Flowers for Algernon

Algernon's Story

Or, Why care about what animals feel, or think or communicate.

Here's the story of a real rat. His name was Algernon. He was my lab rat in college. I was majoring in Psychology, and at my particular University, Behaviorism was the norm. Behaviorism says that it doesn't matter what is "inside the box" of people's heads (or animals) because we can't really know that, we can only study behavior. Which is the evidence of "something" inside the box, but we don't have to know what it is to study it.

Algernon was a white lab rat bred to be practically identical to all the other white lab rats my class was using, so any differences in behavior we noted would be supposedly entirely due to how we treated them and experimented on them. The rats were in little wire cages stacked on top of each other with numbers on the front, a water bottle and a small amount of food pellets for them to eat. They could see and smell each other but not touch each other. We were to reduce the food until they all were hungry based on a formula that was called a starvation diet, then they went without food for a day so we could experiment with hungry rats. The hunger was the motivator for them to do what we wanted to train them to do.

We were rewarding them with a single food pellet for pressing a bar in another cage while we took notes. There was a specific process called "shaping" that we were all supposed to be learning. So us students were being "shaped" too.

I felt sorry for my rat. I wasn't supposed to name him because we weren't supposed to think of them that way so we could be objective when we called them by the numbers we had given them. Of course, I thought the number was a name, too. But I had just read the book "Flowers for Algernon" and thought I'd be cute and name him that to be a bit rebellious. I started feeding him in between other classes. I brought him real food, like lettuce. He seemed to really love the real food--but that was "inside the black box" so I couldn't be sure except that I knew he was very hungry, and I saw him eating it very fast.

Anyway, my rat should have been the slowest to press the bar in the group of rats. The days we all got our rats, most students put on these heavy gloves to pick up their rats so they wouldn't be bitten. Algernon let me pet him when I fed him, so he let me pick him up easily, and then I would pet him and talk to him. My classmates made fun of me talking to a rat. Other classmates picked their rats up by their tails like we were taught to (to avoid the "friendliness" part.) I made fun of them because of their squeeling and even screaming a bit when they reached in to get their rats and the rats struggled.

So I cuddled Algernon a bit, watching all this. My professor frowned at me and said my rat would do poorly because we didn't have as much time to do the "shaping." So, Algernon goes into the testing cage. He looks around curiously exploring everything, touches the bar, sniffs the food pellet, takes his time eating it. Then goes and looks around some more and then looks at ME. I cheer him on. I get teased. (MY shaping isn't going so well.)

This goes on for a few minutes, and pretty soon he's eating about 5 pellets and grooming himself. So I look at how the other rats are doing, thinking I can learn something from all the other behaviorist experts who are doing it "the right way." Next to me, a student's rat is in a corner, fur all ruffled up, head down. I ask, "So how many pellets has he eaten?" She says he hasn't eaten any because he had stayed in the corner the whole time so far.

On the other side, the rat is going in circles, around and around, looking nervous or angry about something (although, I am not supposed to presume such a feeling inside its "black box".) I ask the student how many pellets his rat has eaten and he says something like, "I don't give a shit, he's just bit me when I put him in there. This rat is F***** crazy, he just keeps going in circles." This is the guy who put him in by lifting it by the tail like we were told to.

The next day, I give Algernon a special treat of seeds and fruit. He's not hungry at all when he goes into the cage. We talk a bit, he goes into the cage, looks around, gets comfortable, and saunters over to the bar and then LOOKS AT ME. I cheer him on, I get teased again. He proceeds to push the bar about ten times. The other rats still haven't found the bar yet. Some are just starting to get "closer" to the bar, though. This is the shaping part--we were supposed to give them a pellet for just looking at the bar at first, then for getting "closer."

The next time, I do the same thing. He goes right over to the bar, looks at me, and proceeds to push the bar about 20 times. I cheer him on. I get teased. But everyone comes over to watch. He pushes the bar another 20 times. I have only rewarded him with a few pellets. He looks at me. I think he is enjoying this, but I am probably only "projecting" my feelings onto him. I know I certainly am enjoying this. He proceeds to push the bar another 30 times before cleaning his fur. I take him out of the cage, and give him a bit of bananna. I talk to him.

