Autism: give me a chance and I will change everything | Noah Britton | TEDxNewEnglandCollege

what's the one thing you've done that you're the most ashamed of don't think about it too hard just go with whatever comes to mind first now hold that thought so hold that for a little bit we'll come back to that and I'll tell you what mine is so I was in middle school and it's okay you can laugh I was in middle school and my mom and I were fighting for an entire week I don't remember why all I know is that every minute of the day I was incredibly nervous fearing that I would have

to see her again and knowing that neither of us was going to cross that boundary to resolve our differences so in the middle of this week she took away my magic cards which was a really bad idea and made me more stressed out than ever because I was one of the ways that I self-soothe so after a few days in the middle of this week I'm incredibly stressed out and I'm in the computer lab at school with my friend Jim is a picture of us years later he wrote the caption um and I'm sitting there

in front of him typing and he's behind me holding on to my swivel chair I tried to turn and say something to a person behind me but Jim wouldn't go slack and let the chair swivel now one of the core symptoms of autism is our hypersensitivity to our senses the first one being touch light touch is something that irritates many autistic people many of us remove the tags from our shirts for this reason but deep pressure is very satisfying hugging the feeling of being enclosed in something is very gratifying to many of us another aspect

of this hyper sensitivity to our senses is texture so a lot of us say we hate certain foods but in reality we can't handle the texture of the food so for example I will never eat mashed potatoes even though I love french fries they're exactly the same thing but the texture grosses me out and I never eat anything with that texture cottage cheese cream cheese whatever it's all gross another aspect of our hypersensitivity is sound if I'm in a room talking or reading or thinking and there's someone else making noise I cannot concentrate until they're

done I have tried very hard over the years to overcome this with zero success however I am able to soothe myself very well by listening to my headphones which give me familiar music that blocks out all background noise and then I can concentrate very well many autistic people are also hypersensitive to pitch some of us have perfect pitch and for those autistic people we cannot listen to someone singing off-key or else they'll go crazy I am NOT one of those people luckily but I am a singer and the thing that makes me want to sing

is that I'm also hypersensitive to intonation or inflection this is not something talked about anywhere in the literature that I've been able to find but when I was young as in elementary school I would judge phrases not based on the content but based on the rhythm of the meter and so I would speak in this incredibly odd way where would add in words that may not have made sense just because I wanted to make sure I was speaking in perfect meter this is one reason a lot of autistic people have what's called echolalia we're judging

what we hear based on the inflection and the intonation and the meter rather than the words so you'll meet an autistic person with echolalia and you'll say hi how are you doing today and they will repeat back to you hi how are you doing today because they're listening to the meter it's like when you sing along with the song and you don't think about what the words mean you're enjoying the sound imagine doing that with spoken communication and you can understand how odd we seem to many people who do not have this of course we're

hypersensitive to our sight visual stimuli so for example this picture I took of the Sun looks like this to you but to me it looks like this as a result for 20 years before I realized this about myself I said oh I hate being outside I'll never go outside every time I'm out there I get angry and I didn't know why and then I found out I just have to wear sunglasses every day and I'm fine but for 20 years I wouldn't get enough sunlight and I would be pissed off when I would have to

go play soccer or something luckily this hypersensitivity can be very useful so we have an incredible bird of prey like ability to detect differences in the visual environment very very quickly so for example you look at this picture and to you it probably looks the same as this picture but I can tell that this one is significantly brighter than that last one now that may not be the best example but I couldn't play three-card Monte onstage for you right now but that would get the same point across there's actually a company called a spear attack

that hires autistic people only because of this hypersensitivity to do product testing and figure out what differences there are between their website and the website they actually aunt and this is incredibly useful to us and so we uh-oh oh cool oh cool you're not you're not cool oh cool oops so uh this is a video of me skimming which is what autistic people do when we're feeling a hypersensitive this is not a sign that something is wrong necessarily we can just be very excited and this is how we express it it's okay for you to

laugh at this video I filmed it knowing this was a very silly thing I was doing I was very excited I forget why but when you see an autistic person doing this in the community it's very disconcerting and you don't realize why this is happening but it's probably due to that sensory input I was talking about earlier so you might see someone out in the field doing this because the light is bothering them and sensory input is the first thing we should check when figuring out why is this person feeling overstimulated anyway so aside from

being hypersensitive to irritating noises like this one the thing that irritates me the most is having my range of motion restricted without my permission so when I walk past a doorknob and I get my headphones stuck on it my hormones rush in and my amygdala turns on and I literally want to break down that door for a minute but then my cerebral cortex tells me you have to calm down you're not allowed to break down the door and I stand there and I don't do anything this is a very common autistic defense mechanism we have

learned that because no one else has the same sensitivities we do that were not allowed to express them when they're irritating us when my mom was vacuuming the wood floor and I would scream at her you're driving me crazy why are you doing this she'd say I don't know what I'm doing wrong so I guess the best way I can explain it is like this if I really here most days however that day in middle school when Jim wouldn't let go of my chair my incredibly stressful week combined with the fact that this is my

number one thing that irritates me the most is not being able to control my own body meant that I lost it and I swung around in that stationary chair and slapped him as hard as I could in the ear and he fell out of his chair and started crying and screaming at me why did you just hit me and I yelled back because you're so annoying and you're always and then I realized what I had done and Jim couldn't hear out of his ear for the rest of the day now I immediately felt terrible about

