I was never one to wear shoes as a kid and didn’t think much of socks either.  I felt they were suffocating my feet.  It was like being blindfolded or having your hands in gloves all the time.  So whether the ground was covered in frost or the Australian summer tarmac so hot the tar stuck to your feet, those shoes came off!  In the playground, the shoes came off.  As soon as I was out of the school gate those shoes were off.  When I was 2 I was found to have no response to pain and I was 13 by the time I understood people said ‘ouch’ when they had hurt their body.  I learned it after pulling a chunk of broken bottle from my foot.  The incredible pain on my friend’s mother’s face, I mimicked her ‘oww’ and by twenty years on, I could link the pain with expression (the pain had been there but I hadn’t taken it personally or known what to do with it).  But it was this which taught me why I WANTED to wear shoes, and also that the chillblanes on my toes and the burning of my soles could be helped by caring about my feet.  So my feet were among the first of my ‘pot plant’ experiments, experiments in how to care for parts of my body to stop them being harmed… guess I was working from the bottom up 🙂

But whilst stereotypes abound about sensory hypersensitivities of kids with autism, and whilst I had my equal share or niggles with things too tight, too rubbing, too whatever, I wanted those shoes off for another reason.  My feet were my eyes.

I was face blind, relatively object blind, and context blind.  Meaning blindness occurs when you can only process the part and each piece that would normally be processed as a whole is instead a series of disconnected parts.  So without this cohesion there is little sense of where one is in space or the distance one has traveled, the changes in those spaces and the relationships of these new experiences to past ones.  But there are various compensations.  One can use echo-acoustics, making noises into spaces or at surfaces, even tapping them, to hear their ‘voices’ which give away their substance, density, their distance and relationships to things around them.  One can walk to the ‘point of symmetry’ within any room, garden, staircase, any place, and then turn in a circle like a compass might to map the relative distance of all other points from there to the peripheries.  One can run one’s hand over the boundaries to get a tactile sense of how the room is constructed.  One can use peripheral vision which cuts out the amount of information coming in, leaving more brain time to process what’s left more cohesively than if looking directly.  But one can also take one’s shoes of and voila!  The feet become the ‘hands’ which have constant contact with shifting textures, temperatures, boundaries, distance, and the kinaesthetic feedback of walking on various surfaces.  Put shoes on someone with visual agnosias and it’s like blindfolding someone without visual agnosias.

So how can you tell if a child has visual agnosias, especially if they have no functional speech?  Do they navigate their world through tapping, smelling, flicking objects?   Do they disassemble toys and games into their component parts and enjoy each part at a time?    Do they use objects primarily for textures, smell, sounds, flicking or for catching light, watching movement or creating lines and patterns?  Do they stare through things as if blind, jump and climb on furniture like the cat might and appear to ignore all contextual cues?   So they prefer the mirror or even watch the world through mirrors and window reflections?    Do they greet your hair, earrings, coat, watch your feet and fingers or smell you for recognition?

Visual agnosias don’t have to be severely disabling if we understand them and the ways severe visual agnosias can disrupt language development, relationships and learning.  We need to remember that enjoyment of visual patterns does not make one a visual thinker and that those with severe visual agnosias may think musically, or in movement or think in textures, smells, feelings, systems, even devoid of mental pictures or only have fragmented ones, able to visualise the table leg but lose the table top.  And yet the same people may have incredible serial memory for events, movement and spatial layouts if they’ve navigated them physically.

Remember that  if you are teaching someone with visual agnosias, don’t rely on pictures which they may only see in bits, that gestures and characterisations may be more complete and make better links to learning language with meaning than pictures will.  Remember that having visual and verbal agnosias means each contributes to the other and unless you teach through something other than just visual or verbal you will be that person’s greatest source of disability.

And it is time we acknowledged that being deaf, blind, deaf-blind or having visual, verbal or visual, verbal and body agnosias, can be an isolating, alienating experience which can help some people to develop ‘autistically’ until those deficits are understood and responded to appropriately.  It is time we stopped diagnosing agnosic children as autistic ones and diagnosed agnosias with or without the complication of autism.  And whilst we’re going to try and help kids protect their feet from broken bottles and debris, from burning hot tarmac, let’s remember that being able to connect to the world, make sense of it, feel it consistently, is one of the things which may stop a meaning deaf, meaning blind agnosic child from otherwise drifting off into, even remaining in, their own ‘autistic’ (agnosic) world.

Donna Williams, Dip Ed, BA Hons.
Author, artist, singer-songwriter, screenwriter.
Autism consultant and public speaker.

http://www.myspace.com/nobodynowherethefilm
http://www.donnawilliams.net
http://www.aspinauts.com