Before I wrote The Shangri-La Diet I anticipated the diet would reduce hunger and weight and increase peace of mind but this surprised me:
So far, I have told NO ONE what I am doing, not even [my husband]. A couple of my teens (I’m the mother of 3 teenage boys, ages 19,16 and 15) have walked into the kitchen as I was taking my oil and wondered what I was doing. I just told them it was to take care of some pooping problems I’ve been having.
SLD = more off-limits than poop.
ROBERTS You enjoyed reading, I assume.
NAZEER Yes. That’s true.
ROBERTS So your language development was retarded, even though you enjoyed reading. That’s unusual, I would think.
NAZEER I certainly didn’t enjoy reading at that age. I didn’t read much at all when I was a kid. I started reading a lot more when I was older.
ROBERTS Reading was something that you discovered you enjoyed relatively late in life.
NAZEER Yes.
ROBERTS So, while the other second graders are reading their books, you were not.
NAZEER No, I wasn’t.
ROBERTS Huh. So, did you have any other abilities? I think it’s common enough for people to develop late. There’s a word for it: late bloomers. We don’t normally hear this word in reference to autism. But you know more about it than I do. Is this a common developmental trajectory in autism? The person starts out slow, but slowly and surely passes everyone else?
NAZEER I’m not sure about the passing everyone else, and I’m not sure that’s the case with me, either.
ROBERTS Well, you are an extremely good writer.
NAZEER I chose to focus on a particular skill. What you’re seeing is the result of me having chosen to focus on that. So I’m more uncomfortable with the surpassing idea, but on your idea of developing late, I think that probably is true. I think that autistic young people find it very, very difficult to develop certain skills, but with the right support, they can develop them; they just often develop them much later and much more slowly than other kids.
ROBERTS Well, it helps to have many different kinds of people in the world, with many different kinds of brains, because we need many different skills to have a well-functioning economy. So from that point of view, the fact that autistic kids have different skills, or different abilities, let’s put it that way, makes a lot of sense, because then they’ll grow up to be adults who can do things the result of us can’t. But that’s really different from the idea that they’ve got a handicap that they’ve got to spend the rest of their life trying to overcome. Your story, in your book, suggests there are certain things that autistic kids can do as adults that other people can’t.
NAZEER I don’t think I am suggesting that.
ROBERTS You probably didn’t write the book with that in mind, obviously, but do you think that’s fair?
NAZEER No, I think, on the whole, it’s not fair because most autistic adults, even as adults, even though they might have developed the confidence to do certain things well, experience often quite profound difficulties. Everybody who’s in the book still has quite profound difficulties of one sort or another. So I don’t think it’s at all the case that all autistic adults, or even most, completely overcome the difficulties that they have. But that said, I think there is particular aspects of the condition of autism which might mean you have a particularly good focus on detail, which might suit you very well for certain types of jobs. It may mean that you think in a very structured way, which again, may suit you for particular jobs. I think another thing that comes about for autistic people is because they know that they have to work harder at things than other people, that kind of leads to a certain determination and resourcefulness and kind of reliance on being logical, which again, suits you for certain kinds of jobs.
ROBERTS Thanks very much for your time.
NAZEER Thanks, it was an interesting discussion.
Kamran Nazeer is the pen name of Emran Mian. He is the author of Send In the Idiots: Stories From the Other Side of Autism. Interview directory.Â
Today I made a new cup of matcha (powdered Japanese green tea) before finishing one I’d made earlier.
After Raronauer’ed.
ROBERTS What about your case? Did that happen in your case? Your special skill seems to be language, but — what do I know?
NAZEER Yes, maybe that’s it. It’s a certain kind of precision of expression. Or not even a precision of expression, but an agility of expression, which for me, in the first place, came about because of learning how to write well. Then, from learning how to write well, it turned into being able being able to speak well about particular topics. Whereas I’m not so good at being in a meeting with 12 people and trying to get what I want out of that meeting, I’m better at writing a very persuasive email to 12 people.
ROBERTS A less-useful skill. So your teachers recognized your language ability, your early teachers?
NAZEER No, because at that stage I didn’t have it.
ROBERTS You didn’t have it?
NAZEER What my early teachers helped me to do was to develop it, was to put me on the first steps of the ladder towards having it.
ROBERTS What did they do?
