AGNOSIAS

Agnosia (a-gnosis, or absence of knowledge) is a loss of ability to recognize objects, persons, sounds, shapes, or smells while the specific sense is not defective nor is there any significant memory loss (Wikipedia)

Since my first book in 1991 and throughout my ten published books since, I wrote about a range of sensory perceptual experiences.  I described being unable to tell people apart, being meaning-blind, context blind, how I'd lose more meaning on one side of my body than the other, about seeing objects, people and environments in bits but finding that when things were spinning or falling through space they were whole.  I wrote about being meaning-deaf, about how fans and motors and other noises would make it harder to comprehend speech around me, about how when reading it was as though the meaning kept dropping out of the words.  I wrote about losing parts of my body, about difficulties with body messages or knowing what feelings I was having, struggling to simultaneously process sense of self and other. 

As I became an autism consultant in 1996, I encountered combinations of these issues in those I worked with, including the inability to process body language, facial expression and intonation, some children who could not perceive print itself with meaning, and even some who were unable to hear music as musical.  In working to help people to develop adaptations to function in spite of these issues, I came across the term that made sense of all of them - they were agnosias.

Whilst agnosias were understood in elderly people and those with acquired brain injuries, the distraction of terms like 'childhood psychosis', 'mental retardation' and eventually 'autism' meant that professionals tended to miss the fact that even children could be born with brain differences or brain injury that caused these children to have one, several or a range of visual, auditory, verbal or body agnosias.

I am a qualified teacher who has been an autism consultant since 1996 and has worked with over 1000 people on the autism spectrum most of whom have anything from one to a range of agnosias which have included: