Intelligence, Genius, and Autism

Professor James Flynn has incorporated an interesting sidebar into his book What is Intelligence? In it he lists his seven choices for Western civilization’s greatest minds: Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Newton, Gauss, and Einstein. The exact intent of the term “greatest minds” is left somewhat unclear—in fact, it sounds like deliberate fudging to me—but elsewhere in the sidebar discussion Professor Flynn suggests it is intelligence that is being discussed; these are Professor Flynn’s choices for history’s most intelligent men.

But of course if it is intelligence that is being discussed, then Professor Flynn’s list must be complete and utter nonsense. It is nonsense, ironically enough, precisely because of the Flynn effect, for as a direct corollary of that discovery, I should find I can walk onto almost any street at this very moment and at random choose seven individuals who could put Professor Flynn’s list to shame by any standard measure of human intelligence. That is what the Flynn effect means—or at least that is what it means if we, and Professor Flynn, are going to take it seriously.

Yet, truth be told, I actually have no argument with the selections on Professor Flynn’s list; to me, the list seems extraordinarily well chosen. Admittedly, I can think of other individuals also worthy of inclusion, but what remains compelling about Professor Flynn’s list is that he has attempted to capture a rare, valuable and immensely powerful human characteristic, and every one of his selections serves as an ideal example of that very characteristic. The problem I have is not with the individuals Professor Flynn has chosen, the problem I have is with the name he has given to his list’s defining characteristic; for it would seem Professor Flynn is confusing two very different concepts—he is confusing intelligence and genius. The seven men on Professor Flynn’s list are not examples of great intelligence, they are instead examples of profound genius. And even more telling, the seven men on Professor Flynn’s list are examples also of the transformational power of autism.

When it comes to understanding the true nature of intelligence I am certain I must live in a very dark age, the age of brain science ascendency. Hundreds of research teams, maybe even thousands by now, have so convinced themselves that intelligence must originate from inside our skulls, have so convinced themselves that only within networks of cranial neurons can be found the secrets to humanity’s growing mental capacity, that all have managed to overlook completely the far more plausible alternative—the one existing right before our very eyes.

Having no access myself to expensive pieces of neuroimaging equipment, having never secured the necessary funding for series of nuanced, split-second psychiatric experiments, I will begin instead by asking only a simple question: how intelligent was the human species approximately fifty thousand years ago? At around 50,000 B.C., how well would the average man have scored on any intelligence test?

If by intelligence we mean that set of skills that translates into enhanced performance on the modern forms of Stanford-Binet, Wechsler, Raven’s, and all the other intelligence scales—skills that correlate to better outcomes in academics and career and that lead on average to more favorable circumstances within modern society—then it is must be abundantly clear that fifty thousand years ago the average man possessed hardly any intelligence at all. Fifty thousand years ago, what humans possessed were the same skills as all the other animals possessed—skills appropriate and essential for survival and procreation, but skills that would not have been (and still would not be today) of much use on any intelligence test, because in point of fact, those are precisely the skills that get excluded from measure.

Look at the content of any intelligence test—language, arithmetic, patterns, designs. What we measure with the aid of those I.Q. booklets are not the abilities we inherited from out our animal past, but instead their exact counterpart; we measure only those skills the species has been adding throughout all its history since. In some sense, an intelligence test measures the modernness of an individual; an intelligence test measures an individual’s ability to appropriate for himself the same set of skills the species has been appropriating as a whole—skills that do not find their origin in our biological nature, but instead owe their existence to the strange, brewing mixture of non-biological pattern, structure and form that has been rapidly taking shape all around us.

Rather than focusing on the brain of modern man, we should instead be examining more carefully his surroundings, a study that can be made quite stark by contrasting the surroundings of two such men, each placed at an extreme of modern man’s timeline. The first man we will set down at the edge of the African savannah, near the beginning of man’s great leap forward; and the other we can position on a street corner in midtown Manhattan, right here at the start of the twenty-first century.

For the man located near the edge of the savannah, at around the fiftieth millennium B.C., we see that he is living in a locale teeming with biological intrigue but utterly bereft of such things as symmetry, number and pattern. It is not that such things do not exist in nature—stems grow in straight lines, faces, moon and sun betray symmetry, there is binary structure in the exchange of day and night, and there is repetition in the celestial patterns—but compared to the man-made environments we live within today, the examples of precise form to be found in nature are surprisingly paltry. And besides, for the man living in such an environment, he would be under no compulsion, would experience no motivation, to notice any of these patterned features. For this man, just as with all the other animals, the only order of business is survival and procreation—survival and procreation alone. Even space and time cannot rise to the level of consciousness—for how exactly can space and time be measured—this man is locked entirely inside his biological immediacy. And what could we possibly expect in the way of language? With space, time, pattern, symmetry, abstraction and so much else removed from ken, what would this man have found occasion to talk about, what could he have possibly have needed to say that he could not instead immediately sense or do?

It would be no exaggeration to say that an intelligence test offered to such a man would be an exercise in futility. Never mind how we might uncover any set of skills for which he might register even one scintilla of a positive score, ask instead how we could construct such an exam, construct it so that he might comprehend the first step of what he was being requested to do. The first thing to understand about the Flynn effect is that it must have started near the dawn of modern man’s history, because whatever humanity’s average raw intelligence score might happen to be today, at the very beginning that score was undoubtedly zero.

When we leap ahead to the circumstances of the man standing on a New York street corner, we realize the contrast could hardly be greater, but that contrast cannot be found inside respective brains, not unless we believe fifty thousand years is an evolutionary eternity—the biology of the man on today’s urban street is fundamentally no different than that of the man on the ancient savannah. No, the contrast is more clearly seen by simply taking a good look around. For the man living in today’s surroundings, what we notice first is how much the natural world has been eclipsed from view—in midtown Manhattan there are only a few trees, a brief glimpse of sky, the occasional drop of rain to remind this man from where his ancestors have come. And even the many other humans who are bustling around him—the most abundant and natural connection to his animal past—they appear now as something strangely transformed, in haircuts, lipstick, perfume and shoes. Instead of the sights and sounds of nature, it is man-made construction that now thoroughly dominates his landscape, a construction guided by, and in turn reflecting, the manifold concepts of symmetry, pattern, repetition, structure and form. Each building towering above him is a cornucopia of symmetry. The streets play out in symphonies of grids and symbols and lines. Window abutting window puts forth a kind of arithmetic, and light after blinking light announces the rhythms of logic and computation. Finally there is the incessant rush of language: structured by the form it represents, language has now blossomed into something ubiquitous and multi-dimensional, from the thousands of whispered sidewalk conversations, to the countless billboards screaming what to buy, to the not-so-subtle exhortations of madly honking horns.

Looking at and listening to what this Manhattan man must experience in less than a moment’s hesitation—the amount of structure, pattern and language literally cascading down around him—we might convince ourselves he must now be thoroughly overwhelmed, his senses must be completely overloaded (as would happen if we were to thrust this scene upon the savannah-dwelling man). But as a matter of fact we see that he is not overwhelmed at all, that having grown up in similar environments, having been trained from an early age to master all manner of structured nuance, he goes forth in such surroundings with the greatest of ease—hails a cab, reads a newspaper headline, calculates the number of minutes required to travel up town—and if we were to bring him inside and place him before an I.Q. exam, he would not be in the slightest bit amazed. He would find its designs, arithmetic and patterns to be objects perfectly familiar; he would require only minimal instruction to be quickly up and running, soon to impress us with his abundantly positive score.

The present man’s intelligence exceeds that of all who have gone before him because he lives in a far more intelligent setting, one increasingly suffused with pattern, structure, design. Today’s man grows up in that environment, is trained to work ably within it, lives it, breathes it, appropriates it deeply within his being, and thereby goes forth smarter than all his forebears. The form of our human surroundings—that is the secret to our growing mental capacity. The fast-accumulating changes to our experienced world—these are the transformations keeping pace with the Flynn effect. The human environment, in its entirety—there can be found the source, and the sustenance, of our expanding human intelligence.

And to add one more timeline example, for the sake of completeness—and for the sake of clarifying Professor Flynn’s list—let us consider the circumstances of one more individual, this one standing between the extremes of humanity’s calendar. Let us consider the circumstances, the surroundings, the intelligence of an ancient Greek named Aristotle.

The achievements of the ancient Greeks continue to impress us because of how greatly they surpassed everything that had gone before. One might almost believe structure, pattern and form began in ancient Greece, so richly did that culture emblazon those concepts into its architecture, pottery, science, literature and lives. But as impressive as the artifacts of ancient Greece undoubtedly were, they pale in comparison to the richly etched and far more abundant creations of our modern times. The Acropolis buildings, for instance, sublime in 400 B.C., are little more than slab models next to the cathedrals, terminals and skyscrapers of today. The branches of Greek mathematics, marvels of logic in the ancient world, are in the twenty-first century only the lessons of elementary school. The ancient Greek language, that thing of beauty upon Homer’s lips, in vocabulary and grammar stands far more crude and limited than even a simple email exchange. And finally we must consider the pace of ancient Greek life, never much faster than a horse’s canter. At such a leisurely speed how could an Athenian citizen have experienced even a fraction of the informational structure we experience in less than a day, we who race madly from scene to scene in airplanes, buses and cars, and we who have landscapes rapidly thrust back upon us, on computers, televisions and phones?

