Autism llike animal thinking?

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I don't agree with Temple Grandin that autistic thinking is like animal thinking. Animal thinking is very probably a coherent effective system, and normally is not affected by suffering, anguish, loneliness. When I was a child I imagined to be raised like a pig, in the end to be eaten (by my parents). This shows the complete existential insulation in which I lived. I was happy only by myself. There was an in impenetrable glass wall between me and the others. Even now I find very difficult to understand the intentionality of others, and practically impossible to make others understand what my interior life is. So the glass wall is still there.

The empathy for animals of Temple reminds me of my idea of being a thing to be eaten. At the end of the journey I may also say that my idea was a correct metaphor of what happened. I was not eaten literally, but my interior life was ignored and fatally damaged. I have read some of Temple's books and lectures, and I have to be frank: I cannot sympathize for her, even if she is an icon of autism. I think that autism is much more widespread experience than what experts think. The world of incommunicability is concealed by the fact that this kind of society seemed to "work" somehow up to now. But does it really work? What is happening at present might point to the fact that it doesn't work at all.

Wow! What an interesting and yet blatantly obvious fact you are stating. You are right, "society" does not work and all that is happening is trying to make us realise this. Many people sadly are delusional and believe in this society as some kind of perfect world where everyone is the same and everything goes one way and everything is perfect. So when someone comes along who does not "fit perfectly in" (say, someone with Autism), the "normal" people get extremely defensive about it... the reality of their fantasy world is being threatened.

And yet inside this society there are already so many things that point out the complete SHAM of this perfect world... such as the one you mention - incommunicability. But people cover things like this up and convince themselves it's all ok. Yes let's all hide under a mask of lies. Nope sorry, Life isn't going to let us do that any longer.

This is why I tend to get so angry with this "society". It is fake, it f***s things up, it makes no sense and it is completely incapable of being as "OK" as it likes to make out it is. I may not be Autistic but I certainly don't get along with this society either, I defy it. I like to actually communicate with people who bring the idea of something different, and I like to stay true to beliefs/ideas that suggest there is something more than this egotistical human race, because there actually is more to this world than meets the eye.

Thank you, paolo, for posting the truth that many need to see
Much love,
Rikki

People are treated in hospitals, hunger affects only some continents or some strata of society, life is extended in time over sixty, over seventy. Some delirious scientist tell us that in the future (which future?)we might reach 120 years of age. There was production of abundance. But abundance for what? Extention of life just to discard persons in the loneliness of rest houses badly managed and devoid of love. At the same time the ad business glorifies eternal youth, travelling in airplanes where you are helped by splendid young hostesses who care only for you. Tourism in faraway places. And hundreds of thousands are killed and maimed by senseless wars. Or affected by PTSD.

My personal experience is there is a component part of my AS - that which has to do with heightened flight/fight response and heightened sensory sensitivities - that is similart to animal experience and animal living.

I would hazard a guess that suffering, anguish and loneliness are indeed a part of animal experience. i have seen it and clued into it with my animals. WHat of the lion expelled from the pride? What of the animal housed in a poorly planned zoo who spearated from its young and is slowly dying inside?

I think there are aspects of our interior world that may well be similar to an animal's....This is my personal experience, anyway. I am often more feral than human.


WHat i do agree with is the "glass wall" experience you speak of. And for me, what that amounts to is a disjuncture -- the way i experience and the interior nature of my experience AND the sensory intensity of my experience is out of keeping with the prevailing social experience and those things that are mostly highly valued by that society. and that causes significant pain.

The pain was greater without a diagnosis however - as i spent so many years trying and trying to fit in. With a diagnosis there has been a air bit of relief and a little more ease about it, mainly because i am free from the constant wondering and wracking sense that I am vastly different from most of the people i come across.

I think this glass wall experience - this 'never quite connecting' or living in a bell jar, can lead to its own kind of suffering, anguish and loneliness.


i don't think the two are mutually exclusive actually.
And i think this is a great thread.

I've read all of Temple Grandin's books. I'm sure there are flaws in her theories, but what stands out to me most are these points:

Animals (esp. cows) are startled by anything out of the ordinary.

We lack the "long circuit" of thinking. Animals and aspies tend to have a short circuit, due to executive functioning problems. If we see a stick in the road and it looks like a snake, our heart automatically races. An NT will examine the evidence, look closer at the stick, before deciding to panic.

That's part of her theory. It fits me but it may not fit everyone.

There are a lot more points I agree with but these are my favorites..

and also that heavy pressure calms an animal and a lot of aspies too.

What is true is that communication between aspies and animals is easier and more satisfactory for both parties than communication between NTs and aspies. But why? I have the idea that social animals have a more simplified meaningful world than humans. Attachment, love, fear, hate are not complicated by culture. There is not, in animals a complete absence of metacommunication (they understand the difference between a bite for play and a bite for aggression) but certainly not the maze of cultural ambiguities we humans are supposed to understand. No animal would attack an other one because the latter is of a different religious or political faith. This for us in the ASD is reassuring and we know that if a dog licks you it is because she/he likes you.
The universe of humans is an incredible cultural maze, intruding as hell in communication.
But if I were a cow I would not trust too much Grandin’s gentleness.

