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Ripped from mrbrown's blog!

27-year-old Amanda Baggs is autistic and doesn't speak, but she can communicate by typing 120 words a minute on her DynaVox VMax computer which then outputs the text into a synthesised voice. In this video, she gives a fascinating and rare inside look at what goes on in her head, and what her interactions with her surroundings mean to her. Amanda argues that these forms of nonverbal stimuli make up her "native language" and are just different from spoken language, no better or worse. And yet her inability to speak is seen as a problem or disorder, while other people's failure to learn her language is seen as natural and acceptable.

Wired magazine wrote about this video and Amanda in a column entitled "The Truth About Autism: Scientists Reconsider What They Think They Know". This is an excerpt (read the rest of it at Wired):

"I've said a million times that I'm not trapped in my own world,'" Baggs says. "Yet what do most of these news stories lead with? Saying exactly that."

I tell her that I asked one of the world's leading authorities on autism to check out the video. The expert's opinion: Baggs must have had outside help creating it, perhaps from one of her caregivers. Her inability to talk, coupled with repetitive behaviors, lack of eye contact, and the need for assistance with everyday tasks are telltale signs of severe autism. Among all autistics, 75 percent are expected to score in the mentally retarded range on standard intelligence tests — that's an IQ of 70 or less.

People like Baggs fall at one end of an array of developmental syndromes known as autism spectrum disorders. The spectrum ranges from someone with severe disability and cognitive impairment to the socially awkward eccentric with Asperger's syndrome.

After I explain the scientist's doubts, Baggs grunts, and her mouth forms just a hint of a smirk as she lets loose a salvo on the keyboard. No one helped her shoot the video, edit it, and upload it to YouTube. She used a Sony Cybershot DSC-T1, a digital camera that can record up to 90 seconds of video (she has since upgraded). She then patched the footage together using the editing programs RAD Video Tools, VirtualDub, and DivXLand Media Subtitler. "My care provider wouldn't even know how to work the software," she says.

And she has a blog too! Check them out, otties!