Studying the relationship between emotion, memory, and perception in Autism

Losh and Capps' paper brought to my attention many ideas about the relationship between emotion, memory, and perception.

In one instance, they cite other studies that suggest "experiences rendered through narrative are more likely to be consolidated in memory". Typical children developed the narrative form of response when recounting emotional incidents, and L&C believe that this supports the "prospect that narrative activities may be integrally involved in emotional appraisal and that autistic individuals' noted difficulties with narrative, could, in part, inhibit their capacity for appraising emotional experiences and constructing emotion concepts and memoryies"

This presents an interesting relationship between formation of a narrative, and appraisal of emotions. It suggests that emotions are determined after the formation of a narrative, rather than the reverse. Yet we often address other individuals' emotions and seek reasons / create a narrative afterward.

L&C address this, and acknowledge that autistic individuals certainly posess less elaborate memories of emotions, (as Grandin suggested), and that formation of narrative is not cognitive bottleneck. They believe that memories of emotional events create a "knowledge base... on the causes, consequences and subjective meaning of affectively charged happenings, and that Lacking such a repository could render autistic individuals disadvantaged"

Still, the question remains as to why this knowledge base is not created. This leads me to believe that a core question in autism is studying the relationship between perception and emotion, or perception and creation of narratives. L&C point out the autistic group's tendency to point out the visual elements of emotions (angry faces, sad faces, etc). This leads us to believe that the understanding of emotion that this individuals have, is based more in visual-word association than some 'deeper' emotional understanding or empathy.

It seems that understanding social interaction, requires the need to process emotional information, which seems to be a consolidation or 'essentialized' form of information. As was emphasized in the Rage for Order film, the brain of an autistic individual is structured in such a way that it appears to prefer processing closed, predictable, and physical systems.

This reminds me of a hypothesis for Autism called, The Intense World Syndrome. As it proposes: "...the core pathology of the autistic brain is hyper-reactivity and hyper-plasticity of local neuronal circuits. Such excessive neuronal processing in circumscribed circuits is suggested to lead to hyper-perception, hyper-attention, and hyper-memory, which may lie at the heart of most autistic symptoms. In this view, the autistic spectrum are disorders of hyper-functionality, which turns debilitating, as opposed to disorders of hypo-functionality, as is often assumed."

This in does seem compatible with what the University of California researcher in the Rage for Order film was talking about --a deficit in that kind of coordinating ability that is apparent in the cerebellum. It may be that a dysfunction in this area is what allows hyper-sensitivity to perceptual information., or that hyper-activation of those circuits is what causes disfunction in the cerebellum, as researchers of that theory might propose.




As a side note, I just wanted to say/complain:

Reading Understanding of Emotional Experience in Autism: Insights From the Personal Accounts of High-Functioning Children With Autism, gave me a new found appreciation for the writing of Oliver Sacks and other narrative-neuro writers.

Take for example, this idea of understanding autism through a "discourse analytic framework", or, the great phrase, "personalized causal-explanatory narrative frameworks". I can't imagine anyone who doesn't have an hour to read the paper understanding this. Thankfully, we have writers who address the general public, letting us know that what the authors really mean to describe are, "recorded conversations" and "personal stories" respectively. Some fields are much worse, but this paper reminded me of the great need for popular science writers who can convey specific ideas in more accessible ways.

Nothing new under the sun

Sachs' investigation of Stephen Wiltshire's drawing and Temple Grandin's discussion of her visualization-based drafting process challenge the conventional understanding of what it means to be an artist. We take for granted that an artist (I will, for the sake of simplicity, stick to visual art) renders an image from his imagination, and that art, therefore, is a product of imagination. Certainly, most of the art that fills the world's galleries is taken from life, inspired by or modeled on a scene that took place in reality. But art is not an automatic reproduction. It is created with style and intention. Art speaks; it has a message. Even photography can be more than pure journalistic record-keeping. A photographer frames an image and makes it his own. He manipulates his instrument to emphasize what he judges to be the salient features of a scene. Through the enumerable choices made in shooting and developing, a photographer communicates, and documentation is turned into art. But is Stephen capable of more than documentation? Is he an artist?

