Untitled Document

The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior

Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris

Insights on autism and other observations inspired by "Thinking In Pictures" by Temple Grandin

There are many similarities in the way this woman thinks and the way that I think but with some particular differences. In any event I have some different ideas to explain much of the subject matter that she contemplates in her book, so the book serves as a useful catalyst for some writing.

Pages numbers refer to a 1996 Vintage Books paperback edition.

I'm inspired to write, right off the bat, by the foreward written by Oliver Sacks. Page 11:

"... it had been medical dogma for forty years or more that there was no 'inside,' no inner life, in the autistic, or that if there was it would be forever denied access or expression..."

There are other aspects of this confusion. In some cases the inner life was always there but the autistic just have no inclination to share that inner life. Remember that an "inner life" and the "ability to share the inner life" or "desire to share the inner life" are very different things. In many ways it is the inability to think about what other people think about your thinking and your activities, the removal of concern for how you are perceived, a lack of self-consciousness, that can allow for amazing autistic savant talents.

If you read other writings by Sacks, you will find a story about a pair of autistic twins who were quietly getting joy from exchanging extremely large sequential prime numbers. They did not tell Sacks what they were doing. He discovered it through a hunch and a nearby copy of a book with such numbers listed. (What a nerdy thing to have in your possession! Sacks must have a few autistic traits in himself as well. All personality traits taken to an extreme will appear as a disorder. Scientists, computer programmers and other types with an interest in logical as opposed to emotional interests quite often have a lot of traits that are in the autistic spectrum - usually closer to Aspergers Disorder or ADD - and the lack of social awareness that comes with these disorders can be helpful in promoting a new idea against the social tide as not strength of will but disability of awareness of how you are perceived, or both, can carry you through. The person who is swayed emotionally by an opinion of another over his/her own inner logic is less likely to bring forth any useful change or new insights.)

If these savants were not a pair, it is very likely that on their own they might take pleasure in discovering primes with no communication of the answers to another person as it would be difficult to find another person who took any interest in the game, or they would share the joy of these numbers with a variety of others who would not have any interest or understanding of what was being shared as the autistic would be unlikely to pick up the cue that their topic was not as interesting to the others nearby. The ability to "solve a problem" and the ability to "communicate the discovery" or to "find others able to understand or appreciate the discovery" are very different abilities. Some important scientific ideas have been discovered by people who were unable to persuade others that the ideas were sound and scientific credit for any discovery goes not to the person who first made the discovery but to the person who was able to first get credit for the idea or gain acceptance for that idea. But logically the idea, if it is right, should be just as valuable whether the ignorant public or ignorant scientific community accepts it or not and so the first person to make the discovery (but not be able to gain credit or acceptance for the idea) should be the one given credit. It is usually as if the scientific credit is given to society for getting smart enough to understand the value of the idea. The one who is unable to gain acceptance for a good idea is not given credit because society was not ready, as if a gift does not count unless it is accepted.

The difference between the activity of solving a problem and the activity of sharing or communicating such a solution is important in understanding the nature of the problem with autism. All thinking is emotional. What we call emotion is a bringing together of many different kinds of thinking into a straw poll - a switchboard convergence of information - and it is this convergence of different kind of information that is impaired in those with autism. A variety of activities in the body and a variety of different kinds of thinking are shut off from each other in the autistic. An autistic savant who calculates mathematical answers of great difficulty can spend days and nights of constant mental activity working through the calculation in a constant obsessive way (even during sleep) while doing other activities at the same time. Actually we all do this as the unity of thought is an illusion and all mental processing is really the emergence that comes from millions of much smaller units of thought happening at the same time, but the constant shutting down of the switchboard, the convergence of information, the emotional center (and the language center) of the autistic means that the thinking involved in solving the big mathematical puzzle does not influence the other kinds of thinking and the other way around as well. This compartmentalizing of thought is important in allowing for these great abilities. The same kind of mathematics that runs the part of the brain solving these mathematical puzzles also runs all other kinds of thinking, conscious or autonomic, and the isolation of one area of subject matter from another is important. If a mathematical equation is right, the change of any factor can interfere with the accuracy of the equation. If the person is able to figure out how to use the brain's unique form of mathematics in order to solve a problem in computation (the computation of the invented human form of mathematics which is symbol driven and therefore very different than nervous system mathematics) then the isolation of that problem being solved by one region of the nervous system from the others would help in that ability. An emotional contribution to that calculation - the inclusion of other factors in mental processing into that isolated processing would add mathematical factors that have nothing to do with the problem being attacked and therefore corrupt the mathematics (and force the person to think in language as well which has limitations discussed below).

