Issue #13 – Atypical
ISSUE #13: Atypical
This week – All about me – some candid revelations and reflections.
CONTENTS:
• Selfie
• Curiouser and Curiouser
• Color Studies I
• Emily and Me
• Color Studies II
• Neurotypicality and Ethics
• Hypotheosis II
NEWS AND NOTES:
Recommended: There have been many new scientific studies correlating gut bacteria with an impaired immune system and consequent diseases. Here is a recent article about a similar relationship between gut health and schizophrenia, with implications for other mental illnesses and differences. Gastroenterology issues in schizophrenia: why the gut matters.
Cover image: The Autism Puzzle (google images)
Post Images: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, 2003, Published by Jonathan Cape, London.
Selfie
I have had moments of self-recognition prompted by the sharing of someone else’s experience, just like Katherine May, the author of The Electricity of Every Living Thing. While hers came as she listened to an interview on the radio, mine came when reading an autobiography – Someone Somewhere, I think (by Donna Williams). But the recognition was the same, in that that we both identified with another who described their life and personhood as an autistic.
Curiouser and Curiouser
I am like Christopher (the main character in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) in these ways:
I like puzzles. I am always looking for things to do that have (or can have) a puzzle to solve. Designing a garden or a building or furnishing rooms is puzzle-solving. So is writing a story. And figuring out a TV reality show winner before the finale.
I like murder mysteries,
Color Studies I
Emily and Me
For Mondays this October (those past and a few more to come) I am traveling to Washington, Connecticut with Bruce to attend a lecture series about Emily Dickinson. Washington is in Litchfield County, a rural and beautiful part of the state of Connecticut. We leave our city full of commotion, noise and rush, and slowly, gradually become of a piece with another place and time: northward and sensate, set apart and reposed. The drive is our portal.
Color Studies II
Neurotypicality and Ethics
Empathy and morality
It was with great interest that I read an article in the New York Review of Books, Psychologists Take Power (February 24, 2016), which discussed morality and empathy in psychological terms. As a high-functioning visual autistic I have an atypical take on these intersecting topics. For me morality is a transactional social construct – relative, fluid and changeable, dependent on the match (mismatch) of human capacity and available resources,
Hypotheosis II
One distinct and prominent feature of human language (and so human thought) is that of recursion – which is simply understood as a nesting of ideas, one within another. Recursion is expressed in language by subordinate clauses, which can be constructed ad infinitum, by definition.
Here is one such construction that builds sentences within sentences:
• Mary helped George.
• Cathy knew that Mary helped George.
