Joe, like many others with autism, is good at jigsaws, though has little enthusiasm for them. Frith suggests this is because he will always have an aptitude for identifying fragments. There’s experimental evidence to show that children with autism perform better than normal children at tasks requiring attention to what’s called embedded detail – pictures or shapes hidden within larger pictures. She argues, rightly in my view, that this could be seen as a strength, and anyone who has gawped at Joe’s ability to fly through the visual cacophony in a shop display of several hundred videos and pick out, in seconds, the one he wants, recognises a rare perceptive talent. While my eyes dart about, unable to focus easily on single titles, trying stupidly to take in the rows of tapes as a whole, his sweep smoothly and rapidly over the surface of typefaces and colours as if hoovering up detail in speed.
This suggests, maybe to our surprise, that how we see is an act of unconscious choice as well as a simple physical perception, a cognitive style, as Frith and Happe put it. We must be continually giving our visual perception some kind of guidance, but what kind? And where from? Frith suggests a source and the beginnings of a second theory known as ‘executive function’:
Psychologists have long distinguished ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ processes in the complex handling of incoming stimuli. The former process is controlled by incoming data, the latter by previous experience. A few decades ago, many psychologists assumed that bottom-up processes had priority. Now the general consensus is that top-down processes continuously modulate the bottom-up flow of incoming information. For instance, previous experience establishes whether incoming stimuli are expected or unexpected. If they are expected, then they are automatically processed more thoroughly. In this way the onslaught of the mass of incoming stimuli can be controlled. In autism this type of control might be lacking.
It’s been suggested that one consequence of this deficit is an inability to shift attention easily from one scene to another, from Joe’s house at school, perhaps, to the street outside on the way to the café, from the car to the front door in the lane in our village.
In The Curious Incident when Christopher faces that sensory blitzkrieg at Paddington station, he is, of course, confronted with nothing more or less than the rest of us negotiate with relative ease. Some might find it a bit of a muddle the first time, but by and large we sail through places like this, quickly discriminating between sensory data that is useful for our purposes and that which isn’t: train information rather than fast food if we’ve no time to lose, the sign for the lavatory rather than the cash machine. This is processing capacity of ruthless efficiency, and yet most of the time we’re barely conscious of much more than a flitting of the eyes and a homing instinct.
‘What is it that attunes attention?’ asks Frith. ‘How do we know what is important so that we can attend to it? Some highlevel “executive” component in the mind has to decide what in the mass of incoming sensations is worth attending to.’
She is surely right that we seem to have some kind of top-down faculty that helps us burn through the sensory equivalent of junk mail. In a series of extraordinary tests, it has been shown that we screen out any information that doesn’t seem relevant to a predetermined purpose. This is so even when the information might ordinarily be expected to gatecrash our attention.
Daniel Simons and Daniel Levin conducted an experiment in which people on a college campus were stopped and asked by a stranger for directions. Ten or fifteen seconds into their conversation, two men walked between them carrying a wooden door, momentarily obscuring the line of sight between subject and stranger. Once the door passed and the conversation resumed, the stranger had been substituted for another, dressed differently, of different height, different build and with a different voice. Half those taking part failed to notice any difference. We can speculate that people felt their purpose was to impart information to a stranger, which they pursued with such determination that it obscured the fact that the stranger metamorphosed before them.
In another now famous experiment a group of people was shown a tape of a basketball game and asked to count the passes by one side. About half failed to notice that a woman dressed in a gorilla suit walked slowly across the court for nine seconds, turning at one point to face the camera and beat her chest. If the viewers were given no task to perform, other than simply watching the game, they noticed the ‘gorilla’ straight away.
It’s evident, then, that our attention is ruthlessly directed by our purposes. We rationalise, force it to comply with some stringent contextual rule. We screen, we filter, we don’t so much ignore because we don’t even seem to notice that there is anything to ignore; we simply disregard visual stimuli by the bucketful, behaving as if what interests us is all there is, and we do so without trying or even being aware of what we’re doing.
Is it plausible that Joe, lacking that ruthless executive telling him what not to take in, tries to digest the whole lot? And that furthermore, lacking a sense of how the whole lot forms a single picture, he tries to take in the whole lot at a deep level of detail? This is a claim implied elsewhere in The Curious Incident and sounds to me, at least, like just the thing to induce a breakdown. If true, sticking or freezing would be no surprise, for what he would be attempting is breathtaking. It could be likened to the nightmarish feeling of being lost, late and perhaps drunk in a heaving city we think we ought to know, staring down every route from the crossroads where we stand panicking, scanning the myriad grains of visual texture, nothing recognisable, assailed by noise, scratching for some clue to our whereabouts but finding none. Incapable of making a choice amid the chaos of sensory data, we crumble.