The ability to solve a problem is in a different part of the brain than the part of the brain that is able to communicate the answer to that problem, especially if the kind of problem being solved is in the usual realms of talent that can be found in autistic savants: calculation, memory, drawing, sound imitation, musical abilityÉ talents that are disjointed from other aspects of mental processing without the switchboards of the brain bringing the information together. The autistic savant can calculate without the ability to communicate the answers in a normal way or calculate without any understanding of the "language of mathematics" or the savant can play a song on an instrument exactly as it was played by another without any music lessons because the memory of how the song was just played was not corrupted by the other memories (usually considered to be included in the same memory) of how the song should be understood or of how the musical notation would look if written as notes on a scale or the memory of how this song fits into the lexicon of American or other music - all thoughts that might occur at the same time in a normal person but not in an autistic person. (I'm willing to bet that some such musical savants that can repeat another's performance on the piano, if put to the test, could play back a song that they did not hear because of earplugs because they were focusing on memorizing just one aspect of the memorized piece by visually memorizing the choreography of fingers on the keys of the piano and just repeating that choreography in the way a skilled dancer might be able to repeat a complicated physical figure of dancing.)

It is the disjunction of different types of mental processing that leads to these disabilities and these talents as well. This disjunction is both something that just happens due to problems in the processing of the autistic brain and something that the autistic person does as a habit (to avoid pain) using mechanisms of focus (the same mechanisms that are used in dissociation or in meditation or in artistic thought [click here to see some of my drawings created using an autistic kind of focus and without any artistic training] or in getting lost in playing an improvised jazz solo or forgetting the world while dancing to African drums - it is a big list). Any mechanism or activity of thinking that is practiced a lot will happen with greater and greater ease as any activity that is obsessively repeated will become a greater and greater obsession (just as any neurological symptom such as a tic will become more pronounced as it becomes "better with practice") and obsessive changes in the focus mechanism will get a person into a state that is difficult or almost impossible to get out of. (Too much meditation or too much artistic focus or too much of any in the above list of examples of manipulation of the mechanisms of focus can lead to neurological symptoms in a variety of people.) In autism the neurological stresses that cause the person to avoid pain through the constant use of these focus mechanisms occurs very early in life, usually before the acquisition of language, and this changes the way their brains process logic (disjointedly). When significant stresses develop in a brain much later in life after a relatively normal childhood, the tendency to use whatever brain tricks are used by the autistic are greater (these same focus mechanisms that are more difficult to control in maturity after language and other learning brings together many aspects of perception and thought into the same regions of thought in the emotional and language "switchboards" of mental processing and so accomplishing complete shutdown of any painful region of thinking has more of an effect on changing the logic of a variety of different kinds of processing as the different regions of thought are more integrated with each other after enough time of maturity in the development of a fairly normal personÉ so late onset problems of the same sort that lead to autism lead to schizophrenia or bi-polar disorder or other serious problems of mental illness).

Again from page 11:

"The word 'autism' still conveys a fixed and dreadful meaning to most people - they visualize a child mute, rocking, screaming, inaccessible, cut off from human contact."

One reason that so many with autism are mute is that when different functioning is isolated from other functioning (the switchboard is inhibited), then convergences of different kinds of ability are more difficult to achieve. One with autism might learn to understand language but never speak (or surprisingly start speaking with facility at a much later age than normal) because speaking a language involves a different part of the brain than hearing and understanding a language. Also, because all thinking is emotional thinking and therefore language is first taught using emotional expression before leading to logical expression and understanding ("good" and "bad," "yes" and "no" all expressed to babies with a great deal of emotion) but teaching language using emotion to one who has a need to constantly subdue the switchboard convergence of information - a need to dissociate from emotion - is difficult because the language is taught using emotional cues to a child that is turning off the emotions and is less able to "feel" the complex convergence of information calculating the association with the parent's emotional facial expression with a similar expression and feeling within at the same time with the sound of the word and the apparent meaning of that word associated with the context of use of that word that gives the word its meaning.

(The hearing and understanding in language processing can be separated from the spoken language in the brain in all serious forms of mental illness and this leads to the tendency of the mentally ill to talk to themselves or have echolalia. Speaking words that are a part of the interior monologue or repeating words that are heard before those words are understood gives the brain another pathway to bring different forms of information together when the brains usual pathways for convergence of such information are blocked. The one who repeats words or phrases in this way is repeating the sounds until the meaning of the sounds is processed.)

The child might rock back and forth for the same reason that a person might rock back and forth when impaired by alcohol and listening to a repetitive and trance-inducing exposure to music. Repetitive information received by the brain is recognized as such and is easier to process than extremely varied information. Any experience that is seen or heard or felt and repeats is easier to process with each repetition. A stressed brain receives comfort from repetition because repetitions reduce further stress in that area of processing. Kinesthetic repetition (rocking) can give comfort in association with repetitive music or without it. Statistically, due to factors of neurological connectivity that I'll get into later, significant stress will collect in the auditory centers of the brain more quickly than in the visual processing regions. Therefore a greater amount of impairment is required for one to need to experience repetitive information in visual experience. The person with a need to stare at a small repetitive wallpaper pattern in order to create a lessoning of visual stress by easing the requirements for visual understanding with repetition is probably more impaired than the person who rocks back and forth compulsively or taps a foot compulsively or has a repetitive vocal tic. (This is also related to the reason that auditory hallucinations usually occur before any visual hallucinations during the developing progression of schizophrenia. This can be predicted with a different understanding of the mathematical tendencies of the connectivity of brains that I'll be illustrating further.)

