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    On the Spectrum

    By Donal on Mon, 12/27/2010 - 9:35pm | Health



    We rented a passel of DVDs over the holidays. By far the most moving was Temple Grandin, in which Claire Danes portrays a high-functioning autistic (HFA) girl as she grows into a woman of notable accomplishment. I had seen the Emmy broadcast where the film won several awards. At one point the cast gave way to Ms Grandin herself. Throughout the film, Grandin calls herself autistic, but in her eighty-minute talk to the Mind Institute, above, she occasionally refers to, "the Asperger mind," as if it is a subset of Autism.

    Asperger's Syndrome overlaps with HFA, and while definitions are controversial, both are considered Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), though there is talk that the next version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) will also fold Asperger's into ASD. People with Aspergers are often called Aspies, and in his book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, author Mark Haddon has the protagonist refer to himself as an "ass-burger." At least I'm fairly sure he wrote that. I have a good memory for such things, but as Grandin explains in her talk, if I was the Verbal Thinker type of Aspie, I'd simply know it.




    The basic message of Temple Grandin the film is, "Different Not Less," as spoken by Dr Carlock, Grandin's supportive science teacher, played well by David Strathairn.

    Simon Baron-Cohen, professor of developmental psychopathology at Cambridge, fellow at Trinity College and one of comedian Sacha's cousins, takes that thought much further in I Cannot Tell a Lie - what people with autism can tell us about honesty for In Character.

    So does this mean that people with autism or Asperger's syndrome are somehow less evolved? Not at all. What appears to have happened in human evolution is that the brain has developed down more than one path. The “neurotypical” brain has been selected for its capacity to socialize and chat with ease, keeping track of the rapidly changing social world, different points of view, innuendo, hidden meanings, exchanges of glances, and exploitation. The autistic brain, on the other hand, has been selected for its capacity to focus on the physical world in greater depth than is typical, noticing small details that others miss (such as patterns in numbers or shapes) and attending to highly specific topics in order to understand them completely. ...

    It is not that the neurotypical brain or the autistic brain is more evolved than the other: each has evolved differently, one to empathize and master the social climate, the other to systemize successfully so as to master the physical niche. The unique qualities of human intelligence are characterized not just by the capacity for mind-reading (and deception), which has enabled humans to work in coordinated activity unusually well, but also by the capacity to systemize, which has enabled humans to understand how things work, and to develop innovative technology par excellence. People with autism, who can perceive patterns better and concentrate better than their peers, are also more honest. Rather than regarding autism as a “disease,” we should recognize it as a difference that deserves our respect. Some features of it, like a learning or language disability, may benefit from treatment. But other features, like remarkable attention to detail and utmost honesty, are valuable human qualities.


    Baron-Cohen's assessment reminds me of the Myers-Briggs typology (MBTI) in the sense that normal society tends to prefer Extraverted, Sensing, Thinking and Judging types while those of us who tend heavily towards Introverted, iNtuitive, Feeling or Perceiving modes feel a bit out of place. MBTI has been done to death, though, so I will simply make the comparison. My further observation is, "Different, but not in the same way."

    Grandin divides HFAs into Visual Thinkers, like herself, Music and Math Thinkers, and Verbal Thinkers. I have noticed many differences between my stepson and my daughter, both of whom have been diagnosed with Asperger's. He has a prodigious memory for history, particularly US presidents. He has always been dutiful, but does not deal well with people, doesn't like being touched and can't sing a note. She is rather careless about obligations and boundaries, likes people, loves to cuddle and loves to sing. She has a nice voice, but is no music thinker though. She loves to draw, but is no visual thinker, either. What she can do is tell you anything about dog breeds. She's also parlayed her interest in anime into a working knowledge of spoken and written Japanese, and spends most of her time writing crossover fan fiction novellas. So both are Verbal Thinkers, but otherwise not that much alike. And they don't understand each other very well, either.

    Going even further, Grandin sees traces of Asperger/Autism in her immediate ancestors - engineers, artists and writers - and so presumably in many people who see things differently than most people. Which probably includes many of you reading this.

