questions

This looks great! Thanks, Alan!

I would like to jump right in with a few questions that I've been wondering about. Maybe someone else will have an idea about how to answer them. I seems we all agree that many of the activity patterns developed by people with autism look like the deep, narrow wells (strong attrators) mapped out by Esther Thelen and her colleagues, in that they are hard to avoid and hard to break out of. I would suggest that there are also a lot of deep, wide wells with several small peaks in their valleys, representing the clusters of quickly shifting behaviors with which certain situations are met. It seems to me that many times the perturbations which underlie certain choices of activity can be very slight -- often we cannot figure what they are -- but the range of choices themselves is limited. But there is another phenomenon that I don't know how to fit into that type of representation, and that is the common experience of being stuck at the point of a phase transition (or phase shift). All I can think of is wells with sticky rims. If the ball goes in, the activity becomes stable or quasi-stable, but if it bounces out of the rim, the system seems to go into chaos. Any thoughts?

Next question: It seems that stable or quasi-stable wells are formed by the interactions of three elements: perception, action (motor activity), and their linkage in real time. But people with autism have a problem with accurate and reliable real time linkages. I keep thinking of the baby in Phil Teitelbaum's research videos -- the one who was trying so hard to mouth the pair of sunglasses. Her head went one way, while her eyes went another way, while her arms went yet another way. What happens when a system tries to form patterns/wells out of such out-of-synch elements? Would the observation that perception and action aren't bonding well in time account for the formation of behavior patterns that we perceive as inefficient, or as having that "almost but not quite" quality which can be so frustrating to people with autism as they struggle to accomplish an activity using a pattern that seems strongly locked in, but that doesn't really work too well?

Last question: How does what we know about dynamic systems theory and the formation of activity patterns fit with what we know about the neurology of autism? I am intruiged by the research finding that, both before and after birth, the brains of people with autism do not go through the usual pruning down of brain cell populations. In other words, there can be too much connectivity, to a point where it becomes inefficient. I think of Barbara Moran saying, "My brain always gets there in the end, it's just that it takes the scenic route." There is also the example of Donna Williams, and the way her sense impressions from different modalities quickly fuse and overwhelm each other. Could this overconnectivity be a possible explanation for the formation and persistence of inefficient behavior patterns/wells -- that is, does the system come together into a pattern too quickly because it is overconnected, and therefore too inflexible to spend sufficient time exercising and selecting among a wider variety of options? This might have implications for what O.T.s do, and maybe some of them would have answers.

Thanks again for the opportunity to share and get feedback on these thoughts.