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Chapter 11 - Stairway To Heaven - Religion and Belief
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P190 ...To my mind, all methods and denominations of religious ceremony were equally valid, and I still hold this belief today. Different religious faiths all achieve communication with God and contain guiding moral principles. I’ve met many autistic people who share my belief that all religions are valid and valuable. Many also believe in reincarnation, because it seems more logical to them than heaven and hell.
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For many people with autism, religion is an intellectual rather than emotional activity. Music is one exception. Some people feel much more religious when their participation is accompanied with extensive use of music. One autistic design engineer I know said that religious feeling is utterly missing for him, except when he hears Mozart; then he feels an electrifying resonance. I myself am most likely to feel religious in a church when the organist plays beautiful music and the priest chants. Organ music has an effect on me that other music does not have.
This seems to be one part The Birth of Tragidy and one part The Righteous Mind. Music in particular and religion in general connects us with something more profound and brings us together in our group.
P191 Music and rhythm may help open some doors to emotion. Recently I played a tape of Gregorian chants, and the combination of the rhythm and the rising and lowering pitch was soothing and hypnotic. I could get lost in it... I have strong musical associations, and old songs trigger place-specific memories.
I’ve already written about this.
In high school I came to the conclusion that God was an ordering force that was in everything after Mr. Carlock explained the second law of thermodynamics, the law of physics that states that the universe will gradually lose order and have increasing entropy. Entropy is the increase of disorder in a closed thermodynamic system. I found the idea of the universe becoming more and more disordered profoundly disturbing...
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Stairway to Heaven
P197 This is something Grandin wrote in 1974 after completing her first major project for the Swift facility in Phoenix which she called “The Stairway to Heaven” as it led the cattle to the place where they were slaughtered.
"I believe that a person goes on to someplace else after they die. I do not know where... I watched the cattle die and even killed some of them myself. If a black void exists at the top of the Stairway to Heaven, then a person would have no motivation to be virtuous."
So she’s in Dostoevsky's camp here. Meaning must exist or we would not behave ourselves.
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P198 In the summer of 1978 I swam through the dip vat at the John Wayne Red River feed yard as a stupid publicity stunt. Doing this stunt provided a great boost to my career and got me several speaking engagements. However, coming in contact with the chemical organophosphates had a devastating effect. The feeling of awe that I had when I thought about my beliefs just disappeared. Organophosphates are known to alter levels of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine in the brain, and the chemicals also caused me to have vivid and wild dreams. But why they affected my feeling of religious awe is still a mystery to me. It was like taking all the magic away and finding out that the real Wizard of Oz is just a little old man pushing buttons behind a curtain.
This is amazing, her experience of losing her religious feeling due to exposure to chemicals suggests a chemical basis of religious feelings.
Also, she was building her Stairway to Heaven while I was driving taxis. That sounds about right.
This raised great questions in my mind. Were the feelings of being close to God caused by a chemical Wizard of Oz behind the curtain? In my diary I wrote, “To my horrified amazement the chemicals blocked my need for religious feelings.” They made me very sick, but gradually the effects wore off and the feelings returned. However, my belief in an afterlife was shattered. I had seen the wizard behind the curtain. But there is something in me that really wants to believe that the top of the Stairway to Heaven is not a black void.
She needs to read what I blogged about Zen Physics.
P199 The possibility that a void exists after death has motivated me to work hard so I can make a difference -- so that my thoughts and ideas will not die... Ideas are passed on like genes, and I have a great urge to spread my ideas... Maybe immortality is the effect one’s thoughts and actions can have on other people.
... It was quantum physics that finally helped me believe again, as it provided a plausible scientific basis for belief in a soul and the supernatural...
She proceeds to push quantum entanglement where she wants to go.
P204 [She talks again about the kosher slaughter house from before] ...during those few hot days in Alabama, old yearnings would be reawakened. I felt totally at one with the universe as I kept the animals completely calm while the rabbi performed shehita. Operating the equipment there was like being in a Zen meditative state. Time stood still, and I was totally, completely disconnected from reality. Maybe this was nirvana, the final state of being that Zen meditators seek. It was a feeling of total calmness and peace until I snapped back to reality when the plant manager called me to come to his office...
P205 When it was time to leave, I cried as I drove to the airport. The experience had been so strangely hypnotic that I was tempted to turn around and return to the plant... I thought about the similarities between the wonderful trancelike feeling I had had while gently holding the cattle in the chute and the spaced-out feeling I had had as a child when I concentrated on dribbling sand through my fingers at the beach. During both experiences all other sensation was blocked. Maybe the monks who chant and meditate are kind of autistic. I have observed that there is a great similarity between certain chanting and praying rituals and the rocking of an autistic child. I feel there has to be more to this than just getting high on my own endorphins.