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    Good piece, Donal.  I haven't seen the movie yet but I plan to.  My niece is married to a man with Asperger's and their son has also been diagnosed.  Their older son shows no signs.

    Her husband has spent his life memorizing sports stats and if he says it's so, it's so.  He has nervous tics and no social graces whatsoever.  Whatever thought comes into his head comes out of his mouth, and he doesn't understand that sometimes the truth hurts.  He too doesn't like to be touched, and my niece has a hard time with the fact that he can't express his feelings for her.  I keep trying to tell her not to take it personally--that he's doing the best he can.

    I don't think it's considered a "disease", with a known cause, but rather a syndrome, a combination of symptoms.  It's interesting that before he came into our lives we had never heard of Asperger's and now we know many people who have family members with the same diagnosis.  I don't know if it means it's becoming more common or more recognized.  There is a name attached now to what we might have just called "eccentricities", though it presents in so many different ways it's still hard to pin down.

    The brain is an amazing, inscrutable organ.  Who knows what "normal" really is? 


    by Ramona on Mon, 12/27/2010 - 10:26pm

    Last night I watched an episode of American Masters about the pianist Glenn Gould.  I didn't know too much about his personal life, and it was quite interesting.  I did do a little wiki look at him and saw that there are those who would put him somewhere on this spectrum.

    I spent a number of years working in a halfway house with the chronically mentally ill, primarily schizophrenics, but also some severe borderlines among others who sort of resisted the medical community's ability to give the "definitive diagnosis."

    I didn't have much a pysch background before going into the job and sort of learned it as I went along.  One of the broader lessons I took from the experience was this idea of spectrum.  Our language, our culture, tends to facilitate a strict binary view of the world.  Sane/insane.  Normal/abnormal.  Moreover, we tend to place the judgment of positive and negative, good and bad on the categories.  For purposes of self-interest, we also tend to want to place ourselves in what is deemed the positive category, thereby regulating those who are deemed to be in the other category as being in the broader categories of bad or negative.

    Yet over time it became obvious to me that there wasn't a neat and clear dividing line between, as we put at the facility, those on this side of the counter and those on that side of the counter.  In fact there were days when it seemed that the sane ones, if there were any, were on the other side of counter.  In essence, the thing that really separated us into the two groups was an issue of functionality. As in, who was able more or less to function in the society as it was configured.  So much of the "diagnosis" was merely a matter of attempting to explain the particulars of why this or that person was not able to blend into the society and carry out the roles expected of adults, such as maintaining a job.

    I spent a many of evenings, sitting outside smoking cigarettes with some of the residents that I had some of the more interesting conversations.  And not interesting in the sense of "they were saying some of the wildest comments about this hallucination or that delusion" but interesting in the sense that the comments were coming from a deep engagement with their world, their experiences of life in general and in particulars, in the sense that they had achieved profound insights into not just their own life, but the human condition.

    One of the ways I came to understand at least some of the schizophrenic experience was that for most of us, our brain is able to shutdown our dream-scape during our waking hours, whereas for them they had to live with their dreams while being awake. And that even this is a matter of spectrum.  I for one have from time to time heard "a voice" that wasn't my internal mind voice when there is no around to have said it.   


    by Elusive Trope on Tue, 12/28/2010 - 1:19pm

    My own experience with my brother with mental retardation (afflicted with a syndrome similar to Down's in that it is gene-related and has physical attributes as well, but is much rarer,) taught me to be skeptical of the autism/asperger's labels according to symptoms long before it was fashionable. He clearly shares two symptoms with many put into those groups but he is quite different from the traditional labels in many ways. His intelligence is borderline level.

    He has the savant thing in that he focuses on numbers and dates--if you need to know someone's birthday including the year they were born, he's the one to ask, or perhaps a license plate number of a car owned by the extended family. But it does not rise to the genius level of Dustin Hoffman in "Rain Man." (Though there are similarities in that the Hoffman character tries stuff like making a microwave dinner but can't handle it when things go wrong.) Also, from early childhood he cannot take loud noises like gun fire, fireworks, firecrackers, screeching trains, they are clearly irritants to his nervous system and he really fears them. And he must have his routine, like the character in Rain Man--he will turn down things he really badly wants to do in order to watch his game show or attend church at exactly the same time every Sunday. The routines are very very important.

