Sample Profiles

We have found no evidence that Chantelle has any difficulties with sensory issues. She does not like busy trains, however this is not because of sensory issues, but because of difficulties with social interaction. Chantelle has a strict rule to not talk to strangers. The busier the train, the more likely it is that someone will attempt to speak to her. She does not feel safe when surrounded by people she does not know.

There are signs that Chantelle does have some difficulties with fine motor movements. We tried to get her to learn to touch type. While she did learn this, it took her a long time and she remained slow and error prone.

While Chantelle is in touch with her own emotions, she has no emotional intelligence. She has simply rote learned how people react and why. She applies this to everyone without exception.

We asked Chantelle to buy a subscription to BrainHQ. The results from this, demonstrate that Chantelle’s brain processing speed is much lower than average: - in the bottom 17th percentile. Brain speed is measured by recognising what is flashed up on the screen. This has a profound impact on Chantelle’s ability to deal with everyday life.

A key difficulty as a result of this is communication. Chantelle does not take in verbal information at all well. It is not possible to have a proper conversation with her. While she will answer direct questions, she is unable to take in what you tell her. Instead she picks up on key words, or a pattern of key words and then comes out with what appears to be a random statement.

As Chantelle likes interacting with people, this strategy helps her engage in social chit chat to an extent. However, people realise quite quickly that she isn’t really engaging with them and her attempts at making friends are very short lived because of this.

Thinking

Chantelle has a very good imagination and likes writing stories. She also likes drawing. Her degree is in graphic design and she has demonstrated that she can be very creative in putting words and pictures together in ways that demonstrate imagination and originality.

Chantelle’s reasoning skills are underdeveloped because of her reliance on rote learning and rules. However, the indications are that these can be developed. It appears that using her brain to reason instead of rote learning has never occurred to her.

Learning

Chantelle’s preferred learning style by far is rote learning. She attempts to rote learn everything. She lives via rules and routines. Her life is very regimented. This means that she gets upset when people do not follow rules such as not speaking in the library.

Chantelle’s father set up a budget for her which she follows via an app on her phone. While she is well able to do this, she is not able to devise a budget herself. If the money she has coming in changes, she needs help to create a new budget.

This also means that once Chantelle has an idea in her head, it is generally difficult to change it. Because of her processing issues and difficulty taking in information verbally, Chantelle learns best by doing something under supervision using an iterative try and correct approach until she can do it. It helps if many varied exercises are provided for her.

Inhibition

Chantelle tends to talk too much. She tends to talk about whatever is bothering her repeatedly. She is weak at attending to what other people are saying.

This causes problems when trying to explain something to Chantelle. She tends to fixate on the particular example instead of attending to what the example is illustrating. This is why it takes many examples and varied exercises to get the point across.

Her lack of inhibition also causes problems when Chantelle has to follow a set of instructions. She tends to jump in and do something without taking the time to make sure she has fully understood the instructions and is following them precisely. As a result, she often gets things wrong.

Problem Solving

Chantelle is very poor at problem solving. She has no idea where to start. Chantelle’s reasoning skills have never been developed because she has relied on rote learning.

Planning and execution

Chantelle can follow a process that has been set up for her once she has learnt the steps. So she can cook, and manage the routine essentials of everyday life. She can stick to a budget that someone else has set up. However, if something happens to disrupt her routines or ways of doing things, she can struggle badly. She needs help to cope when an appliance breaks down and needs fixing or replacing. This is made more complicated by the fact that she is extremely reluctant to let people she does not know into her flat.

Chantelle is able to plan her day and follow that plan, but she struggles if something does not work out as expected. She is very punctual.

Chantelle is very resistant when you try to change her plan. She is unable to think flexibly enough in real time to be able to see how other aspects of her schedule can be changed to accommodate a change. If you work it out for her and explain how it works, then she does come round to the idea. However, this takes quite a bit of time to do and will only work if Chantelle trusts you.

Organisation

Chantelle appears organised, but her organising skills are actually poor. She only appears organised because she relies on routine, rote learning, and rigidly adhering to a schedule. Her life is quite regimented.

Chantelle needs help to be able to organise her finances. She keeps a folder of plastic wallets for important documents. Any other document is quickly thrown away. Documents that she needs to keep temporarily such as appointment times are likely to be scrunched up and put in her bag.

