- From Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI, Public Radio International, it's "To the Best of Our Knowledge." I'm Jim Fleming.
- So I'm saying that in these ways, society is becoming more autistic, and counterintuitively, this is in many ways a good thing, not a bad thing, like it might sound to a lot of people. That's Tyler Cowen. He'll explain how the way we use digital technologies, such as the internet and the iPod to organize information bears a striking resemblance to the way autistics classify information as we look at autism today. Also, acclaimed journalist Karl Taro Greenfeld on growing up with his autistic brother, Noah.
- I think that's one of the great sadnesses of my life and the great regrets of my life is that I've never had a conversation with my brother.
- Also, philosophy Professor Ian Hacking on humans, aliens and autism, and "Autism: the Musical." But first Daniel Tammet. He's been described as the most remarkable mind on the planet, and one of the world's 100 living geniuses. Tammet lives with what's called high-functioning autistic savant syndrome. His new book is "Embracing the Wide Sky, A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind." In the book, Tammet writes that Oliver Sacks' famous account of autistic savant twins has led to some misconceptions about autistic savants. Many people see them as freaks of nature, but as Daniel Tammet told Steve Paulson, "Autistic minds are really not that different."
- I think first of all, what is important to say is that my humanity makes the abilities that I have possible. I find numbers and words beautiful. There is a quality to the shapes and the colors that I associate with words and numbers and language and so on, that makes them beautiful. And I think it's the same quality that a musician hears when he listens to Mozart or when someone walking into a gallery sees the Mona Lisa or some of the landscapes painted by some of these great artists, Gauguin and so on. It's the same quality that poets try to put into their work. And what I argue is that this quality of thinking with beauty at its center is fundamentally human. And it's something that's shared by everyone. And as a result, the intuitions that I think savants have for things like numbers and words and so on, these don't come out of robotic computer-like processes in the brain. These come out of intuitions that are shared by everyone.
- You are perhaps most famous for reciting over 22,000 digits of pi from memory. Certainly just an extraordinary feat, which took you over five hours to do. Do you have a photographic memory?
- I don't, no. And again, that's one of the myths that I push back against in the book. I think it's important to make it clear that, you know, my mind isn't perfect. I make mistakes. But, what's important is that, you know, the qualities that govern my thinking, intuition, creativity, love, emotion, positive, you know, very strong emotions that these are very human things and these are things that are shared by everyone. And these are things that anyone can draw on in terms of how they learn, how they teach their children. So this is a very positive inclusive message of intelligence and of thinking about thinking and so on.
- Well, if you don't have a photographic memory, how did you go about remembering those 22,000 digits of pi? I mean, how did you prepare for being able to recite all those numbers in public?
- Well, what I describe in the book is how I think of numbers as shapes and colors and textures, and specifically as semantic shapes. What I mean by that is that these shapes have meanings that are derived from their relationships to other shapes. And I give an example, which is one that everyone can relate to, and that is thinking about the word giraffe. If you think of the word giraffe for a moment, very much unconsciously and spontaneously, you'll think of an animal. You'll think of an animal that is very tall and one that has a very distinctive neck. And if you were trying to describe a giraffe to somebody else, you would need these words. You would need these concepts to be able to talk about it at all. And all of this is, as I say, happens instantly. And it happens in pictures. You know, I think in pictures of this animal and how it looks and the concepts that make it a giraffe. And when I'm thinking of different numbers, like 37 or 23 or whatever the number would be, 37 for example, is a very lumpy number like porridge, like oatmeal. And so, because I can picture the numbers in the same way that you can picture a giraffe, I can pick out visually the things, the qualities, the characteristics that make it meaningful. I give it its meaning by relating it to other pictures that I have for other numbers.
- So numbers for you have a certain shape. Do they have color as well? And do they have size?
- Yes, very often the numbers will have sizes. Six, for example, is a very, very small number, whereas nine would be a much larger number. And colors, certainly, as well. Three would be a green number. Five would be yellow. 11 would be a very bright shiny number. So these qualities, again, help me to make sense of them, help me to relate them to other numbers. And so they form a web of meaning in my mind that helps me to make sense of them and to do calculations. And what I argue in the book, and it's a very interesting point, I think, that the instincts that I have for numbers are shared to some extent by everyone. Everyone is born, scientists now know with an accounting instinct, the ability to, for example, look at four objects and not need to count them, be able to look at them and know immediately four of whatever the object is. And so this suggests that there are certain very basic numbers that have kind of like qualities in the human mind. And we are born with that ability. And in arithmetic and mathematics and all of that which comes later is built on those instincts. I think the problem is that in schools we generally teach in such a way that we kind of take all of the enthusiasm and all of the imagination and all of the intuition out of mathematics. And I think this is what makes people so scared of numbers and trying to do sums and things like this.
- And so if you're saying that for you, this whole world of numbers is just incredibly beautiful.
- Yes, absolutely. I mean, beauty is, as I said, a fundamental part of how I think. It's interesting that people like Albert Einstein, for example, when he was figuring out the laws of relativity and so on, used pictures in his mind as well to come up with those big ideas and described them as beautiful. He knew that they were correct, not because he'd done very rigorous calculations, but even before the calculations were finished, he could tell that this made sense, that this was right in some way, because it was so beautiful it had to be right. I think this is a big way that people would learn language as well. If you are a very young child, you learn a language very easily. You don't have to have verb tables and grammar books. You learn your first language very, very easily at a very young age. And I do wonder, and I do put forward this theory in the book, that young children do this in part by having this kind of synesthetic sensibility that I have for numbers and words that they share as well at a very young age, because the brain is much more like an autistic brain for everyone when you're very small. There are lots and lots of connections in the brain that we lose as we get older. And I wonder if that extra connectivity in the brain at a very young age when we're children helps give us that amazing ability to imagine and to have fun with words and numbers and to spot those patterns and so on. And we lose that as we get older. And the good news is that I think we can regain a lot of that ability. We can retrain those intuitions. I don't think we ever lose those. And I give lots of exercises in the book to help readers to do that.
- Now, you also have a remarkable gift for learning languages. And you are pretty fluent in what, a half dozen languages or so?
- Yes. I know I would say about 12 languages. I can speak some of them fluently. Others I can read pretty well. And I use a kind of thinking, which is, again, similar to numbers, it's very, very associative. I will think of a word and immediately other words will spring out in my mind and form kind of like architectures of meaning, clusters of meaning. And these help to give the words a sense, of course, in my mind. And it also helps me to remember them, because it's much easier to remember a piece of information when it's connected to other pieces of information, than to try to remember a long list of unconnected words.
- If you were to set out to learn a new language, how long do you think that would take you?
- Well, I think the classic experiment that we did for the documentary, I was given a chance to learn Icelandic, the Icelandic language in a few days. We were taken to La Capital Reykjavik, and I was given a tutor and several books, children's books especially. And after those few days, I was put into a studio and given a microphone, and I had to answer lots of questions, kind of similar to what we're doing now, but entirely in Icelandic on live TV. And it was pretty scary even for me, but I managed it pretty well. And I think what the tutor said afterwards was very interesting. She said, "What I found so amazing was not just that you were speaking Icelandic, but that you were creating your own words." In my book, I describe a couple of examples. One of them is the word oroafoss, which means word waterfall. And I said, you know, "This is when I'm learning a new language and I'm just submerged in this language, it's like an oroafoss. It's like being words just falling on, tumbling onto my head in great quantity, like being under a waterfall of words. And they understood this word perfectly and they got the sense exactly. And they were very impressed that I was able after a few days to actually create this word that no one had used before.
- Now, there are a lot of scientists who actually do see the brain as operating basically like a computer. The artificial intelligence pioneer, Marvin Minsky has famously called the brain "a computer made of meat." What do you make of that analogy?
- Well, I totally disagree with the analogy. I give some examples of that in the book. One of the examples I gave is to talk about how different the brain is to a computer. One example would be to look at chess, for example, which computers nowadays are so fast at calculating that even the best grandmasters can no longer compete. And yet what is so interesting is that when they do play grandmasters, they think in a totally different way there. Whereas a computer like Deep Blue will calculate 250 million moves a second, clearly someone like Gary Kasparov, a former world champion, doesn't think like that. What he's doing is using intuition. He's working out what moves are most likely in that situation. He's feeling out the game in the same way that I'm suggesting people could feel out a word or feel out a number. The other example is conversations, what we're having now. One of the things that due to my autism, I found very difficult as a young child and had to consciously learn over many years. Computers are really lousy at conversations. There's the famous Turing test, which says that if ever one day a person in front of a screen could communicate with another person at distance and not realize that it's actually a computer he's talking with, then that would be the real test of artificial intelligence. And every year there is a competition, and the computers get nowhere near being able to simulate human conversation. And one of the examples I give in the book is a conversation I had with the leading program for conversation. And very quickly even I could tell that this is a computer and not a human being.