    But he is no genius, he really is slow in the "IQ" department, has to have a guardian, but smart and wise enough now in middle age to know that he has a handicap. He will say something like "I listen to what you guys say about this--like regarding a family problem--but I do not say anything because I can not understand it all."

    And there is this very crucial difference with him from a lot of the autism labels--he is not standoffish or cold with other people, just the opposite, he is  a hugger similar to a lot of Down's syndrome people. He also gives incredible eye contact, it's as if he uses looking at your facial expressions and emotions to figure out what you are saying because he might not get all the vocabulary, just the opposite of Temple Grandin types.

    So he is just one example of how several supposed opposing labels can be in one person. It's became very clear to me watching him grow up from a baby at the same time I was learning about psychology/neuroscience/human development et. al., that it's very much all about certain parts of the brain being overdeveloped and certain parts undeveloped (whether the cause be genetic dysfunction or poor environment or nutrition during pregnancy or infancy or a baseball hitting a head...) And that there are many many many parts to the brain....Nowadays I look at infants and babies and wonder what pathways are being built at that very moment in their brains, and how each maze built in each head must be incredibly different.

    Oh and never give up on change and development. My brother is a quite different person now from the child.he was. He has developed in his own way and some of his symptoms have tempered and changed. In his 40's, he started to show signs of being a typical teenager, it just took him a few more decades. Wink And I myself still cannot fathom how people can read music or say what key a bit of music is in, nor can I figure out why I can read French and German but cannot speak either worth a damn.


    by artappraiser on Tue, 12/28/2010 - 2:55pm

    found this in today's paper after writing the above:

    ...The task at hand is somewhat similar to trying to untangle a bowl of spaghetti. Each individual spaghetti strand may touch tens of other strands as it weaves in a contorted fashion through the bowl. In this case, the researchers want to do the equivalent of seeing where all the strands connect at the atom level....

    from
    Science Times: Dec. 28, 2010: In Pursuit of a Mind Map, Slice by Slice
    By Ashlee Vance


    by artappraiser on Tue, 12/28/2010 - 4:47pm

    Due to a short attention span, I couldn't go through an entire lecture of Temple Grandin in one sitting but there was an early point that was very salient, where she said that alot of men and women with Asperger's who are in their 50s, having grown up in a conservative era in which everything to table manners to going steady were literally spelled out in plain english, are doing very well while other generations are having a rougher time figuring things out. Here's an instructional video that shows how blunt and specific that era was on subjects that Boomers often figured their children would know instinctively: 

    One of the strongest appeals to me of intellectual conservatism and why part of me is still there (despite my likely not voting Republican any point in the coming future) is the argument that secularism and the chaotic elements of social liberalism left an anarchic vacuum where religion, tradition and custom once governed life. Leo Strauss has argued that this is the critical fault of secularism and George Orwell argued that if religion is ever supplanted by secularism, it will need to be replaced by a clear code of ethics, which is what religion has been on the individual and community level throughout history. If you look at religious leaders from Billy Graham to the Dalai Lama, they are effectively telling people how to live lives that make some sort of sense and contain a degree of structure. 

    If anyone has noticed from my earlier posts, I am diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome. I am very much the verbal learner and taught myself how to read with comic books (which, of course, the teachers said would rot my brains). I currently am in the process of writing a book on the subject and this post provided me with some food for thought that might very well spill over into it. Thanks for it.


    by Orion on Wed, 12/29/2010 - 11:15pm

    I remember those films.  Thanks for the flash from the past.

    My parents were very surprised to learn that my education did not include how to fill out the blank checks they had given me to pay for books and tuition my first quarter of college (yes, quarter and yes, college).  Before then I was a strictly cash consumer. :)

    Turns out there were a lot more things I wish I had been taught that fell through the cracks between parents and teachers.  I would have asked if I had known what to ask. :)


    by EmmaZahn on Thu, 12/30/2010 - 1:12pm

    I remember asking a few questions and getting silence. Also, when so much seemed assumed, it was impossible to know where to start asking questions.


    by Orion on Fri, 12/31/2010 - 1:41am