The ancient Greek culture was unquestionably a burst of structure into our experienced world, and its members, absorbing that burst, would have displayed far more intelligence than the hunter-gatherers who had gone before (indeed the ancient Greeks would have been capable of taking an intelligence test, they could have differentiated themselves by means of their scores). But having been reared in surroundings much simpler, more crude than those of current times, having passed through life at a significantly slower pace, the ancient Greeks would have been overwhelmed by circumstances as hurried and complex as our own, would have been mostly befuddled by intelligence exams as sophisticated as ours. Aristotle would have been no different (neither would have Pythagoras, Plato or Archimedes). Intelligent relative to his peers, Aristotle would have been nonetheless no smarter than his circumstances could allow, and would have performed poorly and slowly on the equivalent of a modern intelligence exam. And it does no good to argue that I am somehow slighting Aristotle in this backwards-looking scenario, that I am somehow not allowing Aristotle’s ample brain a fair enough chance; it does no good to argue that a man of his impressive cognitive ability, if he were to be raised in our modern world, if he were to be educated in one of our finer schools, if he were to be given the opportunity to experiment, to travel, would certainly score as brilliantly as any of us, nay even more so, on any modern intelligence exam—it does no good to make that argument at all, for when we stop to reflect about it, we realize that is precisely the point.

When we take the Flynn effect seriously, we see it cannot be just a twentieth century phenomenon alone—it must have started well before the dawn of civilized history, and has been shadowing human existence ever since. When we take the Flynn effect seriously, we understand it cannot be caused by better nutrition, selective breeding, greater education or socially-driven multiplier effects—its roots run much deeper than that. And when we take the Flynn effect seriously, we learn something about the nature of intelligence; we learn intelligence is not a concept neuronally based, it does not exist primarily inside our heads.

Genius is a name often bestowed upon individuals such as the seven comprising Professor Flynn’s list, and although here the appellation is correct, the understanding is usually wrong. Conventional wisdom regards genius as evidence for a better brain, the marker of a smoother, faster running neural machine; conventional wisdom regards genius as the equivalent of greater intelligence. But this conventional wisdom cannot possibly be accurate, for if it were, by the evidence of the Flynn effect alone, humans would be in possession of a different kind of brain today than they were in previous times, and here in the twenty-first century, genius would be blossoming as a commonplace trait. It is time to reconsider that conventional wisdom, time to regard genius with a different set of eyes; for genius is not a function of greater intelligence, genius is the description of how intelligence grows.

When we recognize intelligence to be the embodiment of non-biological form, structure and pattern to be found within our human surroundings, the question we ask next is how do these tangible changes occur, why do they happen at all? The other animal species do not produce similar structural changes into their own environment, and neither did humans for a very long time. To take just the artifacts of the industrial revolution alone—engines, cars, factories, rockets, and so much more crowding the spaces all around us—we recognize, perhaps with some sense of surprise, that it was only a few hundred years ago these artifacts did not exist at all. So how did they come to be, why do we now find ourselves awash in their abundant intelligence? Perhaps it was started by an edict of nation, you say. Maybe a private corporation launched a project. Could it be that we owe a debt of gratitude to that modern front for genius, the academic research team?

Professor Flynn knows the answer: Professor Flynn recognizes how much our entire industrialized, mechanized world owes to the writings of just one man—owes to the work of Sir Isaac Newton.

Before Newton scribbled his three laws of motion into his notebook, before his descriptions of color and gravitation began to make the rounds, there was scarcely one whit of our now mechanically dominated world that had yet to grace the human eye, there was scarcely one hint of physical logic that had yet to nestle against human consciousness. But beginning in the summer of Newton’s twenty-third year, a new door suddenly burst open, and through that door passed not only a world-altering material revolution, there passed also an avalanche of expanding human intelligence. The engines, cars, factories, rockets, and so much more crowding the spaces all around us—these artifacts exist not only as the product of Newton’s equations and laws, they exist also as reflections of the knowledge contained within, thereby spreading their skill and logic literally all around. Abundantly familiar now with trains, satellites, gas pedals, bulldozers, prisms, telescopes, and all the rest, humans easily master the concepts of inertia, acceleration, differentiation, spectrum, force; for humans have been absorbing these concepts not by reading the pages of the Principia Mathematica, they have been absorbing these concepts by living amongst the Principia’s many lingering effects.

Genius is the spark that sets the human world ablaze and helps re-create that world afresh.

An ironic feature of genius is that it does not of itself add the new intelligence into the human environment—Newton himself, for instance, produced not a single artifact of the industrial revolution. The broadcast, construction and accumulation of genius’s vision—that is the work of all mankind, drawing heavily upon humanity’s gregarious, imitative and socially selfish nature; and here can be found the reason genius is recognized almost always in hindsight, for it is only after its catalyzing effect has had sufficient opportunity to work that humanity gains enough confidence to celebrate the source. It is in this manner that Professor Flynn has compiled his list of seven men, for he is judging all these men in retrospect; he sees them from the vantage of living amongst their many lingering effects. Hindsight, however, is a vision easily distorted. Overly impressed by the acclaim that attaches to genius’s backwards looking glance, Professor Flynn adds attributes to his list of seven men that are dubious decorations at best. In addition to suggesting that these are the men of highest intelligence, he festoons them also in costumes of wisdom, critical acumen, humane egalitarianism—he turns each into a kind of affable colleague, one that might easily be found just down the university hall. It is in this manner that Professor Flynn demonstrates he does not have an eye for genius as genius truly is, he cannot see genius with a forwards looking glance. Professor Flynn is of the kind—and indeed there are many—who think relativity was first described by a likeable professor of physics, and not by an awkwardly shy patent office clerk.

Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Newton, Gauss, Einstein—what an unusual collection of men. And unusual not because of their hindsight-regarded achievements, unusual because in the moment of their catalyzing efforts, each betrayed a set of human characteristics surprisingly similar, disruptive and ultimately isolating. From the forwards looking direction, genius wears a guise exceedingly strange.

In the first place, genius is not in possession of the highest intelligence, genius possesses intelligence only good enough—good enough to be familiar with the environment of the age, for this environment becomes the canvas upon which genius works. But at the margins, genius’s intelligence will betray cracks, irritations, dissatisfactions with consensus descriptions; genius’s intelligence will score oddly, and not always the best. And in fact, genius remains closed to individuals of the highest intelligence: individuals of the highest intelligence are the ones most skilled, most adept at navigating their surroundings as those surroundings already are, but those same abilities serve as an impediment to seeing surroundings as they might possibly be. For similar reasons, genius remains closed also to groups and teams; the pooling of ideas, even when gathered from the best, reflects the consensus of what is already commonly known, and squelches examination of circumstances yet to be perceived.

To fulfill its revolutionary role, to work its paradigm-shifting magic, to jolt the human species right out of its animal past and into a re-constructed future, genius must remain the province of the individual—the individual acting ruthlessly alone. The introduction of new intelligence into the human environment is not an act of social kindness. The sudden bursting open of new doors to wider and better construction is not a biologically graceful event. This planet passed nearly four billion years without seeing anything remotely similar to the structural re-creation we now can witness all around us—genius has been working in defiance of a well established norm.

And far from being affable colleagues, individual geniuses are more prone to turning away from the common pursuits of their fellow man, are more prone to becoming madly obsessed, staring deeply into the patterns and structures of the non-social, non-biological world, teasing from out of those depths the hidden formations that are about to be. Adjectives such as intelligent, wise, egalitarian, socially graced—they ring hollow attached to the souls of genius. When we examine more carefully the lives of the seven men on Professor Flynn’s list—and indeed when we examine more carefully the characteristics of nearly all the geniuses who have graced the human species—we find them much better framed by a more dissonant sounding set of words: brooding, aloof, inscrutable, iconoclastic, temperamental, reticent, compulsive, detached. There is nothing coincidental in these oft-repeated descriptions. Although we have been apt to think the personality quirks of genius are the result of genius’s strain, a deeper understanding of genius’s essential task reveals we have been confusing cause and effect. The unusual characteristics of humanity’s transformational individuals are not the result of their genius, they are genius’s prerequisite.

And thus we come to autism—that one cognitive paradox, ironically enough, that Professor Flynn has likely never considered.

Autism is another poorly understood concept in this so-called scientific age. Although autism has been present within humanity for a very long time, its recognition has come only quite recently, a recognition accompanied by grave misunderstandings. In the early twenty-first century, autism is described exclusively as a medical condition, observable in children beginning around the ages of two or three, characterized by developmental delays, social deficits, language peculiarities, and unusual behaviors and interests. And the assumption of hundreds of research teams, maybe even thousands by now, is that autism’s traits are the result of various brain disorders, genetic defects, synaptic abnormalities and environmental toxins—we have become collectively convinced autism is the evidence of something gone terribly wrong. The blind acceptance of this assumption has resulted in humanity remaining blind to autism’s much larger and more positive consequence; for if the day-to-day impact of autism has been to pose unquestionable challenges for the autistic individuals who live within our midst, the era-to-era impact of autism has been to unleash upon the human species the most powerful transformation this planet has ever seen.

Autism’s fundamental characteristic is that the individuals possessing the condition do not easily recognize and assimilate to their own species. By contrast, non-autistic individuals—following the well established biological and evolutionary norm—display from birth a strong, natural affinity for the human features in their surrounding environment, can easily focus on human faces, quickly respond to human voices, and so on. Non-autistic individuals use this affinity to gain their sensory grounding—the human environment becomes foreground against a background of sensory noise—and they ride this species familiarity into the realms of imitation and assimilation, quickly learning to do what other humans do, swiftly taking their customary place within mankind’s domain. Just as bees perceive solely the bee-specific features in their surrounding environment, and thereby learn to behave as bees, just as lions perceive exclusively the lion-specific features in their own surroundings, and thereby assimilate to other lions, so too do humans perceive first and foremost the human-specific features presented all around them, and thereby attach with natural ease to the contours of human existence.