She returns to the plant months later,
"When the animal remained completely calm I felt an overwhelming feeling of peacefulness, as if God had touched me. I did not feel bad about what I was doing. A good restraint chute operator has to not just like cattle, but love them. Operating the chute has to be done as an act of total kindness. The more gently I was able to hold the animal with the apparatus, the more peaceful I felt. As the life force left the animal, I had deep religious feelings. For the first time in my life logic had been completely overwhelmed with feelings I did not know I had."
I hate to toss this into such a tender moment, but I’m almost certain I could find a similar quote from a serial killer or sniper or torturer. These feeling are telling us something but I’m still not quite sure what.
She goes on to wax poetic about global slaughter traditions and I don’t disagree with what she writes. But what interests me is that this religious transcendence is part of life not part of the ritual avoidance of life practiced by many religious cults. We’re back to Moksa and Lila and the Hindu goddesses.
Well this ending pushed the book from a "maybe" to a "must blog." It will be shorter, less in depth (I think) but there's too much good stuff... plus our overlap at ASU is just too perfect.
A New Beginning
It had always been my expectation that I would, eventually, blog about The Magic Mountain. I even have notes from my last reading. But at this point I don't think I need to. In time I may change my mind and return to this, but for now I'm going to move on to something new: writing an actual blog in real time. This suddenly appeals to me so I'm going to give it a shot.
If you care to follow me there, HERE's the link. [But not yet, perhaps tomorrow?]
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Chapter 10 - Einstein’s Second Cousin - The Link Between Autism and Genius.
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.
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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.
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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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Chapter 9 - Artists and Accountants: An Understanding of Animal Thought
P157 ...Savants memorize huge amounts of information but have difficulty manipulating the material in meaningful ways. Their memory skills far exceed those of normal people, but their cognitive deficits are great. Some are incapable of making simple generalizations that cattle and other animals make easily.
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P158 What interests me most about autistic savants of the extreme type is that they do not satisfy one of Marian Stamp Dawkins’s chief criteria for thinking. Dawkins, a researcher at the University of Oxford, is one of the few specialists who studies thinking in animals. She makes a clear distinction between instinctual behavior and true thinking... Some instincts are hard-wired like computer hardware, and others can be modified by experience... Numerous studies reviewed by Dawkins clearly indicate that animals can think and are capable of using previously learned information to solve problems presented under novel conditions. Animals have the ability to generalize, even though they do not use language.
P159 Dawkins’s work begs the deeper question [sic] of whether a child with autism who is unable to generalize can think. For example, a person with classic Kanner autism can be taught not to run out into the busy street in front of his house because it is dangerous. Unfortunately, he often fails to generalize this knowledge to a street at somebody else's house...
I also have a problem using "begs the question", so I'm sensitive to when it is misused. It seems like it should mean that the real question is avoided but it is more accurately described as "arguing in a circle." Here's a good example of begging the question, "Chocolate is healthy because it's good for you."
According to Dawkins’s criteria, then, savant autistics are not capable of true thought. Autistic people like myself are able to satisfy her criteria for thinking, but I would be denied the ability to think by scientists who maintain that language is essential for thinking.
...I have observed that the people who are most likely to deny animals thought are often highly verbal thinkers who have poor visualization skills. They excel at verbal or sequential thinking activities but are unable to read blue-prints.
P160 It is very likely that animals think in pictures and memories of smell, light, and sound patterns. In fact, my visual thinking patterns probably resemble animal thinking more closely than those of verbal thinkers. It seems silly to me to debate whether or not animals can think. To me it has always been obvious that they do. I have always pictured in my mind how the animal responds to the visual images in his head. Since I have pictures in my imagination, I assume that animals have similar pictures. Differences between language-based thought and picture-based thought may explain why artists and accountants fail to understand each other. They are like apples and oranges.
Can animals think? Here’s a proof that they can: Take a small barrel of oats. Pour some molasses over the oats where horses can see and smell what you’re doing. Hide the barrel of oats in a secured tack shed. Now move off to a position where you can observe the horses as they take apart your tack shed to get to the oats. I mention horses simply because I’ve been outsmarted by them any number of times. People often talk about training horses but mostly, in my experience, horses train people.
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P163 At the University of Illinois farm where I worked as a graduate student, the pigs in one pen learned to unscrew the bolts that held the fence to the wall. As fast as I could screw the bolts back in, their little tongues were unscrewing them. All five pigs in that pen learned to unscrew bolts. My aunt had a horse that learned to put its head through a gate to lift it off the hinges... The vast majority of cattle are content to stay in the pens and don’t try to get out, but a bull that has learned how to break barbed-wire fences is impossible to keep in, because he has learned that he will not get cut if he presses against the posts. Fences only work because cattle do not know that they can break them.
