The Different Flavors of Connection

I continue my Oliver Sacks reading spree.

“I’ve always felt she was the closest I would ever come to an alien intelligence,” the theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson wrote about an autistic child named Jessy Park. "Autistic children are so strange and so different from us – and yet you can communicate; there are many things you can talk with her about… [But] she has no concept of her own identity, she doesn’t understand the difference between “you” and “I” – she uses pronouns almost indiscriminately. And so her universe is radically different from mine. Concrete social relations are for her very, very difficult to comprehend. On the other hand, with anything abstract, she has no trouble. So mathematics, of course, is no problem for her ad we can talk very easily about mathematics…. I think autism comes about as close as possible to the central problem of exploring the neurological basis of personality. Because these are people whose intelligence is intact, but something at the center is missing.”

But I wonder if it’s precisely that “something at the center” that’s the real dysfunction?

That’s the problem about reading so much science fiction at so tender an age that you begin adapting the genre’s actualizations of science metaphors as a deeper truth, I suppose.

I’ve always equated autism with whatever it was in Arthur C. Clark’s Childhood’s End that set the F2 generation apart from its progenitors. I’m particularly struck by the inability to discriminate between “I” and “you.” It hints at a bedrock connection of some sort.

In other news, scriveners gloves or no scriveners gloves, my poor fingers are swollen to the size of Vienna sausages and I can barely bend them. It’s 12 degrees out – was eight when I awakened. But at least there’s a sliver of sunshine along the horizon, a bright gold glimpse of hope.

I fucking hate winter.