Extraordinary Perception

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richie
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17 Mar 2010, 5:11 pm

Extraordinary Perception

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When Pulitzer Prize–winning music critic Tim Page was in second grade, he and his classmates went on a field trip to Boston. He later wrote about the experience as a class assignment, and what follows is an excerpt:

“Well, we went to Boston, Massachusetts, through the town of Warrenville, Connecticut, on Route 44A. It was very pretty, and there was a church that reminded me of pictures of Russia from our book that is published by Time-Life. We arrived in Boston at 9:17. At 11 we went on a big tour of Boston on Gray Line 43, made by the Superior Bus Company like School Bus Six, which goes down Hunting Lodge Road where Maria lives and then on to Separatist Road and then to South Eagleville before it comes to our school. We saw lots of good things like the Boston Massacre site. The tour ended at 1:05. Before I knew, it we were going home. We went through Warrenville again, but it was too dark to see much. A few days later it was Easter. We got a cuckoo clock.”

Page received an unsatisfactory grade on his essay. What’s more, his irate teacher scrawled in red across the top of the essay: “See me!” As he recalls in his new memoir Parallel Play (Doubleday, 2009), such incidents were not uncommon in his childhood, and he knew why he was being scolded: “I had noticed the wrong things.”

A Question of Focus
The subtitle of Page’s memoir is Growing Up with Undiagnosed Asperger’s, and indeed Page didn’t learn until age 45 that he suffers from what is called autism spectrum disorder, or ASD. ASD is usually defined by impairments in social interaction and communication, but many people with autism and Asperger’s syndrome (in which symptoms are milder) also tend to fixate on and remember seemingly irrelevant information in their world. Their attention seems to be awry, or to use Page’s words, they notice the wrong things......

To many of us this seems like old news.

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CockneyRebel
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17 Mar 2010, 5:49 pm

I remember reading that. It's a really good article.

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Peko
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17 Mar 2010, 7:16 pm

When I'm told I notice the wrong things I always wonder, "What the heck am I supposed to notice?"

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pensieve
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17 Mar 2010, 9:01 pm

I always notice things that people overlook. If I wrote something like that in second grade my teachers would think some type of miracle had happened.

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auntblabby
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18 Mar 2010, 1:57 am

it takes an extraordinary person to have the extraordinary perception required to see that the emperor is naked.

DarrylZero
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18 Mar 2010, 4:29 am

This reminds me of something that happened recently. A co-worker recently had a baby and some people were looking at a picture of the co-worker, his wife, and their new baby while they were still in the hospital, the wife in bed holding the baby and the co-worker standing next to them. Everyone was, "Awwwe, how cute!", blah, blah, blah. What did I notice? The half-dozen wristbands she had on. I remember thinking, "Wow. That's a lot of wristbands." I didn't say anything because I've learned that saying things like that is "inappropriate" or would make me look like even more of an unfeeling robot than everybody seems to think I am.

Robin_Hood
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18 Mar 2010, 5:42 am

DarrylZero wrote:

Not sure if that was meant to be funny but it really made me laugh.. I'm very similar, thanks :lol:

StuartN
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18 Mar 2010, 7:07 am

If you get into the right kind of employment, which on occasion I have been lucky enough to find, this is called all kind of extraordinarily complimentary things like "thinking outside the box". At least, for the duration that this skill is minting the employer money.

johanstruijk82
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18 Mar 2010, 11:01 am

auntblabby wrote:

it takes an extraordinary person to have the extraordinary perception required to see that the emperor is naked.

LOL! I 100% agree! People who don't want to be special are special!

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pascalflower
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18 Mar 2010, 11:26 am

A few years ago, I was doing some firefighting training, and we were practicing how to put out fires.

There was a good breeze on a bright sunny day that was twirling the flames around in a rhythmic way, as the sultry orange, yellow, and blue hues melt into each other. The flames were bright and burned with passion. The roar of the fire made the scene even more majestic. I was mesmerized by the flames and deeply wished I had a camera to capture it.

And I looked around and saw that no one else noticed this. No one else saw the beauty in the flames. I was paying attention to the wrong thing.

ursaminor
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18 Mar 2010, 11:56 am

pascalflower wrote:

Or maybe they were paying attention to the wrong thing.
I do not have this, at moments like these, field trips and the like, my memory fails me and I can only remember vague, big things.
If I went to an amusement park, I would not remember what cars had prime number plates or which route we took.
I actually only remember how the things looked, but cannot describe them because I cannot speak in pictures.

auntblabby
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20 Mar 2010, 1:49 am

pascalflower wrote:

I was mesmerized by the flames and deeply wished I had a camera to capture it. And I looked around and saw that no one else noticed this. No one else saw the beauty in the flames. I was paying attention to the wrong thing.

you were paying attention to the pretty thing, not necessarily the wrong thing. the artist in you saw that it was the right thing for you. in interesting story to illustrate this would be when composer george gershwin was on a subway train, he noticed the quasi-rhythmic banging and metallic train transport sounds, and used these as his inspiration to compose "an american in paris." [could've been "rhapsody in blue", i get mixed-up sometimes]

richie
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20 Mar 2010, 8:35 am

This is the sort of perception that Temple Grandin speaks of when she speaks of "thinking in pictures".

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nostromo
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21 Mar 2010, 4:58 am

auntblabby wrote:

pascalflower wrote:

There can be all sorts of activity going on around my young non verbal son, noise, hubub, kids doing stuff, but I will catch him looking intently at the way the tree branches are moving in the breeze. Or at the clouds moving. I guess he likes these things, but is not interested in the other things closer by.

Metalwolf
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21 Mar 2010, 11:04 am

pascalflower wrote:

There was a good breeze on a bright sunny day that was twirling the flames around in a rhythmic way, as the sultry orange, yellow, and blue hues melt into each other. The flames were bright and burned with passion. The roar of the fire made the scene even more majestic. I was mesmerized by the flames and deeply wished I had a camera to capture it.

Actually, that isn't focusing on the wrong things to me, it is focusing on the right things. What you noticed and how you described it is something good artists and poets do, which is why many people like to read them. They make the ordinary into the sublime.

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TallyMan
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21 Mar 2010, 1:15 pm

pascalflower wrote:

I was mesmerized by the flames and deeply wished I had a camera to capture it.

I can picture everyone running around frantic in a real fire situation and you blissfully looking at it saying "Isn't it pretty". :lol:

I do like flames myself though... nothing nicer than having a garden bonfire and watching the flames and bits of wood jetting out flames and the squeaks and pops.

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