Anemone's Research Emporium

An Anthropologist on Mars and a Complexity Theorist on Earth

Anemone Cerridwen
July 6, 2008.

I just finished rereading An Anthropologist on Mars, by Oliver Sacks, (having first read it years ago), and this time through, I was struck by the difference in tone between the first five chapters and the final two. In the first five chapters, Sacks describes a man who loses his colour vision; a man whose autobiographical memory peters out in the late 1960s; a surgeon with Tourettes; a blind man who gains, struggles with, then loses the ability to see; and a man who obsessively paints his childhood village in exquisite detail from memory. Sacks seems fascinated by their conditions, rightly so, but not particularly concerned with their membership in the human race. In other words, he seems to see them as regular people with neat conditions. He doesn't even mention their personhood. It's simply not an issue.

However, in the last two chapters, he describes two autistic people: Stephen Wiltshire, a young savant artist, and Temple Grandin, a livestock researcher, and his tone is completely different. Instead of describing two people with fascinating conditions, and how they interact with and relate to their conditions, he seems to spend a fair amount of time describing his own and others' confusion around these people. He is interested in how these people experience their conditions. But he also seems to be interested in how he experiences their conditions. He struggles to see them as people he can relate to, and so he struggles with their autism. But autism is their condition, not his, isn't it? What is going on here?

It's like with the other subjects, they have conditions and he observes them, but with the two autistic subjects, they themselves are the conditions that he (and others he describes) struggle with.

Autistic people as conditions that other, non-autistic people suffer from. It's strange, but that seems to be how many people seem to experience it. At least, that's how it comes across in the media. And that's how it comes across in this book. I find this fascinating, in a way. It might explain a great deal of the hostility and ignorance surrounding autism that persists today (though not on the part of Sacks).

It's as if people learn how to interact with others at a very young age, then get stuck interacting only in that way (or that range of ways) and then when they meet someone outside that range they can't do it. Imagine learning to speak your native language, and perhaps a few others, as a child, automatically and effortlessly, not even remembering how you did it, then losing the ability to learn new languages. Then as an adult, encountering other, unfamiliar languages for the first time, you are caught by a gulf you cannot cross. There are no dictionaries to translate words for you, no guidebooks to get you started, no way of kick-starting your brain to go back to what it was like as a child when you didn't have preconceived notions of how people interact. So you may see these people as unreachable, perhaps even a different species, the gulf is so wide. It's easy to feel threatened when you don't know how to read or communicate with someone - you have no idea what they're going to do next. And since the person isn't acting the way you would, and in some cases doesn't appear to be acting at all, it's even easy for some people to wonder if there's anyone in there at all.

My own reaction as a complexity theorist is that I wouldn't even question the personhood of an amoeba, let alone an autistic person, since every organism that isn't actually dead has a nervous system that is actively reading its environment and deciding what to do about it, including the lowly amoeba. An organism (from a complexity point of view) is a self-organizing self-regulating system, and it is an organism's job to stay alive, and to thrive, by paying attention to what's out there, deciding what it means, and responding accordingly. Autistic people are interacting with their environments just as much as everyone else, since that's what living beings do, and since they're Homo sapiens (what else would they be?), they're clearly active members of the human race. But autistic people often don't act on the surface the way non-autistic people generally do, and many non-autistic people do not seem to be able to read autistic people, even though the same underlying agenda of reading and responding to the environment is going on, because they don't even know what to look for. And so they wonder if there is anything going on under that unfamiliar, alien surface. Well, there has to be, since the person is still alive, but not everyone automatically assumes that. If you see "human intelligence" as "acting the way I would, more or less", and "interacting with me in a way I can understand", then you might have problems with seeing autistic people as having human intelligence. But if you see human intelligence as the intelligence a human being brings to understanding and interacting with the world, whatever the personal style of that person, then by definition autistic people have human intelligence because they have intelligence (their minds are working) and they're human. Their intelligence may work more or less well than yours in a given situation, but it is going at it and doing its best, same as for everyone else. If it were as broken as some people seem to think, the organism would die sooner rather than later, which it doesn't, since, contrary to popular thought, we do tend to live well into adulthood in spite of all the obstacles we face.

It seems that when people, even the most open-minded people, meet autistic people for the first time as adults, they don't even know where to begin when it comes to reading them and communicating with them, so nothing happens, and they get stuck in a relationship with the communication gap, instead of being able to move into a relationship with the other person. If even Oliver Sacks, clearly a gifted communicator as well as a curious, open-minded person, spends as much time talking about the gulf as about the person on the other side, it's no wonder autistic people are routinely excluded from society. We need guidebooks for translation, written by people who know how to bridge the gulf, so that those who painfully learn the language of how to communicate with unfamiliar autistic people can at least learn a few basics. Until then, or until it becomes the norm to see all persons as living organisms actively interacting with their environments even when you can't see the interactions, most people will probably have a problem seeing us as human at least some of the time.

Note: This is in no way intended as a slur against Oliver Sacks and his writing. His book was written some time ago, and reflects his early reactions to two autistic people. I'm not even sure how much he is describing his own experiences and how much he is describing the issues other people bring up about these people. He's out there, he's being honest, he's giving it his best, and he's made a valuable contribution to understanding autism and its place in human society. It would be interesting, though, to know if he's gone through any major shifts in perspective, to know how he sees things now, and whether he'd write anything differently or not if he were doing it over again.

Reference

Sacks, Oliver, 1995. An anthropologist on Mars: Seven paradoxical tales. Alfred A. Knopf, NY.