Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism (28 page)

Baron-Cohen asks an important question: is Asperger Syndrome a disability? Where is the dividing line between normal and abnormal? He is referring to mild Asperger's with no speech delays where the student is working at normal or above school grade levels. Brain scan studies have shown all kinds of abnormalities in the amygdale (emotion center), frontal cortex, and many other parts of the brain. At what point do these differences in the sizes of different brain structures become just variations on the more extreme end of the normal range?

In the updates of previous chapters I discussed the research on the lack of connectivity between different parts of the brain. Sections that are far apart are underconnected but local areas in the brain may have overconnectivity Dr. S. F. Witelson in the Department of Psychiatry at McMasters University in Canada studied Einstein's brain. He found that the area responsible for mathematical reasoning was 15 percent larger. The mathematical area also had more extensive connections to the visual parts of the brain. It was like having the “math” and “art” departments fused together. Local overconnectivity may explain Einstein's genius.

I Think with My Subconscious

In most people, language covers up the primary sensory based thinking that people share with animals. Sensory based thinking is subconscious in most people. I think with the primary sensory based subconscious areas of the brain. Reading through the scientific literature on different types of memory, I came to the realization that depending on the type of psychology one was studying, there are different names for conscious and subconscious memory. There are two types of long term memory and they are probably the same thing, regardless of what they are called. Below is a chart showing the different pairs of names that mean the same thing.

Since I think with the subconscious, repression does not occur and denial is impossible. My “search engine” has access to the entire library of detailed sensory based memories.

My memory is not automatic. I have to push the “save” button to store a memory in my database. Things which are of little interest to me such as hotel room décor are not remembered unless the place was really unique. To push the “save” button requires either conscious effort or a strong emotion. The brain circuits that connect emotions to my “save” button are intact. However, I can search through old memories of really bad events, such as being fired from a job, with no emotion. At the time I was fired I cried for two days. The emotion was experienced in the present but the memory in my database of being fired can be accessed without emotion. It took me a long time to figure out that most normal people cannot open a “bad experience file” in their brain without experiencing emotion along with the memory.

Privileged Access

People with savant skills are often able to perform tasks better than normal people because they have direct access to primary areas of the brain and experience no interference from language. Simon Baron-Cohen's research showed that people on the autism spectrum are superior to normal people on the “hidden figure” test. In this test a person has to locate a figure such as a triangle hidden in another larger figure. When this task is done in a brain scanner, the autistic person's brain is most active in primary visual systems for object features. It is like a direct line to the “picture department.” In the normal person, the frontal cortex and other areas are activated and may interfere with the visual task.

A. W. Snyder at the University of Sydney found that savantlike drawing skills emerged when the frontal cortex of a normal person was impaired with low-frequency magnetic pulses. Turning off the frontal cortex also enabled normal people to be better proofreaders. The frontal cortex is connected to everything in the brain and it interferes with perceiving details.

Work by Dr. Bruce Miller at the University of California provides hard evidence that primary visual thinking and musical parts of the brain are sometimes blocked by the frontal cortex. He studied patients who have a type of Alzheimer's disease called frontal-temporal lobe dementia. As the disease destroys language parts of the brain, art and music skills emerged in people who had no previous interest in art or music. One patient created paintings that won awards in art shows. As language deteriorated, the art became more photo-realistic and the person's behavior resembled autism. One person who lost all language designed a sprinkler head.

Since I think with my subconscious I can see the decisionmaking process that is not perceived by most people. One day I was driving on the freeway when an elk ran across the road. A picture flashed into my mind of a car rear-ending me. That would be the consequence for putting on the brakes. Another picture flashed up of an elk crashing through the windshield, which would be the consequence of swerving. A third picture came up of the elk passing in front of the car. That would happen if I just slowed down. Now three pictures were on the computer screen in my mind. I clicked on the slowing down choice and avoided an accident. I think what I have just described is how animals think.

11
Stairway to Heaven

Religion and Belief

AS A TOTALLY LOGICAL and scientific person, I continually add data to my library of knowledge and constantly update both my scientific knowledge and my beliefs about God. Since my thought processes use a series of specific examples to form a general principle, it makes logical sense to me that general principles should always be modified when new information becomes available. It is beyond my comprehension to accept anything on faith alone, because of the fact that my thinking is governed by logic instead of emotion. On June 14, 1968, while I was a sophomore in college, I wrote in my diary:

I develop my views from the existing pool of knowledge and I will adapt my views when I learn more. The only permanent view that I have is that there is a God. My views are based on the basic fundamental laws of nature and physics that I am now aware of. As man learns more about his environment I will change my theory to accommodate the new knowledge. Religion should be dynamic and always advancing, not in a state of stagnation.

