There are a lot of parallels that can be drawn, but I think there are still differences between a functional difference that occurs because of overall brain organization (as probably happens in autism), and a structural difference that resulted form an injury. They can resemble each other more when an injury happens so early in life that the entire brain adapts to it, but I suspect that’s not what’s going on with most autistic people. (Although some, quite possibly, it is.)

I still find that I have a lot in common with many people with TBI or strokes though. And I don’t doubt that I probably, in addition to being autistic, have some degree of brain damage from 20 years of head banging (more frequently at some points than others) and 4 or 5 years of neuroleptics.

Hi Donna,
I am a writer in psychology and philosophy in Chicago. I suffered a tbi (traumatic brain injury) at the age of 16 which produced permanent symptoms which include sleep disorders, hypersensitivity to light, sound and touch, ocd, apathy, a slowness in processing affectively intense stimuli, easy distraciblility and need to avoid direct eye contact, and difficulty in processing rapidly transpiring social situations. These symptoms are common to many with acquired brain injuries.

I have studied theories of information processing and affectivity as well as researching the areas of the brain which may be functionally involved in tbi and autism, and I developed the hypothesis that autism and tbi may in many cases share common features. It may turn out to be the case that the difference between autistic experience and the symptoms of tbi is mainly the age of onset . An acquired brain injury (unless it is acquired in infancy) occurs after the point when an individual’s brain has been able to effectively experience social affectivity, perceptual integration and an interpersonal concept of “self”.

Thus, the memory of these concepts remain intact post-injury and can be accessed to aid in reconstructing or filling-in-for the fragmentary perceptual-cognitive processing following a tbi. TBI’ers typically say their old self “died” as a result of their injury and a new one replaced it, but I would argue that what is crucial is that they still remember this old self. Autistics, on the other hand, have no recollections to fall back on of the experience of “normal” perceptual and social-emotional integration and so must undertake the herculean task of constructing these concepts indirectly and piecemeal.

What I’m suggesting is that the difference between the autistic and the tbi’er is like the difference between someone born deaf and someone who became deaf later in life. There is an entire process of perceptual integration between the auditory , visual and movement cortices which has already occurred within the brain of the person who was born with hearing which was unavailable to the person born deaf. One the person born hearing acquires this information, these concepts, they never forget them , and even after they become deaf, they are able to draw on this information to sound out words on a page, etc. In the same way, the person with acquired brain injury is able, in social situations, to draw upon well-learned concepts concerning social-affective cues to use as a crutch when ongoing situations move to rapidly and intensely for them to keep up “on the fly”.

Has there ever been a documented case of autism in someone older than 8 or 9, who had, according to DETAILED and ACCURATE observations of family and friends, been without a trace of autistic behaviors prior to that age? I would suggest that autism is something that is not and cannot be “acquired” later in life precisely because it is a brain injury that is fundamentally defined by a tbi-syndrome that occurs before the individual has the chance to effectively process rapid, sequentially dense, multiple perceptual and social-affective input, and therefore has no store of such information to draw.

If this hypothesis is found to have merit, it will allow us to widen the autism spectrum to include not just ADD, ADHD, Asperger’s and such, but also a whole range of acquired brain syndromes which affect perhaps 100’s of millions of people around the world. Donna, when I read your description of how the world appears to you, there are significant aspects of it which I can directly relate to. If, immediately after my injury, if I hadn’t had the memory of the meaning, importance and rewards associated with social-affective thinking, I would have had little reason to reason to pull away from apathetic immersion in low-level perceptual stimulation

(I also think its important to separate ADD and ADHD from TBI. In many cases, including mine, the core symptoms of TBI are almost opposite of ADD. ADD’ers thrive on multitasking whereas the slowness of processing and deficits in concentration typically of tbi’s require as few distractions as possible in order to function.)

Are you aware of any research that deals with this topic ?

Joshua Soffer

In writing stuff, I try to read something related before trying to write about something, to get that part of my knowledge running. For example before adding to a story I’m working on I read some of what I’ve already written in order to slip back into the stream of the story.

But when it comes to abstract, a-hah type realizations (of which I have had many while reading your blog!) they tend to stick with me forever. I think my problem is encoding. I’m so lost in my own inner abstract musings that I fail to encode the situation around me. My dad calls this “having very loud thoughts.”

Something I have started doing since I started writing online was to start “composing” threads and emails “in my head”. Since I have so few conversations in real life, I never really got the exercise of “practising conversations” until I started typing online so regularly.

A lot of the time it takes a long while between these fragments of threads and ideas and my actually sitting down and typing them out.

A lot of the time I never send them off or post them.

Sometimes I do, and the person then wonders why I am sending them the same conclusion I had come to two years ago, all over again.

The irony is that I think I sent a copy of the Email that got our discussion started to a person to whom I had posted almost exactly the same thing not once but at least twice before, once a bit over a month ago and the other time maybe two years ago…. I do hope she sees the irony in it at least ;)

Anyway what I wanted to say was that while interests do direct WHAT I “practise” about, it is still a handy practice to get used to verbal expression (similar to what I mentioned in the original post that started this musing, the exercise of verbally going through your day’s events, which helped me develop an inner verbal stream).

I think that we are doing things with so few things filtered out (and so few of the shortcuts that other people tend to take) that we have to do several things at a time in order to be doing what other people consider (falsely) to be “one thing”.

only one thing can be done at a time

so whats gone before is packed down to its essential elements and put away

and if you want to look at it again you have to unpack and rebuild it and specific memories can be lost

You wrote: It’s scary in a way. It’s especially unnerving when you’ve had an extraordinary memory all your life.

Yeah, exactly. I do have a really good memory, when it works. And then I’ll be absolutely dead-accurate. But then if I’m not getting a memory triggered in some way, it’s just not there, and I “forget” it.