- Daniel Tammet is the author of "Embracing the Wide Sky, A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind." He spoke with Steve Paulson. What do you think? Are the autistic and non-autistic minds not as different as we've been led to believe? We'd love to hear from you. You can send us email through our website at ttbook.org. Coming up, memories of growing up with an autistic brother and a documentary chronicling six months in the lives of five children with autism as we continue our hour on autism. I'm Jim Fleming. It's "To the Best of Our Knowledge" from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI, Public Radio International. When a group of parents approached filmmaker Tricia Regan for advice on making a film about their autistic children, she obliged. Why not? A little advice is no big deal. But as the parents shared their ideas and their stories, Regan became hooked. Soon, she agreed to be the film's director, cinematographer and producer. The film is called "Autism: The Musical." Yes. It's a documentary about a group of children with autism putting on a musical. Anne Strainchamps talked to Tricia Regan about the film.
- Were you at all concerned that a 90 minute film about kids with autism might be a tough sell to a general audience?
- Totally, totally. And that was the first thing that I said to them, because their idea was to just follow a kid with autism, you know, for like a year. And I said, if you make this film about autism, nobody's gonna see it. You know, I knew firsthand autism is brutal. It's tough. It's tough on the people who have it. It's tough on the people who love them. And I felt like it also would be dehumanizing. And what their goals were with the film was really to sort of spread the word about how great these kids are and how valuable they are. And that they're not only members of our community, but they're valuable members of our community. And I said, "If you do that, you need to create a structure with the film where the film is not about autism, but about the kids, and autism is their obstacle. So we need to find a structure where there's a group of kids with autism that are trying to accomplish something and the obstacle that keeps getting in their way is their autism." And then we have a basic three act structure for a movie that would appeal to anybody. And so it turned out that one of the women knew this woman, Elaine, who was just at that moment working with a group of kids with autism to create a musical.
- What we were pretending about is where you are. It's time to go to school. Should we take the bus or should we drive?
- Bus.
- There's a red light. What do we do? Stop. Green light. Where did we pretend we went today?
- School.
- Yeah. And what did we ride on a...?
- Bus.
- A bus. And did you make new friends?
- Yes.
- Can you guys look at each other and shake hands and thank your scene partner. That was a great scene. Thank you. Thank you, my scene partner. Wait, wait, wait. Come here. You must be so proud of yourself. You know, you pretend played so nicely. I'm so proud. You proud of yourself? Well, give me five for proud.
- What about in terms of filming this group of kids? 'Cause autistic kids have trouble with social interaction, many can't even meet other people's eyes. How did they respond to having cameras in their faces?
- Well, it's interesting. From the very beginning, I always appeared to them with the camera. The camera was always on, and there were certain rules that were set up right away. One is like you don't touch the camera. So in the beginning of the film you see a lot of like touching of the camera, throwing balls at the camera. And that absolutely dissipates by the end of the movie. And it was just this matter of setting up a relationship with them. And I think the myth is, is that kids with autism don't want to have relationships. And that is not the truth. It's just hard for them, and it's scary for them. And so if you just are consistent, and you keep showing up, and, you know, your behavior is consistent so they understand it and the rules are always the same, most of them will pretty much step into line, and they will open up for you and unfurl in the most magnificent ways.
- One of the great things that this film does is helps the audience see autistic kids as real individuals with very distinct personalities and very distinct abilities. I mean, they're each extremely different from the other. Can you talk about some of them? Henry, for instance, here's a kid who's very verbal with a somewhat precocious obsession, right?
- Henry, at the time that we were making the film was obsessed with dinosaurs. That obsession has sort of expanded to animals and creatures in general. Henry is one of the most talented people I've ever known. And you watch the movie, you're not quite sure exactly like what is the issue with him. And I think by the end of the movie you sort of get the sense of the different ways that he's challenged, you know, in terms of his ability to interact with people, to stay in the here and now and not in this fantasy world that is so rich and so evolved for him, And that I think will be a source of his career as he grows up. I think he will have a great career with the right help.
- Now you can see that this saber-tooth is actually hunting down its meal. Look at the way they use the teeth.
- Henry has Asperger's syndrome, which is what some people call high functioning autism. Kids with Asperger's tend to be very gifted or very intelligent in specific areas. With my son, it's all about reptiles and dinosaurs.
- You could see that the Colombian mammoth was the biggest of all. Told you so.
- To soothe his own anxiety, he's been talking to himself and really withdrawing into his own world and not socializing with the other kids at all. They kind of laugh at him. Apparently, he's also being teased more, so he's starting to feel like an outcast, I think.
- And they are eaten by by the amphibious ambulocetus. It is a mammal that is a bizarre beast.
- So then there are other kids who are really not very verbal at all, Lexi, for instance.
