Avril and Autism

Avril And Her Language Of DNA

There is left, however, the ‘language’ of DNA. The basic units or letters’ of the DNA language are chemical components called bases. The 4 types, abbreviated, are thought of as letters in a 4 letter alphabet. Now, in the same way as we arrange letters in our usual alphabet into meaningful words, sentences and syntax, these letters of the DNA language making up our genes arrange into 3 letter ‘words’ that can be understood by the machinery of the cell. Genetic ‘words’ form sentences telling the cell how to manufacture particular protein.

How DNA letters thread together determines whether the protein functions as a enzyme that assists to digest our supper, an antibody that will ward off infection, or any of the thousands of protein that are found within our body.

The ‘Mother Tongue’, as referred and employed singularly and possibly uniquely by Avril, is this DNA, language, or as she describes it; “A matrix algebra that determines the behaviour of physical systems acting in mathematical terms as the network of intersections between input and output loads in a computer - in this case an autistic brain - functioning as encoder or decoder.”

Here is but one brief example of her ‘cybernet alphabet’. I once mentioned the Greek word ‘tetelestai’, which translated means, “it is done”, the final words attestedly spoken by the historical figure of Christ upon the cross, as in Christian theology He is deemed to have altered consciousness and left the earth plane, the message of His Ministry conveyed and communicated to His Father in heaven. Avril, taking a look at the word, and immediately examining its structure, provided from tetelestai.

Tet, from the French, meaning head; Stele, from the engraved Greek stone pillars (often written as Stela), both Stela and stellar sounding alike and thus relating to a star or the stars; and Telestar - any of a series of communication satellites launched by NASA. Telestar 1 was the first satellite to relay live TV pictures across the Atlantic Ocean in July 1962. Not only does tele mean at, over or to a distance, it is also recognisable as ‘telly’, the colloquialism for a television.

Autism: An Analogy

If it can be said that autistic savants must have one particular channelled talent, then Avril’s can be considered as capable of explaining autism not just from her own, but each and every other autistic person’s, as singular pieces of the one complete jigsaw. Here is but one of her analogies; “There is a bowl held by an invisible hand. The bowl is on a table. The bowl is autism; You can take the bowl and smash it into a 1000 pieces and investigate every piece, but you will never find the place where the autism comes from. The invisible hand is the source of the autism, the table is the rules, regulations and framework of its function”.

Personal Experiences - A Needle In A Haystack

Avril’s strange association with signs and symbols as a means to governing her life, extends into what Malcolm describes as a ‘cybernet alphabet’. A most recent example of this interesting study occurred in April 2000 when Avril bought duvet covers for a bed covering in her caravan in which she and Malcolm were temporarily living. The character and theme of the duvet design was the cartoon figure of “Toad of Toad Hall” from the book “The Wind In The Willows”; a classic fantasy for children by Kenneth Grahame.

Upon returning home for work late at night only a few days later, Malcolm and Avril found to their disbelief that the caravan had been hooked up in broad daylight and ‘towed’ away by thieves. The story, however, does not end here.

Usually, such a shock would precipitate a traumatic outburst on the third day following, but no such trauma was forthcoming, both worrying and puzzling Malcolm, who began to wonder if Avril was in denial of the theft.

Almost one month later to the day, whilst returning from a business trip 15 miles away, Avril suddenly and unannounced drove her car off the beaten track, and regular return route, and along a dirt track leading into a caravan park. After two minutes of driving about inside, and hidden from sight, there was our caravan.

Avril’s ‘landscape’ as Oliver Sacks would call it, or her ‘department’ as Avril refers to it, had given her the information.

Time Travel

Brand new research from Scientists at the Salk Institute in California, just released to the public in April, postulates that the brain seems to work in a similar way to the slightly delayed broadcast of live TV shows, to provide an opportunity for fast editing changes – the very changes we had mentioned in our section “Reality ?” (prior to April).

The research is suggesting a bizarre consequence that the brain collects information from the future of an event before it puts together what it thinks it saw at the time of the event, ie, in the case of this sentence, you have reached the full stop before you have made sense of the last few letters.

The Californian team therefore deduce that ‘normal’ people are living in the past – an 80 thousands of a second delay before the brain decides what it has seen, plus the delays required for signals to travel from place to place in the brain – the idea of ‘now’ being an illusion. Here they are simply translating normal consciousness as the Maya, or illusion, of everyday life, as stated in our section titled “Reality ?”, abridged from “Buddha And The Autist”, written during 1999.

Given that autistic brains function in an alternative way from standard brain uses, it is the case whereby some can, in some circumstances, collect information from even further futuristic events, thus experiencing the déjà vu effect as written of by Avril who states in another section “Remembering Birth” that she lives her life as if she is already ahead of it, a part of her ahead of it, a continual déjà vu. Had she retrieved the caravan before it was stolen ? (See the section “A Needle In A Haystack”).

Avril’s Mirror World Discovered By Physicists?

In the sections “Avril Through The Looking Glass” and “Inside Out and Mirror Images” we touched on Avril’s life long fascination with mirror image, the mystery of the mirror and the ‘inside out’ state of autism. The cover story of the 17/06/00 New Scientist magazine reads: “Signals from a mirror world – can we tune into an invisible universe?” Almost twenty pages is contributed to a ‘looking glass world’s special’, more significantly to us, is the section whereupon some physicists say we are surrounded by a universe of mirror matter with mirror beings possibly living on mirror planets that orbit our stars. (A mirror world is predicted in some versions of ‘superstring’ theory that takes account of both quantum theory and relativity).

Does the mirror world contain the realm of autism we have referred to in out section “Autism: The New Perspective”? A proposal for experiments to check for the influence of a possible mirror world within a few years, are being prepared by physicists at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics near Geneva in Switzerland.