When I was ten or eleven, it seemed totally illogical to me that a Protestant religion was better than the Jewish or Catholic religion.I had a proper religious upbringing, with prayers every night, church on Sunday, and Sunday school every week. I was raised in the Episcopal church, but our Catholic cook believed that Catholicism was the only way to get to heaven. The psychiatrist that I started seeing in the fourth grade was Jewish. It made no sense to me that my religion was better than theirs. 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.

There are also autistic people who adopt very rigid fundamentalist beliefs and become obsessed with religion. One girl prayed for hours and went to church every day. In her case, it was an obsession instead of a belief, and she was kicked out of several churches. Low doses of the drug Anafranil allow her to practice her faith in a more moderate and reasonable manner. In another case, a young man had disturbing obsessive thoughts that ran through his head. Intensive prayer helped control them.

People at the Kanner end of the autism continuum may interpret religious symbolism in a very concrete manner. Charles Hart describes his eight-year-old son's reaction to a film in Sunday school about Abraham's being willing to sacrifice his son to God. Ted watched the film and passively said “Cannibals” at the end.

For many people with autism, religion is an intellectual rather than emotional activity. Music is the 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.

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. There have been no formal studies on the effect of music, but therapists have known for years that some autistic children can learn to sing before they can talk. Ralph Mauer, at the University of Florida, has observed that some autistic savants speak in the rhythm of poetic blank verse. I have strong musical associations, and old songs trigger place-specific memories.

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. To visualize how the second law worked, I imagined a model universe consisting of two rooms. This represented a closed thermodynamic system. One room was warm and the other was cold. This represented the state of maximum order. If a small window were opened between the rooms, the air would gradually mix until both rooms were lukewarm. The model was now in a state of maximum disorder, or entropy. The scientist James Clark Maxwell proposed that order could be restored if a little man at the window opened and closed it to allow warm atoms to go to the one side and cold atoms to go to the other side. The only problem is that an outside energy source is required to operate the window. When I was a college sophomore, I called this ordering force God.

Many of my heroes, including Einstein, did not believe in a personal God. In 1941, Einstein wrote that the scientist's “religious feeling takes the form of rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that compared with it, all systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.” When he was eleven years old, he went through a religious phase and practiced the Jewish dietary laws and adhered to a literal interpretation of Scripture. A year later this came to an abrupt end when he was exposed to science. When he read scientific books, he concluded that the Bible stories were not literally true.

In his later years, Einstein wrote: “Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned like a liberation.” He felt that he was right to switch from fundamentalist beliefs to a broader view of religion. He went on to say in the same paper: “The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but it has proved itself trustworthy, and I have never regretted having chosen it.”

But my favorite of Einstein's words on religion is “Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.” I like this because both science and religion are needed to answer life's great questions. Even scientists such as Richard Feynman, who rejected religion and poetry as sources of truth, concede grudgingly that there are questions that science cannot answer.

I am deeply interested in the new chaos theory, because it means that order can arise out of disorder and randomness. I've read many popular articles about it, because I want scientific proof that the universe is orderly. I do not have the mathematical ability to understand chaos theory fully, but it confirms the idea that order can come from disorder and randomness. James Gleick, in the book
Chaos
, explains that snowflakes are ordered symmetrical patterns that form in random air turbulence. Slight changes in the air turbulence will change the basic shape of each snowflake in random and unexpected ways. It is impossible to predict the shape of a snowflake by studying the initial atmospheric conditions. This is why weather is so hard to predict. Weather patterns have order, but random changes affect the order in random, unpredictable ways.

I hated the second law of thermodynamics because I believed that the universe
should
be orderly. Over the years I have collected many articles about spontaneous order and pattern formation in nature. Susumu Ohno, a geneticist, has found classical music in slime and mouse genes. He converted the genetic code of four nucleotide bases into a musical scale. He found that the order of the bases in our DNA is not random, and when the order is played, it sounds like something by Bach or a Chopin nocturne. Patterns in flowers and leaf growth in plants develop in mathematical sequence of the Fibonacci numbers and the golden mean of the Greeks.