- Lexi is a heartbreaker for me. She is one of the most winning kids I've ever known. Her smile can light up an entire planet, honestly. And she has the most beautiful, angelic singing voice. I come to tears. I did come to tears the first time I heard her sing. While I was shooting, there were tears streaming down my face. And she's very smart and very intuitive. And every now and then she'll come out with this really funny, funny comment that just sort of pulls the whole scene together in one short line. But, she has a very, very hard time developing original language. So most of her communication is just repetition of lines that you have either just said to her or that she has heard before. And it's very hard on her mother, because Lexi is, you know, she's the oldest kid in the movie. She's 14 when we're shooting it. So she's about 17 now. Both her parents are struggling with what Lexi's adulthood will look like. It's heartbreaking, because she's this young woman with so much talent and so much charm, but who frankly still needs a babysitter. How do you provide for that adult? How do we create a society where that adult can share her gifts with us, but also be taken care of, especially given these harsh economic times?
- Hi sweetie pie.
- This is Echolalia. She can repeat back what's said to her, but she has a hard time generating original speech.
- How, do you feel about coachee?
- How do I feel about coachee?
- Yeah, can you type how you feel about coachee?
- Okay, I can type how do I feel about coachee?
- Okay. Oh, she's typing. How do I feel about coachee.
- Is that whole? What's so funny, mom? No.
- There's a moment in the film when it really hits you what making a musical, performing in a musical might mean to these kids. And it's the moment when you hear Lexi sing, because up until then you've heard Lexi struggle so hard to communicate. You know, she can barely manage to speak coherently, but when she sings, the words flow.
- And they flow with great meaning. There's a portion somewhere in the middle of the movie where we're sort of exploring the inner life of Lexi, and there's this little love story going on. She has this crush on Jacob. And Jacob, it's unclear whether he is interested in her or not, but she's not getting any real feedback from him. And Jacob has autism too, so we don't know. You know, maybe he could be very interested. We don't know. And she is singing the song. "I'm Not That Girl" from the play "Wicked." And when she sings it, you see the heartbreak in her that she's not that pretty young girl with the blonde curls, that she does have this disability. She is a little overweight, and you feel her pain. And when she finishes the song, she literally has to shake herself to bring herself back into time and into her body, because she had traveled so far in that song. ♪ If you're young at heart ♪ ♪ Maybe I'll see why ♪ ♪ Everyone has a talent ♪ ♪ and they can learn to fly ♪ ♪ If you look long and hard ♪ ♪ you can see beyond the face ♪ ♪ It doesn't speak, but it's too clear ♪ ♪ Everyone has a place ♪ ♪ Fly, fly ♪
- There's a moment I'm thinking of in the film. We've just heard Lexi's mother, I think, talking one of the most poignant pieces of interview. And she says, "What kind of mother actually hopes that her daughter dies before she does?" And you cut from that to a scene of kids just goofing around. And it's the only thing really that made that seem bearable, because you know, you see something heartbreaking, and then you realize, but they're still kids, and they're just goofing around and having fun. And there's still joy here. And it was really, really important that the very lowest point that you could reach emotionally in the film be followed by something. The larger purpose of the whole film was like, life goes on. Let's find the joy. Let's keep going. Because, otherwise it would be that film that nobody would ever wanna see. And it also wouldn't be the full story, because, you know, as hard as these kids' lives are, as hard as their parents' lives are, it's kind of fun hanging around them too. They have a good time. They have full lives. It's not all dark and dreary. There's a lot of laughter. There's a lot of joy. You know, and a lot of challenges.
- Adam. Adam, we're gonna sing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," sweetie.
- Oh, I don't wanna do "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star."
- Okay, go up and try it. You wanna go try it? It's your turn to do Twinkle Twinkle on the stage.
- Yeah, I don't want to do "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star."
- Want me to pick you up?
- No, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. ♪ How I wonder what you are ♪
- Look.
- No. ♪ What you are ♪
- See? ♪ Up above the world so high ♪ ♪ Like a diamond in the sky ♪
- I am right here sweetheart. ♪ Twinkle Twinkle little star ♪
- Everybody ♪ How I wonder what you are ♪
- So the film does build to a climax, which is opening night. The musical is on stage. What happens?
- Well, it's funny because truthfully it was like any other kid's play. It was a total disaster. You know, missed cues, like people forgetting lines, like weird stuff happening. But, it just didn't matter. What really mattered to me and to the kids and to everybody in that room was that the kids had their moment on stage. ♪ You and I not who you see ♪ ♪ I take a chance and now we believe ♪ ♪ I am me ♪ ♪ I am proud ♪ ♪ I am me ♪ ♪ I am loud ♪
- Those were more of the moments when I cried. Exactly.
- Yeah.