NAZEER Well, to begin with, it was very simple things, like giving, kind of forcing me to say particular words, showing me flash cards again and again until I would use particular words, beginning by kind of letting me be able to point to things when I wanted them and then actually withholding them until I would actually say the name of the thing. So there were techniques of that sort. There were also techniques of encouraging me to talk to other kids in the school who were at a similar position in their language development to me, so that we weren’t being over-awed in talking to much more linguistically agile kids, or fully linguistically developed adults, but in fact we were talking to people who were in a similar linguistic position to ourselves. That helps linguistic development.
ROBERTS So you’re saying that, by certain measures, you were linguistically behind. Your language development was retarded relative to other kids.
NAZEER It certainly was. I didn’t start speaking until I was about 6 years old.
ROBERTS It wasn’t because you thought it was boring, or anything.
NAZEER No, not at all, no, no.
ROBERTS So somehow, at some point, you caught up. Is that true?
NAZEER Yes.
ROBERTS So at some point, you caught up. You started off more slowly, and then you caught up, and then you surpassed.
NAZEER I’m not sure I surpassed, but yeah, I’ll agree with the “caught up” bit.
ROBERTS Well, you wrote a book. Very few people write a book, and not only that, your book is very well written, which is much rarer.
NAZEER But I chose to focus on writing as a skill that I wanted to develop and I worked hard at it in the same way that somebody else might focus on becoming an electrician, and work very hard at it, and they’d become much better at wiring than I’d ever be, possibly. But for me, writing is very much that thing; it’s a craft. It’s something I decided I wanted to be good at, and then I spent a lot of time learning to be good at it.
This video, about mercury exposure from amalgam fillings, is all too convincing. Ugh.
Soon after it was published, I listened to an audiobook (abridged) version of Collapse (2005) by Jared Diamond. It is about how several societies destroyed their ecosystem and died. One example was Easter Island; the islanders cut down all the trees, and disappeared. The whole book was meant as a warning, of course: This can happen to us. At first I liked it — interesting stories. Then I heard that Jane Jacobs didn’t like it. I was unable to find out why. I began to wonder what I’d missed.
Now I can guess what she’d say: “ Collapse doesn’t make clear that overexploitation has been avoided countless times. That is the usual outcome. Even before cities, humans were constantly creating new ways to make a living, which decreased reliance on the old ways.”
I could make a video that shows Michael Jordan missing 20 free throws in a row. Every moment would be true but the whole thing would be false. That’s not far from what Collapse does — at least the audiobook version.
ROBERTS This is a big theme of your book, right, sort of a difference in attention. To my way of taking it, you didn’t have any lesson you were trying to teach the readers of your book. You were just trying to tell four stories, or five stories. But reading the stories, someone like me says “Oh my God, how can this be?” Not exactly that, but I felt like this wasn’t something that was supposed to be. There was a recent piece in the news about how kids who are disruptive in kindergarten grown up fine; they grow up without problems. One of the founding assumptions of our society is that things that we say are bad are harmful. They go together so well, right: harmful and bad? If your child has a problem, then presumably they’re going to grow up in some kind of bad way, and something bad is going to happen to them as an adult. But your book didn’t support that assumption, because these kids grow up to be unusual adults, but not terribly impaired, or anything. Is that a fair reading of your book?
NAZEER I think that’s a fair reading. The gloss that I think I would add to it is what happened to them in childhood was incredibly important. What was important about it was all the people in the book, what they have in common was that they all received the diagnosis very early on and received very early and very good intervention. That was fundamentally important to their success in later life. So autistic kids who don’t get the diagnosis early on, and don’t get the help that they need — and I’ll resist the word deficits, because I don’t think they are deficits — to understand the world better and to overcome the kind of differences that they have, then those kids actually do struggle. Whereas I think the kids in the book struggle less because they were lucky enough to get a diagnosis early on and get very good help early on.
ROBERTS I see. So this was unusual, the timing of the diagnosis.
NAZEER It’s usual now. It’s now thankfully becoming much more common for kids to be diagnosed at the age of three or four. It’s now becoming much more common for kids to actually get a decent level of education. It’s still not common enough, but it’s much more common than it was in the early 80s, when we were all at school.
ROBERTS What would have happened if the level of schooling had been worse, or less appropriate?