Patterns spontaneously arise in many purely physical systems. Convection patterns in heated fluids sometimes resemble a pattern of cells. Scientists at the University of California have discovered that silver atoms deposited on a platinum surface spontaneously form ordered patterns. The temperature of the platinum determines the type of pattern, and order can be created from random motion. A small change in temperature totally changes the pattern. At one temperature triangles are formed, and at another temperature hexagons form, and further heating of the surface makes the silver atoms revert to triangles in a different orientation. Another interesting finding is that everything in the universe, ranging from amino acids and bacteria to plants and shells, has handedness. The universe is full of self-ordering systems.

Probably within my lifetime, scientists will determine how to create life from basic chemicals. Even when they have accomplished this task, though, they will not have answered the question that has plagued people for all time: what happens when you die?

Questioning Immortality and Life's Meaning

As a young college student I had never given much thought to what happens after death, but then I started working with cattle in the Arizona feedlots. Did the animals just turn into beef, or did something else happen? This made me uneasy, and my science-based religious beliefs could not provide a satisfactory answer. I thought it must be very comforting to have the kind of blind faith that enables one to believe that one will have an afterlife in heaven.

Prior to going to Arizona State University, I had never seen the outside of a slaughterhouse and I had never seen an animal slaughtered. It wasn't until I first drove past the Swift meatpacking plant that I began to develop a concrete visual system for understanding what would become my life's work. In my diary on March 10, 1971, I wrote about a dream I had: “I walked up to Swift's and put my hands on the outside of the white wall. I had the feeling that I was touching the sacred altar.” A month later I drove past Swift's again, and I could see all the cattle out in the pens, waiting for the end to come. It was then I realized that man believes in heaven, hell, or reincarnation because the idea that after the cattle walk into the slaughterhouse it is all over forever is too horrible to conceive. Like the concept of infinity, it is too ego-shattering for people to endure.

A few days later I got up the courage to go to Swift's and ask if I could go on a tour. I was told that they did not give tours. This just heightened my interest in this forbidden place. Being denied entrance made my holy land even holier. This was not a symbolic door, it was reality that had to be faced. I was attempting to answer many of life's big questions. I made many entries in my diary at that time.

April 7, 1971: “It is important that the animals not be defiled at the slaughterhouse. Hopefully they will be allowed to die with some sort of dignity. The animals probably feel more pain when they are put through the cattle chute to be branded or castrated.”

May 18, 1971: “What is really significant in life? I used to think being a great scientist would be the most significant thing in the world that I could do. Now I have some second thoughts about it.There are many different paths that I could follow right now and I do not know which one leads to significance.”

For me, religion was a means of attaining a certain kind of truth. At that time I had not read any of the popular books on near-death experiences, which were not widely available until around 1975, though I still remember a vivid dream I had on October 25, 1971. Swift was a six-story building. Only the first floor of this building was a slaughterhouse, and when I found a secret elevator, it transported me to the upper floors. These upper levels consisted of beautiful museums and libraries that contained much of the world's culture. As I walked through the vast corridors of knowledge, I realized that life is like the library and the books can be read only one at a time, and each one will reveal something new.

Years later I read interviews with people who have had near-death experiences. Several people interviewed by Raymond Moody reported in his book
Life After Life
that during such an experience they saw libraries and places that contained the ultimate knowledge. The concept of a library of knowledge is also a theme in more recent books such as
Embraced by the Light
, by Betty J. Eadie.

A few days before I had my dream of the Swift plant turning into a vast library, I had visited an Arabian horse farm where great pains were taken to treat each horse as an individual. I petted the beautiful stallions, and I felt that they should never be subjected to the feedlot or the slaughterhouse. The next day I was on a feedlot operating the chute while cattle were being branded and vaccinated. When I looked at each steer, it had the same look of individuality as the stallions. For me the big question was, how could I justify killing them?

When I finally gained entry to Swift's, on April 18, 1973, it was completely anticlimactic, and I was surprised by my lack of a reaction to it. It was no longer the mysterious forbidden place; plus Swift was a very good plant where the cattle did not suffer.Several months later, Lee Bell, the gentle man who maintained the stunners, asked me if I had ever stunned cattle—that is, killing them. After I told him I never had, he suggested that it was now time to do it. The first time I operated the equipment, it was sort of like being in a dream.

After I pulled out of the parking lot, I looked up at the sky, and the clouds were really spectacular. I understood the paradox that unless there is death, we could not appreciate life. Having first faced the paradox of power and responsibility, and coming to terms with my ambivalent feelings of controlling animals with devices such as cattle chutes, I now had to face the paradox of life and death.

The thing that was most upsetting was that there are no definitive answers to the question of what happens when one dies. Philosophers have written about it for centuries. And unanswerable questions have forced people to look to God.