- Because they're also universal moments. Like it makes it so normal. Do you know what I mean? These are just parents with their kids at a play. It's so universal at that point. These aren't disabled kids. These are just kids. ♪ I take a chance ♪ ♪ And know the beat loves me ♪
- It's a clip from "Autism: The Musical." Tricia Regan is the director of the film. She spoke with Anne Strainchamps In the 1970s. Noah Greenfeld may well have been the most famous autistic child in America. His father, Josh Greenfeld, wrote several books about raising Noah. Noah's older brother is acclaimed journalist Karl Taro Greenfeld. He's written his own book about life with Noah. It's called "Boy Alone, A Brother's Memoir." Karl Taro Greenfeld says that, "The challenges of raising Noah caused a lot of tension between his parents."
- My mother punched my father in the face. They were fighting a lot at home. And I think as any of your listeners know who are parents, when you have a sick child at home, that things are tough anyway. You're always sort of trying to baby that child and help that child. And having, Noah was like always having a sick child in a way. And I think both of them were frustrated with how much they were doing and how hard they were trying for Noah. And Noah, unfortunately, he never had that miraculous breakthrough that some middle functioning and higher functioning autistic people have. He remained profoundly autistic and remains so to this day. And I think there was a lot of frustration for my parents in how much they were doing and how they weren't getting the results they wanted. And they couldn't take it out on Noah, so some of it was manifest in these arguments with each other.
- But I keep thinking about the emotional tension in that and how, what effect that must have had on you. In fact, one of the things that's sort of disturbing about that scene as you describe it, is that it was a shock for you to see your mother hit your father. But, you said your father had hit you in the past. I suppose, in a way, because he couldn't hit Noah.
- My father wrote very candidly in "A Child Called Noah," how he used to hit both of us, never violently, but I think it was in part out of frustration. And I think it was also the generation that he was from. I mean, he was raised by a father who hit him. I don't do that with my children. And I hope I break that terrible chain. It's also a different era. I think corporal punishment now is much more frowned upon than it was at that time. But I don't know, I don't equate my father's parenting of me or my mother's parenting of me. I don't somehow claim that Noah impacted that as well. I'm not sure that I can do that. And it's always very hard to separate out what happened to me because of me and what happened to me because of Noah.
- Well, but the boy alone of the title of your book is you.
- I think it's both of us. I think it's both of us.
- You were each alone?
- Yeah. I think that's one of the great sadnesses of my life and the great regrets in my life is that I've never had a conversation with my brother.
- Not once, ever, all these years?
- No, we've never spoken. Noah's nonverbal. He can't speak. I think he understands a lot of what I say. I think he understands a lot of what's going on around him, but he can't talk. And so, it remains to me that, you know, this deep sense of longing that I have to talk to my brother just once was one of the reasons I wrote this book. And the book is in a sense, a conversation with my brother or it becomes that. I only realized when I began writing this book, how desperately I am missed him. And while I loved him, it was in a sense unrequited, because I'd never had a conversation with him.
- Tell me about the real Noah, the one that was actually there. You spent a lot of time with him. You in fact worked in a school that your mother ran.
- Yeah. We ran a daycare center. My mother founded a daycare center for the developmentally disabled. I used to work there plenty of afternoons when they were short staffed. Noah's always been an enigma. Whenever I thought that I had figured him out or understood him, he would change on a dime. He was always very hard to read. Trying to figure out his moods has been, you know, maybe the great decoding challenge of my parents' lives. And it's very difficult for someone who is nonverbal. And Noah didn't have the manual dexterity, really, to learn sign language. It's very difficult, 'cause the, one of the ways he communicates is by having a tantrum. If he has a headache, he has no way of telling you he has a headache, really. So he might hit his head or start banging his head almost as an effort to communicate that he has a headache. If he has a toothache, there's no way for him to tell you he has a toothache. So on a very rudimentary level, this lack of communication influences behavior and can make him sometimes hard to handle.
- And for the person who's trying to handle him too, you are constantly in a state of trying to figure out what it is. And, and in that sense, I suppose throwing your own expectations, trying to say, "Well, if that were me, I would mean this."
- Yeah, we project, I mean, sometimes my mother and my father and I still have arguments of what we think Noah meant. 'Cause we all tend to project our own ideas onto his behavior sometimes. And a lot of specialists and therapists in the past were seduced by that same belief that they understood Noah. They could unlock Noah. They got Noah. And they would invest the hours and the days and the months and almost always come back with very, very little in terms of results.
- So Noah is still at the center of your life in many ways and for your parents as well?
- I think so. And in fact, I'm moving back to Los Angeles with my family in part to take on more of a conservatorship role or take on a conservatorship role, actually, along with my parents, in part because my parents are getting older. My dad's 82 now. My father never told me, and my mother never told me that I'm gonna have to take care of Noah when they're gone. But, I mean, I understood that that was gonna be me.
- Yeah. Where is he now?
