Autism = "Crazy"?

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To be fair, the fact that Simon Baron-Cohen is Sascha Baron-Cohen's cousin has been mentioned several times here. It's not all that extraordinary to expect people are more likely to know that they're cousins on an autistic forum, either, given how many people here invest a lot of time in reading about autism.

And where does "Borat's Cousin" come into play? 'Borat' isn't a misspelling and 'Borat' is certainly not spelt the same as 'Baron'.

I had to google and the only thing I found was this...

"From Borat's Cousin, a Facebook Quiz That Actually Screens for Autism"

Suggesting "Borat's Cousin" is a researcher.

From the google page I mentioned...

See, the fact "Simon Baron-Cohen is Borat's cousin" isn't exactly common knowledge.

"Borat" in this case refers to the actor who played the character Borat, Sacha Baron-Cohen. Just searching "Borat's Cousin" on google sent me to Sacha Baron-Cohen's wikipedia page which mentioned that. It's far from hard to find.

The part that I'd not expect people to know is that Sacha Baron-Cohen is Borat, because not everyone on a autism forum will know anything about movies.

Oh yes, I forgot to send out the search party and read every single word from every single page listed in Google's top 10 search results. Please forgive me for being so lazy.

Saints are examples of people others would regard as insane. Some heard voices they thought were God's, others saw visions. These are what some term hallucinations. If someone heard or saw the same things today, they would be called crazy even though they were not considered crazy back then. Or maybe they were?

Borat = Sascha Baron-Cohen. He's one of the producers, writers, and the star of the movie. Borat is not his real name, it's the name of a fictional character from a fictonal Eastern European nation.



People seem to be generally aware of it here.

Why does it bother you if someone doesn't think to drop every piece of information so you can determine context without google?

Last edited by Verdandi on 15 Oct 2011, 8:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Gosh, do you guys really expect everyone to keep track of actor's real names? I still don't know Jack Black's real name...

Hey, on a different subject, everyone go take THE FUN QUIZ! It's really a fun quiz.

I have no idea what they'd be diagnosed with today. There are any number of reasons why they might be considered sane or insane in their own times (including cultural standards). The Oracle at Delphi, assuming she was real and assuming she really experienced visions was likely not considered insane because the god Apollo granted her those visions (I think). By cultural norms, she wouldn't be insane. But someone today living in a cave and inhaling vapors to have visions might not be seen in the same way.



The quiz is the Autism Quotient. Most of us have taken it already.

And no, I don't expect everyone to keep track of actors' real names. But it's not hard to check wikipedia or IMDB to get more information.

Jack Black's real name is Thomas Jacob Black, but he goes by "Jack." In other words, Jack Black is Jack Black's real name.

Also, I am just speaking for myself, not "you guys" or any other arbitrary group.

I have some experience with voice hearing schizophrenics to share here .... about 10 years ago, both of my best friends developed paranoid schizophrenia at roughly the same time (both were 27). I learned a lot about it.

It's not that they think they hear voices. They do. Actually, hearing voices is their method of thinking. It happens in a "dead space" in the brain that mirrors Broca's Area, which is responsible for language processing. In experiments during world war II, doctors stimulated this dead area with electrodes, and all of the patients so stimulated reported hearing the voices of their parents or other authority figures telling them what to do. The voices ceased when this dead space" was no longer stimulated. A schizophrenic can't disobey the voice they hear because that voice is actually their own decision making process.

Julian Jaynes has a fun theory about how that "dead space" was likely much more active in the human thought process, before literacy increased the scope of language (and consequently, language and foresight.) The Iliad and the Odyssey (Homer, 8th century BC) illustrated this. In the Iliad, almost nobody ever has a thought, they have no concept of the word "I" or of themselves.

Someone has to make a decision, a god appears to them and tells them what to do. Everybody but Odysseus is a schizophrenic. It's entirely possible that schizophrenia was the dominant mental form for humanity before the rise of written language and rationality.

There's only two thoughts in the whole book, and Odysseus has both of them. He's also freaked out about having just had an idea. He doesn't know how he thought of it, and feels like the Gods have abandoned him. One of those ideas is the Trojan Horse ... and Odysseus pretty much wipes out one of the greatest cities on earth with his little idea.

The Odyssey is a totally different book. It's about a modern human outwitting the gods with his new found rational thinking skills. You could instead say that he's outwitting schizophrenics. That the book is a record of the rise of rationality and imagination, and how it wiped out the previous method of thinking.

Schizophrenics persist for a while, but their numbers start to dwindle. At this point historically, they are oracles: those few who can still hear the voices of god(s). Time goes on and they have a harder time fitting into society: they get pushed out, become hermits in the wilderness. Become Saints, later on.

These days, we have such a congested planet that you can't just send the crazy saint into the hills. How about a nice padded room instead?

Sorry that was long...it usually takes me 3 hours to have this conversation with a human in person. Tried to condense it...

Just as a clarification, swbluto, I was not saying you should have known who Borat was. I was saying that the idea that someone on this forum was likely to know Borat's relation to Simon Baron-Cohen was not outrageous or unrealistic. Not everything an autistic person says or does can or should be traced back to errors caused by autistic perceptions.

I just want to say I really liked your post.

Also, it's not every day someone references The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

Verdandi, are you doing OK? You sound like you have a little bitterness and resentment.

I'm fine, not bitter or resentful.

What did I write that gave that impression?

Well, it always comes to mind when I think of those two friends. One of them gave me that book a couple years before he went nuts. It was so odd to have the theories reinforced before my eyes.

Another idea related to madness: when my friends went schizophrenic, they both lost their sense of humor. Everything was very serious, all the time. I didn't have much of a sense of humor at that time, was a very intense person. Well, maybe I was just plain tense? I made myself cultivate a sense of humor, as a safety valve to keep from going crazy.

Kinda sorta worked. Having a sense of humor definitely helped me socialize more though.

I'm going to put the translations of your lines below your lines of text and I'll put it in bold.

I'm going to add my commentary in italics.