this but like most conflicts between young boys this one eventually did resolve itself twenty years later I visited him this summer in India he's one of my closest and oldest friends but I still feel terrible about this the last meltdown I ever had but I know that he is forgiving me and I hope that all of you can forgive the immature and imperfect me for making this mistake you know that I was just a victim of genetics and circumstance and now I want you to think back to what you thought of at the very beginning

of my talk and realized that it was the same whatever you did that you feel so ashamed of was no different than the story I just told you you were overwhelmed you didn't know what to do and you made a bad choice but you're a human you're not perfect and you're never going to be and you're going to make mistakes again and you can carry that guilt with you for 20 years or you can realize everyone in this room is having the same thought I am right now which is how could I possibly forgive myself

for that thing I did but all of us are in this together we've all made those mistakes and I hope that you can forgive yourselves now is that something I can ask of you is this a reasonable request I want to make sure that everyone feels okay like they're in a forgiving mood because you don't deserve to be judged that harshly you're a human being and you deserve to be forgiven for whatever it is that you've done that you know you did wrong and now I want you to stay in that forgiving mindset and think

about someone who has harmed you I'll give you an example of someone I need to forgive someone who has done something that I think is pretty wrong there's a school in Canton Massachusetts called the judge Rotenberg Center this is the only school in the country still using electric shock as a punishment for people with psychiatric disorders including autism what they do is if one of their students who is on this shock plan misbehaves you know gets out of their seat at an inappropriate time tries to hug a staff person they will using a bracelet which

is attached to this student's wrist or ankle give them a two-second electric shock these bracelets are not approved by the FDA they often malfunction they cause burns and scarring in these people and obviously this is pretty upsetting their justification for this is they say well it's better than the alternative which they assume is giving these people a ton of drugs now obviously yes psychotropic medication is dangerous and not helpful for people on the autism spectrum but there are other alternatives besides electrically shocking them like cattle and I think most you probably understand this and agree

with me here however when we try to protest this place and go outside with signs saying stop the abuse or call these staff people monsters how are they going to react they're not going to say oh thanks good point everything I've been doing is wrong you're right thanks of course they're not going to do that what they're actually going to do is saying well screw him this is called reactance when someone challenges you for something you're doing and as a result you go further away from them towards whatever you were doing before I'll give you

an example when I was in high school the Dean of boys forced all of us to wear collared shirts I haven't worn a collared shirt since to screw that guy but you see my point reactance is everywhere those who are parents I hope you remember this the next time you tell your kids don't do drugs is not going to work they don't care what your opinion is of drugs so what is the answer the judge rothenburg school reactance happens all the time specifically reactance happens when they take one of their students who's covering her ears

because she's hypersensitive and the room is too loud and they give her an electric shock to get her to stop this inappropriate behavior after they shock her is she going to say oh I better stop doing that or is she going to say screw them and then their students become dangerous and begin to lash out at these people aggressively and as these people lash out aggressively then we get problems and then they actually do become the threat that they were claimed to be at first now the only way this resolved itself when we use punishment

is through these people not saying oh you're right unconvinced but giving up and saying I can't do anything I'm not allowed to cover my ears when I need protection I have to just sit here and do nothing and then the staff say well their dangerous behavior has stopped this was a success and yes a lot of us are very angry about this people have been trying to stop this for many years with some success and yes you have to get that anger out you know run around mosh paint something build a birdhouse whatever but judging

the staff as people doesn't help it doesn't help them and it doesn't help you because all they're doing is the same thing you and I did at the beginning of this talk they didn't know the right way to do something they were emotionally overwhelmed by a very difficult situation and they did something that most of us would say is wrong now it's stupid to hate somebody for being stupid it's not their fault you know I don't hate the staff any more than I hate their students and it's equally stupid if not more so to hate

someone for hating because then you're just creating a loop and you're no better than they are but I pity them I pity these people who don't know what to do and who respond with hate and I think maybe if we start pitying those people who have harmed you who you want to forgive instead of hating we can talk to them instead of maybe trying to unsuccessfully battle them into submission what do you mean do you want to come talk about this okay um we're going to give her a hand for having the courage to talk

to me up front yeah you can use this Mike I think your size it on high um what's your name I'm Rachel hello Rachel I'm Noah so what do you want to say uh well I was just thinking about what you're saying and um I don't think that forgiving people for something that's like truly really coming from an evil place like that is going to be effective in solving or changing anything well I think there's probably a lot of people here who agree with that and I think that's a fair point but I also don't

think that judging these people is going to do anything better and I think that if we have this cycle of hatred it's only going to make things worse okay but what you would be doing you know what what you're doing right now the way that you're talking about this stuff like protesting what they're doing isn't coming from a place of hate you know it's coming from a place of of loving people and wanting to change something for the better well I guess the issue with that and I thought about this too um that's how they

feel about themselves as they are shocking these children okay as they say look we have to punish this person because that's justice and that's important and if we let bad behavior go unpunished it's going to continue when in fact you're just creating this cycle and if you hate them for hating you're no better than they are um and I think I'm running out of time likely story um but I guess thanks for coming up and talking to me and you know I I want to give this woman some commendation for having the guts to speak

her mind unlike so many hecklers or you-tube mentors or whatever and talk to me like a human being and I guess if anyone else wants to talk to me reasonably you know about this issue you're welcome to especially the staff at the judg rothenburg Center who I want to say before I go you have the power to stop shocking children right now you can actually do this you are capable of having that responsibility please stop I will forgive you for what you have done and anyway thanks I guess Rachel I I hope that I've convinced

you a little bit and if not um I hope that we can respect each other and forgive one another and care about each other as people despite these things do you want to hug or something