A Nickel's Worth of Empathy

I'm sure it is a common family tale told around many Thanksgiving tables; the young child filled with compassion to the point of overflowing rescues some sickly, desperate animal who thereby becomes the beloved family pet.  The greater the need of the animal, the greater the love, and then of course, the harder it is for the parents to say no.  And they can't.  Now, we too, have our own version that timeless story.  Not without a twist, of course.

It is often assumed that children with ASD have a fundamental lack of empathy.  Often this seems very true, like when my boys laugh at someone who is hurt or make a hurtful (albeit true) observation.  However, I've always felt this bit of conventional wisdom was at best an oversimplification and possibly completely and utterly wrong.  It is true that the boys often miss the social clues that might generate empathy in others, but I wouldn't regard that as a deficit in empathy, but rather of awareness.  When they do become aware of the suffering of another the impact, the feeling of empathy, often seems overwhelming to them.  So much so that I've often wondered if as opposed to a lack of empathy they actually possess it in excess to the point that they have to shut it off completely to avoid it's crushing heaviness.
 
Recently Daniel, who generally shows a stunning disregard for the material world around him put on an impressive display of compassion and empathy. Like the classic young child of so many family stories who takes in and nurses a bedraggled and half starving kitten and continues to protect it for years to come, Daniel rescued something of his own and is now fiercely protective of it.  He worries about it.  He checks on it.  He makes arrangements for its safety when he is gone.

It is a nickel.  A completely ordinary nickel, minted in 1994.

The nickel first came into my awareness when he suddenly sat upright in his top bunk as I began our nighttime story.  He leaned over the bed and peered down intently at his desk.  When asked why he said he was just checking on something and that was the end of it.  The next night, when the process nearly repeated itself, I began to ask more questions.  He was checking on his nickel, making sure it was safe.  He said it was special, but didn't say why.  Certainly odd behavior for Daniel, who typically cares not one cent for money and will open a card and lose any birthday money it might contain within seconds, letting it fall idly to the floor.  The next night he went into more detail as he began to build a sort of protective shrine around the nickel.  He had found it perched perilously above an open knot in the floorboards.  He had saved it.  He cried about it, how close it had come to being lost forever.  He demanded the hole taped over before he would dare to move the nickel again.  He searched out other dangerous holes in the house and demanded those be taped too.  He checks on the nickel, to ensure its safety daily and before he goes to bed at night, he verifies that is safe.  He won't let it be removed to a potentially safer location as he needs to KNOW that it is safe.

It may just be a nickel, but it is a start.  The boys might not show empathy in the way most people expect, but it is there.  It is there in an abundance.

Sense meditation, sensory processing disorder and autism

Having children on the autism spectrum one comes to think about the senses in a completely different manner. Regardless of your level of philosophical or scientific interest this becomes a practical matter. In order to navigate the day with some level of peace and happiness a parent must be able to recognize all manner of sensory insults that may be assaulting your child, a child often unable to communicate what is wrong. You have to learn to see, feel and hear the world through anothers eyes, ears and skin and this turns out to be much tougher than one expects. The reality my boys perceive is far different from the reality my brain constructs for me. Lights are brighter. Patterns are everywhere and demand attention. Tags are like sandpaper. The sudden eruption of clapping, well, I don't even know what that is like other than to say it must be terrifying and horrible. Observing this I can't help but wonder about the nature of reality and how different their reality must be from mine.
These thoughts were part of my background musings when I read Temple Grandin's Animals in Translation. The book describes her experiences as a person with autism and relates her personal experience to her years of experience working with animals. She describes her brain as functioning closer to that of the animals she works with in regard to the intake of sensory input, which has allowed her to be very successful designing systems for handling cattle, for instance. The autistic brain, she contends, is in essence receiving the raw input of the senses without filtering the information the way a neurotypical brain does. This enables some amazing feats that defy our human experience but also results in a great amount of fear and anxiety.

The notion that the direct experience of raw sense data devoid of our well developed filters is a rather terrifying experience stands in contradiction to the Buddhist notion of open awareness in which raw experience of reality is strengthened through meditation using the senses as props for meditation. For the past couple months the mediation group I am a part of has been focusing on sense mediation, following the book Joy of Living by Mingyur Rinpoche. The focus of our work has been to utilize our senses to experience reality without our usual judgements, or at least that is the interpretation I've taken away. To be able to experience sounds as just sounds, smells as just smells, etc. is truly liberating. On a practical level I've seen results. The sounds of traffic, say a car honking, doesn't trigger the anxiety and cascade of thoughts about being late that it once did. It is just sound and I can now be freer to just experience that in the moment.

So, all that has me wondering what the disconnect between the positive experiences I've been having just experiencing sounds as sounds free of my filters of judgement and the troubled experience my children seem to have experiencing sounds as just sounds without any judgement or interpretation.

For the answer I'll delve, perhaps unskillfully, into the field of neurobiology. The boys seemed to be ruled by their amygdala. The amygdala is the small reptilian portion of the brain responsible for the flight or fight response. It is the amygdala that first receives the message that something long and skinny has been spotted on the side of the trail. And the amygdala always starts yelling, "SNAKE!" and sets action in motion. It is the amygdala that makes you jump, shout or run. It is a bit longer before the data makes its way to the prefrontal cortex where it will be analyzed and then the message will be sent that says, "it is just a stick, calm down" and the amygdala and it's burst of neurotransmitters is shut down. With the boys it seems, and some days more than others, that their brains are simply yelling "SNAKE, SNAKE, SNAKE" all day long in response to any and all forms of sensory input. Simply observing them you'd likely describe their reactions as panic and some days even a physiological change is evident as their pupils become dilated. Testing of neurotransmitters has also shown elevated levels of norepenephrine and adrenaline further confirming the increased activity of their amygdalas.

Again the question remains if Temple Grandin is correct and individuals with autism are experiencing something closer to the raw input of senses than the rest of us, what makes that experience quite terrifying for them, whereas through my effort to cultivate that kind of open awareness through sense meditation I've found an opposite release from the fear and anxiety that sense responses formerly elicited in me? I think, and I am really just guessing, the answer comes in one word, training. The first part of training has a occurred throughout my life in all manner of experience. I've learned that in most situations I am truly safe. I have some sense what other people are going to do in any situation. I can make quick predictions. However, being deficit in "theory of the mind" the boys perhaps lack this life experience. They don't know what other people are going to do. To them, humans are quite unpredictable, so to begin with they are on high alert already and simply don't have that background knowledge or training about being safe. The pathways leading to the prefrontal cortex and the interpretations of safety just aren't being strengthened as humans seem so unpredictable.

A second form of training could come through sense meditation. I suspect that when I've been meditating on certain sense input in a deliberate manner I have actually been strengthening the neuronal connections between sense experience and a general feeling of well-being and safety produced by the act of meditation. The amygdala isn't interested in meditation and is happily turned off allowing connections to the prefrontal cortex to be strengthened preferentially. This changes the way I respond now, leading to calmer and less reactive response to sensory input.

I wonder, therefore, if sense meditation (or meditation in general) would be a good approach that could help calm the reactivity of the boys, teaching them to safely co-exist with sounds and other sensory input. While I've not seen sense meditation ever described as a therapy for autism there are numerous other forms of music therapy or therapeutic listening that I suspect may act on a similar notion.