Jacqui Russell is the artistic director of Chicago Children’s Theater.  My good friend Arnold April mentioned to me the unique program that Jacqui manages at Agassiz Elementary School in Chicago, encouraged into existence by CAPE (Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education).  Arnold is CAPE’s creative director.

The program that Jacqui manages guides autistic children into more interactive relationships by blending performance with a sensitivity to the nuances of emotion.  An audio interview is located here, an article here, with CAPE documentation of her process located here and here.

The documentation describes a step-by-step process that guides children with deep difficulties intuiting the experience of others into a place where they can estimate another person’s emotion and respond in an appropriate way.

What has me thinking is the possibility of approaching autism with a blending of performance, rhythm and education around emotion, something that this program has been doing to a large degree for more than ten years.

If autistic children can be encouraged to dance to rhythms, dancing to the same beat in a group, experiencing the mirroring of each other’s experience in a performance context, then perhaps bridges can be built between beings with difficulty entering others’ worlds.

Mark Stairwalt, my colleague producing Shift Journal, reminded me of the power of mirrored experience…

“My wife and I have a family friend who once worked as an untrained volunteer with autistic kids, and she astounded the professional staff by achieving a communications breakthrough with one particularly hard-to-reach child.  When I asked how she had done it, she told me she had simply mirrored the body language, breathing pattern, facial expression, etc., of the child in question.  Empathy expressed via mimicry > instant breakthrough.”

This is the principle of biofeedback, mirroring or establishing rapport taught by the practitioners of Neuro-linguistic Programming, much of it derived from the work of Milton Erickson, the hypnotherapist.  It has been discovered that very effective therapists and hypnotherapists engage in mirroring to establish contact with a client’s unconscious.  The same principle applies when communicating with a person with autism.  Reflecting an autistic person’s experience by mirroring his or her biological rhythms, breathing, heartbeat and movements gives the autistic person purchase on the reflector’s experience.  They see you, in no small part, because you, at that moment, are reflecting them.

Engaging in the performance of rhythmic activities, activities that perhaps, as in the Jacqui Russell programs, offer information on how emotions work, also engages the experience of feeling mirrored that is integral to establishing rapport.  A group of people performing the same movements at the same time, dancing, are mirroring one another’s experience.

The autistic have trouble establishing rapport.  The foundation feature of establishing rapport is mirroring another person’s experience.  It is important that the mirrorer genuinely have the feelings that he or she is mirroring, or at least have access to those feelings.  Two people having the same feelings while at least one of the two people is mirroring the other’s experience is what makes a sharing authentic.

The performance of two or more people of a rhythm-based experience such as dance places that group into the same physical experience, one that reproduces and generates the dynamics of rapport.

Performance, rhythm, dance and mirroring are perhaps a combination that can leverage an autistic person into an experience that includes another person.  Principles of how an unconscious is accessed are combined with an understanding that how we may have evolved may be directly related to the performance of dance and rhythm.  If autism is an evolutionary condition featuring characteristics of our species’ ontogeny from a few thousand generations ago, then perhaps an intervention that features both a reproduction of an autistic indigenous environment, dance and rhythm, with a proven doorway to the unconscious, mirroring, can be the opportunity for an autistic person to behave in new and different ways.

Superb programs exist now, such as Jacqui Russell’s work in Chicago schools.  Let’s use the principles above to expand those programs.  To guide the autistic to have more facile access to their imaginations, it is necessary that we use ours.

Hegel and Lyell and others made philosophical and physical science contributions that led to the idea that such a thing as progress could exist.  With Darwin, progress was not a variable; contingency was king.  Species evolved according to the dictates of what was required to procreate.  Marx believed society was evolving toward a specific end in a particular way.  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin believed the particular end was profoundly positive.  Others have run with variations on that theme.  At this time we have Social Darwinists, what we now call free market proponents, suggesting that economic survival of the fittest and societal progress are both true.  The wealthy have to be allowed to do what they want to make it possible for society to advance.  This is the entrepreneurial imperative.

In the West, we have been seeking to integrate these two seemingly incompatible beliefs:  evolution has no goal and society is evolving toward something specific that is good.  It would not be the first time that humans believed two opposite things to be true if it seemed there was a benefit in doing so.