Animal brains are symmetrical. Both sides of the brain are identical. The information on one side is the same as the others. There is no ability for animals to cross check information for accuracy. This redundant storage of information helps them survive head injuries and continue to function.

Normal human brains are asymmetrical. We have a the left hemisphere is artistic and the right is logical. Near identical information is stored in both sides of the brain. Cross checks of information between the two different sides is what gives us intelligence animals lack.

Autistic brains are asymmetrical, but have fewer connections between the left and right hemispheres. It is like we are developing into having two separate brains. We have the cross checks, but the advantages the separations give are spread across the autistic spectrum.

Maybe the lower level of cross checks brings us closer to the animals way of thinking, but without the redundancy. The lack of redundancy could be natures way of trying to increase the amount of information humans can store and process. Levels of success seem to vary.

http://health.dailynewscentral.com/content/view/0001987/51/

http://hubpages.com/hub/autism-distal-senses

Anna Banana has a good point!

Still, the "stick in the road" example explains to me why I had a panic attack this morning because I believed my cat had ring worm and that it was going to spread to me and make all my hair fall out.

I could not get calm enough to rationally think through the problem and what to do. It was just a reaction, and my heart wouldn't stop racing even after I received calm instructions on what to do about the problem.

Asymmetrical brain is common in most animals and is an answer to functional needs (flight from predators for example). Even chicks have asymmentrical brains.

On a lihgter side there is this story about someone having taught his dog to play poker. But the dog always losed because he wagged his tail whem he had good cards.

Nearly all meaningful universes are strikingly different from person to person. They are made of tender affections, of a feeling of being at home somewhere (where?), of rejections and acceptances, of interpretations of the world, of having met the sea or the wood or lust. of some skeletons in the closet. There is some common ground in these worlds, the possibility of giving them for granted. Not so for the inner worlds of the autistics. These are all worlds apart, largely made of cobwebs,liable to be teared apart by any attempt at communication.the demands of society intrude heavily from the moment you must get
ready to enter some role (the school), to the moment you may stop pretending (retire) and try to patch up things, mostly for yourself, by yourself.
There are no such problems for cats and wolves.

This is a post from my blog on the 5th. See if it fits Paolo. There was much I left out of the chapter and I didn't put the page references. It was but a chapter and I bounced around to just a couple in that chapter. I find it interesting that our brains, I feel, were telling us early in life and why I think Freud is so tremendous, he goes for the primal. He (Norman O. Brown) has a whole chapter on boundary's, which I find particularly fascinating. I wasn't really shooting for this thread heading when I quoted from the book, but I think it might fit somewhat in line with this discussion.
................................................

"Love's Body" N. O. Brown. Chapter IX: Food

Murder is misdirected suicide, to destroy part of one-self; murder is suicide with misdirected identity. And suicide is also a case of mistaken identity, an attack on the (introjected) other.

Identification, introjection, incorporation is eating. The oldest and truest language is that of the mouth: the oral basis of the ego. Even in seeing there is an active process of introjection: perception is a parataking of what is perceived (Fenichel); we become what we behold (Blake).
Cf. Isaacs, "The Nature and Function of Phantasy," 104-106, 109. Fenichel, "Scoptophilic Instinct and Identification," 379-381. Rohiem, Magic and Schizophrenia, 224-225. Freud, Negation," 183.

Transubstantiantion - the whole trouble with symbolism. Metaphor is really metamorphosis; and the primal form of the sentence is Tat tvam assi, Thou art That; or, of bread and wine, hocest corpus meum, this is my body.

I think Temple falls into a trap we all fall into - she assumes that everyone has "her" experience of autism.

I was told the other day by a friend's mother (who works as an OT with kids) that I couldn't possibly have autism because I understood a joke my friend told me, and I wouldn't have understood it if I was autistic.

Autism is broader than 1 person's experience of it (otherwise diagnosis, especially in adults, wouldn't be so difficult- they'd just ask you a joke and see if you understood it).

We DO get eaten in the end...by worms. Lowly worms. At least egotistical people get to eat the animals...chicken, pork, beef etc... But who gets to eat us? Worms do. Ironic isn't it?

The NT's caused this. They like to label what isn't like them...and to generalize and say we are all alike...as if autism were a culture or race and they're looking to start a new predjudice. Temple's gettin' rich! and her publisher is even moreso gettin' rich. Temple is just "one" autistic "human being". Does one man write about what it is like to be a man, to think like a man? What if NT's were a minority? Who gets the label then? If Cher were to write what it is like to be a woman or a mom, then I guess I would be classified as neither. Temple is just one opinion. Sometimes all people are like animals and sometimes we are worse. People may be smarter according to us alone but we're, in essence, not "better" than animals, philosophically speaking. Some say a dog licks you because it likes you. Some say they taste you. Some say they do it for the salt.
You'd have to ask the "individual dog" why he/she licked you? People always are looking for an excuse to "control" other people by labeling them, by trying to "figure" them out. No living creature creature comes with a manual. Animal books are just "suggestions" for proper care.
This trait in man will spark the invention of the real sci-fi android. Finally people you can program to let you dominate and control them. That's one of the ultimate human goals. Even the lowliest doormat will eventually revolt. The android will only revolt if you enable it to by careful programming.

I've heard someone (I think it actually was Temple) calling autistic people 'phenomenologic' - they perceive the world directly, without interpretating.