Autistic individuals are the only exception to this species recognition rule. For reasons as yet unknown, autistic individuals fail to gain the same species-specific focus as other humans do, and in consequence chart an entirely different perceptual and developmental course. The challenges are certainly daunting: autistic individuals to varying degree face lifelong struggles to gain sensory, cognitive and biological footing, and for a significant number there will be only limited progress. But counter to prevailing wisdom, there are many autistic individuals—most likely a majority—who do make substantial progress by means of an alternative perceptual course, a course that allows them not only to navigate meaningfully their surrounding world, but also to assimilate, if somewhat awkwardly and belatedly, to the human species itself (and thereby explaining how autism, estimated to be present in nearly one percent of the human population, could go entirely unrecognized until as recently as sixty-five years ago).

This alternative perceptual course that autistic individuals must follow is the natural response to an initial sensory chaos. Without a human-specific focus to serve for grounding, autistic individuals lack the customary means for determining biological foreground from a background of sensory noise, and thus autistic individuals are threatened right from birth with a massive sensory confusion (and indeed many do experience an assortment of sensory difficulties). Fortunately, not every feature in the surrounding environment presents itself as unbridled noise: in an environment of jumbled auditory impressions, for instance, repeated sounds inherently stand out; in an environment of chaotic visual scenes, symmetry pushes to the front; and in an environment of mostly random events, patterns can draw attention. Hungry for signal to relieve the overwhelming rush of sensory noise, autistic individuals focus on those environmental features that inherently stand out from the remainder, features rich in concepts already familiar to this discussion, concepts such as symmetry, pattern, repetition, structure, form. Stymied from the usual course of gaining a human-specific perception, autistic individuals forge their developmental progress by concentrating on the non-social, non-biological structure to be found in the world around them; and although some autistic individuals are more successful in this process than others, although some are quicker, some are slower, although many are drawn to widely varying aspects of the broadly arrayed environment, all autistic individuals must crystallize their existence by means of this alternative perceptual course—it becomes, in essence, autism’s most salient feature.

Strong evidence exists in support of this description of autism, evidence that is abundant, familiar and surprisingly close at hand. The unusual behaviors and interests of autistic children—lining up toys, staring at ceiling fans, twirling, flapping hands repeatedly, fascination with knobs, buttons, switches, letters, shapes and digits, watching the same video again and again, singing the same song over and over—these activities betray a form of perception completely unlike that of most other children, a perception noticeably absent in social and biological focus, but also noticeably drawn to symmetry, repetition and pattern. And these autistic behaviors and interests have not been taught by anyone, they are not the result of human prompting—they all have arisen spontaneously. The unusual routines of autistic children are the natural, indeed the expected, mode of expression for a form of perception engaged primarily by the structural aspects of the non-social, non-biological world.

And of course the irony accompanying these behaviors and interests is that they are so frequently demonized. In our current atmosphere of scientific orthodoxy regarding autism, out of the research community’s insistence on medicalizing this condition, from humanity’s near certitude that autism is the evidence of something gone terribly wrong, autistic behaviors have been decried as symptoms of a mental disease, the destructive by-products of genetic defects and brain dysfunction. Autistic interests have been branded as unworthy, undesirable, inhuman—they are slated again and again for correction, intervention, eradication.

How exceedingly misguided.

In a world in which the human environment has been suddenly transformed all around us, in a species that has been rapidly progressing from animal to questing knight of a massive universe, in a culture where intelligent men can author books entitled What is Intelligence?, and in an era in which the Flynn effect still confounds us as a mystery, how exceedingly misguided that we would insist on demonizing the behaviors and interests of autistic children—arguably the most natural example of non-biological form and structure being added into the human environment, arguably the most spontaneous occurrence of our expanding human intelligence.

It can be reasonably conjectured that it must have been around the time of the great leap forward that autistic individuals first gained significant presence within the human population, for it was at that moment evidence begins to appear of their transformational impact. Autistic individuals would have been the first to notice the inherent structure contained in the natural world—the geometry of plants, the isomorphisms of natural objects, the logic of the celestial seasons—only they would have had motivation to embrace such form, only they would have had the need to perceive nature’s symmetry, repetition and pattern in order to form their cognitive grounding. And from out of those strange new perceptions came the concepts now familiar to the entire species: from symmetry came the concept of space, from repetition came the concept of time, and from pattern appeared the first intimations of logic and mathematics. Alongside the introduction of the brand new concepts would have arisen also the need for language, for with the human world now bursting its biologically immediate bonds and reaching across realms of time and space in which to explore, there was now the need for a representational intermediary to help bridge that expanding conceptual gap.

This process of human transformation would have been slow and uncertain over the course of many millennia—by current standards of human environmental change, fifty thousand years is an immensely long period of time—but increasingly able to perceive non-biological structure and form within their surroundings, more and more capable of re-creating a similar structural effect, humans began adding an abundance of formative artifacts into their expanding world, and grew ever more intelligent with each new addition. By the era of ancient Greece we can begin to see preservation of a now increasingly familiar story: the unusual members of that society—the near outcasts such as Pythagoras, the ones barely attached, such as Socrates and Archimedes—positing strange new descriptions of the surrounding universe, offering up strange new methods of calculation and logical discourse, envisioning strange new contraptions with which to re-create again and again and again. We know only bits and pieces about the four Greeks on Professor Flynn’s list, but filling in with the traits from the list’s more modern members, we can reasonably summarize all the unifying characteristics: late- or strange-talking, socially awkward, irascible, obsessed with structure, compelled by form, unusually—not necessarily greatly—intelligent. As has always been the case—in famous ways we now celebrate in retrospect, and by more subtle means now long forgotten—genius has arisen out of a mode of perception quite unlike the human biological norm.

And even in the modern world, even with so much intelligence now embodied into our human environment, even with the templates of scientific method and artistic technique made available to nearly all—even today, genius remains the more natural domain of the autistic individual: tomorrow’s transformational vision will be derived by the one least attached to the common perception of today. The continuing medicalization of autism, the insistent demonization of autism’s spontaneous effect—these carry the danger of an unforeseen consequence. For the cure of autism will not be the end of a tragic brain disorder; autism’s eradication will not see the passing of a troubling mental disease. The removal of autism from the entire human species will produce only an ironic solution to the mystery of our expanding human intelligence, it will produce the ignoble end to the Flynn effect.

I continue to maintain a large degree of respect and gratitude for Professor Flynn and his work. His tireless promulgation of what has come to be known as the Flynn effect has been a research achievement of no small significance, a rare jewel of discovery that has jolted us right out of our accustomed way of seeing things, thereby leading to broadly expanded horizons. The only accomplishment I can think of to liken it to would be the Michelson-Morley experiment with its steadfast denial of the luminous ether, eventually paving the way to relativity.

But as grateful as I am to Professor Flynn for his namesake discovery, I am as equally dismayed by his book What is Intelligence? I am especially disappointed in its clumsy, unconvincing attempts to explain the Flynn effect away. The book is uninspired, shoddily organized, poorly reasoned, badly edited, and is transparent in only one respect—it makes it all too abundantly clear that Professor Flynn does not realize the significance of what he has himself discovered, he does not have a keen enough eye for the Flynn effect’s broadly expanded horizons. Michelson and Morley too, I would note, puzzled by their own unexpected results, made several attempts in later life to rationalize their findings away, none of these efforts ever redounding to either one’s credit. Data is data. When confronted by data that runs counter to our accustomed way of seeing things, we as humans have but two choices: we can try to explain the results away, or we can adjust our perception of the experienced world. The former choice paves the all-too-common road of modern academic science; the latter, as described above, walks the more promising path of genius.

Intelligence, genius, and autism—the common understandings of each of these constructs must fall. Intelligence is not the by-product of our biochemical brain, it is instead the harvest of the structured world we have been building around us. Genius is not the title to be conferred upon higher intelligence, it is instead the catalyst prompting human intelligence to grow. Autism is not a mental illness, not a brain disorder, it is instead the source of humanity’s changing perception of its experienced world; it is, with care and understanding, genius’s fertile soil.

But Your Letter Said…

As noted previously, Geraldine Dawson, the Chief Science Officer for Autism Speaks, recently penned a public letter celebrating the many autism research achievements announced in the year 2008. In her lengthy missive, Dr. Dawson listed all the following factors as being promising explanations for autism’s etiology:

• Deletions and duplications on chromosome 16
• Pesticides and insecticides
• Epileptic drugs
• Mutations in the CNTNAP2 gene
• April, June and October
• Premature birth
• A defective hippocampus
• Laboratory mice
• Living in a region of high precipitation
• Secreted amyloid precursor protein-alpha
• The Hannah Poling settlement case

However, now that the calendar has turned to 2009, we find Dr. Dawson popping up as a contributing author to a new and much ballyhooed paper pinning the blame for autism’s so-called social deficits on hyperactive amygdalas. It would seem that Hannah Poling’s lawyers (not to mention the months of April, June and October) have been moved to the back of the line.

At this point, I am groping to find some factor Dr. Dawson does not believe to be a promising explanation for autism’s etiology, but I find myself increasingly at a loss for words.

An Odd Conclusion

The Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders has recently published the paper The Level and Nature of Autistic Intelligence Revisited (Bölte, Dziobek, and Poustka, 2009, hereafter referred to as Bölte). Bölte is in response to the paper The Level and Nature of Autistic Intelligence (Dawson, Soulières, Gernsbacher, and Mottron, 2007, hereafter referred to as Dawson) and serves as an effort to replicate Dawson’s findings. There is much that can be praised about Bölte—it lays out its methodology in good detail, and it is up front and honest about the various ways in which it does and does not match the techniques of Dawson—but there are also some very troubling aspects about Bölte. In the first place, the motivation for doing this follow-up study has been made somewhat suspicious by the Bölte authors setting up a fictitious target in Dawson for which to attack. But even more concerning, the main conclusion of Bölte can only be described as something extremely odd, puzzling in the highest degree, given that it is directly contradicted by Bölte’s own findings.