My professor is furious. He says I have "ruined" the experiment. The next day, nobody is watching anyone else's rat. Algernon is the star. He is pushing the bar as fast as he can, to cheers and whoops. He pushes the bar 100 times, and I have to stop him and give him a rest. The experiment is over. He only had to do 100 times to get one pellet to "prove" how shaping works. He didn't need that one pellet. I had given him an entire apple that morning.

I was reprimanded by my professor, and my grade was docked for feeding my rat and not keeping him on the standard starvation diet during the experiment. I complained that my rat completed the experiment, did the shaping, and I had learned how to do the shaping even though he wasn't "motivated" by hunger. The professor said I had disrupted the class (just because everone was watching my rat, not because I was acting disruptive during class) and was a bad example to the other students, and my grade was reduced.

I asked to keep Algernon when the experiment was over. The professor said it was against the rules because the students tended to loose track of them and they got into the University's sewers. I was going to sneak in and steal him (the professor told me I would be accused of stealing University property if I did) but because I had spoken to my professor about it, he had expedited the process of killing all the rats used in the experiment by the standard method of putting them all into a black plastic bag and gassing them.

There were lots of tears for Algernon. He did a very good job of being a lab rat for me.

So my experience with Behaviorism, was that I got really good at shaping animal behavior. I got on the Dean's list that year. I used that to get a scholarship, and I used the scholarship to buy a motorcycle.

Thank you for the motorcycle, Algernon. It drove me really nice to my Physics class, where there are few parking spots.

One Year Update on Doing the GF/CF Diet

Earlier I posted a personal experience with putting an Autistic boy on the GF/CF diet. Here is an update one year later (the posting was written a year ago for another Forum, but I didn't put it on this blog right away.)

My son is 15 and was a non-verbal, moderately Autistic child when diagnosed. He had a lot of behavior issues and minimal responsiveness to the world outside our own home, and tons of feeding issues. He had GI studies which showed unusual lesions in his stomach nobody could explain or treat. Some Doctors think that this is actually a result of measles from the MMR and an incomplete immune reaction to the immunization.

The first month was all about getting ready. I cleared out the entire house of anything with Gluten and Casein in it and gave away what was still good to friends and a food pantry. I printed up the diet guidelines, and gave them to the school and family members who would be eating with him. I printed up cards with the restrictions on it to give to staff at restaraunts. I started following two publications: The "Gluten-Free Girl" blog, and "Living Without Magazine."

Reading the Gluten-Free Girl's book by the same name (its in our local library) led me to recognize some of her same symptoms in myself, too. So I put the entire family on the diet. Its SO MUCH EASIER this way. No worry about what to eat, what is OK to eat. I put the pantry together with enough stuff over a week or two so that I had enough snacks to tide us over until I could make more of the meals on my own. My autistic son was already pretty much eating things we could keep. The only thing he ended up missing was pizza. I tried to make a GF/CF pizza, but he didn't like the version I made at the time. Later, I found a brand of frozen pizza that is made GF/CF which he is starting to get used to. I think after a year, he's forgotten the taste of the other kind of pizza, so the difference isn't so obvious.

Anyway, the results are in. After a few "misses" where his Dad had trouble with buying into it, his behavior improved so much that even he is more convinced that the diet is worth the trouble of being careful even away from home. The school is very, very convinced. Enough to have taken an interest in how the diet works, and providing a separate place for him to prepare his own food, and to provide staff support during lunchtime. The caffeteria staff has agreed to provide one item he really likes at the school during lunches for him.

He is on the honor roll now. His behavior issues have dwindled to almost none, from several times a week. He has learned to cook his own lunch at school, knows what is on his own diet (with a little mock moaning about it, but he follows it anyway.) He even makes extra food for friends. He eats with everyone else in the caffeteria. He has several new friends (non-special ed.) and has been to two dances, and has some girlfriends (nothing serious.) He has made a movie, posted it to UTube, and has about 50 friends on Facebook. He is doing advanced work in computers and even finished his exam ahead of time, so he could take that day off and made plans with friends instead. He can go independently to a restaraunt with friends.

He's grown several inches and is now taller than his father. He looks very healthy and is height/weight proportionate.

He doesn't think he's all that different, but everyone else is noticing how much better he is doing. He even sleeps better at night.