The autistic child might scream at times when he/she is unable to continue using the technique of dissociating for whatever reason such as when losing the focus required or being forced to connect by well-meaning parents or others trying to get their attention through touch. They scream because that is the representation of the inner pain that is emergent in their brains when the switchboard, the emotion, is turned "on." This pain is there because of a problem in the software, the logic, of their brains caused by an accumulation of stress (inhibition) in their brains because of heredity and/or other factors. As I've written in other essays, the entire brain works using an algorithm of experiences in basic units of pleasure and pain but using pleasure and pain to represent all manner of experience and information. Problems in this form of logic can bring about pain of emotion but also pain of vision or pain of sound or pain of understanding or pain of any realm of experience.

Again on page 11:

"And we almost always speak of autistic children, never of autistic adults, as if such children never grew up..."

Such a perception occurs mostly because it is more common for normal individuals to come into contact with the children with such problems but as adults we tend to spend time with others who are most like us. The children with problems still mix with other children who are normal but adults with white-collar jobs might not mix with adults with blue-collar jobs.

Another issue here is that the person with autism is a slow starter but might find many ways to use logic to make sense of social (social being multi-faceted subtle and emotional) information. Also (an issue of importance to me) is that a person with a significant disability might not be understood because of a significant ability that is used to compensate. A genius might be able to completely hide a significant social impairment - even autism through imitation and other kinds of logic to "pass."

So now I've finished writing some comments on the first page of the Foreward of Grandin's book. It took me a couple of hours to write it and the effort was stressful for me because I was able to think of all of these ideas (and some others) in the same time (less than a minute) it took me to read that page of her book. (Think of all the other ideas I could have enjoyed thinking about in that time if I am telling you the truth.) The reason is that I don't think in words either. But I don't think she is right to conclude that those with autism think in pictures. (What about autistic people that are blind?) They just think in the absence of language that seems to be a kind of visual thinking (we are visually biased because visual comprehension gives us much more information than auditory comprehension - especially if language understanding is being subdued temporarily). To think in pictures is too limited because vision only gets into three dimensions of information and I think far beyond three dimensions and so does every brain although without knowing it. The brain uses a form of mathematics in which every subset of processing is dealing with different dimensions (not just different factors within a dimension or two or three). To learn to think without language is very powerful, especially if you really understand what you are doing when you are doing it. (All animals think without language, but without any language they would not have any desire to think about the things that humans desire to think about because of what language and the history of learning with language along with the culture that comes with such all brings to humanity in using their minds with the algorithm following pleasures and avoiding pains that is in the nature of a nervous system.)

It is stressful because it is very difficult to go back and forth in and out of language thought in order to communicate ideas that are first considered in a visual/spatial kind of way without language. It is something like the ability to be able to go back and forth into a deep meditative state several times a minute and get completely out of that state several times during the same minute. I can do it but putting the words on this page is not easy.

It is stressful also because I can never really completely express what is happening in the brain or show the beauty of the logic and the mathematics that is used to make it all happen. I can "see" how it works but I can't say what it is like to "see" in such a way. It is a beautiful logic. But I'm doing my best.

When I read that first page of the Foreward I had most of these ideas and others and they occurred as fast as I read. But when I read, I get the understanding of the words, then I stop thinking of words and translate that verbal information (very quickly) into another language that might be best described as a visual language in Temple's book but is really translated into another brain language that is not visual either as just visual understanding is not enoughÉ it is just without the limits of language (or the limits of the language of higher mathematics as all known math is a language-based system), because, as I wrote before, it is the language part of our brain that is the slowest because of the limitations of translating many-dimensional understanding and processing into a form that must be expressed in the constraints of a two-dimensional form of one sound following another in time as is needed to communicate information from an extremely connected nervous system to another nervous system with no connections to the first one but through a coded system of language and the limitations of that language.

A picture is worth much more than a thousand words because an infinite number of words can still not give a sense of sight to a blind person. (And what if a picture or sight deals with too few dimensions to give any sense of the nature of how the brain works? An infinite number of words are needed until the others can start to "see" how the brain works themselves.)

It is much more fun to think and discover and theorize than it is to try to communicate my theories because I think of them massively faster than I can communicate them. Would you enjoy spending your time trying to communicate an answer that could only be communicated in a limited and insufficient way to an indifferent public when communicating it takes more than a hundred times the time it took to solve the problem (using concepts and techniques I already know, of course) or when communicating a solution takes more time than it would take to have the thrill of solving a hundred other problems?

To communicate an idea is a very different ability than the ability to think of that idea.

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