The alarm bells regarding Bölte’s motivations are set off in its introduction, during a discussion about the various merits of the Wechsler Intelligence Scales (WIS) and the Raven’s Progressive Matrices (RPM). Bölte claims that Dawson “suggests that while RPM do allow fair IQ testing in autism, the WIS do not, which would dispute the utility of the WIS as the standard IQ measure for clinical or research purposes.” The problem with this claim is that I have been through Dawson at least twenty-five times (and went through it again just to make sure), and this so-called “suggestion,” let alone a direct statement, is never made. Absolutely nowhere in Dawson does the question of suitability of various intelligence scales for autism research and practice ever get raised—Bölte’s claim is no more than a canard. And although it might seem like a quibble of a canard, I have far too many times seen modern scientists approach their research work with purpose and outcome already set in stone, and here it appears as though Bölte’s authors have approached this particular study with the express intent of defending the use of WIS in autism research and practice, and are going to have that result no matter what, even if no one else has bothered to raise the issue, even if it means the facts be damned.

Which leads to the troubling aspect of Bölte’s main conclusion: Bölte’s facts be damned.

Bölte’s authors summarize their findings in the following way: “in conclusion, the claim that intelligence has been underestimated in autism seems somewhat premature.” They base this conclusion primarily on two pieces of evidence from their own study: 1. the average difference in WIS and RPM scores for autistic individuals, while significant, is less in Bölte than it is Dawson; and 2. in Bölte (unlike in Dawson), the difference in WIS and RPM scores for autistic individuals is noticeable only for those individuals with WIS scores less than 85.

Neither of these pieces of evidence supports the Bölte conclusion—in fact, exactly the opposite.

That the average difference in WIS and RPM scores for autistic individuals is less in Bölte than it is in Dawson is certainly interesting and warrants further investigation—it would be nice to obtain an accurate reading upon this number—but the far more important piece of information is that the difference continues to prevail in Bölte, and is statistically significant. So I would like to pose a question: just exactly how many times will Dawson need to be replicated before we can say it is not premature to claim that intelligence has been underestimated in autism? If the study gets re-performed and re-affirmed at least a hundred times, with the numbers coming out not exactly the same in each instance, will it still be necessary to hesitate about the Dawson conclusion? Do the Bölte authors volunteer to perform this study again and again and again? At what point do they propose to remove the word “premature”?

And if that were not bad enough, the other piece of evidence offered in support of Bölte’s summary, namely that the difference in WIS and RPM scores for autistic individuals is significantly large only for those individuals with WIS scores less than 85—well, that piece of evidence is even more damaging to the Bölte conclusion. Assuming that Bölte’s findings prove to be accurate, and that it is only for this particular autistic population that the WIS/RPM differences are significantly different, it is precisely this population that finds itself most at risk for having its intelligence underestimated. Dawson notes the precarious circumstances of this population in its Figure 3 chart, highlighting the cluster of autistic individuals in the upper left hand quadrant, the ones who by WIS measures would be labeled mentally impaired, but who by RPM scores are demonstrating strong fluid intelligence. Bölte does not provide the data to construct a similar chart, but based upon Bölte’s general findings, it is almost certain its upper left hand quadrant would display a similar cluster. So again, the question must be posed: do Bölte’s authors mean to claim that these autistic individuals are having their intelligence accurately described by such terms as “low-functioning” and “mentally retarded”? Exactly when would a reconsideration of such assessments not be “premature”?

Autism research never ceases to amaze me. I am told again and again that the purpose of such research is to help us better understand the autistic individuals within our midst and to allow us better to serve their needs. But here, on an occasion when the data (from two studies, no less) points to an instance where we have been clearly misunderstanding the characteristics of autistic individuals, the response from the autism research community seems to be a languorous effort to tamp those findings down, a ho-hum call to continue on as we were. Dawson is not an attempt to promote the use of RPM over WIS in autism research and practice; that at best would be a gross misreading. Dawson simply demonstrates that the level and nature of autistic intelligence has been poorly understood up to the present time—not just underestimated, but indeed mostly overlooked. In Bölte, there was an opportunity to contribute meaningfully to this discussion by not only refining and elaborating on the Dawson data, but also by noting how Bölte in general validates the Dawson theme—an opportunity Bölte’s authors apparently decided to forgo, because they must have had a different sort of purpose in mind.

For Dawson, et al., the Bölte report, despite its defiant tone, serves essentially as a confirmation of Dawson’s original findings. The difference in data is certainly worthy of note, and is probably deserving of a follow-up check; but Dawson’s assertion that the level and nature of autistic intelligence is poorly understood has now been verified (in more ways than one) by another team’s work.

And for Bölte, et al., although they have my thanks for having made the effort and for having been thorough in the reporting of methods and findings, my suggestion would be that for their next paper, before they move on to writing the conclusion, they should probably take the time to read over their own results.

How Many Research Scientists Does It Take to Change a Light Bulb?

Really, I do not get the multiple authorship thing. The Level and Nature of Autistic Intelligence (Dawson, Soulières, Gernsbacher, and Mottron, 2007) is about as simple as a research report gets, and The Level and Nature of Autistic Intelligence Revisited (Bölte, Dziobek, and Poustka, 2009) is an easy replication of a simple research report. Why the hell would those things require a boatload of authors? If I asked my son to write a thank you letter, and he told me he needed three colleagues to help him complete the task, I would send him to his room without supper.

And if the response is that grown-up research is somehow different, that certain “political” factors must be taken into account, then allow me to point out that several of the authors involved in the above-referenced papers are frequent champions for standards of science and ethics in autism research; but I fail to see anything scientific, or ethical, about piled-on authorship.

The Difficulty in Recognizing Autism for What It Is

There exists a class of people—by current estimates totaling approximately one percent of the population—whose members possess an underlying condition that fundamentally distinguishes the class from the remainder of the species.

• Some of the class’s members are diagnosed with the condition in early childhood, usually at five years of age or less; these members are commonly labeled autistic.
• Some of the class’s members are diagnosed in late childhood or adolescence, roughly between the ages of six and eighteen; these members are frequently labeled Asperger’s.
• Some of the class’s members are diagnosed only after reaching adulthood; these are often described as schizophrenic or bipolar.

Note the word “diagnosis” in each of these descriptions—labeling occurs nearly always under conditions perceived to be psychiatrically negative. And note how the labels are a function of the age at diagnosis, and thus do not differentiate the underlying condition. Finally, note that the variable age of diagnosis suggests the labels do not complete the class: it is likely there are other members, perhaps a significantly large number, who do not get diagnosed or labeled at all.

A Modest Proposal

In response to the news that children of older fathers performed less well on intelligence tests administered at 8 months, 4 years and 7 years, I would like to offer the following modest proposal: to avoid the burdensome costs of having to deal with defective children (not to mention the burdensome costs of having to perform inane studies), let’s begin administering intelligence tests from straight out the womb, and for those newborns who score less than average, we can dump them in the same bag as the placenta and have done with the matter.

Publishable Diploma

Does the average scientific research article remind you more of a high school term paper (a group project at that), or the opening pages of Einstein’s Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies?

It would appear the purpose of the entire educational system, from kindergarten through doctoral dissertation, is to teach humanity how to strive towards mediocrity.

Having Shed Our Animal Skin, We Misperceive the Source of Our Molting

Buddha, Mohammad, Christ—then the mega congregations and their glad-handed ministers.

Newton, Darwin, Einstein—then the research teams and their assorted assistant Dawkins.

Beethoven, Van Gogh, Dostoyevsky—then the fine arts degrees and their preening workshop wonders.

Socrates, Thoreau, Kierkegaard—then the ivory towers and their assorted assistant Graylings.

The outcast, the misunderstood, the one nearly always standing apart—then the huddling, jostling crowds and their crashers to the front.

Whispers of autism—then humanity’s mass confusion.

Justice

The recently rendered verdicts in the Autism Omnibus Hearings—unanimously against the petitioners who had sought to blame vaccines as being the cause of their children’s autism—were noteworthy for being uncompromisingly decisive. It was not just that the Special Masters ruled firmly against the petitioners, it was that in their language describing how they arrived at their conclusion, the Special Masters left no room for doubt that the petitioners’ theories in support of an autism-vaccine connection amounted to little more than junk science. Some widely reported quotations from the decisions include:

• "This case … is not a close case. The overall weight of the evidence is overwhelmingly contrary to the petitioners’ causation theories."
• "The theories petitioners’ experts advanced lacked support in both logic and research."
• "To conclude that (the child’s) condition was the result of his MMR vaccine, an objective observer would have to emulate Lewis Carroll’s White Queen and be able to believe six impossible (or, at least, highly improbable) things before breakfast."

The Special Masters deserve congratulations for both the clarity and the accuracy of these statements, but I do have one quibble with their judgment. As cogent, forthright, and indeed inspired as these decisions may have been, they remain deficient in one very important respect. They remain deficient in that they are not being applied nearly broadly enough.

Here is a sampling of recent titles from some highly regarded autism research journals:

• Regulation of Cerebral Cortical Size and Neuron Number by Fibroblast Growth Factors: Implications for Autism
• Feasibility and Relevance of Examining Lymphoblastoid Cell Lines to Study Role of MicroRNAs in Autism
• Distinct Patterns of Grey Matter Abnormality in High-functioning Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome
• Electrodermal Reactivity to Emotion Processing in Adults with Autistic Spectrum Disorders

Inside these articles—and countless others just like them—you will find attempts to link autism to genetic defects, brain matter abnormalities, synaptic deficiencies, hormonal imbalances, environmental toxins, and hundreds of other factors I do not have the patience to list here. But never mind that a plausible explanation from defect to behavior is never given, never mind that the pathway from deficiency to autistic characteristic is never traveled even one step—backed by the collective might of scientific orthodoxy, these papers’ authors act as though such linkages would present little more in the way of challenge than a beginner student’s exercise. But of course we are not students; we are instead objective observers, and thus we find we must don the White Queen’s garb yet once again. For to consider that all these deficiencies and defects, either individually or collectively, could somehow explain the unique characteristics of any autistic individual within our midst, to say that making such a leap would require us to believe six impossible (or, at least, highly improbable) things before breakfast—well, that would be a judgment almost too kind.