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P165 ...When a pigeon is transported from its home loft to the release point, it remembers smells along the way, and it uses these cues to get back home... It appears that visual landmarks are the preferred method of homing, but a bird will switch gears and use olfactory cues when it finds itself over strange territory where familiar landmarks are absent. It may be using “smell pictures.”
A fairly high percentage of people with autism have a very acute sense of smell and become overwhelmed by strong odors. I am embarrassed to admit it, but when I was a young child, I liked to sniff people like a dog... The scents of different people were interesting... Many people with autism share... hyperacute senses [with animals]. They are unable to concentrate in the classroom because they can hear talking in three other rooms. I have often observed that the senses of some people with autism resemble the acute senses of animals.
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Chapter 8 - A Cow’s Eye View
This is the heart of the book so I will quote more than I have in the past.
p142 One third of the cattle and hogs in the United States are handled in facilities I have designed. Throughout my career I have worked on systems to improve the treatment of livestock. The principle behind my designs is to use the animals' natural behavior patterns to encourage them to move willingly through the system. If an animal balks and refuses to walk through an alley, one needs to find out why it is scared and refuses to move. Unfortunately, people often try to correct these problems with force instead of by understanding the animal’s behavior." [I'd say this is the key to all good design, not just livestock design. ] My connection with these animals goes back to the time I first realized that the squeeze machine could help calm my anxiety. I have been seeing the world from their point of view ever since.
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I’m skipping the interesting stuff about designing for cattle.
P143 When I put myself in a cow’s place, I really have to be that cow and not a person in a cow costume. I use my visual thinking skills to simulate what an animal would see and hear in a given situation. I place myself inside its body and imagine what it experiences... I have to follow the cattle’s rules of behavior. I also have to imagine what experiencing the world through the cow’s sensory system is like. Cattle have a very wide, panoramic visual field, because they are a prey species, ever wary and watchful for signs of danger. Similarly, some people with autism are like fearful animals in a world full of dangerous predators. They live in a constant state of fear, worrying about a change in routine or becoming upset if objects in their environment are moved. This fear of change may be an activation of ancient antipredator systems that are blocked or masked in most people.
Looking at this the other way, have we adapted to being quasi-predators in ways that sometimes fail... as with the apparent difficulty many people have with experiencing modern war?
P144 Fear is a universal emotion in the animal kingdom, because it provides an intense motivation to avoid predators. Fear is also a dominant emotion in autism. Therese Joliffe wrote that trying to keep everything the same helped her avoid some of the terrible fear. Tony W. wrote that he lived in a world of daydreaming and fear and was afraid of everything. Before I started taking antidepressants, minor changes in my daily routine caused a fear reaction. There were times when I was dominated by fear of trivial changes, such as switching to daylight savings time. This intense fear is probably due to a neurological defect that sensitizes the nervous system to stimuli that are minor to normal people.
...Cattle and sheep have supersensitive hearing, and acute sense of smell, and eyes on the side of their heads so they can scan the landscape while grazing. They are much more sensitive to high-pitched sounds than people and can hear sounds that are outside the range of human hearing.
High-pitched sounds tend to be more disturbing to them than low-pitched sounds... an outdoor telephone caused a calf’s heart rate to jump suddenly by fifty to seventy beats per minute. It’s unlikely that anyone but me would have noticed that the sounds that upset cattle are the same kinds of sounds that are unbearable to many autistic children with overly sensitive hearing...
P145 Even today, a person whistling in the middle of the night will cause my heart to race. High-pitched sounds are the worst... In tame animals... high-pitched sounds have a mild activating effect, but in wild animals and autistic children they set off a massive fear reaction.
...cattle and other livestock can see color, but their visual system is most attuned to detecting novel movement. Cattle vision is like having wide-angle camera lenses mounted on the sides of your head. The animals... can see all around themselves, except for a small blind spot behind their rear ends...
...Coats and hats left on fences will often cause... [cattle] to balk and refuse to walk by. When a steer is calm in its familiar home feedlot pen, the same hat or coat left on a fence may evoke first fear and then curiosity. The steer will turn and look at the coat and then cautiously approach it. If the coat does not move, he will eventually lick it. A coat that is flapping in the wind is most likely to make animals fearful, and they will keep their distance. In the wild, sudden movement is a sign of danger; it may be a lion in a bush or an animal fleeing from a predator.
It is curious that calves tend to be much more curious and bold than mature cows. I believe this is true of sheep as well. Perhaps this fear response is to some degree taught by the herd. I can’t help noticing that she hasn’t mentioned goats, which don’t seem to be much afraid of anything.
