Working in Movement

Answer, but No Cure, for a Social Disorder That Isolates Many describes some of the social awkwardness of adults with Asperger's Syndrome, a "mild" form of autism named after the doctor who first wrote about it in the 1940's. People with Asperger's symptoms share a defining trait with those with more severe symptoms: something called mindblindness:

Lacking the ability to read cues like body language to intuit what other people are thinking, they have profound difficulty navigating basic social interactions. The diagnosis is reordering their lives. Some have become newly determined to learn how to compensate.

And, fortunately, though they are relatively scarce, there are learning opportunities availalble to Asperger's adults and children. The classes focus on skills like how close to stand next to someone at a party, or how to tell when people are angry even when they are smiling. Apparently, the learning approach can work. Said one Aspie teenager, "It's like we stay tadpoles for longer, but once we're ready, we're no less of a frog."

This all got me to thinking of another type of awkwardness--sensory/motor. Do the symptoms of Asperger's extend to the sensory/motor system? The Asperger's Connection provides some good information, even a couple of on-line courses. One of them is Sensory and Motor Problems in Individuals with Asperger’s Syndrome. Written mainly from an occupational therapy point of view, the course contains lots of information addressing these questions.

It turns out that there's not a lot of research about sensory/motor problems in Asperger's, although Asperger himself wrote about it extensively. About half of those diagnosed will exhibit some problems with fine or gross motor skills. Handwriting seems to be a particularly nasty issue for many, though general lack of coordination is often described too. In particular, motor planning, the activity of planning, initiating and performing a certain movement sequence, is difficult for many. This involves the accuracy of the neural "maps" of the body that we all carry around in our nervous systems. Here's an experiment from the website to illustrate the issue:

Try this. Move two chairs together so they are about 15-inches apart. and walk between them. Did you turn to the side to do this? If you were walking through a room and came to this 15-inch gap, you would automatically realize that you could not get through that space without turning and going through sideways. This would not be something you had to stop and think about, you would just do it. You can do this because you have an internal “map” of your body that is created through propioceptive information and this map is constantly being updated telling you where your arms are etc. When you visually viewed the space and automatically “measured” the distance against your internal map of the body, you concluded that you are to wide to go through a 15-inch space without turning to the side. What would happen if your internal body map was faulty or poorly developed? Would you find that you hit the door jam when going through a door, that you bumped into desks when going through a classroom? Would you look clumsy?

Movement education (like the Feldenkrais Method that I practice) stress developing body awareness to a fine degree to improve the neural maps and the proprioceptive and vestibular senses. Sensitivity can increase by greatly reducing the effort involved in making a particular movement. The assumption is that kinesthetic sensation and effort have an inverse relationship: work too hard and you can't feel what you are doing.

In some exhibiting Asperger's symptoms, however, this reduced effort doesn't work well. They seem to need to ramp up the sensations in order to feel anything.

People with Asperger’s Syndrome often seek out heavy work input to their bodies to get more information about where their bodies are in space.

Some people with Asperger’s Syndrome seek a great deal of movement in order to get more information into their vestibular systems.

The course goes into the assessment and intervention processes of dealing with these issues, mainly drawing on the work of A. Jean Ayres.

It seems Asperger's symptoms can include awkwardness of all sorts. But there are also learning approaches to dealing with any of them.