Exploration

Exploration #5 Read the Temple piece in Oliver Sacks' An Anthropologist on Mars.. Write your reflection on learning in light of what you learned about Temple. About what aspects of her life were you intrigued? Dismayed? How are you making sense of her intelligence?

I was most interested in making some sense of the "Theory of Mind" that an autistic person can achieve. One key point that the author makes is that every person with autism presents in a slightly different way, they will sit at different points on the spectrum and they may have different co-morbidities. But, the one constant for all autistic individuals is the disabling lack of communication skills and social interaction skills. Both of these are key pieces to achieving "theory of mind", something unachievable for an autistic individual. Without reading beyond this article I would suggest that deeper research would reveal this to be true. I would also posit that this does not preclude an autistic from being part of a knowledge building community with other team members. However, other individuals would need to be very clear in their communication, leaving nothing to conjecture. This is not normal or comfortable for the neurotypical. As the autistic family that the author visited suggested, they feel like another species, but at the same time have amazing skills to contribute to a community of learners. My understanding is that online learning has an appeal to autistic learners because of the alternative communication methods, the ability to screen and plan communication, as well as pace the work. Recently Russell Sage College and Excelsior teamed up to appeal to Asperger's students by creating a program in Computer Science with this learner in mind. [] Hopefully the world will begin to realize the benefits of these individuals and the accomodations that they need to be successful. Recently there was an article in the New York Post (I think) about a business that is hiring Asperger's exclusively to do "consultant" work for other companies. The business works with the Asperger's individuals for the social skills issues, but targets Asperger's because of their perseverative nature and obsession for detail. As in the article (p. 283) supports the "quality of memory is prodigious in its detail and pathological in its fixity." Thus, we may want to consider that autism may be an evolutionary change in humans that is necessary for the technology explosion of the past couple of decades. Temple uses many "computational analogies" when she speaks about her autism and that of others. By having "the emotion circuit's not hooked up" as Temple suggests, the autie is well suited for thinking and doing in a very creative (yet disorganized) fashion. All the more reason that potential team members in a learning environment acquire alternative communication skills to better interact with the autistic team member. However, additionally preparing yourself to best organize and work with neurotypicals, the autistic can utilize therapies and methods to cope in the neurotypical world. Temple Grandin is a role model for this. She has maximized her ability to function in this "different" world from her own by "scripting", deep pressure therapy, structuring, and knowing her limitations. I applaud her final quote from the article "If I could snap my fingers and be non-autistic, I would not".

This high level of intelligence may be at the expense of the cognitive and existential aspects of the disorder. Would we want to lose that, probably not. If we look historically we can find possible autistic individuals that have made global impacts on us and what we know, how we live. So, the bigger question to answer may be, how valuable is the "theory of mind", how to we accomodate those that do not have a theory of mind.