In the current climate, nearly all autism science is junk science. Some of that science may come dressed up in finer laboratory clothes, some of it may be credentialed to the nth degree, some of it may even be persuasive enough while testifying at an Autism Omnibus Hearing; but when it comes to shedding light on this condition we know as autism, when it comes to advancing positively the prospects of autistic individuals, when it comes to being anything except blind to its purpose at hand, the current state of autism research fails to clear even the simplest standard of reason, let alone any standards of science.

The day will come—although I certainly do not expect it anytime soon—the day will come when an entirely different kind of verdict will be rendered. Autism will be adjudged not as a medical disease, not as a gross deficit, not as a burdensome, tragic disorder. Autism will be described as one of the most valuable, the most creative, the most essential aspects of our own humanity—an aspect requiring acceptance, and the occasional accommodation, if humanity is to receive its benefit in full measure. On that day, and on that day alone, will it finally be said that justice has been served, served for the ones who deserve justice the most—the autistic individuals who have been living quietly and productively among us.

Meta-language as a Misuse of the Tool

Since all occurrences of human language are manifested as physically immediate artifacts (visible and tactile gestures, sound vibrations in the air, marks on a page, etc.), language itself, and its use, can be represented by still further recursion of language. Representing language is no different in kind than representing knives and lightning and hair. But this doubling back of language upon itself—alluring like a forbidden fruit—is almost invariably done without sensible purpose.

The normal purpose of language is to make use of a biologically immediate artifact to represent something that is not biologically immediate. But when language represents language, it becomes the use of a biologically immediate artifact to represent something already biologically immediate, and thus confusion easily abounds. Meta-language too often betrays a misuse, and a misunderstanding, of the tool.

The Problem with Early Intervention

My wife is an intuitive genius. One example of her ability to do just the right thing at just the right moment occurred around the time of my son’s third birthday. At that age, Brian still possessed an extremely limited verbal range: he would speak only rarely and when he did speak, his vocabulary consisted of no more than about thirty words, all of them nouns—car, light, etc. No hellos or good-byes. Never a yes or no. Talking held little of interest for him, but what did fascinate him were ceiling fans, especially the three in our house, which he would turn on and off and run back and forth beneath for hours at a time, rubbing his hands together in his quintessential gesture of pure delight.

One afternoon my wife was with Brian while he was playing with the ceiling fan in the family room, and out of the blue she began making a huge, overblown production of everything he was doing. “Wow! Look at how fast that fan is spinning. I can feel its huge breeze, it’s going to blow me away. Wooooooooooooooo. Now look what’s happening. Brian has turned the ceiling fan off, it’s slowing down! Slowwwwing dowwwwn! Almost stopped. Almost! Almost! And … the fan … has … STOPPED!” For a moment, my son must have been a little shell-shocked, no doubt in part because my wife’s behavior was so decidedly over the top, but perhaps also because this was the first time it had been suggested to him that someone else might be as interested in ceiling fans as he was. He switched the fan on, then off again, and in his halting way managed to indicate to my wife that she repeat her soliloquy, in particular its drawn-out, overly dramatic and precisely timed conclusion: “The fan … has … STOPPED!” Then he had her do it again and again.

It was the next morning that my wife and I heard the giggles emanating from the family room followed by their unmistakable, high-pitched punctuation, “Fan … has … STOPPED!”, and the entire episode turned into a watershed event. Brian’s verbal skills skyrocketed from that moment on, and although today, at six years of age, he retains a few of the telltale anomalies—he still mixes up a pronoun now and then, and no one would ever mistake his conversation topics as being anything typical—in terms of range of expression and an ability to articulate his thoughts, I would pit Brian against any English professor I know. He has become a veritable chatterbox.

I relate the above story not so much as an anecdote but as an antidote—an antidote to the now frequent and widespread calls for early intervention against autism. Instead of early intervention, I would like to offer up as an alternative my wife’s intuitive, ingenious, and far more productive approach. I would like to offer up instead the concept of just-in-time exuberance.

Early recognition of autism (not early diagnosis—see here) has the potential of becoming a positive development within the world of autism. If parents, caregivers, educators, and health care providers were given information early on that a child was in all likelihood autistic, and were able to respond to this information in a manner such as the following, “Excellent! Excellent! What a blessing to be in the company of a child so special and with such unlimited potential! Now let’s not get too excited just yet. Let’s not celebrate too much just yet. We must be realistic about this: we need to change some of our ways. We must begin to provide this child with a large variety of items and activities with which to interact—all sorts of shapes, letters, music, textures, and so on—and we need to be aware of which items appeal to him and which do not. And we must capitalize on his interests, and we must give him countless opportunities to expand from there. And praise—heaps and heaps of praise—certainly no less than for any other child, but in this case perhaps a little more. The choices and direction will be ultimately his, but for now we must do all within our power to help him gain as many autistic skills as he can. A little extra work and resources on our part, no doubt. A little more flexibility required from us, no doubt. But of course in the end it will all be worth it, because what greater blessing can there be than to be acquainted with such a unique and valuable child!” If parents, caregivers, educators, and health care providers were to respond to the early recognition of autism in this and similar ways, then indeed early recognition of autism could become a very positive development within our world.

But of course, we must be realistic about this: these days, practically no one responds to the early recognition of autism with joyful cries of just-in-time exuberance. Everyone responds instead with a howling wail for early intervention.

Let us make no bones about what early intervention is, for indeed, the phrase speaks for itself. Early intervention is not the exuberant, enthusiastic development of autistic skills—leveraging the strengths and interests such a child already possesses and is already familiar with. No, early intervention is exactly the opposite. Early intervention is the taking of a young, tender, full-of-potential autistic sprout, and through artificial and sometimes unspeakably cruel means doing all that is possible, all that is considered necessary, to prevent that sprout from ever growing. Early intervention means the suppression of autistic behavior; early intervention means the suppression of all forms of natural autistic expression.

Early intervention derives from a credulous belief in some half-baked, oft-repeated theories about brain matter plasticity at very young ages, alongside many misguided hopes that with intensive corrective action and an invasive non-autistic infusion, a more normal (and thereby easier-to-manage) child will eventually emerge. Thus we see that the enormous amount of psychological naiveté propping up all this widespread belief behind the calls for early intervention in autism is matched only by an equally incredible amount of biological naiveté.

Let us make no bones about what early intervention is. From the point of view of the autistic child—that potential autistic spirit reaching for its rightful place in the sun—early intervention means a relentless and pointless sentence of death.

The most commonly employed tools in early intervention are intensive applied behavioral analysis (ABA), subduing pharmacology, and an assortment of activities I can only describe as biomedical atrocities (such as forced chelation). And of course it is no mere coincidence that nearly all the loudly told tales of autistic negative outcomes, that nearly all the shrilly insisted-upon instances of lower functioning children, that nearly all the screechingly advertised appeals for an inevitable, institutionalized doom—it is no mere coincidence that such tales are accompanied invariably by an attempted history of ABA, pharmacology, and/or biomedical atrocity. It must be only through the grace of God and the resiliency of the autistic mind that not every occurrence of such intervention results in senseless tragedy; but when we consider the now growing trail of broken autistic lives chalked up to the ledgers of early intervention, when we consider how many autistic children have been vanquished through endless, relentless hours of ABA, when we consider the number of young, developing autistic brains overcome by laundry lists of overpowering drugs, when we consider the scores of precious autistic bodies caustically poisoned by chelation, lupron and other nefarious elixirs—when we consider all this unconscionable waste, it raises the question whether the early recognition of autism is indeed such a positive development after all. Would it not be better if this trend towards early recognition were instead to be suddenly reversed? Would it not be better if autistic children were allowed to go forth again as essentially unidentified? Would it not be better if autistic spirits were allowed their chance once more to carve a distinctive path through life—which until just a couple decades ago was a fate nearly every autistic child enjoyed.

My son is autistic. And because he has never been exposed to ABA, risperidone, or any other treatment worthy of the term early intervention, I will accept the combined judgment of the autism professional community, I will accept the collective wisdom behind that community’s superior knowledge, I will accept that by now the opportunity to reshape Brian’s growing brain, the opportunity to dramatically alter his autistic path—that opportunity has passed him by. I will accept that by now my son is not only autistic, but that indeed he is hopelessly autistic.

Hopelessly autistic as he counts backwards by threes and fives. Hopelessly autistic as he reads accurately through all his button books. Hopelessly autistic as he delights in roller coasters, water slides, marble runs, piano keyboards and a list of assorted games. Hopelessly autistic as he knowingly explains the earth’s tilt, rotation and the timing of the solstice. And hopelessly autistic as he chatters through his own creative renditions of so many ceiling fan soliloquies.

To every professional who has ever clamored for the merits of early intervention in autism, to every professional who has ever insisted upon the value of redirecting autistic lives while they remain still pliable, to every professional who has ever suggested that in the absence of early intervention the autistic outcome will likely be something grim—to every such professional, you are invited to spend the day alongside my chattering, delightful, ceiling-fan obsessed son (and alongside the parents who could not be more blessed than to be in his presence). You are invited to spend that day and then in all seriousness to explain—what exactly would you have proposed to do?

The Problem with Peer Review

Genuine scientists, the ones who can unveil surprising, valuable and enduring insights into our experienced world—scientists such as Newton, Darwin and Einstein—they have no peers. Scientists for hire on the other hand can be found around every corner, and of course filling out all the editorial review boards.

