Dr. Kaplan shares an excerpt from his soon-to-be-published book on the topic of music and the brain.

To align with this week’s @USAutism Featured Video on the topic of Person Centered Planning for Teens with Significant Support Needs, US Autism’s Advisory Board Member and Non-Vocal Advocate Sameer Dahar, shares his thoughts about how learning to write changed his thinking patterns and what things were like for him before learning to write imposed that structure. In this week’s video, Dr. Robin Brewer emphasizes why the presumption of competence is so critical for all individuals across the spectrum and Sameer’s reflection on his own thinking and processing as an individual who was considered severely intellectually disabled as a child certainly proves this point. Please join us in reading and sharing Sameer’s words as he prepares to host his own blog through our US Autism platform.

For this week’s @USAutism Featured Video, Dr. Marlo Thurman, US Autism President, speaks with Advisory Board Member Dr. Robin Brewer on the topic of preparing teens with significant support needs for their transition from high school to adult life. Dr. Brewer shares her wealth of expertise on the importance of uncovering individual strengths, interests, and needs through Person Centered Planning to drive services, supports, and transition plans for all individuals. While this topic is geared towards those within Special Education programs, it can and should apply to all individuals across the broad autism spectrum.

Source: https://youtu.be/hceZTEcWTQo

Gifted, Autistic, or Both? Might there be some correlation between autism and giftedness? For those of us who specialize in the cross-section population of autism in the gifted, there certainly seems to be a lot of similarity between these two conditions, especially when giftedness moves into the range of “highly to profoundly gifted”. We even recognize shared characteristics in children who have otherwise been considered intellectually disabled.