The reaction of cattle to something that appears out of place may be similar to the reaction of autistic children to small discrepancies in their environment. Autistic children don’t like anything that looks out of place -- a thread hanging on a piece of furniture, a wrinkled rug, books that are crooked on the bookshelf. Sometimes they will straighten out the books and other times they will be afraid... Autistic children will also notice minor discrepancies that normal people ignore. Could this be an old antipredator instinct that has surfaced?
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P148 Preliminary evidence indicates that the more nervous and excitable cows are the ones that are the most reluctant to change a previously learned safe route. Resistance to change may be partially motivated by attempts to reduce anxiety. In my own experience, minor changes in my high school class schedule or switching from daylight savings time to standard time caused severe anxiety. My nervous system and the nervous systems of some other people with autism are in a state of hyperarousal for no good reason...
One of the most stressful events for semiwild cattle is having people deeply invade their flight zone when they are unable to move away. A person leaning over the top of an alley is very threatening to beef cattle that are not completely tame. Cattle will balk and refuse to walk through an alley if they can see people up ahead. This is one of the reasons that I designed curved single-file alleys with solid sides. They help keep cattle calmer. The solid sides prevent the animals from being frightened by people and other moving objects outside the alley. A curved alley also works better than a straight one because the cattle are unable to see people up ahead, and each animal thinks he is going back where he came from.
That last sentence can be interpretted in a way that also applies to humans and their belief in an afterlife.
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There’s more here about her design work but I think you get the idea.
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Chapter 6 - Believer in Biochemistry
This is all about taking medications to make living with autism easier. I’m skipping it.
Chapter 7 - Autism and Relationships
P 131 Many people with autism are fans of the television show Star Trek. I have been a fan since the show started. When I was in college, it greatly influenced my thinking, as each episode of the original series had a moral point. The characters had a set of firm moral principles to follow, which came from the United Federation of Planets. I strongly identified with the logical Mr. Spock, since I completely related to his way of thinking.
[She describes a situation on the show where they struggle to recover the body of a crewman even though it is putting the rest of them at risk.] ...To Spock, it made no sense to rescue a dead body when the shuttle was being battered to pieces... It may sound simplistic, but this episode helped me finally understand how I was different. I agreed with Spock, but I learned that emotions will often overpower logical thinking, even if these decisions prove hazardous.
A couple things here: This attitude is relatively new for military organizations -- and Star Trek is semi-military. As late at the Battle of Waterloo casualties on a battlefield were largely ignored. This was partly because the unit didn’t want to be further weakened by using healthy troops to care for the injured and dead and partly, I believe, because there was very little that could be done for badly wounded men in any case. The current attitude -- at least in the U.S. military -- reflects both a more humane approach to treatment of the men, but also the reality that casualties can often be patched up and returned to the ranks.
I have to admit that when it comes to the dead, I agree with Spock here. The determination to maintain control of the disposal of corpses (I believe this is especially important to the Marines) is a component of esprit de corp and is useful in binding the men together, but, I would argue, can be pushed too far if it leads to additional casualties. Another factor here is that today bodies tend to be returned to the family back in the U.S. where as, as late as WW2 they were buried near where they died.
My point (besides inadvertently showing that Spock and I could have had a very reasonable discussion of this practice) is that these conventions change over time and are not hard and fast.
Also, I’m now imagining Grandin as one of the aliens in Galaxy Quest, taking Star Trek a little more seriously than she should because she doesn’t understand the concept of fiction.
P132 Social interactions that come naturally to most people can be daunting for people with autism... I had to think about every social interaction. When other students swooned over the Beatles, I called their reaction an ISP -- interesting sociological phenomenon. I was a scientist trying to figure out the ways of the natives. I wanted to participate, but I didn’t know how...
All my life I have been an observer, and I have always felt like someone who watches from the outside... My peers spent hours standing around talking about jewelry or some other topic with no real substance. What did they get out of this? I just did not fit in....
...It is true that autistics with severe cognitive deficits are unable to look at situations from the vantage point of another person. But I have always used visualization and logic to solve problems and work out how people will react, and I have always understood deception.
There goes my idea about having autistics imagine situations from the other person’s perspective.
P 139 There’s a discussion here of reason and emotion that actually relates to much of what was said in The Righteous Mind. Grandin claims that her thought process is completely reason based. I would say the same thing about myself. I suspect Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism would make as much intuitive sense to her as it does to me. But it sounds like she might be a better social observer so she, like me, would have to admit Emile Durkheim’s arguments about how people really make moral decisions.
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Chapter 5 - The Ways of the World
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p96 [At 2 and a half] I would tune out, shut off my ears, and daydream. My daydreams were like Technicolor movies in my head. I would also become completely absorbed in spinning a penny or studying the wood-grain pattern on my desktop. During these times the rest of the world disappeared..."
