Send in the Idiots: Stories from the Other Side of Autism (2006) by Kamran Nazeer is one of my favorite books. Nazeer works as a policy advisor to the British government. When I found a reason to interview him, I took it.
ROBERTS At a conference of experimental psychologists, I heard about some test results that found that autistic kids did better than non-autistic kids. The researchers were expecting the opposite. They expected the autistic kids to have deficits in processing of faces, how well they can perceive faces. But they found the opposite. That’s what prompts this. I spoke to the researcher afterwards, and he said it wasn’t the only example. Another researcher has several findings along these lines and parents are fond of the idea that autistic kids have a different set of skills.
NAZEER I’m not convinced that we need to think of these things as polar opposites. I think what’s going on is that autistic kids have equal or even higher attention to particular details, or particular kinds of details. There can be two issues; one issue is sometimes that their sense of hierarchy about sense data is different from what we regard as normal. So it may be that autistic kids will regard particular sense data as being more interesting to them than sense data that might be more socially useful. So they might well pick up just as much, or more, information about people’s faces, but it’s just not the thing that they focus on. They might focus on something completely different instead. So then, it’s a question of how do you change the kid’s focus so that the data that all the time they’ve been taking in is the data that they actually use to form judgments about the world. So I think that that’s one thing that happens. I think the other thing that often happens is that, because of language difficulties, even though autistic kids might be picking up equal or higher levels of sense data, they’re just not able to articulate to other people, and hence probably not even that well to themselves, what it is that they’re perceiving.
ROBERTS You’re saying that autistic kids favor some kinds of sense data over other kinds of sense data?
NAZEER Right. To give you an example that I use in the book, which is about Elizabeth, who you might remember is the only girl that I write about. There is this scene in which her parents took her along to a bus stop. It’s not that she wouldn’t notice that there was a bus coming, and it’s not that she wouldn’t notice what the number on the bus was; it’s that she would also notice who in the queue for the bus had their nails cut, or what color people’s sneakers were, or if there was a missing apostrophe in the advertisement on the side of the bus. So, you know, it’s not that she was missing out on the crucial piece of sense data, which is “where is this bus going,” but she was not realizing that this was the most important piece of sense data for her at that time, to be paying attention to. So in that sense, she had a different hierarchy.
ROBERTS So you’re saying that for other people, where the bus is going would be higher on their hierarchy?
NAZEER Exactly. That’s because the non-autistic have a better social sense of what the relevant piece of sense data is at any particular time, whereas an autistic person might have a different hierarchy, or might have no hierarchy at all of sense data. That’s what often happens with autistic people when they feel overwhelmed by their surroundings. It’s because they’re not forming a hierarchy of sense data, it’s because they’re taking on all the sense data, it’s random, and as you can imagine, we’re always overwhelmed by sense data. But the reason why we don’t feel overwhelmed is because we have a hierarchy for sorting them out. So, when we’re sitting and reading the newspaper, we realize that it’s the words on the page that are at the top of the hierarchy. When we’re standing at a bus stop, we realize that it’s whether or not the bus is coming in, what the destination at the front of the bus is that’s at the top of the hierarchy. I think that what often happens with autistic people is that they don’t hierarchize. Either they don’t hierarchize in the same way, or they don’t hierarchize at all?
ROBERTS What does it mean, to not hierarchize at all?
NAZEER It means that you just feel overwhelmed by what you see around you, and so you don’t know, what if it is useful to you? And so you don’t know, what if it is useful to you, so you experience it all as being sort of alien and unsettling. That, I think, is why a lot of autistic people display what I and many other people have called desire for local coherence. So because they’re not forming a hierarchy of sense data, which ultimately is the only way in which we can stop ourselves from feeling overwhelmed in the world, what they do instead, instead of forming the hierarchy, they ache for some simple way of bringing order to the chaos around them. So rather than sorting out the sense data, they just pick one thing to focus on, so they pick a pen, or the edge of the table, or they start rocking, or they walk on the soles of their feet. So they take one random thing and put it on the top of the hierarchy, so that everything else that’s under it doesn’t overwhelm them any more.