[Martin Taylor 950116 13:50]
Bill Powers (950115.1815 MST)
If you could get
them to do a tracking task, or any kind of instrumented control task,
you would know what they are perceiving and you would know what their
intention is. These tracking experiments are awfully simple, but when
you think about them, they provide a NONVERBAL window into at least one
little aspect of a person's internal experiences, a window that with
patience and persistence could probably be opened wider. If I were to
watch an autistic person doing a control task, I would feel that I was
sharing an experience with that person, possibly the first kind of
contact I would ever have had past that baffling exterior.
I recommend (re-)reading Donna Willams' "Nobody, Nowhere," and to a lesser
degree the follow-up "Somebody Somewhere." Donna many times notes that
autism seems (from the inside) to be largely a problem of controlling
one's perceptions; the inner (imagination) world is much easier to control
than the outer, and the autist has what she sees as a very impoverished
set of perceptions of what we would call higher-level constructs. She
sees many blades of grass rather than a lawn, for example, and sees almost
nothing of what we would call emotion in other people. The autist does
control in the outer world where possible, using repetitive actions or
laying out symmetrical sets of objects and the like; but has great
problems "controlling what she cannot perceive." (I put that in quotes
because it's obviously not a good phrase, but I don't know how else to
put it). We, non-autistic people, want the autist to seem to control
perceptions the autist hasn't developed. The autist doesn't know what it
is that we expect them to be perceiving and controlling.
As a therapist for autistic children, Donna takes advantage of her inside
knowledge of what autism is about, allowing (helping in the non-interfering
sense) them to control something that they CAN control, and (it seems to
me) allowing them a perception THAT they are controlling a perception.
And she avoids so far as she can getting them into a situation in which
they think they are being asked to control a perception they don't have
or can't consistently affect.
Never having seen an autistic child at first hand, I can obviously not
make any informed comments. But I do think that Donna Williams' writings
should be a major sourcebook for anyone seriously interested in the subject.
Also, as I mentioned in Durango 93, I think "Nobody, Nowhere" is a textbook
of PCT.
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Last observation on autism: There is a condition known as "hyperlexia,"
almost the inverse of dyslexia, though it often occurs in children in
families that have a history of dyslexia. "The hyperlexic child has
general language and cognitive problems but nevertheless learns very
early to read. The child reads avidly, even though he may be classified
as autistic, not reacting much to people and things in the world around
him.(Healy, et.al. 1982)... Hyperlexics may be much better than normal
skilled readers at recognizing words composed of mutilated letters (Cobrink,
1982)...Although hyperlexics are highly skilled in recognizing words, they
are poor in integrating words into sentence contexts (Richman % Kitchell,
1981)... Many hyperlexic children are autistic, and autistic children
tend to lack LH specialization for language (Dawson et al, 1982)."
(from Taylor and Taylor, The psychology of reading, Academic Press 1993, p254)
[Internal references: Healy, Aram, Horwitz & Kessler, 1982, A Study of
hyperlexia, Brain and Language, 17, 1-23.
Cobrink, L., 1982. The performance of hyperlexic children on an "incomplete
words" task. Neuropsychologia, 20, 569-577
Richman & Kitchell, 1981. Hyperlexia as a variant of developmental language
disorder. Brain and language, 12, 203-212.
Dawson, Warrenburg and Fuller, 1982, Cerebral lateralization in individuals
diagnosed as autistic in early childhood. Brain and Language, 15, 353-368.]
Remember that Donna Williams was very good at music, but often found that
either spoken or written language "turned off" for her under stressfull
conditions.
I hope we can all follow through on this. It may be another frustrating
dead end, but considering the plight of autistic people, it's worth a
good try.
Is it worth trying to make contact through Donna Williams? I imagine that
her publisher could pass on a letter so that she could participate if she
felt it useful to do so.
Martin