Arthur L. Schawlow is the Jackson-Wood Professor of Physics emeritus at Stanford University. He received a Nobel Prize in 1981 and the President's National Medal of Science in 1991. He has also received seven honorary doctorates, from universities in six countries.
Many children and adults with autism or related disabilities are not able to talk or write. They are able only to use broad gestures, and are able to communicate almost nothing about their feelings and desires. When coupled with bizarre repetitive gestures, they often appear to be incapable of serious thoughts or emotions. Yet in the past few years, a simple technique called facilitated communication has provided a way for them to type words, phrases and sentences on a keyboard. To make this possible, another person known as the facilitator starts by holding the hand of the person communicating and steadying it while the non-verbal person's finger types on a keyboard or points to a letter on an alphabet chart. It is thought that this procedure helps to control involuntary muscle tremors and overcomes the apraxic difficulty in initiating desired actions. In some cases it has been possible to reduce support by moving it from the hand to the wrist, then later to the elbow, or even just touching the shoulder. A few have even advanced from no communication to entirely independent typing.
Although this method has been found independently in several places over the last twenty years, including by my late wife Aurelia and myself, it became widely known only during the last few years, mainly through the work of Rosemary Crossley in Australia, Douglas Biklen at the University of Syracuse and Carol Berger of Eugene, Oregon. Many people are using it now, and the results have often been spectacular. To give just one instance, David Eastham in Canada wrote a book of poetry which was published and translated into French. He graduated from junior college before his untimely death, and Margaret Eastham has detailed his accomplishments in the biography Silent Words.
Facilitated communication is permitting many non-verbal people to express for the first time the emotional anguish of their prolonged isolation.
Moreover, they can tell about physical suffering and ask for help. In Los Angeles recently, a non-verbal young man was awake all night and complained of a severe toothache in a particular place. He is so afraid of dentistry that he can only be examined under complete anaesthesia, not a trivial procedure. His father is himself a dentist, and so arranged for another dentist to make this examination and the tooth was found to be cracked.
In Eugene, Oregon a young woman used facilitated communication to complain of a bad toothache. Two dentists, perhaps afraid of her autisticlike gestures, made only cursory looks and found nothing. She continued to complain and, after several more months, her parents found a dentist seventy miles away who was accustomed to working with people who have developmental disabilities. He made a careful examination and found that the tooth she had complained about was so badly abscessed that it had to be removed. How much have our non-verbal people suffered because they could not tell about their pain?
Many parents and teachers have seen similar dramatic results and do not need any further proof. However, school administrators and others who are concerned about costs and the possibility of misinformation have demanded more reproducible proof. There have been skeptics, and a number of quantitative studies have attempted to validate this form of communication. In each of them, the student was asked to convey some information not known to the facilitator. However, most of these studies have given negative results because of serious flaws in their methods, resulting from a failure to understand what was being tested. In fact, all that those studies have shown is that it is possible to interfere with the process of facilitated communication.
Those of us who have had extensive experience realize that the non-verbal people are shy and that communication is inherently difficult for many of them. One attempted validation method used has been to show four objects, then bring in the facilitator and try to get the names of the objects. But who has not had the experience of being unable to think of the name of a familiar person when suddenly confronted with the need to make an introduction? Finding names for objects is not easy for many non-verbal people, although they can do better with practice in a relaxed setting. In another kind of failed validation experiment, pictures are shown to the person communicating and to the facilitator, with a screen arranged so that each could not see what the other saw. When the two saw the same picture, sometimes the name was typed, but not when different pictures were shown. This not only involves the problems of naming objects, but also defeats the facilitated communication by distracting the facilitator who should be paying attention to nothing but the movements of the hand being steadied, avoiding perseveration on one key to produce a string like xxxx. The facilitator needs to make sure that the person is concentrating on the task of communicating.
Despite the handicaps of the non-verbal subjects, statistically valid tests of facilitated communication can be done. It is necessary first to test whether the person can do the sort of thing that is asked, under quiet, relaxed conditions. Not every non-verbal person can do everything. It has been said, quite rightly, that they have "splintered abilities," very strong in some things but deficient in others. Once it has been found that the person can do something such as match a name to a picture of an object of or even allowed to practice that skill until it can be used during the validation test. This might well take several weeks. All of us have practiced taking examinations from infancy, so that most of us are not upset by further testing. Finally, the facilitator should not be distracted by information, true or false. Any physicist knows that you must be careful to disturb the thing being measured as little as possible. To disturb the communication being tested is like looking for a ping pong ball on the floor of a dark room by shuffling your feet around. If you kick it even slightly, it's not there anymore and you can deny its existence.
Indeed four such tests have been carried out and announced. In Australia students were able to communicate the order of four blocks, colored red, yellow, green and blue, which the facilitator could not see. In a court case in New York, a well-practiced non-verbal girl was able to identify objects whose photographs were shown to her. Attempts to fool the facilitator by showing pictures which were sometime the same, sometimes not, were overcome because the facilitator deliberately ignored anything shown and concentrated on the communication. In Connecticut the person was shown a page with a question on it, and gave the answer by communication through a facilitator who could not see the questions. Many more such careful experiments are in progress.
Clearly, there is an enormous amount of evidence that, under proper conditions, facilitated communication really does work. Not everything communicated is true: non-verbal persons can fantasize, lie and tell the facilitator what they think is wanted just as normal persons do. Under some circumstances communication is very positive and unmistakable. At other times, the response can be weak and could be manipulated even unconsciously by the facilitator. But if it concerns a matter of any importance, the information can be check by at least one other experienced, responsible facilitator.
It is scandalous that some people are using the unscientific "validation" experiments as an excuse to describe the facilitated communication as fraudulent. One recent television program deliberately set out to convey that impression, even though the producers were given, and refused to show, much of the positive evidence. Even worse, they want to deny these non-verbal people their only way to escape their prison of silence and condemn them to a lifetime of futility and frustration.
Facilitated communication is real. It has been and is being subjected to rigorous well-designed scientific tests. Most of all, it has made an enormous improvement in the quality of life and given hope to many who had none.