Jul 8, 2016 07:33 PM
http://www.npr.org/2016/07/07/485138695/...-a-new-way
EXCERPT - [...] SPIEGEL: Kim's brain is not great at seeing emotion. When she looks out at the world, she physically sees all the things that most people see. It's just that much of the emotion is subtracted. Though for most of her life, she didn't realize that, and so her interactions with other kids could be difficult.
KIM: You know, taunting and name calling, and then it would progress to, you know, physical acts. [...] it's so hard when you have no idea why people treat you like this.
SPIEGEL: This kind of bullying took place for years, but after high school, things did ease. There were still issues, but Kim had a good job and good friends. And then in 2008, someone close to her was diagnosed with what used to be called Asperger's syndrome, now known as autism spectrum disorder, so Kim decided to do some reading about it. [...] Staring into the screen, it suddenly dawned on Kim that she could have Asperger's. She grew up in the '60s, so no one had ever suggested that before. Now, Kim has kept her Asperger's private in her professional life, which is why we're not using her full name. But eventually she did go to an Asperger's support group, and it was there that she heard about the experiment.
KIM: They were saying there are some research studies being done, and there's one currently at Beth Israel Deaconess. So I thought, well, this might be interesting.
SPIEGEL: That's when Kim met Dr. Lindsay Oberman. Oberman is a professor at Brown now, but when Kim met her, she was at Harvard, researching how a procedure called TMS affects people with Asperger's.
LINDSAY OBERMAN: So TMS stands for transcranial magnetic stimulation.
SPIEGEL: Basically in TMS you take this very fancy magnet, hold it to the scalp and send pulses through the skull to get brain cells to activate in a different way. They typically change for a very short period of time - between 15 and 40 minutes. And Dr. Oberman wanted to see if TMS could change the way that people like Kim process language.
[...] KIM: OK, now we watch the same video again. [...] Everything that was intended in this went completely over my head [before], and now I saw it - completely missed the meaning of the whole thing until after the TMS. And then I saw the whole thing clearly.
SPIEGEL: Because TMS is so short-lived, Kim's ability to see this way only lasted for a very little while. By the time she drove home, it was gone. And I want to be very clear here and underline - TMS is not currently approved for autism spectrum disorders, and Dr. Oberman says people, particularly children, should steer clear of it at this point because as treatment, it is totally unproven.
But even though TMS has not changed Kim's ability to see long-term, she says she's still happy she got it. She says she thinks a lot about one of the videos she was shown. In it, two employees were saying mean things to a fellow employee named Frank (ph). And Kim says the first time she watched it before the TMS, she couldn't answer any of the questions the researchers were asking about it. But afterwards, she understood not only the video but also one of the big mysteries that had dominated much of her life.....
EXCERPT - [...] SPIEGEL: Kim's brain is not great at seeing emotion. When she looks out at the world, she physically sees all the things that most people see. It's just that much of the emotion is subtracted. Though for most of her life, she didn't realize that, and so her interactions with other kids could be difficult.
KIM: You know, taunting and name calling, and then it would progress to, you know, physical acts. [...] it's so hard when you have no idea why people treat you like this.
SPIEGEL: This kind of bullying took place for years, but after high school, things did ease. There were still issues, but Kim had a good job and good friends. And then in 2008, someone close to her was diagnosed with what used to be called Asperger's syndrome, now known as autism spectrum disorder, so Kim decided to do some reading about it. [...] Staring into the screen, it suddenly dawned on Kim that she could have Asperger's. She grew up in the '60s, so no one had ever suggested that before. Now, Kim has kept her Asperger's private in her professional life, which is why we're not using her full name. But eventually she did go to an Asperger's support group, and it was there that she heard about the experiment.
KIM: They were saying there are some research studies being done, and there's one currently at Beth Israel Deaconess. So I thought, well, this might be interesting.
SPIEGEL: That's when Kim met Dr. Lindsay Oberman. Oberman is a professor at Brown now, but when Kim met her, she was at Harvard, researching how a procedure called TMS affects people with Asperger's.
LINDSAY OBERMAN: So TMS stands for transcranial magnetic stimulation.
SPIEGEL: Basically in TMS you take this very fancy magnet, hold it to the scalp and send pulses through the skull to get brain cells to activate in a different way. They typically change for a very short period of time - between 15 and 40 minutes. And Dr. Oberman wanted to see if TMS could change the way that people like Kim process language.
[...] KIM: OK, now we watch the same video again. [...] Everything that was intended in this went completely over my head [before], and now I saw it - completely missed the meaning of the whole thing until after the TMS. And then I saw the whole thing clearly.
SPIEGEL: Because TMS is so short-lived, Kim's ability to see this way only lasted for a very little while. By the time she drove home, it was gone. And I want to be very clear here and underline - TMS is not currently approved for autism spectrum disorders, and Dr. Oberman says people, particularly children, should steer clear of it at this point because as treatment, it is totally unproven.
But even though TMS has not changed Kim's ability to see long-term, she says she's still happy she got it. She says she thinks a lot about one of the videos she was shown. In it, two employees were saying mean things to a fellow employee named Frank (ph). And Kim says the first time she watched it before the TMS, she couldn't answer any of the questions the researchers were asking about it. But afterwards, she understood not only the video but also one of the big mysteries that had dominated much of her life.....