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Thinking In Pictures
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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