It would be for Joe and others as for Temple Grandin, who writes that ‘when noise and sensory over-stimulation became too intense, I was able to shut off my hearing and retreat into my own world’. Others with autism speak of an occasional oversensitivity to light, noise or bustling activity. So though it is a cognitive style with undoubted advantages at times, perhaps it can also feel like rawness, a tenderness easily inflamed.
In his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks describes a patient, Jose, an autistic boy aged twentyone said to be hopelessly retarded but with an extraordinary gift for drawing. He was capable of reproducing objects with remarkable fidelity, but more than this, his pictures showed wit and imagination. He was an artist.
And yet the peculiarity of his art, says Sacks, was that it remained rooted in the particular. At one point, Sacks speculates that some of the drawings might have had symbolic meanings, a large fish and a smaller one leaping together from the sea being perhaps himself and Jose, for example. I find this improbable, and in any case, somewhat in contradiction, Sacks goes on to comment in quite different terms on the fastidious, botanical exactness of Jose’s first drawing for many years from life, of a dandelion:
His mind is not built for the abstract, the conceptual. That is not available to him as a path to truth. But he has a passion and a real power for the particular – he loves it, he enters into it, he recreates it. And the particular, if one is particular enough, is also a road – one might say nature’s road – to reality and truth.
The particular is in certain respects at odds with the symbolic. If a picture shows essentially this subject, this scene, this particular flower, it is hard to see how it also reaches beyond the particular to some other essence. If your fish are particular, then these fish are these fish, not analogies of human relationships. So Sacks seems to me on more consistent ground when he continues:
The abstract, the categorical, has no interest for the autistic person – the concrete, the particular, the singular is all. Whether this is a question of capacity or disposition, it is strikingly the case. Lacking, or indisposed to, the general, the autistic seem to compose their world picture entirely of particulars. Thus they live, not in a universe but in what William James calls a “multiverse”, of innumerable, exact and passionately intense particulars.
We spent several years teaching Joe intensively using a technique known as applied behavioural analysis, increasingly popular with the parents of children with autism, but relentless and exhausting, taking anything up to forty hours a week of one-to-one instruction. The child’s attention is directed wherever possible by an adult – no childish curiosity can be depended on for motivation – and there are strict rules about the management of behaviour. The main educating principle of ABA is that everything to be learnt is broken down into component parts and the lesson repeated innumerable times until, it is hoped, an idea sinks in. For example, we taught Joe prepositions – in, on, under, next to – by repeated demonstration with toy animals. The programme did bring certain benefits and there are reports of dramatic improvement in some children, but our biggest problem was that he found great difficulty in carrying these detailed lessons into any wider, more general context. It was as if what he learnt at the table-top was a particular that applied nowhere else. Thus ‘next to’ was a concept he never quite grasped except in relation to a certain plastic sheep and cow, and even then it was possible he responded to the visual prompt of seeing these animals rather than the spoken words denoting their arrangement. Paul Bloom makes the ruthless comment that ‘a perfect memory, one that treats experience as a distinct thing-in-itself, is useless’.
To be ‘local’ in the extreme would leave us lost in William James’s ‘multiverse’. To be entirely global would be, in words that sound like sentimental piety, to conceive all we see as one. No one is so unfortunate as to languish at either end, we all sit somewhere on a continuum, but I find it unsettling and odd, liquefying my foundations, to think that the way I see works on a scale that others might not share.
I can be as clear about the video I want as Joe, yet Joe is an order of magnitude better than me at spotting it. Even when seeking things about which he’s not that fanatical – yoghurts on the supermarket shelf, for example – he makes me feel like a perceptual sloth. His visual memory is vastly superior to mine, his eye for detail sharper. Sometimes, when sitting down, he’ll stop, pick up and throw away a single crumb from the chair.
It’s plausible, given Joe’s disabilities, that he might need a different perceptual strategy. If you find it hard to categorise, if, as seems to be true of Joe, your imagination struggles to stretch to the abstract and thus to generalisation, it strikes me that you’d be short of a few of the necessary tools for effective filtering. If, on the other hand, you seem to have an eye for fragments and details, if you seem to be better at identifying component parts rather than aggregating them into the whole, I suppose you might conceivably try to get along by processing as many particulars as you can cram into your eye. I hesitate to embrace that conclusion not only because there have been one or two unresolved theoretical and experimental problems with the idea of central coherence, but partly because in this extreme interpretation of its effects I find what it describes overwhelming. Can it be true?
Anyone who has seen the astonishing drawings of Stephen Wiltshire would find it less incredible, for they are the incredible made real. Often drawn quickly from memory, frequently featuring architectural landmarks, cityscapes, or classic American cars, they have a detailed exactness that is stupefying. His last retrospective exhibition was called ‘Not a Camera’.
