Since 2002, I have been trying to unlock the core mystery of why my son Fridrik, who started out on a normal growth of learning, speech, and interaction, fell off the cliff with the regressive form of autism. Why would a child, who loved to draw each day with a single-minded joy, lose that ability as his fine-motor skills devolved along with his once robust appetite and speech?
Last November, the need to know the root cause had been replaced by the more pressing need to get him to speak. At the age of 9 years, with three-quarters of his life having gone through Applied Behavioral Analysis and speech therapies—the traditional tools for treating kids on the “spectrum”—my son needed something more potent.
With speech therapy in school and a speech pathologist after it hitting the wall with Fridrik uttering a few meager words, something more radical had to happen. Otherwise, my mute son might remain that way well into adulthood and perhaps for the rest of his life.
For the first time, I understood my son’s problem. But who would have thought that my dozen years of working in highway construction would have helped me visualize my son’s underlying problem of why he is unable to speak.
I came across a study being conducted at Columbia University called “Functional and Structural MRI on Children of Autism Spectrum Disorder and Pervasive Developmental Disorder,” led by investigator Dr. Joy Hirsh.
My son has the latter, also known as the regressive form of autism. When I sat Fridrik down with neurologist and DAN’s (Defeat Autism Now!) Dr. Harry Schneider, who has teamed up with Dr. Hirsh on the study, for the first time I began to realize why traditional therapies had failed and why, as with so many children stricken by the disorder, therapists continue to fail to get my son to speak no matter how many years of therapy he receives.
An “active” MRI is used to capture the movement of oxygen throughout the brain. External sounds stimulated the brain, in Fridrik’s case under sedation (he couldn’t lie still for the two- to three-hour scan) with songs with lyrics, music without lyrics, and the sounds of his mother’s and father’s voices.
The MRI was to chart the three areas of the brain that generate language in humans with cross-sectional and top-down views: the rear of the brain, where words are stored in a database; the center highway or route where the data is transferred from the back to the forebrain; and the frontal lobe of the brain, where words are converted into audio and transmitted to the tongue to be spoken—all in an instant, of course, and all usually taken for granted.
In a normal child, the colorful rendered images from the MRI look like a swimming pool, a clearly defined 3-D rectangle, a garden hose that runs like a speaker wire from front to back, and a faucet where the sound is produced.
But in a child like Fridrik, the same regions of the brain resemble an overflowing reservoir, a severed or knotted hose, and a broken or missing spigot. What the images revealed in my son was that the bridge, the neuro pathway from the database in the rear to where sounds are generated in the front, was out—it was not intact.
This picture instantly shed more light on my son’s deficit than all the time spent with psychologists, speech, behavioral, and occupational therapists combined. The truth explained why Fridrik hasn’t spoken for most of his life. And since fine-motor skills share the same region of the brain as language, the image of what autism does to a child became clear as a mountain lake. But how does one go about repairing an “out” or broken bridge in the brain?
Dr. Schneider shared the results of Fridrik’s active MRI. In the 40-plus slides, the images showed Fridrik’s brain fired up the most when he actively tried to decipher his parents’ recorded voices spoken in reverse by a computer program. The conclusion from Dr. “Harry,” as his autistic clients call him, was a smart autistic boy with an active brain, suffering with a severe language problem.
The treatment, however, seemed like one out of a kid’s Frankenstein movie. Put a couple of damp sponges, held down by a headband, around the skull with wires hooked up to a 9-volt battery. Dr. Harry works in concert with these minute electrical pulses from the sponges, which he resets a few times during a one-hour session, teaching children how to learn how to speak again—or for the first time—with implicit learning techniques.
After a couple of months, the two- to three-year treatment regime began to produce results. Fridrik spoke without prompts. He strung a few words into a sentence—something speech therapy would have taken years to achieve, if ever.
It seems a road in the brain can be repaired without the use of sci-fi nanobots. A neuropath that sends signals from one part of the brain to another, which suffers a break, could now be sent on a detour that will one day fix what has been broken.
As I learned in road construction a couple of decades ago, building a bridge takes time. The brain of a person, whether a stroke victim or a child “on the spectrum” [autism spectrum disorder], can take years to mend. Perhaps in that time, traditionalists (disclosure: my sister teaches autistic children in New Jersey) will learn to be bridge builders and complement a program that is tackling one of the core issues of autism—the inability to speak.
James Ottar Grundvig is the father of an autistic child. He lives and works in New York City.