It wasn't a dramatic, overnight change. But mine was. Within a week of following this diet strictly myself, I lost all symptoms of health problems I had been having for over 20 years. I was able to go off all prescription medications I was on, and so was my son. He only takes some supplements now. There really is something to this diet. But it is something you can't cheat on (no, nobody is going to have an allergic reaction like some kids have to peanuts) but if you cheat, it does make a difference. Even if you have some food that seems GF/CF, but has tiny amounts in the form of additives or cross-contamination you can have a difference.

I think that for my son, he might be able to cheat a bit as time goes on, but for me, I can tell right away because I have pain and all my old symptoms return for at least 5 hours to 3 days.

Autistics have an unusual tolerance for pain (and an equally unusual intolerance for light touch and bright lights and loud sounds.) So perhaps my son doesn't notice pain that might have been similar to mine. Either that, or his symptoms hadn't had the chance to progress to the level mine had over the last 20 years.

I hope that someday this diet is researched better. But it is unlikely that drug manufacturers will fund it because it isn't a drug treatment. Parents, the government, and charity funders will have to do it.

I hope that every parent of an Autistic child at least hears about the potential for this diet to help their child. It might not help every child, but I have a feeling that some families have a hard time keeping the strictness required, like we had the first time we tried it. It really helped to have the blogs, the magazine, the family support and the school support. This time around, it really helped to have more choices of prepared foods. There is a bakery in a nearby town that makes some really delicious fresh baked goods that are Celiac-friendly, and that has helped a lot.

My extended family has all seen such improvement in us that my sister, mother and a neice have all gone on versions of this diet. The neice's rhumatism has gone into remission. My sister lost the last 5 pounds she has been battling to get to a size 6. I lost 25 lbs without trying to. I never thought to even suggest they try an autism diet for these things (except the rhumatism.)

I have so much more energy that I have started learning swing dancing, joined the local gym and work out every day now. I feel like a whole new person.

The diet isn't a weight loss diet. You can loose weight if you want to. Nor is it for treating Fibromyalgia (I had been diagnosed with Fibromyalgia, IBS, Chronic Fatigue, low thyroid and headaches.) However, for anyone with chronic pain, I suggest at least trying it for two weeks. I could tell after only one week.

The high point of the year was when my family produced an entire Christmas feast that was GF/CF for us, and I got my very first GF/CF birthday cake for my 50th. I wish I had known to do this 30 years ago.

I sometimes wonder now, that if I had avoided these two allergens back then, if I might have prevented at least some aspects of my son being born with Autism.

Personally, I think my son inherited certain genes, and my immune system was compromised by stress from the loss of my first child to cancer. My imbalanced immunity was passed to him through the neonatal period and from nursing. After which, the many, many immunizations he was given made his immune system become unbalanced in a way that has neurological implications.

A Personal Experience Putting an Autistic Boy on the GFCF Diet

Ok, I thought I would share with you my personal experience because I am not a Doctor.

My personal experience is with a child who had moderate Autism, no language, hearing issues, behavior issues, pica, and all the classic signs of Autism 11 years ago. He was diagnosed by 3 different Doctors so he could be admitted into a research program for Autism. (Dr. Lovaas's Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) research study.) I was trained to do this treatment also, as well as recruiting and training all the therapists who worked with us with supervision from the Wisconsin Early Autism Project. The ABA therapy helped tremendously. In fact, I don't think my son would have ever learned to talk or read without this therapy. But it doesn't address the organic cause of the Autism, which, at the time, nobody knew anything about or what to do for it. At least in my City. The diet was only one of many things we tried with our son.

But the diet is so important to his well-being that we have tried it more than once, even though at the time we first tried it, I struggled with it because there was so little information about it, and I couldn't get the other family members to be on the same page with it. This time around is so much easier, and I have the whole family on it so cooking is simpler. Everybody seems to like it and I have more specialized products available to replace some of the things we missed the most, like frozen waffles and ice cream.

Also, Oprah went on a diet that is called "The 21 Day Cleanse" which is supposed to be GFCF also, but eliminates meat, too. So more people are looking for GFCF alternatives. The demand is up for more products, and resources.