What if both things could be true?  What if understanding how both contingency and progress could both…

Ten years ago as this theory came together, then called “Shift Theory,” I imagined setting up a research foundation to explore the medical implications of the hypothesis. With the original impetus behind the research being an exploration of the origin of dragon and then serpent myths across six continents (see humanevolution.net), I titled the first site the Serpent Foundation. The serpent suggested, for me, the matrifocal origins of culture and the serpent as a symbol of the medical profession, a connection derived from those early societies.

With time I let the title drop. It seemed cultish and, in our culture, suggestive of something sinister. Visitors were sometimes confused. Confusion was not the effect I was looking for. Nevertheless, serpentfd.org is still a functional domain name of the original site, now going by the URL sexualselection.org.

Ten years later, I’ve brought in a research assistant, Rosanna Schatzki, to help me gather information and help write papers that will appear in this blog from time to time. Roger Olson continues his excellent editing as he has over the last year, having edited almost 400 pages of these essays.

Of the…

I just noted the NY Times article on Somali Autism. My 1998 conjectures that this could occur are discussed in several pieces here. The piece, Somali Children in Minnesota, Autism and the Effects of Light on Uterine Testosterone supplies the best summary.

Information coming out today that I haven’t seen before include articles mentioning higher rates of autism in other countries among immigrants. The Huffington Post noted, “Higher than normal autism rates among children of immigrants have also been reported in Ireland, the UK and several cities in North America, especially Montreal.”

One article notes a Swedish study concluding autism is higher among Somali immigrants in Sweden.

I see no articles that mention my posted pieces on the subject, or the work of Norman Geschwind that inspired my hypothesis.

It was noted by Marrion in 1986 that Kwakiutl (Annett, 2002) display high incidence of left-handedness. Riane Eisler has written of the partnership society qualities of Scandinavian societies. There are studies that suggest increased percentages of anomalous dominance among Scandinavian populations. In 1998, I wrote that equatorial populations migrating to Northern climates will be subject to higher degrees of autism and conditions characterized by maturational delay. Minnesota Somali children seem to be fitting this prediction.

In other pieces, I’ve discussed the hypothesis, first considered by Geschwind and Galaburda, that light mediated by the pineal gland could be influencing testosterone levels, thus engendering conditions characterized by maturational delay. They did not make the connection to heterochronic theory, but it seems fairly reasonable to mate migration with left-handedness. Yet, if Kwakiutl evidence maturational delay having lived in or near the Arctic Circle for thousands of years, then the effects of light on the pineal may show signs of creating maturational-delayed populations at the extreme Northern and Southern ends across the earth, without recent migration.

Are there signs of increased left-handedness in Southern Australia, Southern Africa and the Southern tip of South America? What about the Lapplanders? Consider Latino and African-American populations in…

I’ve talked about the effect of sunlight on the pineal gland changing testosterone levels of immigrants from equatorial regions. Equatorial people with established, normal, daily 30% fluctuations in testosterone move to northern climates and experience fluctuations that last for months, thus compelling radical changes in a mother’s uterine testosterone levels. Unusually high or low mother’s uterine testosterone levels can cause unusually high or low testosterone levels in her children, translating into exaggerated maturational delay and acceleration (depending on the season of conception) that can contribute to autism.

In previous pieces, I’ve noted these effects on Jewish and American Black populations, with a skewing of populations toward the extremes of maturational delay and acceleration evidenced by a number of diseases and disorders characterized by these hormonal extremes. I would predict that both these populations would evidence higher percentages of autism and left-handedness, perhaps higher in places like Milwaukee and Minnesota than Houston and Miami. In just the way the Somalis in Minneapolis and St. Paul are exhibiting higher rates of autism, I would suggest that this Somali population would exhibit higher rates of left-handedness.

Another population influenced by these processes are the Latino immigrants from South and Central America. Studies could…

A superb 25-year study in the UK by Marian Annett ending in the 1990s seemed to prove that in that part of the UK, left-handedness was not increasing over time. It’s been a difficult issue to parse out, what with left-handedness being repressed before WW II. When conventional wisdom declared that forcing children to switch hands would encourage stuttering, schools withdrew from demanding all children use the right hand. A result has been that though it looks like the number of left-handers has been increasing over the decades, it is obvious that institutions stopping the repression of left-handers has skewed the numbers.

A similar effect is seen in Asia. Society has strongly encouraged that the left hand not be used. The rates of left-handedness in many parts of Asia are 2% and lower. It’s difficult to determine the true handedness percentages.