I argue he is on both counts, and there are a couple of reasons for this. First of all, he is driven to draw. His compulsion seems to stem, in the most general terms, from a need to make order out of what he perceives and, in rendering it, to communicate that order. I don't mean that Stephen is trying to reach out to the larger public — Emily Dickinson wrote the vast majority of her poems without any apparent intention to publish them; they were a way of communicating with herself — but he is solidifying his perception of the outer world into something tangible. Second, he interprets.  He adds details and ornamentation to buildings for both aesthetic (the chimney on Sachs' house) and symbolic (the flagpole in his yard) purposes. Jessy Park's psychedelic coloration is similarly interpretive and has an individualized style that parallels the warm lines of Stephen's later drawings. 

The additional perspective we get from Grandin is problematic. Her mode of piecing visual images together to make something new seems to be echoed in Stephen's creative alterations and additions. Is it truly art if he is only mechanically stacking visual images like building blocks? I think this is a false distinction. Grandin's process merely literalizes the common method of all human creative output. Nothing comes from nothing. An artist takes in what is pre-existing and makes a new pattern out of the old pieces. The pieces themselves are eternal, though we add new meanings to them as our memory of associations grows. So to strip Stephen of his artistic mantle would be an act of supreme arrogance on the part of the neurotypical. It would require belief that the neurotypical artist can make something out of nothing in a manner beyond the ken of an autistic one. 

"a scientist trying to figure out the ways of the natives"

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.

A jumble of thoughts

 

Oliver Sacks is one of my favorite writers, in general, and certainly my favorite among the authors we’ve read for this class.  I was pleasantly surprised (though not actually surprised) to find Sacks’ forwards in some of our recent readings.  In Exiting Nirvana he perfectly sets up the following text, and provides a historical context in terms of prior research on the autism spectrum, and an emotional context by providing certain details of the family portrayed in this book that the author did not provide.  Additionally, I appreciate how he sees the benefits, as well as drawbacks of each disorder he studies.  He includes some of this insight in his forwards.  As we’ve discovered, especially after reading “Prodigies,” among other chapters from our reading, and watching films such as Rain Man, etc., there are many remarkable individuals with autism.  The level of artistic and other skills in the cases we’ve encountered are staggering- not simply considered in the realm of individuals with certain deficits, but among “healthy” children and adults.         

 

Exiting Nirvana discusses “theory of mind” at length, and how people with autism are characterized as not being able to see from another person’s perspective.  Immediately upon reading the first few pages of Thinking in Pictures, I was stunned by Grandin’s ability to create such effective designs mostly due to her ability to see through the eyes of the livestock (both emotionally and literally- creating humane ways to move these animals by thinking about their emotions and physical comfort, and literally seeing through their eyes with the aid of her vivid visual mind).  This raises a lot of questions for me.  First, if humans are animals, why then can certain individuals with autism see from only certain animals’ perspective, and not humans?  Why is there a disconnect here?  If a person with autism possesses an innate ability to empathize with livestock, can this person learn to empathize with other humans easily?  Additionally, as Katie mentions in her post, is there a link between autism and sociopathy (“given that a lack of empathy is also a hallmark of the antisocial personality disorders, the connotation feels a bit negative.”)? 

A picture is worth a thousand words...

Cliche, I know, but after reading "Thinking In Pictures? that saying is so much more powerful. The thought of thinking in pictures is mind-boggling to me. I am an extremely verbal thinker -- everything I imagine comes up as a series of words strung together, or placed in its representative spot. For example, I once was asked to describe my favorite place to be in the world. This happens to be my best friend's bedroom, since I virtually grew up there -- we've known each other for sixteen years and her bedroom has hardly changed. She has a queen sized bed with no frame in the left upper corner, a dresser about three feet in front of that with a tv and a dvd player. To the right of the dresser is a brown book shelf stacked completely with CD's, and to the left is the door. n the adjacent wall, another brown bookshelf, a tall white floor lamp, and her coral colored closet doors. On the wall directly behind her bed, a large window with white sills and mini blinds. When I visualize this picture, however, I don't see those things. I see the word bed, and clumped around it I see 'green, white, purple' for the colors of her bed sheets. The word 'dresser' is in front of that, with the words 't.v.' and 'DVD player' stacked on top of it. The shelf shows as 'shelf' in very large letters, and the word 'CD' is packed over and over very tightly in between the letters. It is impressive and amazing that someone can not only fully visualize an object, but even rotate and see it from all sides. I have never once visualized an object in its entirety.

