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Christopher Davis

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The Intense World Theory and early intervention

In this TED talk, the speaker illustrates a graph where infants with autism seem to be born with a higher developed sense of eye connection than those without autism, and then dips down, whereas infants that are not eventual diagnosed with autism start lower but stay relatively stable.
The Intense World theory is a theory by Makram and Makram that pursues the idea that instead of the idea that people who are autistic were born with an undeveloped sense of empathy and connection towards other people, it is actually the opposite, and that over-sensitiviy has caused people with autism to have natural aversions to other people over time because it causes too much emotional distress.
What do you all think of this theory? The data shown in the TED presentation seems to be consistent with what the theory proposes. What kind of implications would this discovery have on this concept of early intervention?

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Topics: autism
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    Jul 1 2012: [2]And here is why I say so. Within Mensa I have a few friends who are also autistic. We have our own set of nonverbal communications, our own set of social "rules" and we have even tested them in a wider context. The most interesting observations happened when there was a large group of autistic people with only a couple of neurotypical people. In this setting the autistic way of communicating was used by almost everyone, and those who did not "speak" our social interaction were left out. This of course meant the most hardcore neurotypical people. They were unable to join conversations, they were unable to get any contact whatsoever, and in the end some of them just left the conference. If we apply the term normocentrism, in this setting it would mean that the autistic way of communicating was the norm and those who have not mastered the autistic way of interacting were socially inapt.
    I have also been to several meetings for aspergers, in that setting it is easy for all of us to join conversations, to engage in social contact, etc. etc. because we all speak the same social lan

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