How does this sound to a Zen practitioner? Someone who has carefully trained himself to meditate.
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P 97 I was enrolled in a normal kindergarten at a small elementary school. Each class had only twelve to fourteen pupils and an experienced teacher who knew how to put firm but fair limits on children to control behavior. The day before I entered kindergarten, Mother attended the class and explained to the other children that they needed to help me. This prevented teasing and created a better learning environment. I am indebted to the good teachers at that school, who ran an old-fashioned, highly structured classroom, with lots of opportunity for interesting hands-on activities.
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P98 When I started school I was still diagnosed with brain damage. The teachers were aware of my diagnosis and were willing to work with me even though they had no training in special education. Two years of intensive teaching prior to kindergarten had prepared me for a normal school. I was now fully verbal, and many of the more severe autistic symptoms had disappeared. When an educational program is successful the child will act less autistic... My mind processes information slowly, and answering a question quickly was difficult.
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P99 It was Mr. Carlock, one of my science teachers, who became my most important mentor in high school. After I was thrown out of regular high school, my parents enrolled me in a small boarding school for gifted students with emotional problems. Even though I had scored 137 on the Wechsler IQ test when I was twelve, I was totally bored with schoolwork... The other teachers and professionals at the school wanted to discourage my weird interests and make me more normal, but Mr. Carlock took my interests and used them as motivators for doing schoolwork. When I talked about visual symbols such as doors, he gave me philosophy books.
That almost never turns out well.
Likewise, the psychologist and psychiatrist wanted me to get rid of my squeeze machine, but Mr Carlock defended it and went a step further... He told me if I wanted to find out why it relaxed me, I had to learn science. If I studied hard enough to get into college, I would be able to learn why pressure had a relaxing effect...
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P100 Dr. Kanner... noted that an autistic person’s fixations can be their way to achieve some social life and friends. Today, many people with autism become fascinated with computers and become very good at programming... The Internet... is wonderful for such people. Problems that autistic people have with eye contact and awkward gestures are not visible on the Internet, and typewritten messages avoid many of the social problems of face-to-face contact. [Now this is an interesting topic. One of the problems with communicating with text online is the likelihood of misunderstandings because of the lack of visual and audio cues that accompany normal conversation. This is why emojis and similar devices have become popular for adding some additional information to the text. In particular, sarcasm and irony can lead to misunderstandings and confused flamewars. Are the autistic more or less liable to all this? I would guess more. ] The Internet may be the best thing yet for improving an autistic person’s social life...
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P101 Tom McKean became frustrated during a college computer programming course because the professor flunked him for finding a better way to write a program. My guess is that the professor may have been offended by Tom’s direct manner... Tom would walk up to the blackboard and erase and correct his professor’s example... Tom was frustrated and confused when he failed the course. A more creative professor would have challenged him with more interesting and difficult program writing.
Now here’s a nice can of worms. This was a teachable moment, but not for that programming professor. He was the lesson. In many situations in the Real World, you have to determine whether what is wanted is the best solution or an authority’s idea of the proper solution. You can play this situation either way and come out ahead (ignore what the professor or client wants and pay the price, but get some compensatory reward, or play along and please the boss man. This also confirms my prejudice against learning programming in school since what kind of coder would be teaching instead of making tons more money as a programmer? The kind, to answer my own question, who couldn’t write great code to save his life. It surprises me that as both an autistic person and a woman, Grandin doesn’t make this point. I suspect, from what she’s written about herself in this book, that this is because she is still oblivious to it. She just forges ahead like a force of nature not really understanding the toes she’s stepping on.
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P 102 When I became interested in something, I rode the subject to death. I would talk about the same thing over and over again. It was like playing a favorite song over and over...
Sounds like Sachs and chemistry.
College and Graduate School
P102 ...
I developed a simple classification system for rules, which I called “sins of the system.” A rule designated as a sin of the system was very important, and breaking it would result in severe loss of privileges or expulsion. Students got into serious trouble for smoking and having sex. If a student could be totally trusted not to engage in these two activities, she could break some of the minor rules without any consequences... Once the staff realized that I would not run off into the bushes and have sex I was never punished for going out in the woods without a staff member. I was never given special permission to go hiking by myself, but on the other hand, I learned that the staff would make no attempt to stop me...
Again, what I find interesting here is that while she does, as she says but I don’t quote, learn these rules by rote, she still shows no indication that she understands what’s behind them. That the things you really can’t do are the things that can get the staff in trouble. You would think one of the things autistic people would be taught by rote is to consider what actions make the lives of people in authority either easier or harder. And that doing the former will either be rewarded or get you leeway while the later will end up making your life harder as well.