Grandin addresses the fact that being a visual thinker has the downside of not being able to comprehend words with which there is no concrete image to associate. But what I am curious about is what happens for words that have multiple meanings. I imagine that the first image associated with the word would be the most widely recalled, but is it possible to file the word away again with a second image? For example, the word 'leech'. From older days it means physician or surgeon, and it's also a blood sucking annelid. As a verb it is the act of using an annelid to suck blood, or more generally to drain or exhaust something. Is there such a way for a visual thinker such at Grandin to remember each of these definitions in conjunction with the same word? Can slight alterations to the word affect how she visualizes? I'm reminded of some of the work I do as a computer technician. Occasionally, work orders are lost before they can be completed and I have to create new ones. however, the system won't allow me to create multiple work orders for the same serial number. I avoid that situation by putting in the serial number with a period behind it. I wonder if the same concept could be applied to Grandin's visualization process.

To better understand the mind of the visual thinker, I took Grandin's suggestion and used Google Images. I typed in a few random nouns that came to mind and sorted through he first few pages of results. Simple nouns such as 'leech' yielded pictures of the animal, but after a few pages I started to see boots, which are worn to prevent leeches from attaching to the ankles or getting into pant legs, and vials of blood because that's what leeches eat. Upon searching 'liberty', I got a plethora of pictures of the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell, and a Jeep Liberty. My final word was 'symbiotic' for which I received a bunch of pictures of different animals that have symbiotic relationships with other organisms. It was a great representation of the associative way people on the autistic spectrum think.

I am fascinated by this system and have many questions. Do all of the visual thinkers have memories that are inexhaustible? if only a percentage of visual thinkers have Grandin's ability to modify information, is there a point where those without that skill are "maxed out" on their ability to associate a word with something? Do visual speakers excel at word games such as anagrams and scrambled words? Grandin offers a lot of insight on the visual mind but I suspect that she is right when she says that it works in ways forever incomprehensible to the non-visual person.

The Uncertainty of Autism

Apart from the obvious separation between fiction and memoir, Exiting Nirvana and The Curious Incident of a Dog in the Night-Time are two books about autism, separated by view points. Haddon gives the perspective of Christopher, an autistic boy whereas Park gives her own, neurotypical perspective on her autistic daughter, Jessy. Something that struck me after reading Park’s memoir was the constant and very detailed search for an answer to her daughter’s differences and the
realizations and perceptions that come from the perspective of an outsider.

Exiting Nirvana is written in such a way that allows the reader to work through the same process that Clara experienced when trying to understand or at least grapple with her daughter’s autism. The anecdotes are usually coupled with Clara’s attempts to reason and come to grips with the fact that Jessy meant to ask a question rather than make a statement, or that she has a sudden obsession with clichés, or that the sky suddenly has so much power over her emotions. Through deduction and reasoning, much like the way Jessy solves math problems, Clara comes to the conclusions that Jessy’s “clichés help her express herself, but their real advantage is far more fundamental. They help her give structure to chaos” (37) and “ ‘Jane’s house is in New Jersey.’ It sounds like a statement…Yet she doesn’t know where Jane’s house is, and the statement is false. But she has no reason to mislead me, and she is incapable of a convincing lie, so I’m able to guess: this is one of her odd assertions that function as a question” (55). These efforts to understand do not always end in success, however.

Jessy’s need to keep everything constant and in perfect order and her inability to comprehend change and abstraction is difficult for any outsider, including her mother, to decipher. “Jessy loves charts: they too reduce an untidy world to order” ( 36). In spite of all her efforts to understand Jessy, for Clara, there will always be a void. When recalling the anecdote where Jessy had eight pieces of bacon, Clara states, “Though it would make for a neater narrative, I won’t reinvent the words of the question I didn’t record. My question mark, floating in the blankness, is a truer rendition” (26).

The math that Jessy employed as a child didn’t have any real rhyme or reason to an observer and although it seemed that “gradually, numbers lost their magic” and Jessy’s “emotions seemed independent of the weather” (82), a meeting with Oliver Sacks twenty years later proved these theories to be only somewhat true. Something that I was very taken with after reading both, Mark Haddon’s novel, and Clara Claiborne Park’s memoir, is the world of total “bewilderment” that comes with autism. Not only does it come from the observers of the autistic, like Clara Claiborne Park, but it most certainly comes from the person housing the illness, like Jessy and Christopher.

Bridging the Gap (With Empathy).

