The Genius of the Autistic Mind, or, There's No Such Thing as "Details"
In virtually all educational experiences, there's a pervasive idea that there is the surface that we see and apprehend, and then something else "behind" - hidden structure, meaning, emotion - that must be teased or coaxed out into the light. This approach does damage to both the cultivation of our perceptions and indeed the notion of intuition as well.
How do we parse the (strictly speaking) undifferentiated field of sense-data which bombards our perception at every single waking & sleeping moment? Were this barrage of information unfiltered and unlimited by any kind of internal mechanism I believe it could drive us to a kind of madness. Instead, through education, culture, genetic predisposition, and circumstance we gate and constrain this incoming data into manageable blocks and networks of meaning and reference.
Recent insights into the autistic mind, for example through the writings of the extraordinary Tito Mukhopadhya (who by most measures would otherwise be classified as a "low-functioning" person with autism) provide us with a useful means to understand the false dichotomy of detail/structure. An example: a person with autism such as Tito, may clap his hands, then hear a dog bark outside--he may then persist in clapping his hands for a long, long time in order to elicit the dogs bark again, highlighting two assumptions made by "neurotypical" people, namely, that we assume the dog's bark is unrelated to the hand clapping, and that repetition will not likely bring it about.
A linear, time-dominated view of cause/effect and structure/detail, while useful in navigating through life and social interactions, is only one of the many assumptions and conditions we accept which limit our ability to perceive, and attenuate our ability to analyze and imagine. While no-one would wish autism upon themselves or others, some of the characteristics of autism have often been compared to those of genius. At the border of both of these worlds are some individuals with Asperger's Syndrome. While many would be classified as of "average" intelligence, many exhibit brilliance in areas which particularly interest them, even to a savant-like degree. It may be too facile to say that the person with Asperger's "benefits" from a touch of autism through an ability to absorb a tremendous amount of observable phenomena (noumena?) which permits what appear to be sudden or discontinuous leaps of logic or insight, or startlingly rapid problem solving - it may be too facile, but it is illuminating.
David Prall, a Harvard professor who influenced a whole generation of artists and thinkers (Robert Motherwell, Arthur Berger, Leonard Bernstein, Delmore Schwarz among others), said "Ideal aesthetic knowledge, absolutely ready response, would bury the whole system of discriminations in our nerves and habits." Not to say that a system of discrimination is bad, but we're operating half-blind if we don't know when our "systems of discriminations" come to bear.
So any experience is known through it's surface--and it isn't reductive or limiting to say that there isn't anything beyond the surface. Rather, to understand that the patterns, signs, structures meaning which we attribute to an experience of something are born of the very detail, the very surface--are indeed inherent in it. Delight in experience of the world or in art frequently arises out of the gaps (similar in aesthetic experiences to the rhetorical enthymeme of Aristotle) resulting from our attempts to attribute patterns & meaning, providing the individual a direct opportunity to insert themselves via their own understanding, to become part of the experience or art, providing opportunity for us all to delight in the fact that we can look at the same thing and react differently.
How do we parse the (strictly speaking) undifferentiated field of sense-data which bombards our perception at every single waking & sleeping moment? Were this barrage of information unfiltered and unlimited by any kind of internal mechanism I believe it could drive us to a kind of madness. Instead, through education, culture, genetic predisposition, and circumstance we gate and constrain this incoming data into manageable blocks and networks of meaning and reference.
Recent insights into the autistic mind, for example through the writings of the extraordinary Tito Mukhopadhya (who by most measures would otherwise be classified as a "low-functioning" person with autism) provide us with a useful means to understand the false dichotomy of detail/structure. An example: a person with autism such as Tito, may clap his hands, then hear a dog bark outside--he may then persist in clapping his hands for a long, long time in order to elicit the dogs bark again, highlighting two assumptions made by "neurotypical" people, namely, that we assume the dog's bark is unrelated to the hand clapping, and that repetition will not likely bring it about.
A linear, time-dominated view of cause/effect and structure/detail, while useful in navigating through life and social interactions, is only one of the many assumptions and conditions we accept which limit our ability to perceive, and attenuate our ability to analyze and imagine. While no-one would wish autism upon themselves or others, some of the characteristics of autism have often been compared to those of genius. At the border of both of these worlds are some individuals with Asperger's Syndrome. While many would be classified as of "average" intelligence, many exhibit brilliance in areas which particularly interest them, even to a savant-like degree. It may be too facile to say that the person with Asperger's "benefits" from a touch of autism through an ability to absorb a tremendous amount of observable phenomena (noumena?) which permits what appear to be sudden or discontinuous leaps of logic or insight, or startlingly rapid problem solving - it may be too facile, but it is illuminating.
David Prall, a Harvard professor who influenced a whole generation of artists and thinkers (Robert Motherwell, Arthur Berger, Leonard Bernstein, Delmore Schwarz among others), said "Ideal aesthetic knowledge, absolutely ready response, would bury the whole system of discriminations in our nerves and habits." Not to say that a system of discrimination is bad, but we're operating half-blind if we don't know when our "systems of discriminations" come to bear.
So any experience is known through it's surface--and it isn't reductive or limiting to say that there isn't anything beyond the surface. Rather, to understand that the patterns, signs, structures meaning which we attribute to an experience of something are born of the very detail, the very surface--are indeed inherent in it. Delight in experience of the world or in art frequently arises out of the gaps (similar in aesthetic experiences to the rhetorical enthymeme of Aristotle) resulting from our attempts to attribute patterns & meaning, providing the individual a direct opportunity to insert themselves via their own understanding, to become part of the experience or art, providing opportunity for us all to delight in the fact that we can look at the same thing and react differently.
posted by Paul at 14:22
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