- He's in a home in Los Angeles, a supported living home run by an outfit called Diverse Journeys. And he's in a better place than he was a couple years ago. He was in a state facility and was getting injured and beat up a little bit. Unfortunately, that happens way too often in the state facilities. And we were lucky and got him out and into a supported living home where it's better. It's not perfect, but, you know, as his family members and as those who love him, nothing will ever be perfect. We want the best for Noah.
- So what is life like for Noah now?
- He doesn't have a day program. He goes out, you know, maybe goes to the park, goes take a walk with one of his caregivers, and he doesn't have that much of a day. We visit him. We hang out with him for a bit. He goes to a restaurant, maybe, if he's in a good mood. If he is in a bad mood, you can't really take him anywhere. And I don't think it's a very enriching day. I wish it were. I wish we could find something, you know, a supported work program or something we could do for him. But Noah's always required one-on-one supervision and care. And almost no programs really will provide that for him. So it's up to us to try to figure out some way to get him out more. I think when I'm in Los Angeles, I mean, I go there very often as it is, but once I'm living there, I'm gonna be able to do a little more. I'm gonna be able to go see him a lot more. Or, I can maybe take him out a little bit. I hope that makes a difference.
- But what's it like then for you when you go? You wrote in the book that sometimes he'll hug you, and sometimes he'll spit on you.
- Well, that's exactly what it's like. And you don't know what you're gonna get. When you knock on the door to his house, and you go in, you don't know what you're gonna get. I guess that, you know, he'll take a shot at me sometimes. He'll pinch me. He'll scratch me. He'll try to pull my hair when he is in a bad mood. When he is in a good mood, he is a sweetheart. And that's always been one of the enigmas and mysteries of Noah. And much of my childhood was spent with that same weariness about Noah and uncertainty about about exactly what I was gonna get.
- Karl Taro Greenfeld is the author of "Boy Alone, A Brothers Memoir." If you have questions or comments about the show, you can send us email through our website at ttbook.org. It's always nice to hear from you. Coming up, philosophy professor Ian Hacking on the use of the alien metaphor to describe autistics. And Tyler Cowen on how modern society is becoming more autistic and why that's a good thing as we conclude our hour on autism. I'm Jim Fleming. It's "To the Best of Our Knowledge," from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI, Public Radio International. Ian Hacking is a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto. He's the author of 13 books and over 220 papers, articles and reviews, including an article called "Humans, Aliens and Autism." Hacking talked to Steve Paulson.
- One of the things I'm interested in is the use of the metaphor of the alien. It somehow got picked up about 20 years ago and was sometimes used by advocacy groups. One sound bite, which I really didn't like a couple of years ago, run by Cure Autism Now, which is called CAN, was a sort of solemn young man's voice saying something like this, but I could get the actual quote. "Imagine that one in 200 children in America were being abducted by aliens right now. That's called autism." See, this way of God, this one in 200 are, it's like being abducted by aliens. And then people have written novels with the word alien in the title, and which are about autistic people. Other autists absolutely loath the comparison with aliens. It means we're not human. There's a guy called Jim Sinclair who founded one of the advocacy movements, which is called GRASP, where the A stands for Asperger rather than autism, who gave a very celebrated talk called "Don't Mourn for us," on which he said, "If you have a severely autistic child, and you think that your child has been stolen from you, well then go to a grief counselor who advises parents who've had a child die. Mourn for that child you didn't have. Don't mourn for the child you do have, who is a living human being with immense potential. You treat us as aliens." This is his word. "But what we do as we gradually work our way into your society is try to navigate a world of aliens." These are all the words that they use. And so I'm interested in why did the metaphor of the alien become so attractive and also be resisted so strongly? You can see the resistance.
- Sure, sure.
- I don't wanna be called an alien. I'm a human, you know, et cetera.
- But, so why would other people use that word?
- Well, it somehow captures something which they think, why do metaphors ever catch on? I think because that it somehow seemed to fit the case. And I think, see, I think there's an explanation of why it's so attractive. One of the things that human beings can do is to just read from another person's gestures, voice, look at the face where they're looking. You just know what the other person is, roughly speaking. Often we have to infer. But many times we just see. Now this is part of sort of the birthright of every human child that very, very quickly they are able to learn, whether it's learning or whether it's just innate, they immediately know what other people's doing. They don't interpret, they just read it off. And that's what autistic people don't do.
- They don't have that kind of emotional reaction.
- They don't have that reaction. They can't tell what you're doing. They don't understand that you're mad. They don't understand that you're bored. The lack of that birthright, in a sense means it's very hard to enter the community of human beings. And aliens, the meaning of the word alien is that you're outside the community of human beings. So I think that the use of the metaphor does represent a recognition of an important aspect of autism. I don't say autism is just this. There is a very important saying in many autism movements now, "If you know one autist, you know one autist." Autistic people are very different. But, I'm just drawing attention to one rather widespread aspect of autistic life, which makes it very hard and unnatural for an autistic person to relate to what are often called neurotypicals. That's you, and that's me.