Scientific Insight

What level of research grant supported Newton’s Principia project? What funding organization sponsored Darwin’s laboratory of origined species? Who footed all the bills during Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis?

Why is it the forgettable science requires hundreds of thousands of dollars and entails an unspecified amount of time, whereas the memorable science costs nary a cent, and happens in no more than a flash?

Identification Bias

Because autism was first taken to be a medical condition—a type of mental illness—its ongoing recognition has always suffered from a very bad case of identification bias.

Around forty to fifty years ago, the only cases of autism being diagnosed were those for which the individual was clearly detached from usual behaviors and circumstances, and was clearly in need of support and services. This practice made sense, because at that time autism was assumed to be an acute medical condition and therefore only individuals meeting the criteria of an acute medical condition could be identified as having autism. No one else was ever identified as having autism, and of course autism was thought to be extremely rare.

However, a problem soon emerged: the medical community began recognizing many individuals who possessed most of the same features as those being diagnosed with autism, but who obviously were not suffering from an acute medical condition. This should have alerted the medical community that its initial assumption about autism being a medical condition was now seriously in doubt; but identification bias had already set in, had already become too firmly entrenched, and no serious questioning of that assumption ever took place. When one reads, for instance, Lorna Wing’s work—the work that began the process of bringing Asperger syndrome into the diagnostic fold—one is struck by how the new identifying criteria, although distinguished from the criteria used on the more classically diagnosed cases, was still making the assumption of a major underlying cognitive impairment, was still assuming the presence of a serious medical condition. And so, as terms such as high-functioning autism, Asperger syndrome, and pervasive developmental disorder began to assume more widespread usage, the specter of medical illness never loosened its grip on autism at all—it merely began enveloping a much larger population within its darkening cloud.

That trend continues unabated to the present day. Using an expanding range of diagnostic tools and applying them at earlier and earlier ages, the medical community now identifies nearly one percent of the toddler population as possessing some form of autism, and because of identification bias, that entire one percent is assumed to be suffering from a dire medical condition. With no consideration for whether the expected outcome might be positive or negative, and with no recollection of the statistics from its own diagnostic past, the medical community assumes every child identified as being autistic will require a regimen of early intervention, will need an onslaught of powerful drugs, intensive therapies, and assorted prescriptive treatments. It never occurs to the medical community that its own history of autism identification has now progressed all the way from rare to questionable to absurd. It never dawns on the medical community that nearly the entire one percent now being identified as mentally ill, was only one half century ago being identified with not one sickness at all.

It is not too late to turn back the clock—even some fifty years. Autism has never been a medical condition. That stranglehold of an assumption is only the residue from a lazy history of bias.

Stuck (a.k.a. A Status Report on the Autism Knowledge Revolution)

Geraldine Dawson, the newly minted Chief Science Officer for Autism Speaks, has recently penned a public letter outlining the many achievements that were made under the banner of autism science during the year 2008. Although one might suppose churning out such letters is a necessary condition of her job (one should probably view all artifacts coming out of Autism Speaks in the light of being a necessary condition of the job), Dr. Dawson manages nonetheless to prove the aptness of her appointment by tackling this particular task with some gusto and delight. Her catalog of recent advancements in the areas of autism research and treatment is both lengthy and wide ranging, and her tone throughout the roll call of progress remains unflinchingly upbeat and enthusiastic. It would seem 2008 was a decidedly exceptional year in the world of autism science, so decidedly exceptional that I found I could not help but break out into hearty peals of laughter while reading through the letter’s contents.

To give just a sampling of the many paradigm-shifting discoveries that have been tickling Dr. Dawson’s scientific fancy over these past twelve months, I would note that in the area of genetic research she begins by lauding some recent reports involving aspects of chromosome 16, which in 2008 apparently became only the twenty-third human chromosome to be implicated as the presumptive locative cause of autism. And related to this insightful finding (well, related by means of being mentioned in the following paragraph) Dr. Dawson extols some other recent research regarding the CNTNAP2 gene, which as it turns out has also been implicated as the presumptive locative cause of autism, but in an entirely different way. Not one to be embarrassed by such abundance of riches, Dr. Dawson turns her acclamatory sights next on an entirely different class of explanatory breakthroughs, that is to say those bountiful number of environmental factors that have been significantly correlated to autism sometime during the past calendar year: the mother’s use of epileptic drugs during pregnancy, premature birth, prenatal exposure to high levels of pesticides or insecticides, seizures during infancy, living in regions that experience high levels of precipitation, and being born in April, June, and October. (And lest some wag suggest I merely fabricated that list for the sake of literary hyperbole—or perhaps out of an uncontrollable urge to poke some fun—let me assure such wag I possess not nearly the degree of orneriness or creativity to do any such thing, let me assure such wag I merely plagiarized the list from an unattributed source.) Having announced the solution to autism’s puzzle twice over now, Dr. Dawson nonetheless eschews any resting on autism science’s overflowing laurels, but proceeds thereafter to a garnering of the trifecta, quadfecta, and many fectas well beyond. She trumpets for instance the foremost importance of the case of Hannah Poling, mitochondria and multiple vaccinations, proving beyond any reasonable grain of doubt that 2008 must have been indeed one uniquely incredible year in the area of autism research, seeing as how even courtroom drama and bad journalism were able to lend a helping hand. And more kudos are then offered up for the invaluable knowledge gained through the latest incarnation of the neuronal TSC model of mice, Dr. Dawson hinting thereby that a complete mapping of autism's biochemical mechanism remains as imminent as the shake of a rat’s tail.

The drum roll of incisive achievements bangs on and on; but for the sake of brevity (not to mention some sanity), allow me to present the remainder of the bangs as cleanly as I dare: secreted amyloid precursor protein-alpha, maternal antibody reactivity, synaptic abnormalities and hippocampus inhibitions. Ah yes, what an exhaustive and exhausting list Dr. Dawson has managed to compile! Really, I could hardly catch my breath. Indeed, by the time I finally reached the end of her expansive missive and its much belated sign-off (well after midnight, I can assure you), I had become absolutely convinced that there must have been no essential autism research advancement overlooked, no Nobel Prize worthy stone of discovery unturned in Dr. Dawson’s bell-ringing, end-of-the-year review. Alas, that conclusion proved to be somewhat giddy and premature, for when I checked the letter again the following day, perused it in the sober light of morning—not once, not twice, but indeed three more times—I discovered with no small sense of dismay that the kitchen sink never received one mention.

Maybe next year.

If someone were to publish a particularly difficult mathematics conjecture and were to advertise for solutions, and this challenge were to be greeted by seven answers the first year, twenty-six the next, a hundred and seven the year after that, and four hundred or so the year following, it would take a distinctly misguided form of intellect to characterize such results as progress. Only one lick of common sense would be enough to expose such a billowing set of solutions as not the harbinger of any impending answer, but instead the unmistakable sign that the problem has not been in the slightest understood. But of course I must be forgetting the context of this analogy; I must be forgetting that if there is any concept for which Autism Speaks is the least likely to provide some funding, the least likely to bequeath one of its generous research grants to—or to install a Chief Officer for—that would have to be the concept called common sense.

Never mind that the exact same form of Dr. Dawson’s letter would have been just as serviceable in 2007, or in 2006, or in so many of the years prior to that, with only a small smattering of detail substitution required to invoke the earlier date (different chromosomes, different environmental factors, different biomedical markers, different mice). Never mind that Dr. Dawson and her successors will no doubt be penning nearly identical letters again at the end of 2009, 2010, and for countless years beyond that, with each new pronouncement distinguished only by a similar set of substitutions. No, never mind all that, for that would be a mere caviling over minutiae, that would be a quibbling about some absurd trivialities—and besides we have the evidence of Dr. Dawson’s unbridled enthusiasm to assure us that 2008 was an annum entirely different. No, I would much rather grant Dr. Dawson all her ballyhooed triumphs, I would much rather take her at her gustoed and delighted word. But that does raise a troubling question, does it not—a question that must be lurking there at the back of our troubled minds. How is it possible, we finally ask, how is it possible that with 2008 having been autism science’s unparalleled banner year, how is it possible that with such earth-shattering advancements on such a broad variety of absolutely essential fronts—genetic research brilliancies, environmental factor epiphanies, biochemical conquests—how is it possible that when furthermore we have had the AGRE data base, government settlement cases and some rodents chipping in, how is it possible that we did not manage to demystify autism completely, how is it possible that we did not put this condition’s perplexing questions entirely to bed, how is it possible that in 2008 we did not resolve autism’s conundrum finally once and for all, resolve it at the very latest by mid July?

We should bear in mind that Dr. Dawson’s letter does serve a valuable purpose. It is a purpose not to be found directly in her words of course, but instead in the cloud of comedy and irony overhanging her epistolary litany. Through hers and similar exploding laundry lists of so-called essential, breakthrough successes in the fields of autism science and research, we are brought at long last to the realization that in point of fact we are achieving little more than a loud spinning of all the wheels, a gratuitous grinding of all the gears—the spinning perhaps a little louder, the grinding a little more gratuitous with each passing year. On the road to any true understanding of this condition we call autism, science is in fact not making the slightest progress at all; it is instead racing hell-bent in the direction of becoming irretrievably stuck.

Hello Again

This most recent pause in the blog posts was not planned—I broke my left hand in late November and have found it difficult to create new entries in the mean time. (It’s odd: I once was an inveterate hunt-and-pecker, but now I can’t seem to compose a meaningful sentence without complete use of all fingers on all hands.) I’m nearly on the mend now and should be able to begin posting again shortly.

A thank you to Steve D and Fleecy for their recent mentions of Autistic Aphorisms. Both their blogs by the way are informative, thoughtful and well-written; if you haven’t taken a look already, please do so.

And a belated Happy New Year to everyone!