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P104 I wanted to do my master’s thesis in animal science on the behavior of cattle in feedlots in different types of cattle chutes, but my adviser at Arizona State University thought that cattle chutes were not an appropriate academic subject. Back in 1974, [OMG! I was there then as well] animal behavior research on farm livestock was a rarity. Once again my fixation propelled me. I was going to do my survey of cattle behavior in cattle chutes even though the professor thought it was stupid... Most of the professors in the Animal Science Department thought my ideas were crazy. Fortunately, I persevered and found two new professors, Dr. Foster Burton, chairman of the Construction Department, and Mike Nielson, from Industrial Design, who were interested... An idea that seemed crazy to conservative professors in animal science seemed perfectly reasonable to a construction man and a designer.
I would not want to be standing between Grandin and something she wanted to do.
There’s interesting stuff here about her research and her mastery of keypunching IBM cards, but I’m skipping it.
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P106 I still remember taking that vital first step in establishing my credibility in the livestock industry. I knew if I could get an article published in the Arizona Farmer Ranchman, I could go on from there. While I was attending a rodeo, I walked up to the publisher of the magazine and asked him if he would be interested in an article on the design of squeeze chutes. He said he would be, and the following week I sent in an article entitled “The Great Headgate Controversy.” ... I just could not believe it. It was plain old nerve that got me my first job. That was in 1972. From then on I wrote for the magazine regularly while I was working on my master’s degree.
Now I’m looking at this from the publisher’s point of view. I’m guessing one of the problems of publishing that particular trade journal (really any trade journal) is finding content that anyone wants to read. Walking up to him at the rodeo may have seemed bold to Grandin but he had everything to gain here and nothing to lose. Then she threw in a headline that even makes me mildly curious.
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P109 ...Free-lancing enabled me to avoid many of the social problems that can occur at a regular job. [Preach! ] It meant I could go in, design a project, and leave before I got into social difficulties. [Aside from the fact that I actually enjoying working on site, that was my approach to programming. ] I still don’t easily recognize subtle social cues for trouble, though I can tell a mile away if an animal is in trouble.
...
Talking about how rare women were in the world of cattle at that time, she mentions she had to change clothes in the men’s bathroom at the ASU dairy. The dairy is where we got the manure for our organic garden at the ASU farm at that same time. Small world.
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Thinking In Pictures
Chapter 4 - Learning Empathy
P82 To have feelings of gentleness, one must experience gentle bodily comfort. As my nervous system learned to tolerate the soothing pressure from my squeeze machine, I discovered that the comfortable feeling made me a kinder and gentler person... It wasn’t until after I had used the modified squeeze machine that I learned how to pet our cat gently... As I became gentler, the cat began to stay with me, and this helped me understand the ideas of reciprocity and gentleness.
...The relaxing feeling of being held washes negative thoughts away... Gentle touching teaches kindness.
P83 I always thought about cattle intellectually until I started touching them. I was able to remain the neutral scientist until I placed my hands on them at the Swift plant and feedlots in 1974. When I pressed my hand against the side of a steer, I could feel whether he was nervous, angry, or relaxed. The cattle flinched unless I firmly put my hand on them, but then touching had a calming effect. Sometimes touching the cattle relaxed them, but it always brought me closer to the reality of their being.
...
The application of physical pressure has similar effects on people and animals. Pressure reduces touch sensitivity. For instance, gentle pressure on the sides of a piglet will cause it to fall asleep, and trainers have found that massaging horses relaxes them. The reactions of an autistic child and a scared, flighty horse are similar. Both will lash out and kick anything that touches them.
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P91 At a conference a man with autism told me that he feels only three emotions, fear, sadness, and anger. He has no joy. He also has problems with the intensity of his emotions, which both fluctuate and get mixed up, similar to sensory jumbling. My emotions don’t get mixed up, but they are reduced and simplified in some areas...
During the last couple of years, I have become more aware of a kind of electricity that goes on between people which is much subtler than overt anger, happiness, or fear. I have observed that when several people are together and having a good time, their speech and laughter follow a rhythm. They will all laugh together and then talk quietly until the next laughing cycle. I have always had a hard time fitting in with this rhythm, and I usually interrupt conversations without realizing my mistake. The problem is that I can’t follow the rhythm. Twenty years ago, Dr. Condon, a Boston physician, observed that babies with autism and other developmental disorders failed to move in synchronicity with adult speech. Normal infants will tune into adult speech and get in sync with it.
While Temple Grandin’s autism makes her a sympathetic student of cattle, it also makes her unusually observant of human behavior as she stands outside it, the same way that European sociologists or anthropologists stand outside the native cultures they study.