Section A: Social Communication and Social Interaction

Chantelle clearly has difficulties with social communication and social interaction. Her slow processing and reliance on rote learning to get by results in stilted and strange social interaction. She struggles to understand what people are saying and thus simply comes out with random statements. She has a tendency to hog the conversation and speak about her own life, her own worries and concerns while showing very little interest in the concerns of others.

Chantelle demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the world around her. She relies on rules. She checks with her family before she does anything. This actually reduces her vulnerability to being exploited because she will only do something with the approval of a trusted person. Although she wants a job, a partner, a circle of friends, her world really revolves pretty much exclusively around her own everyday life.

Because of her slow processing speed and difficulty taking in information orally, it is completely unrealistic to expect Chantelle to be able to interpret facial expression and body language during a conversation. This means that she is unable to pick up on subtle signals that people are not interested in her, or that they are no longer interested. This also applies to electronic means of communication. Chantelle has no idea how often to text someone, or how to tell when the person is losing interest.

As a result, she finds it virtually impossible to make and to keep friends. Any attempts are short lived as people lose interest in her and stop responding. This leaves Chantelle feeling hurt and confused because she does not understand what went wrong. Her social contact is with her family, although she has a great need for social interaction.

Section B: Restricted, Repetitive, Patterns of Behaviour, Interests, or Activities.

For this section, you have to meet two out of four criteria. Chantelle easily meets the criterion regarding difficulty with change and inflexible adherence to routines.

As we saw above, Chantelle struggles with changes in her planned schedule because she is unable to adjust the other parts of her schedule in order to accommodate.

Chantelle is very rigid in her thinking because she lives by rules and rote learning. She has a plan for her life: 1) get a job. 2) get friends, 3) get a partner. In her thinking, she cannot get friends until she has a job because she needs to be able to tell people what she does and she does not want to tell people she is unemployed. She has no interest in trying to make friends. Add to this, her rule to not speak to strangers and it is clear that she has very limited opportunity to come into appropriate contact with people.

It is very difficult to persuade Chantelle to be more flexible in her thinking. To perhaps consider doing things more flexibly and less rigidly. Perhaps it might be a good idea if she were to at least practice making friends before she gets a job.

Chantelle has a very small range of interests. She has very few interests and a very narrow life. She likes drawing, writing stories, watching films, and going to the gym and that is about it. It is doubtful how much she actually understands of the films she watches because her stories demonstrate no understanding of the adult world and are very simplistic in their characters and relationships between characters.

Chantelle is not able to handle a conversation that deals with many different topics. In fact she does not get much further than herself and her own very narrow life.

When she is anxious, Chantelle repeats the same two or three sentences over and over again. This is a clear sign she is anxious and the topic is an indication regarding what is bothering her.

Vision

Helen shows signs of hypersensitivity to visual stimuli:

• Fascination with colour and form
• Strong sense of aesthetics, visual patterns
• Eye strain under fluorescent lights

Helen does have major problems with spatial awareness and it appears that she has very little or no 3D vision. She has no sense of distance. She got a driving license (after 6 attempts) but does not drive because she had too many accidents. It is likely that this is because Helen does not process visual information in the same way as other people.

She appears to have difficulty resolving patterns and lines into actual objects quickly. While this makes her very good at design, it is not conducive to being a safe driver. Given her difficulties with spatial awareness, it is surprising that she actually passed her driving test.

It appears that Helen sees patterns more than objects. While she can identify the handle to open a window, she is unable to work out how to use that information to work out how to open the window. She gets lost easily because she does not recognise familiar places if seen from a different direction or in the dark. But she does have a very strong sense of patterns, of light and dark, and of colour. She also has a very strong sense of the whole, of aesthetics.

Helen is able to manipulate space in front of her, but that is likely to be because of kinaesthetics combined with 2D vision rather than 3D perception. She enjoys making hats (3D) activity, but each has to be a one off. She could not make 10 identical hats, for example.

Sound

Helen shows signs of hypersensitivity to sound:

• Doesn’t like loud noises -Easily distracted by noise, open plan studio is a nightmare
• Has very acute hearing under certain circumstances (such as hearing conversation at the other side of a large room).

However, noise is ok if it is constant and fairly uniform – such as in a noisy café. She therefore has no difficulty with separating background from foreground noise and is able to ignore background noise.