This is how we started. His whole life, my son has limited himself to about 5 foods total. Sometimes the specific foods change, but he stays with about 5 choices, period. He screams as if you are trying to poison him if you offer him a food he won't tolerate. He runs from the kitchen if I cook something he doesn't like because of the cooking smells in the room. So I went to several nutritionists early on, and had a feeding study done at the hospital, and we did specialized "feeding therapy" all to no avail. One time a feeding tube was mentioned (another parent called it a "brain bypass.") I mean, therapy helped to at least keep him from starving, but didn't change his basic behavior around food. As he grew older, he didn't grow out of his food issues. As he learned to talk (thank God) he started to say he was a vegetarian to help make his case for not eating what he didn't/couldn't/wouldn't eat. He has to smell everything before eating it, and can taste even tiny "adulterations" we might make to sneak in healthy things. He even has to have certain "Brands" of food, with exactly the right label and packaging before he will eat it. So I thought a diet of any kind was out of the question. So I put it off several years after hearing about it, because I just wasn't up to it. (We were running a 30-40 hour a week therapy program out of our house at the time.)

After many, many small introductions to foods with the help of therapists and family, we got him to eat most vegetables and fruit, because I figured that people seem to do just fine on a vegan diet, which is the most restrictive so-called "normal" diet I could find that would sustain a long life. I figured that if I could get him to at least eat like a vegan, that would be an improvement!!

So introducing this diet wasn't as difficult as it could have been, because a vegan diet has no dairy products already. Every time he ate a new food we would celebrate, and he would get "points" which we use to reward him with his favorite games and kid stuff.

As it stands now, here is a list of the foods he will eat, and also fit the GF/CF yeast-free diet:

potatoes, rice, sweet red pepper, romaine lettuce, apples, pears, grapes, kiwi, sweet peas, cucumber, carrots, celery, peanuts, cashews, almonds, rasperries, strawberries, cherries, black olives, raisins, maple syrup, olive oil, 100% fruit juices, popcorn, corn chips, dairy-free chocolate, grapefruit, cantaloupe, honeydew melon, watermelon, green beans, red cabbage, oranges, bananas, blue potatoes, blue corn chips, cauliflower, broccoli, zuchini, honey, lemon, lime, iodized sea salt, gluten-free ketsup, garlic, onion, blueberries, blackberries, yams, sweet potato, brussels sprouts, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, cherry tomatoes, peaches, nectarines, parsley, gluten-free cookies, gluten-free crackers, Rice Chex, Gluten-free waffles, sorbet, sherbert, home-made popcicles, natural sugar, tapioca flour, certified gluten-free oats, GFCF granola bars called "Luna".

He takes various vitamins and supplements to balance things out, and are also theraputic. I will list these next post.

When we go to McDonald's, he can have: A side salad with french dressing, an order of fries, apple dippers, an orange juice (not orange drink), and I bring a handful of cashews for protein. Right now this minute he is eating organic "Spud Puppies" which are usually called Tater Tots, with ketchup, home-made lemonaid, some slices of sweet red pepper, a couple of leaves of leafy green lettuce, 10 maple coated cashews, and half of a peach. He's normal weight and height for his age, speaks with perfect diction, is mainstreamed in school and working at his grade level, has about 6 friends who call him daily and arrange activities, (one of his friends just called now), loves drawing cartoons, and is a computer whiz.

He still needs to be coaxed into eating some of these foods, for instance, if he was cooking for himself he would still only eat 5 foods. But these are all foods he will eat, with just a little coaxing, which is a big difference from running screaming from the room! His description of his diet is "anything without eyes." Which I guess works.

I am perpetually working on a new food with him, which takes several months to a year for him to tolerate. Right now, we are working on garbanzo beans (chick peas.) This means presenting it to him in tiny amounts very gradually (first he just has to tolerate looking at the food without gagging.) Then we go to touching it, smelling it, and then finally tasting a tiny amount. Most foods I present un-cooked (except for potatoes, rice, waffles, and chicken, which he says has eyes and so this will be harder) un-altered, and with no dips or sauces. I think its easier for him because he can "standardize" in his mind the taste/texture of the food better that way.

The longer we follow the diet, and the more carefully we follow it, the easier it is for him to eat things. I think his system is healing, he is thinking clearer, and he can tolerate more tastes and textures than before we put him on this diet.