I'm going to start, if I may, with a personal anecdote. Trying to write this response has been uncommonly difficult for me, because the subject matter is so personal and so difficult for me to relate to people. I was diagnosed with high-functioning Asperger's syndrome when I was sixteen and, despite the fact that there has been a good deal of research demystifying Asperger's and the autism spectrum, it really something isn't something that I like talking about. Immediately following my diagnosis, my mom reacted very negatively, trying to find any alternate diagnosis to explain the experiences and symptoms that I described and that were noted to my psychiatrist, maybe because she was a concerned parent still operating with a set of beliefs like the "views" noted by Capps and Losh "that individuals with autism do not experience or express emotions (e.g., Bettelheim, 1967)" or "that autism involves an absence of emotional expression and indifference to others (e.g., American Psychiatric Association, 1994; Bettelheim, 1967; Kanner, 1943; 1971)".
Of the conditions we've studied, the disorders on the autism spectrum strike me as being among the most subjected to negative social stigma, along with epileptic disorders, which I also had the privilege to write about. I feel a bit hypocritical for this, but while I find the stigma surrounding epilepsy to be rather outdated and highly motivated by superstition -- the experiences of epileptics are such a radical break from neurotypical people that one of the most logical ways to explain them without using neuroscience are through falling into the realms of the unscientific and unrealistic -- I honestly can understand the stigma against autism spectrum disorders. As LeDoux made a point of discussing in last week's reading, emotions are exceedingly difficult to explain through the same methods in which neuropsychologists describe other phenomena, but they are too inherent to the human experience to ignore.
Considering this, the notion of someone's brain being so neurologically atypical that they have marked difficulty understanding and relating to their own emotions and those of other people, experiencing deep a 'disconnection' between themselves and the rest of the world, naturally seems foreign, strange, and even impossible to understand. Even living with it myself, I don't understand much of my own experiences and my family has even greater difficulty doing so, though having the context of Asperger's gives us a framework within which to work. Reading the selections for this week has been difficult for me to sort through and, thus, respond to because so much of it is simultaneously familiar and alien. For example, while, I could empathize with Temple Grandin on many counts -- her experiences with finding the right course of medications, for example, struck a chord, albeit for different reasons -- other parts of her descriptions of her experiences were so far removed from how I understand things. Her early notion of "thinking in pictures," for example, was strikingly other.
The otherness of autism spectrum disorders is, though, what I think makes them inherently essential to an understanding of the human mind and the neurotypical experience. As we've come back to time and time again during the course, understanding how a neurologically atypical brain works highlights the functioning of the brain in general, so that we can better learn how a neurotypical brain crafts and contributes to our experiences. In our readings about autistic spectrum disorders, we've had the perspectives of the neurotypical (Clara Claiborne-Park, Lisa Capps and Molly Losh, and our friend Oliver Sacks, in both An Anthropologist on Mars and his introduction to Exiting Nirvana), the autistic (Temple Grandin), the Asperger's (Tim Page), and the neurotypical writing as autistic (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime), and this synthesis, this meeting different aspects of similar experiences, even more than the experiences themselves, is where we can really find an understanding of the material. The relationship between a neurotypical brain and an autistic one could be seen as this idea, written in synapses and chemicals rather than in words.
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Kassie - Thank you for this deeply reflective response to the readings. I admire the courage and integrity you demonstrate in facing the challenge of writing about something with such a complex and close personal connection. You do a phenomenal job of navigating the perplexing terrain to give us a way forward in thinking about profound individual differences.
ReplyDeleteYes, Kassie, thank you for sharing this with us. I think your sharing your own experience could be very helpful to the class, not least because your experience seems to differ in important ways from Temple Grandin's and, presumably, from others that we read about. I'm struck by the variety of experiences across "The Great Continuum" and even within certain groups on the continuum, e.g. the variety of experiences among people with Asperger's. The important difference you note between yourself and Temple Grandin is quite interesting--that is, "Her early notion of 'thinking in pictures' . . . was strikingly other." A friend of mine who has Asperger's--whom I actually mentioned in a previous post--is somewhere between Grandin's visual thinker and music and math thinker. He's a musician (an extremely gifted one, who studies at Juilliard) but says that, in order to do ear-training, he has to "take a picture of the sounds" (what an idea!) and "then scroll that picture by" his "eyes." What's more, the pictures of the sounds have definite colors (as do the days of the week, so there seems to be an element of synaesthesia here). These varieties of consciousness fascinate me to no end. I think almost exclusively in language, with only flashes of fragments of images--only fragments, never the whole at once (in other words, I can picture your nose or forehead for a second but not the whole face; other features somehow recede; I have a rich apprehension of them,perhaps even a color, but I can't fully visualize them), and a given fragment of an image disappears in a blip. Instead, I hear in my "mind's ear" the sounds of English words--strung together in sentences, though not always complete ones--virtually non-stop, in my own voice. I described this to my friend, and he said, "If that happened to me, I'd think I was schizophrenic." Lots to talk about tomorrow.
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