yes, they should! I wonder how receptive most of them would be to that idea. They might look at you weird if you were to suggest that……but hell, that’s their problem.

TI

Evonne’s comment about her experience reminded me too of how in a family where hyperlexia is prevelent in more then one child it is just accepted as normal for the family by the family. Amanda’s oldest brother was riding in the car strapped into his car seat when he spontaneously read “milk” on a truck passing by. He was fascinated too by the game show” Concentration” dancing to the music and playing the game when he could barely walk…So it was no surprise when Amanda was an early reader . The most common way I remember Amanda falling asleep was with a book on her face or chest and a cat curled up by her side as she read herself to sleep in her crib. It was no surprise when her interest in astronomy led to her reading all the adult astronomy books at an early age ..It would have been more unusual and disturbing to me if she had not as this was just a progression of her early interest in the written word….More disturbing was her loss of spoken language for a while…when she pointed and grunted at what she wanted…and words were hard to come by…..It was a revelation later on to see how much better she could express herself with written words…using a keyboard…then if she had to deal with speech…At one point it all just became very hard….An educational testing place better defined the need for a keyboard…and an audiologist diagnosed the central processing disorder. I wish as a parent I had known about such testing earlier…as they led to better learning accommodations….and helped explain the difficulty with such tasks as keeping a desk, a locker or a room clean…The audiologist explained too the difficulty in a room full of people talking picking out the one to which she was supposed to listen. It was also an educator experienced with Irlen lenses who first helped us realize how faces were a jumble to her and she had virtually no depth perception and lost the ability to function under flourescent lights and had difficulty in rooms with white walls. When he put colored lenses in front of her to defract the light differently she saw my whole face for the first time…I can remember too her look of awe with her new colored glasses to see the ocean…Before she had been afraid of it…She also used to shriek in the car if we got close to a cliff…I realized then how terryfying it must have been. This too might explain her crying uncontrollably on a winding ride down the mountain when she was an infant as all she could see above her was moving canopy of tree limbs and not being able to judge their depth must have been horrific…Speaking of light and the difference in how some people seem to process it…an early observation I had about Amanda and her brother was their inability to sync with day and night…Both seemed not to have normal circadian rhythems…often sleeping in the day and playing at night. It was much later we found that the type of lightbox or light visor used in the morning for an hour would get circadian rhythems back in sync and day was more day and night a time to sleep. There were other things like noise overload for a person with super sensetive hearing that made going into a loud resturaunt impossible…Later we learned that an audiologist could fashion musician’s ear plugs to lower the sound level to a more tolerable level. I wish the things we learned through trial-and-error had been all summerized in a book somewhere so we could have found more helpful ways to do things earlier….I remember once when I was working in a hospital where they wanted us to be more empathetic to the elderly they had us do an exercise where we wore glasses that made us see like someone with cataracts…we had pebbles put in our shoes to make walking more difficult…They did a number of things to help us experience getting around as an elderly person might experience. It was eye opening…I wonder
if teachers of autistic children should go through a similar exercise..Put sandpaper clothes on them…put lenses in glasses that distort faces…
turn up the sound to a deafening level…paint the walls a really distracting color…let sound drift in and out…use storbe lights too…I wonder then
how well they would learn and concentrate…and if they might then take what they had experienced and change the environment to fit the child…Not that every autistic has the same experiences…but whatever they experience should be considered in their normal environment and their school environment.

I started writing seriously at 10 before that it was mostly survival and only that.

I had a back injury around that time and i do not know if that may have helped to start my writing addiction but that was when it started big time.

I have thrown out about as much as i have kept and have reems of discs as well. Thanks for the digital world and I do find writing by hand to be a mostly different experience and that i need to do it as well. Gah, here i am raw and unedited in all my english mixed up glory.

Tht empty page or journal can also be a huge rush for me.

I just want to let you know that as a person, I have not felt much love in this life. I have felt love and I now know this, as at one point I felt like I did not. I learned to identify the feeling in the heart and that that is what love is, it is a rush within my heart that feels good.

Reading you brings me that rush within my heart and I have feelings. Ordinarily, I do not feel much beyond, fear, irritation, frustration or generally emptiness. My favourite feeling is emptyness.

Yep, thanks.

I suppose that there are some people whose need to read takes precedence over eating, and that could have life-threatening results.

Having this knowledge readily available en masse to every patient is a critical step towards our medical future.