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Thinking In Pictures
P174 At an autism conference... I met Einstein’s second cousin... I can remember the great difficulty she had in finding something on the menu that she would not be allergic to. She then preceded to tell me that she had one musically talented autistic child and an intellectually gifted child. As we continued to talk, she revealed that her family history contained many individuals with depression, food allergies, and dyslexia. Since then I have talked with many families and discovered that the parents and relatives of autistic children are often intellectually gifted.
This reminds me of Henry Ryecrotf’s insistence that health and serious literature were incompatible and Thomas Mann’s obsession with the role of disease in creation. Perhaps it isn’t so much disease as a different way of experiencing the world that they had in mind.
P177 [I’m skipping a lot here about the genetic aspect of autism but this is interesting,] Many researchers speculate that a cluster of interacting genes may cause a variety of disorders such as depression, dyslexia, schizophrenia, manic-depression, and learning disabilities. Dr. Robert Plomin and his colleagues at Pennsylvania State University state that autism is one of the inheritable psychological diagnoses. They also maintain that many disorders such as depression represent extremes of a continuum of behavior from normal to abnormal. The same genes are responsible for both normal variations and the abnormal extremes. It is likely that the same applies to autism. People labeled autistic have an extreme form of traits found in normal people. Leo Kanner found that in four of nine cases, depression or anxiety occurred in the parents of autistic children...
Genius Is an Abnormality
P178 It is likely that genius is an abnormality. If the genes that cause autism and other disorders such as manic-depression were eliminated, the world might be left to boring conformists with few creative ideas. The interacting cluster of genes that cause autism, manic-depression, and schizophrenia probably has a beneficial effect in small doses. In her book Touched with Fire, Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison reviewed studies that showed a link between manic-depression and creativity. Manic-depressives experience a continuum of emotions, from moody to full-blown mania and deep, dark depression. When writers experience a mild form of the condition, they often produce some of their best work. When the disorder becomes full-blown, they are no longer able to function. There is a tendency for the mood swings to worsen with age... Studies have shown that artists, poets, and creative writers have higher rates of manic-depression or depressive disorder than the general population.
[Some more of this,] ... Simonton concludes that “in order to be creative, it seems you have to be slightly crazy.”
This may be what Gissing and Mann really meant to say. In million years I would not have expected to find insights into this topic in this book. Almost makes me think that choosing books at random might be as good a method as any.
P179 ...Three things that occur more frequently in people with high mathematical ability than in the population at large are lefthandedness, allergies, and nearsightedness.
I was gypped -- or the “lefthandedness” is key, as I have allergies and extreme nearsightedness. I’m even ambidextrous! And still no math ability.
p178 - This is an interesting variation on the illness and genius theme from Mann. If you lump these "disorders" together and define them as "illness" then you would isolate a large percentage of people of genius from the general population. And this would go back to their experiencing the world differently as well as having possibly superior intelligence or artistic abilities.
And I have to put in a good word for old Foucault here as well. Since much of the behavior she's describing here could fall under the heading of "madness" then what he was saying in favor of madness makes sense when viewed from this perspective.
P180 Some scientists are strictly analytical thinkers. The physicist Richard Feynman denied the validity of poetry and art. In his biography of Feynman, Genius, James Gleick wrote, “He would not concede that poetry or painting or religion could reach a different kind of truth.” ...
What? I have no idea what point Gleick was trying to make, but I think Grandin must have missed it. Besides loving math, I believe Feynman was a very visual person, and not just because he was an artist both on paper and canvas. And a musician! He had no use for religion or philosophy --or dentists I learned recently -- but I'm pretty sure you could place him near if not on the spectrum if you really tried. Being "analytical" is probably another aspect of not relating to people and society in a "normal" way.
Could this be yet another Apollinian vs Dionysian contrast. I would agree that Feynman was on the side of Apollo here. Though to the extent that autistic people are closer to nature, they should be on the side of Dionysus -- but I don't see any evidence of that. Actually I take that back, while people like Kant and Bentham are abstracted from the world, what I previously suggested sounded like a Zen-like state in autistic children suggests that, when left alone, they could well be in-touch with the Dionysian foundation of reality. This would be Nietzsche's "hidden substratum of suffering and of knowledge" from The Birth of Tragedy.
What follows is a great deal of anecdotal speculation based on secondary sources that I’m going to skip. Unfortunately, after she deals with Einstein she moves on to Ludwig Wittgenstein -- who I would normally (even yesterday) be ready to skip as well but I happened to watch a video on YouTube [here] about the hut he built for himself at the end of a fjord in the empty heart of Norway -- so, having speculated about him yesterday I’m going to include some of this.
...
P183 It has been suggested by Oliver Sacks that the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was probably a high-functioning person with autism. He did not talk until he was four years old, and he was considered a dullard with no talent... both of his brothers committed suicide. He had great mechanical ability, and at age ten he constructed a sewing machine. Young Wittgenstein was a poor student, and he never wore a tie or hat. He used formal, pedantic language and used the polite form of “sie” in German to address his fellow students, [Now this sounds like Adrian in Doctor Faustus. ] which alienated them and caused them to tease him. Overly formal speech is common in high-functioning autistics.
...
She continues speculating about Van Gogh, Bill Gates, Darwin, and Gregor Mendel but doesn’t seem to have heard of old Jeremy Bentham. But to return to Wittgenstein, one of the richest men in Europe (I’ve heard) he periodically retreated to this tiny shack in this spectacularly beautiful and isolated spot in Norway to be alone. Since he was also influenced by Tolstoy (?), I speculate that he had a spiritual (Desert Fathers) aim in mind here. Why anyone would abandon Vienna for the boondocks to think and write is a bit of a mystery to me unless one was either a social butterfly like Proust or possible someone who was over-stimulated by city life -- as Grandin’s take would suggest.
I have to admit that Wittgenstein is a philosopher who has never much interested me, so I know little about his work. Perhaps he was more like Father Ferapont than Thoreau. Perhaps he wanted to go into the wilderness to stew in his juices. Or, to be fair, to get in-touch with the underlying, Dionysian reality that I’ve suggested Grandin and other autistic children -- and presumably adults -- are closer to. What if autistics are only semi-individuated? What if they are on the fence and can go either way? The end of a Norwegian fjord would be a lovely place to connect with the underlying nature of reality, though Sara Maitland’s silent desert would seem an even better venue for this. Perhaps for some people the problem isn’t finding the right place to “transcend” but rather the most convenient place to not be bothered while you are transcending.
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