full-force, my body and nervous system will send me the message via repeated meltdowns.

What I wrote a year ago:

"If I have lots of shouting, freak-out, PTSD meltdowns when we spend time alone with each other, yes it’s an Autistic thing. But it also means you’re regularly doing something messed up. 

"An isolated meltdown could just be a random convergence of awful that has nothing to do with you, but if a pattern develops, you’re probably gaslighting me, mistreating me, abusing me, or generally taking nastily unfair advantage of that same Autistic neurology that makes me unable to recognize I’m being abused or mistreated until I see the pattern of meltdowns. 

"All my life I’ve been told, and believed, that losing my shit was a personal shortcoming I should work to overcome. 

"I now realize it’s actually my body/brain’s alarm system letting me know something’s seriously wrong in my life. Something bad that needs to be fixed, like yesterday, if not sooner. 

"I finally realized all this today. Everything suddenly connected. 

"And in an instant, I no longer hate my meltdowns. I think I might actually love them. They protect me.

So… I still do hate meltdowns. More specifically, I hate having meltdowns. They are hard on me, physically and emotionally. They are embarrassing, messy, frightening.

But I am grateful that my body has a way to tell me when I’m in a bad situation, even if my mind is not capable of figuring it out yet. I vow to respect and honor my meltdowns. This is not the same as excusing my behavior. This is not the same as giving myself free reign to do whatever, whenever.

I still want to do whatever I can to avoid having a meltdown. I still want to work on my ability to detect a meltdown on the horizon, and remove myself to safety before things go too far.

But I also vow to listen to my meltdowns and pay closer attention to my triggers. Meltdowns teach me what my nervous system can handle and what is too much for me. Meltdowns teach me how to take care of myself. Meltdowns teach me what my nervous system needs. Meltdowns highlight areas of my life that are not on track.

Sometimes my depression shows me that something is wrong in my life, but sometimes depression is just like a wildfire, burning out of control. The same is true of my anxiety. But I have learned that meltdowns are always highlighting something I need to address.

Meltdowns protect me. Some aspects of my neurology make me more vulnerable. Some remnants of childhood experiences leave me more vulnerable. Meltdowns fill that gap and send me messages about my life that can help me protect myself.

While I will never enjoy having a meltdown, I promise I will always value the protective gift meltdowns bring me

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