NAZEER I think it would have taken them a lot longer to overcome — and I don’t use this word in a perjorative way — overcome their disabilities. It would have taken than a lot longer to develop their language abilities, to develop useful hierarchies of sense data, and develop a sense of confidence about themselves, which I think is really fundamentally important as well. I think one of the big benefits of early intervention for autistic children is they begin to get a sense of things that they can do. And getting a sense of things that you can do then in turns builds a sense of confidence in yourself. So it means that even when you’re 13 and you’ve had a really really bad day, you can still remind yourself that you have had moments of progress, and there are things you can do at 13 that you weren’t able to do when you were 11.
ROBERTS What is an example of these things that you can do?
NAZEER Sometimes it can be very, very simple things. For Elizabeth, it was things as simple as teaching herself how to ride a bike. For somebody who perhaps was at the higher-functioning end of autism, somebody like Craig, that sense of confidence came from being able to write a good essay. So even though he might have still very profound social difficulties, because he knew that there was this thing that he was good at doing, that gave him a certain sense of confidence, even when it came to activities that he found much more challenging.
ROBERTS So you’re saying the way he was taught helped him to be confident, because somehow, his ability to write an essay was stressed, or something? Is that what you’re saying?
NAZEER Right. I think that’s what I’m saying. I think, in that sense, autisticyoung people aren’t any different from anybody else. I think, ultimately, nobody ever becomes brilliant at everything; we all become decent at some things, but being decent at some things gives us the confidence to try out things that we’re not so good at.
ROBERTS I think you’re right. I think that’s the incredibly important thing about education: to help people figure out that there are some things that they’re good at.
NAZEER People end up being good at different things. That is what I think — your deficit and difference opposition comes into play, which is that autistic people may well be different — may well be good at other things to other people. But as long as they get to the position where they feel comfortable, capable, and confident in doing some things, then that gives them confidence in functioning socially.
ROBERTS So they need schooling in which their abilities are recognized and developed and encouraged.
NAZEER That’s right.
ROBERTS That’s what you seem to be saying: that if autistic kids have different skills, then they have to have teachers who know how to develop and recognize those skills.
NAZEER That’s exactly it.
In poor countries, cellphones have a big anti-poverty effect:
Jan Chipchase and his user-research colleagues at Nokia can rattle off example upon example of the cellphone’s ability to increase people’s productivity and well-being, mostly because of the simple fact that they can be reached. There’s the live-in housekeeper in China who was more or less an indentured servant until she got a cellphone so that new customers could call and book her services. Or the porter who spent his days hanging around outside of department stores and construction sites hoping to be hired to carry other people’s loads but now, with a cellphone, can go only where the jobs are. . . . Over several years, his research team has spoken to rickshaw drivers, prostitutes, shopkeepers, day laborers and farmers, and all of them say more or less the same thing: their income gets a big boost when they have access to a cellphone.
This is exactly the effect I propose that the very first words had: They helped two traders find each other. Having a word for knife made it much easier for the person who had a knife to trade to find someone who wanted a knife. I was in Guatemala when I ran out of contact-lens solution. Not knowing the Spanish term for it, it was extremely hard to find. Once I knew the Spanish term, it was very easy to find. In a Guatemalan market, I heard a man shout “toothpaste” (in Spanish) over and over. He was selling toothpaste.
I think the first words were also the first names; You became identified by the name of what you were good at making (and therefore had to trade, since you made many of them). This information spread, like a cellphone signal, from tower to tower: From one person to another. If you were Mr. X, and someone wanted X, and they said so (“X?”), someone would point them to you. All it took were single words.
Later in the article, Chipchase responds to the author, who wonders if more technology is always better. “People once believed that people in other cultures might not benefit from having books either,” he says. I would go further: Not having cellphones is like not having language.
A most intriguing comment on Tim Ferriss’s excellent post about how to sleep better:
To require less sleep and yet still feel awake, energetic and not sleep deprived in general:
The single biggest factor for me has been the elimination of all dairy products from my diet. I have experimented with this over 4 years now and it is clear the most benefit is achieved with the most radical approach to this. In other words, removing dairy products completely from my diet has the biggest benefit. Yes this means no chocolate, no products with whey in them, no milk, yoghurt etc etc. it’s also interesting to see how difficult this is to do, but the benefits are so astounding from an energetic lifestyle point of view that I do it for long periods of time at a stretch.
Huh. Cheese makes me sleepy, so much so that I use it to fall asleep on planes. I didn’t always understand this. Several years ago, I was in New York and bought expensive tickets to a Broadway show. Before the show I ate some cheese — samples at a store, maybe. During the show I fell asleep.