Why I'm turning my son into a cyborg (archive) (alt)
Imagine if everyone spoke a language you don't understand. People have been speaking it around you since the day you were born, but while everyone else picks it up immediately, for you it means nothing. Others become frustrated with you. Friendships and jobs are difficult. Just being "normal" becomes a battle.
For many with autism, this is the language of emotion. For those on the spectrum, fluency in facial expressions doesn't come for free as it does for "neurotypicals." To them, reading facial expressions seems like a superpower.
So when my son was diagnosed, I reacted not just as a mom. I reacted as a mad scientist and built him a superpower.
This isn't the first time I've played mad scientist with my son's biology. When he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, I hacked his insulin pump and built an AI that learned to match his insulin to his emotions and activities. I've also explored neurotechnologies to augment human sight, hearing, memory, creativity, and emotions. Tiger moms might obsess over the "right" prep schools and extracurriculars for their child, but I say why leave their intellect up to chance?
I've chosen to turn my son into a cyborg and change the definition of what it means to be human. But do my son's engineered superpowers make him more human, or less?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bradley13 on Friday July 19 2019, @02:17PM (2 children)
First, note this: "Earlier versions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) ... listed autistic disorder, Asperger syndrome and [two other conditions] as separate diagnoses. In the latest edition of the DSM, however, experts combined these conditions into one group called autism spectrum disorder because they all appear to be varying degrees of the same disorder."
Unless one is very careful with the stats, that alone is going to skew them.
More importantly, people seem to want their kids to be diagnosed with something. Autism, Asperger's, ADD, ADHD, whatever - every kid who has the faintest signs of anything is going to get a diagnosis. In earlier decades, this was not true. Kids were kids, they have a range of behaviors, and only the most extreme cases were formally diagnosed. As this trend has increased, so has the percentage of kids carrying diagnoses around.
As an aside: I'm not sure this is helpful for the kids. Seems to me that it gives them an excuse to not fit in, to not along with others, to demand special treatment. Lacking a diagnosis, you just figure out how to make life work. Everybody has their challenges. FWIW, I figure I'm probably somewhere on the spectrum, but I've never been diagnosed, and I hardly see any reason to pursue it. Really, what difference would it make?
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by Mer on Friday July 19 2019, @04:53PM (1 child)
Whether or not it's helpful for the kid is up to what parents do with that information. As long as autism is mild enough that the kid is not language impaired, you can teach emotion reading explicitly instead of letting the kid pick it up on their own. Even neurotypicals sometimes have a quirk that needs to be corrected because body language skills are rarely perfect and they didn't learn it as they grew up.
Stuff like reminding yourself to blink a bit more than you need to during face to face conversations if you don't blink a lot. Most people even if they blink infrequently will automatically drift to the rythm of their interlocutor.
Shut up!, he explained.
(Score: 2) by Snospar on Friday July 19 2019, @05:23PM
Just wear hard contact lenses and you'll be blinking in no time! Now if only I could master the "I'm listening; I'm interested" facial expression to go with it
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