text: Rose did the same for Opo yesterday. She picked a couple pads and a bunch of the flower buds and let Opo go at them. I also fed him 4 pads during the day.
  
  In the last issue of totalhealth, I published an article called “What is Autism,” which described Dr. Ahsen’s innovative method of treating autism. The following is a real success story that describes a cure of autism symptoms through working with a methodology developed by Dr. Akhter Ahsen, originator of Image Psychology and author of more than 30 books.
  In “What is Autism” I used the word ecology to describe autistic children’s highly sensitive genetic predispositions and the way they interact with their environments. I suggested that the environment or “ecology” around autistic children impacts them more strongly than it does others of a less gifted and susceptible nature. In fact, the article reveals that the individuals who are most prone to developing autism fall along the most brilliant, imaginative and sensitive side of the human spectrum. Due to their highly responsive minds, these children absorb life’s interactions in a deeply acute manner, leaving them more wounded by the exchanges that other children can easily brush off.
  Much research into the causes of autism focuses upon mirror neurons found in the amygdala center of the brain, which deals with memory, emotion, and personal and social development. These mirror neurons play a key role in the interaction of social cues between individuals, encoding templates for specific actions and allowing one person to understand another’s acts, intentions and emotions. Recent research by Cynthia Schuman and David Bower (2006) reveals that autistic children have a decreased number of mirror neurons compared to the normal population.
  Schuman and Bower found that autistic children had an increased number of mirror neurons at birth, which decreased rapidly from then on. Dr. Ahsen points out this initially high level of neurons causes children to be more naturally perceptive in absorbing the subtle cues in their environment. Because of their increased sensitivity, such children are exceptionally alert to both positive stimuli and environmental dangers. Thus, in psychologically stressful environments, these children feel overly fearful or anxious, and they withdraw inward into their own vivid imaginations. Dr. Ahsen writes: “The constant rush of stress hormones in an area that has rich potentials renders it poorer and vulnerable and contributes to the severity in the symptoms of autism.”
  The degenerating mirror neurons in autistic children make it difficult for them to connect socially with others, and their ability to discern and interpret social cues becomes increasingly compromised. Since every child is unique in terms of how, why and when they withdraw into autistic patterns of behavior, some children present autistic symptoms soon after birth, while they occur for others at later stages, due to the stressors that uniquely impact them.
  Highly sensitive children withdraw inward because they find the world around them either too accelerated, too harsh, or lacking understanding into the true nature of their heightened sensibilities. To raise such a sensitive child is indeed a challenging task for any parent in our fast-paced, modern world.