- Well, and-
- Then conversely, we can't do the same. We don't-
- Yeah.
- We can't read off, and this is one of the things that's just so upsetting to a parent. They can't tell what their child is thinking. You know, normally parents know perfectly well what their children are thinking, or they don't, and you know. But the parent has the feeling, I don't know what's going on in my child's head. We have to learn how to relate to this different aspect of humanity. For millennia, neurotypicals have been putting autistic children in homes for the feeble-minded, or treating them like village idiots or whatever. Namely, treating them as subhumans, treating them as non-citizens. Whereas, now I think that we are doing an extraordinary job of making greater possibilities available to autistic children and adults and also revising our own attitudes to them, making it easier to live with people who don't behave like I do.
- Ian Hacking is professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. He spoke with Steve Paulson. Tyler Cowen is an economics professor at George Mason University. He's also the author of "Create Your Own Economy, the Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World." Cowen begins the book with something that happened to him about five years ago. One of his blog readers wrote to ask him if he might be described by either Asperger's syndrome or high functioning autism. Tyler Cowen told Anne Strainchamps how he reacted.
- Well, when I first got the email, it seemed crazy to me. If you go say on Wikipedia and you read about autism, there's a lot in the current definition of autism that doesn't apply to my life. For instance, one common definition would involve the notion of impairments in social communications. And that's not something that's ever characterized my life. But the notion of autistic people as extreme information processors and gatherers and collectors, I found that spoke very much to who I am. In the book I coined the term infovore to describe people like this. So I think I have some cognitive aspects of autism without having what might otherwise be considered Some of the debilitating aspects that some, but not all autistic people have.
- I guess when people talk about autism, they do tend to focus on the negative aspects of being autistic, don't they, the social handicaps, for instance, but not so much on whether there's a particular autistic cognitive style, a particular style of thinking and ordering information. Can you describe more what you see as the autistic cognitive style?
- Well, if you look at the diagnostic manuals, which would be considered the formal definitions of autism, they basically define autism in terms of impairments or problems. And I think this is first, ethically, not really right to take a group of people and brand them as losers, so to speak. And I think scientifically it's also wrong, because if you define a group of people as people who fail, you won't ever be able to see how it is that they might sometimes succeed. So there's another way of thinking about autism, which is a way that your brain processes information. And you may then conclude some autistic people will do very well in society, some autistic people will do very poorly. But, you'll have a broader, more diverse notion of the concept. And in my view, that's very much an improvement in our understanding of what autism might be about.
- There's another diagnosis that's made a lot today, Asperger's syndrome.
- Sure.
- Do you see that as, well You write that "in some ways we've simply used that diagnosis to create a distinction between the bad autistics and the good autistics."
- That's exactly what I think happened. The term Asperger's as a syndrome dates from 1981. It was a kind of arbitrary creation, because people who were autistic started doing things or succeeding in ways that weren't really expected to be possible. More and more researchers seem to be concluding that in cognitive terms, autism and Asperger's are more or less the same thing. Some people would define Asperger's as an autistic person without a speech delay. That's a consistent definition. But, you're again, getting back to this notion that they're actually pretty close.
- So the title of your book is "Create Your Own Economy, The Path to Prosperity In a Disordered World." What do you see as the relationship between autism and the economy?
- If we think of autistics as information gatherers, collectors as infovores, one of the key points in my book is that because of the web, because of the internet, we're all doing this much more. We're ordering our realities. We're ordering our entertainment. You take an iPod, you order your music collection. You put it into categories, you manipulate it. You have a new software to play with it. So we're using capital goods, technologies to in some ways be more like autistic people. Without knowing it, we're mimicking some of their strengths. So I'm saying that in these ways, society's becoming more autistic and counterintuitively, this is in many ways a good thing, not a bad thing like it might sound to a lot of people.
- That's fascinating. If that's the case, do you think it's possible that more autistic people are actually being more successful in this economy?
- Again, it goes back very much to how you define autism. If you define autism the way that it is formally defined in diagnostic manuals, you'll find very high rates of unemployment. You'll find very low social status for most autistic people, given that definition. So when all of your questions, when you ask autism this, autism that, autistic this, under one definition, a lot of the outcomes look pretty negative. But, I'm suggesting we should broaden our conception, and under this other meaning of the notion of autistic, then there's a lot more room for positive outcomes.
- You were kind of telling an anecdote in your book. There's a guy who's something of an expert on autism cognitive style, who says that when he gives talks in most cities, he can draw maybe 100, 200 people to a talk. But when he gives a talk in Silicon Valley, 600 people show up.
