EMOTIONLESS?!

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As I write this I'm listening to Oliver Sacks on the radio who just said that people with frontal lobe issues or autism may "not be able to experience any emotion in the normal way" (something like that), but can be set free by music.

Did he seriously say that?

Well, I disagree with Oliver Sacks, but "normal" is a fuzzy word. It has a culturally loaded meaning but actually just means average. I wonder if he meant it that way. I like Oliver Sacks. I think he has a real compassion for the people he writes about.

It sounds like shorthand on his part—talking in shorthand and smudging it, as J.R.R. Tolkien used to put it. He knows better than that.


Cheers,

TH

Well, to be fair, he didn't say 'emotionless' - he said 'not be able to experience any emotion in a normal way'. In my case this is absolutely true. I seem to experience emotions very intensely or not at all.

I don't see anything to get annoyed about here.

No big deal, he did say "in a normal way" not "not at all". He could have meant expressing emotions in a strange way or feeling them too intensly. It doesn't necessarily mean emotionless.
I like Oliver Sacks, I've read the man who mistook his wife for a hat, it's one of my favourite books.

Oh, and I can experience emotions in a "normal" way, albiet from being overly emotional at times.

Is it possible he was talking about "processing" as opposed to experiencing or feeling? There are some neurologists conducing brain scan studies of Autistics that suggest Autistics may tend to process emotions in parts of the brain other than frontal lobes (where most people process them.) That seems to me to be what he may have been referring to.

I am anything but emotionless.

@Delirium: Gasp! That's impossible! You can't be sarcastic!! My worldview is SHATTERED!! !!

(/sarcasm)

@MrXxx, that's cool. Do you have links?

@The various people who suggest he means not feeling the precise emotions of an NT, then why would feeling something while listening to music be so impressive?

I wonder about the idea of being "emotionless" or having "non-conventional emotional responses." I wonder, because I'm not so sure about myself in this regard.

For example: Each time I hear about that one church in Florida and its plan to observe the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks as "International Burn a Koran Day," my body responds by shivering/shuddering. Here's what I don't know about it: would such shivering count as a "real" emotional response (suggesting dislike, fear, revulsion) or would the facct that I have Asperger's syndorme lead to the cocnclusion that my response wasn't really "emotional?"

I wonder if any attempt to respond "emotionally" would place me in a Catch-22: the original Catch-22 of Joseph Heller's novel is the situation where the only actions you can take to suggest that you are insane are willfully construed as evidence of reasonable thinking, which implies that you are not insane.

My "Catch-22", by analogy, would be a situation where any action I take such that I appear to be appropriately "emotional" will be understood by others as a sign that I am "not emotional", that I am "faking it." What then?