Helen has problems discriminating sounds which caused an issue with parts of speech and language therapy. She finds it difficult to correct diction because of difficulties with sound discrimination and because her visual system makes it extremely difficult for her to see what mouth movements her client is doing.

Helen’s issues with sound discrimination cause problems with learning. She finds she needs the kinaesthetic feedback from exaggerated articulation as well as the sound in order to take in information.

Touch

Helen seeks out certain fabrics because of feel – generally natural fibres. This may be a sign of hyper-sensitivity to light touch. Helen is cuddly with close family members but strangers are a problem. It is likely that touch from strangers is a problem because that kind of touch tends to come with emotion. Light touch that she is not expecting, startles her.

Smell

Helen is hypersensitive to the smell of meat, cooked and raw. This means she cannot stand to eat meat, but she does not prevent her children from eating meat.

Otherwise smell is not a major problem. She does like perfume, which suggests the hypersensitivity to smell is not generalised.

Body Awareness and balance

Helen has been diagnosed with dyspraxia and is not good with gross or fine motor movements. Normally stimulating hypo-sensitivities has a calming effect. Helen has already discovered this and stimulates this sense using dance, fidget products, exaggerated articulation, and typing.

Helen struggles with heights and can fall on uneven ground. Although she can perform dance moves, it was very difficult for her to learn to do this. This indicates that Helen does have problems with balance.

Helen is hypersensitive to emotion. She does not like conflict, and hates confrontation. She is too quick to apologise and does not stand up for herself. This makes Helen very vulnerable to exploitation and generally being taken advantage of.

It does not help that Helen cannot label emotions – neither her own nor others. This makes it difficult to process experiences and learn from them.

Helen has no problems separating her own emotions from the emotions of others. But uses this understanding to withdraw or smooth over the problem rather than trying to solve the problem.

Helen has issues with slow and delayed processing. She is easily overwhelmed if she has to deal with more than one thing at once. She struggles to process incoming (verbal) information. This affects learning and social interaction.

Helen has difficulty organising her thoughts, getting to the point, and spotting mistakes. It can be difficult to translate a pattern and associative thinking style to the 1D verbal output that people use to communicate. This will make it difficult to organise thoughts in a logical manner.

Thinking

Helen is a verbal (written and oral) pattern and associative thinker. She is also an abstract thinker and can think in detail while seeing the bigger picture.

Helen is a verbal thinker because she likes to reason things through verbally. She likes linguistics which is very much a verbal subject. Linguistics is very much about sounds, words, and most importantly patterns (grammar). Helen studied speech and language therapy, but got on best with the language part – the part involving grammar and patterns. It is understandable that Helen found the phonetics part difficult because of issues with sound discrimination and lack of the visual skills necessary to work out someone’s mouth movements.

It is the patterns that feature in Helen’s visual work. The visual work is very strongly connected to emotions.

Helen is both a detail and a global thinker. This is particularly evident in her creative work. This would have helped her in her language therapy. It is this that makes her a good problem solver.

Helen applies her creativity to visual activities, but the only evidence that she applied this to academic studies is her high marks for her studies – in the subjects she could handle. There appears to be a longing that is not well articulated to apply her creativity to her cognitive world as well as her sensory world.

Helen’s creativity also comes from her associative way of thinking. She sees connections between things that others do not see.

learning

Helen has a problem with learning because her preferred learning styles clash with her sensory issues. She clearly learns aurally.

• Likes to read out loud in order to learn something
• Reasons things through by talking

But this is difficult for her because of issues with sound discrimination. If people slur words, she will not be able to make them out. In addition, she will have difficulty if the acoustics are poor, and sound gets distorted.

Helen also learns kinaesthetically:

• Learns best by typing instead of dictating.
• Needs the feedback from mouth movements when learning something orally. This will also help with sound discrimination by providing an extra modality.
• Learnt dance not by watching but by being physically manipulated into position.

Although Helen is very visual in many ways this is not her preferred way of learning. She does not learn simply by watching or being shown.

On the whole we can conclude that it is quite difficult to get information into Helen, but it is comparatively easy to get the information out of her. Helen communicates very effectively in writing and orally if given enough time to get her thoughts in order for which she relies heavily on word processing and mindmaps to reason through the issues. Helen has to work hard to learn new material. She has obtained two degrees, but it has been hard work.

