He developed normally until about 18 months. He was even picking up things fast - memorized a picture book in one sitting for example. Then over the next 2 year

He developed normally until about 18 months. He was even picking up things fast - memorized a picture book in one sitting for example. Then over the next 2 years, we started noticing his speech was delayed but he seemed fine otherwise (affectionate and connected). At that point we were concerned but not alarmed. His big regression came around 5, we seemed to completely lose him. He lost skills and seemed to lose the connection he had. We started him on ABA but we stopped it soon because we were concerned about the animal-like training it involved. The next few years were spent in various types of interventions but without any real breakthrough. Then we started to notice he could pick answers for multiple choice questions, often showing a surprising level of understanding. For example, noticing that he was hanging around when the TV was on (not really watching, simply hanging around) I remember giving him a quiz: "Barack Obama is a a) Republican b) Democrat c) Libertarian d) Independent" and he would pick the answer. Thinking may be it was a fluke, I would try with Bush, McCain, Clinton and so on, and he would get each of them. This was unexpected because the way he looked and acted, there was no hint he could have known any of these things. That was the point at which we discovered the prompting method. Initially I was personally skeptical if he really was learning, but by now, given the way he has passed externally-administered tests by people who have no connection to him or us, it is very clear that he was learning all along. He can still be very prompt dependent in a social setting, but give him a paper and pencil test, he tends to do extremely well. He still has huge issues (OCD, repetitive and random behaviors) and he has practically no social skills to speak of, but he does seem to show a remarkable degree of intelligence.