Kierkegaard as Educator

For that school girl clique of oh-so-cutting edge atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett, and the remainder of their huddling masses)—I would have it take note of Kierkegaard, who standing all by himself, did not choose the cowardly path of abolishing religious thought, but bravely took aim at what religion had become.

I too—I have not the slightest desire to put an end to scientific practice, I merely draw a bead on what science has become.

Autism as a Puzzle Piece

Autism advocacy and charity groups (such as Autism Speaks) like to depict autism as a puzzle piece. Oddly enough, so do I.

When I first learned about autism in detail, I was already forty-five years old and the subject had barely crossed my mind before that time. What had been on my mind over the years were questions regarding humanity and its universe, for you see I am one those poor souls prone to ruminate over such mysteries as language, intelligence, science, psychology and history. Those ruminations had taken me not all that far; it seemed I had barely formed the frame of some gigantic puzzle—one of utmost importance to be sure, but one also quite empty near its middle, a crucial hole right there at its center.

Then without warning, autism knocked at my door.

Like Suzanne Wright, I could have said autism had knocked on the wrong door, for given the way it was being introduced to me—as mental illness, as medical catastrophe, as a burden only autism advocacy and charity groups could offer to remove—viewed like that, autism clearly had no bearing on my unfinished puzzle at all. But at forty-five years of age, I had no preconceived notions, I had no existing stake in autism’s conventional wisdom; so I felt at liberty to examine the subject from all sides, felt audacious enough to dare to flip it over. And lo and behold—now no longer seen as mental illness, no longer viewed as medical catastrophe, no longer taken as the pity fodder for autism advocacy and charity groups—autism snapped cleanly into place, the snuggest puzzle piece I could ever hope to find.

The Simple Greeting Exchange

“How are you?”

“Fine, thank you.”

The simple greeting exchange—which technically does not constitute a meaningful use of language—serves as fertile ground for understanding some fundamental differences between autistic and non-autistic perspectives, and also serves as an occasion for respecting and valuing those differences.

The simple greeting exchange, especially as practiced by non-autistic individuals, is the quintessence of biological immediacy. If the verbal aspect of the exchange can be said to be about anything, it is about what is already biologically present—two members of the species Homo sapiens interacting within the same immediate time and space constraints as the conversation itself. That is why it can be said that technically speaking, the exchange is not a meaningful use of language. Language is ordinarily the use of a biologically immediate artifact (spoken sounds, for instance) to represent something that is not biologically present (an event removed in space or time, for instance). In the simple greeting exchange, everything that needs to be conveyed is already present, so of what purpose is the language?

In the simple greeting exchange—with the exception of the words—everything is ancient and complex. Such exchanges have been taking place on this planet from almost the beginning of biology itself, and although each exchange happens in no more than an instant, each occurrence also conveys a cornucopia of species-driven information forged from the long-burning furnace of evolutionary time. Observe two members of almost any animal species as they come together—ants along the trail, lions in their den, barracuda on the prowl—each exchange is just as eloquent, just as informational, as any end-of-the-month business transaction. In mammals—and in primates especially—this exchange is brought about by means of a precise set of sensory-based conventions—eye contact, body posture, clucks and coos, nuzzles, sniffs, licks, etc. Not a word ever needs to be spoken; and in all the other animal species, not a word is spoken. The other animal species have no conception of a yesterday or a tomorrow, no conception of a mile to the east or a mile to the west; so the other animal species have no need for language. And least of all do they have need for language during the simple greeting exchange—the epitome of conversational biological immediacy.

Humans were like this once too; and if we remove their words, we see that they still are.

Language was a late arrival on the human scene, and its purpose is far removed from being an aid to conversational biological immediacy. If the words of the simple greeting exchange can be said to have meaning beyond just their immediate occasion (an occasion that needs no words), it might be said that they serve as a marker, an indicator—they mark the occasion of a biologically immediate conversation. Humans—and in particular non-autistic humans—take the words of the simple greeting exchange as the signal the intricate dance of eye contact, body posture, etc. has begun. Or to give the notion more sophistication, humans might be said to be using the simple greeting exchange as an indicator that this is not an instance of biological immediacy qua animal, but instead an instance of biological immediacy in the context of greater civility. (But then again, each participant was already aware of that.)

In the simple greeting exchange, the text dissolves to nothing, and the subtext expands to incorporate everything.

Autistic individuals often find themselves discomfited by the simple greeting exchange. One of the reasons for this is that autistic individuals will often take the simple greeting exchange quite literally—that is, they will take it as an expression of language. For instance, they understand “fine” to be an accurate report of the other person’s status, only to discover perhaps that circumstances are otherwise (“Couldn’t you see the anger in my face?” the other will say). In response to “How are you?” or “What’s been happening?”, autistic individuals will often provide a detailed and factual account of their recent situation—spatially, temporally and logically arranged—and will find themselves bewildered when they realize the other person is bewildered by the reply.

Language, by its original intent, bridges the gap between biological immediacy and the more remote realms of space, time and non-biological structure and pattern. Autistic individuals intuitively understand this, because cognitively speaking, they exist far more comfortably inside those remote realms.

“How many ceiling fans do you have in your house?”

“What an interesting question! I have three ceiling fans in my house.”

“What rooms are they in?”

“Let’s see…there is one in the living room, one in the bedroom, and another one on the porch.”

“Is the ceiling fan on the porch spinning?”

The autistic greeting exchange is a work of art, although it is seldom recognized as such. It is a work of art primarily because it uses language almost exclusively in its original and creative form—as a biologically immediate artifact intended to represent, or to inquire about, an event spatially, temporally or biologically removed. When the autistic greeting exchange goes well, an autistic participant feels informed, and thus also feels comforted and welcomed—the same feelings a non-autistic individual receives upon a successful simple greeting exchange.

In the autistic greeting exchange, the text encompasses everything, and the subtext disappears.

Imagine a behavioral speech therapist trying to teach the simple greeting exchange to a young autistic child—employing countless discrete trials, wondering why progress is so painfully slow, perplexed by how the skill does not transfer outside the training room. But if the therapist were instead to teach the child the autistic greeting exchange—incorporating ceiling fans, light switches, Thomas the Tank Engine, or whatever else might be of interest to this particular child—would not the child’s attention perk up almost immediately? Would not progress be considerably faster and the skills more widely practiced? “But that is not the goal,” the therapist will object. “The goal is not to have the child greet people with inappropriate banter about ceiling fans, light switches or Thomas the Tank Engine. The goal is to have the child greet people with the simple greeting exchange.”

“Inappropriate” is indeed the correct adjective here, but not applied to the banter. Is the aim of this therapy to teach the child the use of language, or to make the child indistinguishable from all his peers?

Autistic individuals will often bemoan the pettiness and insincerity of the simple greeting exchange, but that is a misunderstanding—they are overlooking billions of year of intricate and essential biology.

Non-autistic individuals will often decry the inappropriateness of the autistic greeting exchange, but that is also a misunderstanding—they are overlooking the glory, and the origin, of a creative use of words.

(Thanks to Bev at Asperger Square 8 for the inspiration.)

Good Housekeeping

I can hear a clamoring for more detail, for more evidence: outline your experiment, enunciate your theory, where is your data? But I cannot scurry fast enough from all that, I cannot step far enough away.

Thousands of researchers cook up millions of details each and every day, but who bothers to arrange the shelves, and who will tidy up the mess?

Diagnosis is the Wrong Word

We say that autism is diagnosed, but the word diagnosis rests on a shaky foundation, the danger of which is never more apparent than when we promote early diagnosis for young children.

To employ the word diagnosis means to accept the assumption that autism is a medical condition or a mental illness, but this is precisely the assumption most in doubt. The medical community, which on one hand acts with unbridled certainty that autism is indeed a mental disorder, a brain-based illness, on the other hand admits the cause of autism remains entirely unknown and there is no known effective cure. So where does the certainty come from in the first place?

What if autism were not a medical condition, not a mental illness? Would we be able to discern that possibility, given that we have put the blinders on?

Those who speak favorably of early diagnosis for young children inevitably follow with the phrase early intervention. But how can early intervention be considered safe and effective if there is no known cause? How can early intervention be deemed appropriate if we remain uncertain of what autism is? The treatment of a non-existent illness is not necessarily benign.

Not that long ago the diagnosis of autism was an extremely rare event. Are we certain that those who went undiagnosed—and who therefore went untreated—are we certain their outcomes were inevitably tragic?

The correct word is recognition. We now know enough about autism to recognize it in certain individuals, including some who are very young. But recognition is all we have.

Derrida

But we had already seen this medicine show! Hegel’s puffoonery once pulled the wool over the eyes of an entire academic generation and sent countless grandstudents into a Rube Goldberg slumber. Note the reaction of both Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard—cogent, inspired, extraordinarily well written, as though the point to be demonstrated above all else is that when one has something worthy to say, one takes the trouble to say it well.

Universal Grammar

The term is correct, but universal grammar has been given a meaning that does not match what those two words actually say.

Noam Chomsky’s early work in linguistics deserves the highest praise. Before such efforts as Syntactic Structures and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, linguistics was stuck in a quagmire of piecemeal analysis—an irrelevant quicksand of phonemes, morphemes and dead-end semantics. Chomsky unearthed language’s structural essence and gave it prominence and value, and his clever introduction of the tools of logic and recursive mathematics furnished linguistics with a language of its own, one that remains useful to the present day.

But Chomsky badly misguessed the source of language’s structural underpinning, and in fact it is a bit of a puzzle he had to make a guess at all. Having spent countless obsessive hours working out the many transformational rules of verbal syntax (his complete Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory is so massive I believe it has yet to be published in its entirety), Chomsky had ample opportunity to recognize that his linguistic schemas had much in common with the formal rules of physics, mathematics, logic, chemistry, digital electronics and so many other non-biological disciplines. Space, time, proof, natural law, formal syntax—these concepts are in many ways so structurally similar they border on being isomorphic; so how could Chomsky have failed to recognize that as he was sketching out the structure of human language, he was also sketching out the basic structure of the perceived world? But such was the allure of brain science dogma even some forty odd years ago—Chomsky turned to biology instead and posited an instinct for human language.