The same effect comes into play with autism. Though it seems there have been dramatic rises in autism over the last twenty years, many believe we just have more refined evaluation protocols with more attention being placed upon those individuals exhibiting unconventional behaviors.

The thesis presented in this work makes several predictions regarding handedness and autism, two issues that…

We are playing with the concept of four prototype pairings, with eight prototype human beings. We are estimating that because the mother, at six weeks before birth, sets her children’s testosterone levels based upon her own testosterone levels (mother with high testosterone T creates a low t male and a high T female while a mother with low t creates a low t female and a high T male) that estrogen will run a similar dynamic. The result will be natural mated pairings resulting in across-sex matchings of testosterone and estrogen that will be complementary opposites. We are hypothesizing that there will be exceptions, but they will not be the convention in that society.

F te/M TE Conventional Patrifocal
F tE/M Te Warrior Patrifocal
F Te/M tE Contemporary Matrifocal
F TE/M te Classic Matrifocal

F te/M TE means low-testosterone & estrogen females, high-testosterone & estrogen male. Domineering, caring, discriminating men choosing cooperative women.

F tE/M Te means low-testosterone, high-estrogen female, high-testosterone, low-estrogen male. Domineering men choosing cooperative, caring, discriminating women.

F Te/M tE means high-testosterone, low-estrogen female, low-testosterone, high-estrogen male. Commanding women choosing creative, cooperative, caring, discriminating men.

F TE/M te means high-testosterone & estrogen female, low-testosterone…

The work of scientists is not often poetry. But they do reveal patterns that are profound.

“A corollary of our hypothesis is that hormonal effects on the brains of offspring may vary with the time of conception. The activity of the pineal gland changes seasonally with alterations in day length. As a general rule, during the dark winter months the pineal becomes active and suppresses both ovaries and testes, whereas in the summer it is inactive and sex hormone levels are higher. For this reason many animals bear young in the spring, an advantageous situation since temperature and food supplies are more suitable for survival. An example of such seasonal modulation of hormonal effects on the brain is observed in the HVc nucleus of the singing bird (Nottebohm 1981). This description of pineal physiology is, however, somewhat oversimplified. An animal’s sensitivity to light may vary through the year. Gonadal hormones may thus become activated in the spring, but as a result of loss of sensitivity to light over the summer hormone levels may diminish as fall approaches. Despite these facts, day length is a powerful influence. Thus, steers increase their weight more rapidly in the winter when artificial light is…

A child’s lifelong maturation rates are set several weeks before birth by the mother’s testosterone levels. A mother with high testosterone gives birth to low testosterone males and high testosterone females. A low testosterone female raises high testosterone males and low testosterone females. Numerous factors influence a mother’s testosterone levels, including age, stress, exercise, smoking, alcohol, drugs, touch, diet and light. Radical elevations in a mother’s testosterone level can lead to extreme maturational delay and autism.

This scheme is part of a larger picture of how humans evolve. Changing maturation rates over generations send societies in one of two directions: matrifocal or patrifocal social structures. Low testosterone males mating with high testosterone females form the foundation of matrifocal social structure. High testosterone males pairing with low testosterone females make up patrifocal social structure. When mothers today exhibit matrifocal features, high testosterone, while exposed to environmental influences that elevate their testosterone further, male children with delay tendencies may shift into extreme delay.

This theory predicts that females with autism will not exhibit maturational delay, but maturational acceleration accompanied by elevated testosterone. When a mother’s testosterone level elevates, she not only influences the maturation rates of her children, she sends them on…

When I was a kid, my sisters and I would place a marble in the middle of the dining room linoleum floor and watch it begin rolling toward the hallway. Quickly, it would pick up speed, pass through the dining room door and then start lolling back and forth (north and south), and it careened more or less westward across the house. The history of the nearly 100-year old structure, since torn down, was represented in the pathway of the marble.

Tracing the path of societal ideas is compromised by an interpretation protocol that traces only the productions, not the origins, of the mind. We don’t think of biology or genetics as informing a discussion of the evolution of ideas. Exploring the connection between physical and mental when seeking an understanding of culture is not an intuitive choice. It has a lot to do with our not consciously knowing how we evolve biologically and societally. We are left watching the marble, guessing at what might have influenced its path.

No single variable influences our evolution more powerfully than changes in the rate and timing of maturation. Neoteny, or the prolongation of infant features into the adult of descendants by the…