P92 The work I do is emotionally difficult for many people, and I am often asked how I can care about animals and be involved in slaughtering them. Perhaps because I am less emotional than other people, it is easier for me to face the fact of death. I live each day as if I will die tomorrow. This motivates me to accomplish many worthwhile things, because I have learned not to fear death and have accepted my own mortality. This has enabled me to look at slaughtering objectively and perceive it the way the cattle do. However, I am not just an objective, unfeeling observer; I have sensory empathy for the cattle. When they remain calm I feel calm, and when something goes wrong that causes pain, I also feel their pain. I tune into what the actual sensations are like to the cattle rather than having the idea of death rile up my emotions. My goal is to reduce suffering and improve the way farm animals are treated.
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Thinking In Pictures
Chapter 3 - The Squeeze Machine
I’m going to mostly skip this interesting chapter, but here’s just a taste.
P62
...
Many autistic children crave pressure stimulation even though they cannot tolerate being touched. It is much easier for a person with autism to tolerate touch if he or she initiates it... Parents used to report that their autistic children loved to crawl under mattresses and wrap up in blankets or wedge themselves in tight places, long before anyone made sense of this strange behavior.
I was one of these pressure seekers. When I was six, I would wrap myself up in blankets and get under sofa cushions, because the pressure was relaxing. [I think this is true for most people? ] I used to daydream for hours in elementary school about constructing a device that would apply pressure to my body. I visualized a box with an inflatable liner that I could lie in. It would be like being totally encased in inflatable splints.
P63 After visiting my aunt’s ranch in Arizona, I got the idea of building such a device, patterned after the cattle squeeze chute I first saw there. When I watched cattle being put in the squeeze chute for their vaccinations, I noticed that some of them relaxed when they were pressed between the side panels. I guess I had made my first connection between those cows and myself, because a few days later, after I had a big panic attack, I just got inside the squeeze chute... Since puberty I had experienced constant fear and anxiety coupled with severe panic attacks... My life was based on avoiding situations that might trigger an attack.
I asked Aunt Ann to press the squeeze sides against me and to close the head restraint bars around my neck... At first there were a few moments of sheer panic as I stiffened up and tried to pull away from the pressure, but I couldn’t get away... Five seconds later I felt a wave of relaxation, and about thirty minutes later I asked Aunt Ann to release me. For about an hour afterwards I felt very calm and serene. My constant anxiety had diminished. This was the first time I ever felt really comfortable in my own skin...
I copied the design and built the first human squeeze machine out of plywood panels when I returned to school. Entering the machine on hands and knees, I applied pressure to both sides of my body...
[The authorities at her school are not on-board with this idea. Today there are commercially available updates on her squeeze machine available to the autistic community.]
This chapter is something of a mixed bag. She also talks about body boundary problems and sensitive skin and then moves on to auditory problems which can be severe and vary amazingly. I’m going to skip most of this.
Auditory Problems
P67 ...I still have problems with losing my train of thought when distracting noises occur. If a pager goes off while I am giving a lecture, it fully captures my attention and I completely forget what I was talking about... Several research studies have shown that rapid shifting of attention between two different stimuli is very difficult for people with autism... ... there is a fundamental impairment in the brain’s ability to process incoming information rapidly.
P68 When two people are talking at once, it is difficult for me to screen out one voice and listen to the other...
...People with autism usually seem to have normal hearing when tested with the standard test, which measures the ability to hear faint pure tones. My hearing tested normal on that test. The problem arises in processing complex sounds such as spoken words.
Especially with background or other distracting sounds, I may be becoming autistic by this standard.
...
P69 [The researcher testing Grandin’s hearing,] ...explained to me that the kinds of problems I have in processing speech indicate defects in my brain stem and possibly the corpus callosum, the bundle of neurons that allows the two halves of the brain to communicate. The brain stem is one of the relay stations that send input from the ears to the thinking parts of the brain.
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P70 My auditory problems are very mild compared with those of individuals who are more severely afflicted with autism. Some people have lost all or almost all ability to understand speech. Others have such acute hearing that everyday noises are completely intolerable. One person said that rain sounded like gunfire; others claim they hear blood whooshing through their veins or every sound in an entire school building...
10/29/16: I'm reviewing this book and have to add something here. This summer I was overseeing the seismic retrofit work at my building. I especially had to be attuned to traffic in our alley early in the morning when the garbage collectors, porta-potty servicer, and our contractors could interfere with each other. Our alley is about half a block long opening at only one end to a larger street. Over time I became proficient at detecting and identifying sounds out on the street that related to our building... while still in bed.
Our work is complete now and I've gone back to only noticing sounds directly outside our building. This shows, I think, how we have sensory capabilities beyond what we usually need or are aware of. Under the right circumstances, our brains can fine tune our awareness as needed, but this, presumably, is precisely the ability autistics lack.