Sequences

Helen has severe issues with numbers. She appears to have no sense of the meaning of numbers. When it comes to money, she either has, or she does not have. It looks as if Helen struggles with the concept of sequence:

• Lack of understanding of distance, except perhaps by time.
• Lack of ability to deal with numbers. No concept of money and how much something is worth in monetary terms.
• Appears to be able to only carry out simple plans.
• Often gets lost in unfamiliar places, makes mistakes following directions.
• Struggles with a complex set of instructions unless learnt kinaesthetically, as in dance and hat making.

Bad choices of study topics

Helen has an uncanny ability to make bad choices about study topics:

• Interior design did not work out because of the lack of 3D perception. She could not design on paper, but only by prototyping.
• Fashion design did not work out well because of the inability to design on paper and the inability to work out cutting patterns from her creations.
• It is probably as well she did not continue Fine Art onto degree level studies. It is unlikely that Helen would have coped well with the interpretation of art – because she perceives things so differently.

Helen has expressed a desire to study cognitive neuroscience because she is interested in brain function. Again, this is a bad choice because this requires the ability to visualise the structures of the brain in 3D along with their 3D relationships.

Inhibition

Inhibition is not generally a problem for Helen except in circumstances where there is a lot of emotion. She does have problems with intrusive thoughts until they are completely processed.

Problem Solving

Helen is very good at problem solving. She has solved lots of problems in order to do her modelling – mostly to get round the lack of 3D perception and visualisation. It is extremely difficult to get good marks in linguistics if you cannot problem solve. Linguistics is all about patterns and problem solving. Speech and language therapy is about problem solving. Helen could help people with aphasia (loss of speech).

Planning and execution

Helen is not good at planning and execution. She can follow simple plans, but struggles to execute all the steps if something unexpected happens or she gets distracted. It is likely that she uses her problem solving skills to compensate to a certain extent.

Planning travel is a real problem. She makes mistakes and gets lost. She has problems with directional instructions (left/right). This will be due to the lack of spatial awareness and lack of 3D perception. Problems with sequential information will also make this difficult.

Organisation

Helen is not good at organisation. She has to work very hard at it.

Section A: Social Communication and Social Interaction

Helen has issues with slow and delayed processing. She is easily overwhelmed if she has to deal with more than one thing at once. This combined with difficulty discriminating between sounds means that she struggles to process incoming (verbal) information. Helen tends to speak at length about a topic and proceed with the conversation in her own way without properly interacting with the other person. If the other person tries to change the topic, or go back for clarification, she will carry on regardless. The normal to and fro of conversation escapes her.

In addition, because she does not understand emotions, she is unable to engage in the emotional reciprocity of social interaction.

Helen does not understand the world and is easily taken advantage of. She has no concept of the value of money and therefore although she would like to be self employed, she would need a lot of help to be able to sustain it without getting exploited. She has invited homeless people into her home who she has then found it extremely difficult to get rid of.

The way she experiences and interacts with the world is too bizarre for most people to connect with. It is just exploited by people who pretend to be friendly.

Apart from issues with slow and delayed processing, Helen would not be able to interpret facial expression or body language because of her difficulty in resolving her visual world into separate objects. This is also why she is so good at art and also at design when she can prototype. She can draw a facial expression, but not actually interpret it.

Section B: Restricted, Repetitive, Patterns of Behaviour, Interests, or Activities.

For this section, you have to meet at least two out of four criteria. Helen meets the sensory, difficulty with change, and narrow range of interests criteria.

Helen easily meets the sensory criterion as she has many sensory issues as described above. Her sensory perception is very different to the norm.

Helen is fixated on aesthetics. The aesthetics of her environment is very important to her. As a result her home is sparsely furnished and uncluttered.

As we saw above Helen finds it difficult to choose appropriate topics of study because the clash between her perceptual and thinking worlds. However, she does get fixated on different topics, which she attempts to go into in depth as far as her limitations will allow.

The result is that she has a narrow range of interests and Helen’s life is very narrow – and to the outsider looking in – very boring. Not that she finds her life boring. Dealing with her challenges on a day to day basis makes her life anything but boring.

Finally, Helen’s processing issues makes dealing with unplanned changes problematic. Because of her fixation on aesthetics she does not like it at if someone moves something because that destroys the overall aesthetics of her environment.