The title was an insistence that his work has character and personality as well as astonishing fidelity, and all this is true; but it is the quality of intricate precision that first compels our attention. Stephen at work is described not so much looking at a scene as consuming it with apparently casual but breathtaking swiftness and intensity, and by Oliver Sacks as bestowing on one of his subjects, ‘a brief, indifferent glance’, before reproducing it with style and exactitude.
And as Stephen reproduces on paper the images taken in with such accuracy, the same process seems to be at work in reverse, the details racing out. A past president of the Royal Academy, Sir Hugh Casson, said of him: ‘From the first mark the pencil moves as quickly and as surely as a sewing-machine – the line spinning from the pencil point like embroidery.’
In the introduction to Stephen’s book American Dream, Margaret Hewson wrote: ‘I should like to suggest, albeit tentatively, that autistic artistic savants “see” everything without necessarily focusing upon anything in particular. The vision of lesser mortals is unconsciously highly selective.’
The savant is not as common among autistics as often supposed. People of Stephen’s ability are extremely rare, but one or other more moderately heightened skill might still be present in about one in ten with autism, and in many cases their abilities do seem to depend on a highly discriminating eye or ear or memory for detail. A cognitive style that prefers the local to the global, the detail to the whole, might extend to many more than the savants. It is unquestionably an impressive talent.
Why doesn’t the mind normally work this way, asks the psychologist Paul Bloom. ‘Why don’t we store each instance as a precious and unique individual …? One answer is that all of these discrete memories could not fit into our heads.’ That’s not quite good enough, as Bloom agrees, because we don’t know if capacity is a problem, we don’t know what the human capacity for discrete mental impressions is. The deeper explanation is that detail holds us up when we’re busy determining the broad categorisation of things around us, and it is by swift categorisation that we recognise those things; limiting the detail makes the world comprehensible. Regard the chair in its uniqueness, in all its detailed particulars, with no reference to any category, and you might dwell on the grain of the wood or the texture of the plastic and scarcely be aware that it’s a chair at all, might not even appreciate that it can be sat on. Oliver Sacks’s man who mistook his wife for a hat, Dr P, a musician of distinction, was probably as close to such a case as one can get, seeing only detail and never the whole, and describing a glove as ‘a continuous surface, infolded on itself … five outpouchings, if that is the word’.
Maybe autistic children sometimes find themselves, if not at such an extreme, then not far from it, perhaps momentarily overwhelmed by particulars. When moving between one place and another, especially from one atmospheric light into another, perhaps Joe carries a jigsaw of the world in his hands which never quite fuses into a whole and, for a moment or two, in the haste to assemble a new jigsaw of a new scene, the pieces fall and scatter. When I think of him, nervy and tentative as I step blithely from one scene to another, pulling his hand, I wonder how I could ever again be impatient of a boy who sometimes finds himself among scenes of infinite broken eggshell.
How much easier, we might think, to swan along picking up no more than the gist of what’s going on around us. More than seventy years ago, Professor F. C. Bartlett said of the results of a famous series of experiments on memory that an individual does not usually take in a situation detail by detail. ‘In all ordinary instances,’ said Bartlett, ‘he has an overmastering tendency simply to get a general impression of the whole; and, on the basis of this, he constructs the probable detail.’ That is, recollection is very much that: we remember the broad outline and then gather the pieces we think most likely to have been present. We do not even attempt to store them all. The surprising conclusion is that sometimes perceptual laziness can also have its advantages, one of which is a kind of cognitive economy, a second that it makes the world recognisable, and a third being our own composure: if our world were prone to disintegration, it would be no surprise if we were too.
Quite likely Joe will always stick from time to time, whether at school or home, and the rest of us will fight our impatience, reminding ourselves as we call ‘Come on, Joe!’ repeatedly to the child who has apparently just gone on sullen strike that this is not necessarily borne of wilfulness. Whether the theory is right, that he feels as if someone has just rattled his mosaic, we might never know for sure, but I’m inclined to try at least to give him the benefit of the doubt.
A few weeks later Great Ormond Street worked its magic on his smile once m
ore. He woke up to become briefly preoccupied by the novel sensation in his mouth, trying, but failing, to pull off the new piece of tooth. We had managed the anaesthetic better too, and he went out on gas with far less ferocious panic.
And as term progressed, a strange thing happened: the reports took a sudden turn for the better. Joe, we heard, had become more compliant, he began to participate more fully in the routines and rituals of school life. He was joining in with the singing before meals, he performed his household chores with something approaching enthusiasm. He had whole weeks of cheerful, playful cooperation. If this episode had been another blaze of resentment, then it seemed to be subsiding, at last. Perhaps the fight was going out of him here too. Perhaps it had been no less a rebellion than the fearful one against that earlier anaesthetic, just more protracted. Perhaps now, I dared think, they had been able to whisper to his rage in that gentle, persistent way of theirs and convince him that he could find comfort and familiarity among them. Maybe, at last, some of the new pieces were beginning to settle.
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