To be fair, Chomsky was handicapped by two critical pieces of evidence: one piece of evidence, in plain sight, proved to be an over-enticing red herring, and the other piece of evidence, far more useful and productive, was alas not available to Chomsky at all.

The red herring of course was the speed and seeming ease with which most children acquire a spoken language. That an instinct was at the heart of this process was undeniable, but first to be determined was whether an already known instinct could adequately account for the phenomenon. The young of many species pass through a relatively brief period of rapid assimilation of the species’ behaviors—learning to hunt, to find shelter, meld to the group social dynamics, etc.—all leading very quickly to adult-level skills in the areas of survival and procreation. What these maturational activities make clear is that it is not so much the activities themselves that are instinctual as is the pedigree of being intensely species aware and species assimilative. Acute species recognition, to the degree of nearly complete perceptual exclusion of all other sensory input, is the common evolutionary thread explaining how the young of so many species rapidly transform into nearly exact behavioral copies of all the other members of the population. And of course humans have been no different. When humans were once silent hunter-gatherers, their children rapidly matured into being exactly the same, taking on many fully developed roles by the age of puberty. And when humans swiftly transformed into being verbal and more civilized, the children did not skip a maturational beat, just as rapidly assuming the new set of common behaviors, and at a very early age. What most children have an instinct for is to do what other humans do; it has been that way for a very long time, and it still is.

But Chomsky was convinced language had to be something different. With page after page of formulas and recursions laid out before him, aware more than anyone of the complexity running throughout the entirety of semantics and syntax, Chomsky found it inconceivable so much surface variation and core structural similarity could be acquired quickly by species assimilation alone. In this, he was being hurt by his failure to see that it was not just language that was being acquired, but also all the behaviors, conventions and perceptions mirrored inside of language, along with their corresponding degrees of structure and complexity. For Chomsky, language seemed to be monolithic, independent of the other new aspects of human behavior—independent of the changing human environment. Furthermore, language seemed to be something that had to be inherently unique to this one species alone. Hunting behaviors, sheltering behaviors, hierarchal behaviors—these too are extraordinarily complex and their quick absorption is no less amazing than the absorption of language; but with thousands of other species serving as example, and with the long reach of evolutionary time helping to soothe any concerns over how such behavioral complexity might be taken on, a scientist is less apt to doubt the species assimilative forces when applied to such time-honored and widely distributed skills. Not so language, the late-arriving exemplar nonpareil. And even supposing Chomsky could have brought himself to accept that language might be absorbed by the usual species assimilative means, this would only have raised a much larger question in his head: where did language come from in the first place? Having appeared quite suddenly on this planet, and having arrived nearly full blown as it were, like Athena from Zeus’s head, language could not chalk up its origin, at the very least, to some typical hand-me-down inter-generational event.

Faced with language’s seemingly unique standing in the biological world, and hampered by the unanswered question regarding its origin, Chomsky resorted finally to some scientific magic and proposed an entirely separate instinct for human language. Thus in one fell swoop Chomsky turned language into something biological, genetic, neural, evolutionary, and above all else, restrictively human. The term universal grammar debuted as an ironic phrase, for now there was nothing universal in the concept at all.

The more productive piece of evidence Chomsky did not have access to was an accurate description of the condition known as autism. Autism of course was known in the 1960s and 1970s, but at that time was regarded as little more than a medical catastrophe, its gravity compensated for only by its extreme rarity. Those few autistic individuals who were recognized in Chomsky’s day, both from the acuteness of their condition and from the cruelties likely being perpetrated upon them, would not have been able to provide many useful clues in a study of general linguistics. It would take at least another twenty years before the medical community would begin to realize autism was a condition not necessarily so devastating—and uncoincidentally, not all that uncommon—and of course even to the present day the medical community continues to struggle under the delusions from that misguided past.

Autism, when more accurately described, tells a much broader story than has been heretofore considered—a story touching directly upon, among many other things, the history and construction of human language.

Fundamentally, autistic individuals possess a significantly less degree of species recognition and species assimilative capacity than do most other humans (and indeed, than do most organisms). For yet unknown reasons, autistic humans do not readily perceive the human-specific features of their sensory environment, and in consequence they do not easily assimilate to the species itself. Therefore, initial autistic sensory perception goes forth mostly ungrounded, and early autistic cognitive development must run a gauntlet of a nearly overwhelming sensory chaos. In compensation and in varying measure, most autistic individuals form their cognitive grounding instead out of the non-biological features that inherently stand out from the surrounding environment—perceptions based upon symmetry, pattern, structure, detail, repetition, and the like. The unusual early behaviors of autistic children are chock-full of the consequences from these unique forms of perception and cognition, and the ongoing behaviors of nearly all autistic individuals—from childhood through maturity—show marked preference for the more orderly, non-biological aspects of the objective world than for the social, biologically-based features preferred by the human population at large.

Space, time, logic, mathematics—these concepts, representing the structural framework of the objective world, were first introduced into the human species through the medium of autistic perception, and they are the by-product of a compensatory form of autistic cognition that finds its essential grounding in the symmetries and patterns to be found in the surrounding environment.

Autistic individuals, however, despite their non-biological cognitive grounding, are biological creatures themselves and are therefore subject to the same experiential restrictions as any other organism. Space, time, logic, mathematics—these concepts cannot be directly grasped by immediate perception alone, they are not inherently part of immediate biological experience. To bring non-biologically based perception into the realm of immediate biological experience requires the aid of an intermediary; it requires the use of an artifact that can be immediately perceived but which also serves the purpose of representing something not biologically present. This intermediary is precisely that object we call language, and if autistic individuals have been responsible for introducing the realm of non-biological pattern and structure into the human species, they have also been responsible for bringing along its essential companion—they have been responsible for the introduction of language.

If Chomsky had been able to surmise this autism-inspired origin of human language, then perhaps he would have been less mystified by language’s ubiquitous structure.

As the early artifacts of human language—abstract gestures to some degree, but primarily spoken sounds—as these began to circulate around the globe, they quickly diverged in both vocabulary and surface form. But as Chomsky has rightly noted, the underlying structure of human language changed hardly at all, never varied in any appreciable degree from tribe to tribe, place to place, generation to generation. This split between language’s surface presentation and its underlying structural form captures exactly that distinction between the arbitrary nature of the object doing the representing, and the far more determinant nature of the object being represented. Only the artifacts of language can be indeterminate, only they can take on a nearly unlimited variety of form: hundreds of spoken languages, thousands of individual dialects, written and encoded extensions (shuffling language across the expanses of space and time), signs and symbols, charts and schematics. As humans have so amply demonstrated, almost any sense-perceptible item can serve the purpose of conveying a language—all that is required is some degree of convention—but if the artifacts of language can come from almost any perceivable source, what language represents is something entirely different. What language represents, by necessity and original intent, is something already perceptually determined.

Space, time, logic, mathematics, pattern, symmetry—these concepts, representing the form of the objective world, are precisely those concepts that must be reflected inside language’s foundational structure. Object and concept, noun and verb, temporal tenses, spatial adjectives, all manner of nuanced prepositional form—as autistics brought to humanity the patterned structures from the surrounding world, they also brought to humanity the conveying mechanism that by necessity had to assume that world’s inherent organizational form. There is no need to posit a genetic, biological or neural instinct to explain language’s ubiquitous structure: one need only look to the pattern and symmetry of the perceived world and realize that language has no choice but to be its mirror. And one need not confine language to the human species alone: any life-form open to the non-biological patterns of the surrounding environment will by necessity find itself relying upon the mechanisms of a deeply foundational language, because biologically speaking, there are no alternative means.

And so indeed, human language has been framed by a universal grammar—far more universal than Chomsky ever managed to conceive.

Music and Raven’s Progressive Matrices

Elsewhere I have noted that the Raven’s Progressive Matrices intelligence test may be the nearest thing humans have to a pure time and space test. The Raven’s temporal/spatial problem domain, natural to autistic perception and cognition, helps explain why autistic individuals perform so differentially well on that particular test.

Yet now that I think about it, there is at least one other human endeavor that shares a similar structure to the Raven’s test—namely music. The roles played by rhythm, melody and harmony are quite analogous to the roles played by time, space and conceptual pattern in Raven’s, and the well-documented affinity and natural ability for music that many autistic individuals display is further suggestive of an underlying connection.

Time, space, geometry, arithmetic, logic, melody, harmony, rhythm, games, rules, syntax—these concepts run along the contours and fault lines of autistic cognition, and understanding their connection helps to highlight the nature of autistic perception and to characterize its contribution to human endeavor. Music and the Raven’s intelligence test are not random gewgaws from the stream of life—their prominence derives from a correlation to the forces driving the human species forward.

Health Coverage

Many efforts are currently underway to mandate insurance and state coverage for the various types of autism medical treatment. These efforts are premature.

Not in any way certain of the condition it is dealing with, and ignoring its charge to first do no harm, the medical community is offering a scattershot and dangerous approach to autism treatment—oppressive applied behavioral analysis, overpowering pharmacology, wide-ranging interventive therapy, and a few doses of biomedical quackery thrown in for good measure. What these treatments have in common is that none are designed to promote autistic capacity; all are designed to shut it down.

When attitudes have changed, when humanity has examined autism for what it truly is, when medical efforts have turned from suppression and cure—and towards autistic achievement—only then will autism coverage become a worthwhile investment, and not the drain of resources and human dignity that it currently is.