Losh and Capps point to a critical and widely accepted notion in proper emotional and social development. In a neuro-typical individual, “advances in emotional understanding occur as children are increasingly able and inclined to locate emotions within causal–explanatory frameworks and evaluate their significance in relation to self and other.” The authors go on to argue that “the development of such evaluative skills has been argued to be a key factor in the enabling of children to penetrate the psychological and sociocultural dimensions of complex affective encounters.” Thus it is the acquisition of these increasingly complex abilities that is lacking in autistic individuals.
Though this would seem to encompass the lack of empathy long assumed to be a hallmark of both Kanner’s and Asperger’s autism, such a definition circumvents the slightly caustic ring of former classifications. I use the word caustic here, because to claim another individual lacks empathy sounds (at least to me) somewhat accusatory.
Perhaps this is a case of cue distortion on my party, but given that a lack of empathy is also a hallmark of the antisocial personality disorders, the connotation feels a bit negative.
I find it preferable, therefore, to conceive of the undeniable emotional barriers faced by autistic individuals not as an absence of the very emotion that renders us human, but as a snag in his or her emotional development. Or, as Temple Grandin might put it, a short-circuit in the computer wires.
In reference to this, I think the work of Martin Hoffman is an appropriate parallel. In Hoffman’s view, empathetic ability increases as a direct function of developing cognitive awareness of others (Hoffman 1984). In simpler terms, as more complex mental capacities develop, so too does the capacity to engage in and experience empathy. In infancy (0-1 years of age), for example, only a rudimentary form of empathy exists, wherein a basic imitation of adult gestures—or, motor mimicry— is observed (Meltzoff 1977), as well as what Hoffman terms the “primary circular reaction” wherein newborns reactively cry upon exposure to other crying infants (Sagi and Hoffman, 1976). By contrast, in later childhood and early adolescence, “person identity” (the realization that others’ identities, opinions, personal experiences and emotions are not solely dependent upon oneself—and that they exist outside of immediate, observable situations) enables a more advanced (and abstract) understanding of others. Only when person identity is acquired, Hoffman argues, can individuals “take the other’s role and asses their reactions in particular situations [while] also generaliz[ing] from these situations and construct[ing] a concept of the other’s general life experience” (Hoffman 1984). By transcending early childhood fusions of self and other, and by refining the resulting perceptions of separate entities, a more complex and mature form of empathy is engendered.
In its entirety, Hoffman’s model of empathy comprises four distinct stages (of which primary circular reactions and person identity acquisition are associated with the first and last, respectively). As for the second stage (1-2 years of life), sympathy (in absence of the ability to put oneself in another’s shoes, as mandated by empathy) is made possible by the attainment of person permanence (the notion that people do not disappear when, say, they leave the room). Following this is the stage lasting from 3 to 10 years of age, wherein role taking (the ability to assume another’s perspective) develops, and thus empathy takes its first roots.
If this model is to be applied to autistic individuals, one might argue that—dependent upon the severity of their symptoms—they are prevented from progressing to the third and fourth stages of empathy acquisition, based on neurological hindrances. In other words, from a developmental standpoint that carries a hint of psychoanalytic theory (inasmuch as this might be mistaken to parallel Freud’s psychosexual stages—and this is by no means my intention), autistic individuals may be neurobiologically incapable of engaging in role taking, which is necessary for the more complex forms of empathy.
To me, this correlates with the “complex attributional processes hinging on later developmental achievements, such as the capacity for reflecting upon experiences
and evaluating them in relation to sociocultural norms and expectations, as well as the appraisals of others” that Losh and Capps refer to. In that sense, though it may seem somewhat tangential, Hoffman’s approach to empathy development might shed a more humanistic light on cases of autism. Not that I find them to elicit the negative connotations associated with antisocial personality disorder. But I do believe that there is a want of empathy in the neuro-typical population and their reactions to autism.
Not only is there a disconnection on the autistic individual’s part—as they can engage only limitedly in the emotional currency upon which otherwise normal individuals rely. There is also a critical lack of understanding on the parts of non-autistic individuals who, say, observe their neuro-developmentally impaired counterparts and cast them off as retarded or burdensome. Perhaps, then, if empathic connections are fostered on more basic, more rudimentary or earlier forms of empathy (as one would attempt to cultivate in youngsters who have not yet developed a person permanence or person identity), a greater communication between the two seemingly opposite worlds could be achieved.