Postcards From My Mind: Perspectives of Asperger's Syndrome

(2) Shifting Attention

Everything we do in life involves attending to one stimulus then shifting attention to the next. For example, even reading this text involves shifting between printed words and meaning. While you are reading this, your attention is probably also shifting between the texture of the pages and the text, between your watch and the text, between other auditory distractions and the text. All of this is normal.

Shifts of attention occur in several ways:

1. internal to internal (reflecting on ones own thoughts)
2. internal to external stimuli (what’s happening in my body and what can I do about it?)
3. external to external (between two objects or people)
4. external to internal (when I see such-and-such how does that make me feel?)

Several problems can occur which effects shifting:

1. Unable to Shift Attention means the person can only concentrate on one thing at a time
2. Forgetting: the person can shift, but forgets the previous stimuli (“Hum, what was I just doing?”)
3. Premature Shifting: attention becomes hijacked or the person is not able to filter out stimuli so too much is attended to at once (as in Attention Deficit Disorder)
4. Lack of Modality Shifting: the person can shift his/her attention, but not between stimuli that comes in from two different modalities (i.e., can’t look and listen at the same time).

As a child I was always in trouble at school because I could not follow auditory directions. I would be writing in my notebook doing my work trying hard to ignore the sounds of other student’s pencils scratching all around me. The teacher would start to jumble out some words that were not interpretable (“Pencil’s down, everyone look up here”). The next think I new … the horrible scratching had stopped and I could finally finish my work in peace. Then bam!… I was in trouble again. The teacher’s voice started to sound like a Charlie Brown cartoon, “wha, whua, wha, wha, wha, principal’s office”. The words “principal’s office” always came through loud and clear! Switching my attention between modalities (tactile and auditory) and between two different stimuli (desk work and looking at the teacher) was impossible. Later in High School I was always in trouble for not taking notes during lectures. Switching between listening to a lecture and writing (which is extremely difficult for me) was completely ineffective. I got so much more out of the lecture if I would just listen.

Timing presents a problem in other areas as well such as when I’m hungry or need to use the bathroom, by the time my brain interprets the signal correctly (I’m hungry, I need to go to the bathroom), I have very little time to engage in the activity before I urinate in my pants or become cranky from not eating. I have compensated for these difficulties by peseverating on meal times. If I’m hungry I might talk about it incessantly until I eat. This is a way of reminding myself that I’m hungry. There are times that I become frustrated with the people around me because of their lack of understanding about the “now factor”. When I say I have to go to the bathroom or eat I mean now. Not 20 minutes from now, but now! It’s not that I’m trying to be demanding, although it might appear this way – I literally can’t wait. Switching attention also involves more complex things such as making choices. When I was growing up, certain choices confounded me. My ritualized ways of getting through life served to both organize me, but it also eliminated the needing to make a choice. If there is only one way to do something, then one never needs to make a choice. Gym class was always so difficult. I hated gym anyway because competitive and group sports were just something I never could get the hang of and my gross motor skills left a lot to be desired!

When our class first entered the gym we needed to sign up for an activity. The loud echoes and squeaking sneakers were terrible distractions. My class lined up and one-by-one each member wrote his/her name next to the preferred choice. Once I reached the check off board I would become engrossed in the smell of the marker needing to smell it three times before I could even begin to decide upon a choice. Once this ritual was over I would look at the name of the two game choices, click up a picture of them, run video clips in my mind about previous times I played these sports, and then start to use rule-based logic to assign numerical values to each part of the sport. I never got to do my final calculation because the kids in line would yell, “hurry up”. Generally this disaster ended by the teacher choosing for me.

Switching attention also involves abstraction, which leads to symbolic play. When children are infants, their play involves sensory exploration. As they grow their ability to switch attention becomes more sophisticated and they start displaying an interest in symbolic toys. It is the most incredible thing to watch a child start to associate a stuffed animal with a character on television and hear him/her say the characters name in the form of a question “Poo?” Essentially when you are switching your attention, you are creating two separate images and have the ability to compare the two.

