Babies With Frickin' Laser Beams On Their Heads

 For about the last year now I have been attending various autism conferences around Atlanta. It's been a very eye-opening experiencing to say the least. For several months I've been giving my take on these various meetings on a student e-mail list out of Georgia Tech. This is the first of those critiques.

Regarding October 8th's Atlanta Autism Consortium meeting at the Marcus Center for those who may have missed it.

Mary Ann Romski addressed the state of knowledge regarding non-verbal children. To sum it up: Nobody knows anything. Nobody can agree on anything. Nobody can define anything including the meaning of "non verbal." I, personally, applaud her for her honesty.

Interesting fact: How many non- verbal 5 year old autistic children are still non-verbal at 10 or 15? Oh, wait, it's not an interesting fact because nobody knows! That's right. Nobody has bothered to do a tracking on these kids that are the literal poster children for the autism "crisis." Why might this be? Hmmmm.

Next up was Warren Jones: a snake oil salesman who is making his reputation putting laser pointers on baby heads. Or something like that. Turns out, those of us on the spectrum look at the mouths of actors in Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe more than we do the eyes. This is important because...um...oh yeah, regular people look at eyes more than mouths. So looking at mouths MUST be a symptom then. Now Warren Jones, of course, is waaay too much of a "scientist" to inquire of people who can CAN communicate why they look at the things they do, even to gain a little insight before self-generating his own hypothesis. Turns out, he says, that people will tell you different thing. And that would make his job hard. Far easier to stick laser pointers on baby heads and make your own inferences for those who can't talk. Oh, and did I mention that at the beginning of his talk that he promised that he was going to offer us an insight as to what an autistic child might be feeling when he walked into a school cafeteria and then proceeded to do absolutely nothing of the sort? Unless showing us chart after chart of where babies with lasers on their heads look when shown some other chart somehow did that.

Warren Jones is a straight-up fraud. Exactly the type to benefit the Marcus Center. Let's put a laser pointer on every baby head in America, find out which of the toddlers have a mouth fixation, get them diagnosed as High Risk, and then get them into ABA as soon as possible. Ka-ching.