- That's right. That's Tony Attwood. There's a lot of evidence also from Simon Baron-Cohen, that autistic people are more likely to be high achievers in mathematics and engineering. He describes it as a tendency toward systematizing, that this is a cognitive strength. And there's a lot of evidence for that. There's also a lot of evidence that autistic people are more likely to have brothers and fathers who are mathematicians and engineers. So there's genetic transmittal of a lot of the qualities, even if relatives are not themselves autistic in the formal sense.
- So you're really redefining autism with this approach to thinking differently?
- Well, when you say that I'm redefining autism, I would stress that a lot of what I'm presenting in the book is based on the research of other people who are specialists in autism. I don't think of myself personally as the one doing the redefinition. I think there's a shift in the research community as a whole. It's far from complete. It's not even at this point a majority of people taking this approach, but this has come out of laboratory research and researchers on autism, not really coming from me, Tyler Cowen.
- So I'm fascinated by this suggestion that our culture and our economy is moving more in the direction of an autistic cognitive style. Can you sort of play that out a little bit more?
- Well, think about something like Facebook. Facebook gives you different ways to order your friends. You collect friends with Facebook. If you think of Twitter, you're collecting small bits of information. One cognitive strength of the autistic profile is to be very good at perceiving and collecting small bits of information. So a lot of what's going on in the web is again, this use of the artificial technological means to make our minds more powerful, whether we're autistic or not. And in most major web developments, you see some version of this.
- So in this new web-based, information-based economy, might there be advantages to being able to think autistically? I mean in the sense that this might be a cognitive style really worth emulating.
- Sure. If you go back, say to the world of 1600 where most people work in agriculture and brute physical labor is what's valuable, you would expect in that world autistics to be relatively disadvantaged. But, if you go say to Silicon Valley where the ability to order a lot of information or to write a good software package is very valuable in a way that it is only in the modern world, we should expect some subgroup of autistics or quasi-autistics or whatever in this environment to do very well.
- You have some interesting sections in your book also when you talk about fictional characters. There's an intriguing section where you write about Sherlock Holmes and describe him as the most fully developed autistic character in the Western literary tradition. So what makes you think of Sherlock Holmes as autistic?
- Well, as a fictional character, he fits the profile very exactly. He's extremely observant. He's wonderful with small detail. He talks of having a kind of mind like a steel trap with information. He knows a lot about many different areas. He also has a kind of autistic cognitive specialization. There's areas he knows a lot about, and then a lot of areas he knows nothing at all about. In my book, I go through a lot of passages in the Sherlock Holmes story that in different ways portray Holmes as being what we now call autistic, but of course, at the time would not have been recognized as such, because we didn't have the concept.
- It's interesting, 'cause Holmes is also, I don't wanna say misunderstood, but at one level, Holmes seems a bit cold, unlike somebody who does have trouble with human relationships, has trouble even understanding the sort of warm bonds of human relationships. And at another level, that's how Holmes is misperceived, and he's hurt by being misperceived in that way.
- He is. But I think on the other hand, a lot of people see him as a very charismatic character. Even to this day, women will write in marriage proposals to Sherlock Holmes at the Baker Street address.
- You're kidding.
- He's great. They do. He has great loyalty to Dr. Watson. There's actually a person employed full time just answering mail sent to Holmes by people who either think he's real or pretend he's real or they're fans or whatever. So here's this incredibly magnetic character with a lot of charisma. They're still making Sherlock Holmes movies. And I think a lot of the appeal of Holmes is his personal bond to Watson and the reciprocity and the loyalty and the connection that these two men have. I don't think it's at all or not very much homoerotic. I think it's truly a connection between human beings and the notion that autistic or Asperger's people have those connections I think is foreign to a lot of people. But, the Holmes stories are in many ways a better portrait or more accurate portrait of autism than you'll get from a lot of contemporary discussions.
- Tyler Cowen is the author of "Create Your Own Economy, The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World." He spoke with Anne Strainchamps. It's "To the Best of our Knowledge." I'm Jim Fleming. If you'd like a copy of this hour, you can call the radio store at 1-800-747-7444 and ask for program number 82A, "Amazing Minds Inside Autism." If you have questions or comments about the program, you can send us email through our website at ttbook.org. "To the Best of Our Knowledge: is produced by Wisconsin Public Radio. This program was produced by Doug Gordon with help from Mary Lou Finnegan, Anne Strainchamps, Charles Monroe-Kane and Veronica Rueckert. Our executive producer is Steve Paulson. Thanks to special guest engineer Brittany Deanda. Our technical director is Caryl Owen. You can stream "To the Best of Our Knowledge" on our website at ttbook.org, where you will also find a link to the weekly podcast.
- PRI, Public Radio International.
