dagblog - Comments for "On the Spectrum"

I remember asking a few

Orion — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 06:41:50 +0000

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.

I remember those films.

EmmaZahn — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 18:12:00 +0000

In reply to Due to a short attention

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. :)

Due to a short attention

Orion — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 04:15:36 +0000

In reply to On the Spectrum

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.

found this in today's paper

artappraiser — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 21:47:16 +0000

In reply to My own experience with my

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

My own experience with my

artappraiser — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 19:55:26 +0000

In reply to On the Spectrum

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. 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.

Last night I watched an

Elusive Trope — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 18:19:07 +0000

In reply to On the Spectrum

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.

Good piece, Donal. I haven't

Ramona — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 03:26:55 +0000

In reply to On the Spectrum

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?