Visual Problems
P73 Some people have very severe visual processing problems, and sight may be their most unreliable sense...
...Some of the problems autistics have with making eye contact may be nothing more than an intolerance for the movement of the other person’s eyes. One autistic person reported that looking at other people’s eyes was difficult because the eyes did not stay still. Face recognition also presents certain problems for many people with autism.
P74 ...Barbara Jones... told me that to remember a face, she has to see the person fifteen times. Barbara works in a laboratory identifying cancer cells under a microscope. Her ability to recognize patterns has made her one of the best technicians in the lab. Her visual abilities enable her to spot abnormal cells instantly, because they just jump out at her. But there is some evidence that facial recognition involves different neural systems from those used for imagery of objects such as buildings.
Again, this is a little too close to home.
...
Distorted visual images may possibly explain why some children with autism favor peripheral vision. They may receive more reliable information when they look out of the corners of their eyes. One autistic person reported that he saw better from the side and that he didn’t see things if he looked straight at them.
Smell and Taste
Many autistic children like to smell things, and smell may provide more reliable information about their surroundings than either vision or hearing... only 30 percent [in one study] reported taste or smell oversensitivities.
...Neil Walker reported that one person refused to walk on a lawn because he could not bear the smell of grass. Several autistic people have told me that they remember people by smell. And one reported that he liked safe smells such as the smell of pots and pans, [?] which he associated with his home.
Sensory Mixing
P76 ...a twenty-seven-year-old male graduate student with autism... described difficulty hearing and seeing at the same time as his sensory channels got mixed up. Sound came through as color, while touching his face produced a soundlike sensation. Donna Williams describes herself as mono channel; in other words she cannot see and hear at the same time. When she is listening to somebody speak, visual input loses its meaning. She is unable to perceive a cat jumping on her lap while she is listening to a friend talk...
...Therese Joliffe succinctly summarizes the chaos caused by autistic sensory problems:
Reality to an autistic person is a confusing interacting mass of events, people, places, sounds and sights. There seem to be no clear boundaries, order or meaning to anything. A large part of my life is spent just trying to work out the pattern behind everything. Set routines, times, particular routes and rituals all help to get order into an unbearably chaotic life.
...
Donna Williams found the world incomprehensible, and she had to fight constantly to get meaning from her senses. When she gave up trying to get meaning, she would let her attention wander into fractured patterns, which were entertaining, hypnotic, and secure. In Somebody Somewhere she writes, “This was the beautiful side of autism. This was the sanctuary of the prison.” People with severe sensory processing problems can also go into total shutdown when they become overstimulated.
This is what it’s like to live constantly with Annie Dillard’s “tree with the lights in it.”
P77 Many therapists and doctors confuse autistic perceptual problems with the hallucinations and delusions of schizophrenics, but true schizophrenics delusions and hallucinations follow a different pattern. Autistic fantasies [I’ll come back to this] can be confused with hallucinations, but the autistic person knows they are fantasies, whereas the schizophrenic believes they are reality...
...
Donna Williams has been greatly helped by Irlen tinted glasses, which filter out irritating color frequencies and enable her defective visual system to handle sharp contrast. The glasses stopped fracturing visual perception. She is now able to see an entire garden instead of bits and pieces of flowers. Tom McKean has less severe visual processing problems, but he finds that wearing rust-colored glasses with a purplish tint has stopped areas of high contrast from vibrating. Another woman with mild visual problems has also been greatly helped by rose-colored glasses... [ha]
Annie Dillard and Muriel Barbery (and I) would have reservations about Grandin’s use of the word “fantasies” to describe the way these autistic people perceive reality. I haven’t repeated all the filters (like the rose-colored glasses) Grandin describes as being helpful for the autistic to experience reality in a more “normal” way. Which is, of course, simply the way our brains normally filter this same input. It would be asking too much to have an autistic person report a slimy green cat, but we’re good enough Phenomenologists now to make that jump.
This is not to say that any particular autistic person possesses the unique ability to perceive the Thing In Itself. But, collectively, they point to the arbitrariness of our own perceptions. As with so many things, there seems to be both a nature and nurture component to how we perceive reality. We are taught by our families (for the most part) how to interpret the raw data reported by our senses, but the physical quality of those senses and of the neurological components they feed into also determine what reality is for us. All you need to drive this point home is yet another thought experiment.
Imagine an isolated community where everyone was autistic to the same degree. Auditory conventions, color conventions, even behavioral conventions would be adapted to suit the sensitivities of this population. Were a “normal” person to venture into that community he would, unless he studied very carefully the habits of the natives, offend everyone by what we would deem “normal” behavior. He might not even be recognizable as human in their terms.
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