What is this object to the right? I’m sure all of you said, “A car”. But is it actually a car? No, it a drawing of a piece of metal with four round rubber pieces on the bottom. In your mind you said it was a car because it looked like a small representation of a car. In order to come to this conclusion (probably unconsciously, unless you’re on the spectrum!) you clicked up this photograph and compared it with a picture in your mind of a real car. You decided it was close enough and came up with this answer. In order to have symbolism, one must have a level of abstraction. The only way one can have abstraction is to be able to “click up” two images side-by-side and compare them.

The next level of abstraction involves a bit more imagination. In this next level a tissue box could be transformed into a car. All children start off with concrete symbolic play (or imagining an object that resembles the real object – such as a matchbox car). During the next developmental stage children start to become more creative. This is generally when blankets are pulled off beds and kids start to make forts.

Many doctors have commented about the “bizarre” object attachment that children on the autism spectrum show. As a child I was obsessed with collecting paint samples – the strips of paper that have a range of color on them – the kind that are displayed at hardware stores. These “professionals” are comparing people on the autism spectrum who have highly abnormal processing systems to typically developing peers. I would like to offer an alternative explanation, as I don’t see this “attachment” as so odd. Would you think it was odd if a child who was totally deaf didn’t enjoy playing with a music box? The autism spectrum is similar in that aspect.

Because sensory systems are faulty and many people on the autism spectrum do not have representation, many children prefer not to play with symbolic “toys”. Think for a moment, what is the purpose of a toy or an activity that you like? Usually, the most simplistic answer is that you derive pleasure from it. If you didn’t have representation how much pleasure do you think you would have playing with a toy car? How much pleasure would you have if you couldn’t see or comprehend an object as a whole – if biologically you only could comprehend the wheels, a screw, the shiny plastic, the gas hole, etc. as separate pieces? How much fun do you think this miniature “car” would be? If you roll the wheels back and forth on your arm and it feels good why wouldn’t you repeat this activity? I saw a rubber wheel massager in the Sharper Image that cost $32.50. When children on the autism spectrum partake in this behavior it’s called “a disorder”; when “normal” adults do it, it’s called stress reduction. In reality, there is little difference.

Shopping malls are a place that I used to avoid like the plague – anyone who has ever walked into one knows of the echoing noise, the amount of different smells which come in waves as people pass combining with the odor of stores themselves. Most malls have fluorescent lights and people tend not to talk in an orderly fashion at the same time, at the same speed – basically it’s a nightmare not only for people on the spectrum, but for other people as well. Now think about this same scenario the week before Christmas – does the thought of a shopping mall at Christmastime make your skin crawl? Picture now if your stimulation level was that high no matter where you went – sometimes even in your own home. If this was the base I bet that you too would be searching for something soothing such as a rubber wheel massager!

Children with sensory impairments tend to find external ways to modulate the stimulation in their environment because, neurologically, they are unable to do so internally. As a child one of my favorite “toys” was an old fashion vegetable steamer – the shiny metal kind with holes on the sides and the sides could curl/fold up into a closed overlapping circle. This proved the perfect amount of simulation – it was generally cold which calms me down. It would open and close and had many succinct holes which provided a wonderful stimulation when I was under stimulated. I would run my fingers back and forth over the overlapping sides, which filled my tactile stimulation needs. To top it all off it was complex enough that when I was over-stimulated I could become completely absorbed with it. It was a “toy” for every occasion! I think this is rather clever. If I asked you to name one item that could fulfill all of your sensory needs could you name just one?

This type of abstraction is also the route of metaphors and jokes. Metaphors involve representation (as if…). Before I truly understood this concept, I was walking up the stairs at my office and a woman commented, “Boy these stairs are killers” I was very alarmed and immediately looked down expecting to find spikes or some mouse-trap like contraption at my feet. I didn’t see anything so I just smiled and got off at the next floor finishing my trip via elevator. It took me three weeks before I realized it was a metaphor and I could use the stairs again!

The whole basis of jokes is either to compare two situations that are not equal or to find the irony. When one hears, “What’s black and white, and read [red] all over?” hearing the punch line, “A newspaper”, makes people laugh because what you had anticipated was different than the outcome. In essence, this is the whole basis for comedy. If one can’t shift one’s attention, making future predictions does not occur. In order to make a future prediction, one needs to hold two schematics in one’s mind simultaneously and shift between them.