Category: books

Interview with Kamran Nazeer (part 2)

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ROBERTS I got the sense reading your book that the autistic persons got more pleasure from focusing on small details of things. Those details were comforting. Like a favorite piece of music, or whatever; anything you enjoy is comforting. So when they were uncomfortable, they would go to an unusual place. If somebody likes small details, they’ll pay more attention to them, simple as that. Because if you don’t you’ll do something else with your attention.

NAZEER We get taught that it’s more socially useful not to focus on the small details. Sometimes we get taught that in explicit ways, or sometimes that’s just the way things are. So people forget about small details, because they’re focusing on something that’s more socially useful.

ROBERTS When you say focus on the small details, you gave an example. The opposite of a small detail is where the bus is going; that’s sort of a big thing. So what’s another example that’s opposite of the small detail?

NAZEER I’ll give you an example of Craig, who’s the speechwriter, also in the book. Craig will often find that he’s sitting in a meeting and he’s supposed to be focusing on the political issue or the speech that is the topic of discussion at that meeting. That is the thing that he’s supposed to be focusing on professionally. But he’ll often find difficult is that he’s noticing lots and lots of other small details, as well. He tries very hard to keep his focus where it ought to be, but because he keeps noticing these other small details, they can drag him away from where he’s supposed to be focusing.

ROBERTS Details of the meeting, or details of the argument, or what?

NAZEER It could be that. So he could be seeing a level of nuance that actually isn’t all that useful. Because sometimes when you’re in a meeting, you have to ignore certain nuances to get the bigger points. Or it could just be sometimes that he’s focusing on the fact that somebody’s missed a button when they buttoned up their shirt, or that their cufflinks are unusual, or that they’re flicking their pen. He might notice and focus on things that are completely irrelevant to the conversation he’s supposed to be having.

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Interview with Kamran Nazeer (part 1)

Seth Roberts2 Comments

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.

The Fate of Laura

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This sounds promising. I have read more words written by Vladimir Nabokov than by anyone else, by a large margin. A few days ago I was watching American Idol and thinking about how I have come to enjoy singing more because of the judges’ evaluations. It reminded me of reading Nabokov’s commentary to Eugene Onegin when I was in college. In his commentary, Nabokov passed judgment on many lines of poetry — “this is beautiful,” “that is awful.” Studying those remarks — what did he see? — made me read in a new way forever.

Recent Reading

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Random paragraphs from two books I’ve recently read.

By 1853 Riemann was twenty-seven and on the last stretch of the long road to a lectureship at Gottingen. In Germany at that time, such an academic position did not pay the modest salary it does today. It did not pay any salary. To many of us, that would be a bit of a drawback. To Riemann, it was a coveted position, a stepping stone to a professorship. And students gave tips.

From Euclid’s Window: The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace (2001) by Leonard Mlodinow.

“Tastes great, less filling!” could be the motto for most processed foods, which are far more energy dense than most whole foods: They contain much less water, fiber, and micronutrients, and generally much more sugar and fat, making them at the same time, to coin a marketing slogan, “More fattening, less nutritious!”

From In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (2008) by Michael Pollan.

Everything Old is New Again: Pick-Up Lines

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Long before Atkins, there was Banting. The first low-carb diet was the creation of William Banting’s doctor. A pamphlet about it titled Letter on Corpulence, published in 1864, was a huge best-seller. The verb to banting meant to diet.

And long before The Game — albeit less well-known for teaching pick-up lines — there was Jane Austen. The lessons of The Game were a subplot of a recent episode of Ugly Betty in which Betty interviews an author of a similar book that says the best way to get a woman’s interest to follow praise with criticism. Later in the episode, we see this advice in action: Henry tells a woman that she has a lovely face — “your doctor did an excellent job.”

Here’s Austen, from Northanger Abbey:

“I have sometimes thought,” said Catherine, doubtingly, “whether ladies do write so much better letters than gentlemen! That is — I should not think the superiority was always on our side.”

“As far as I have had opportunity of judging, it appears to me that the usual style of letter-writing among women is faultless, except in three particulars.”

“And what are they?”

“A general deficiency of subject, a total inattention to stops, and a very frequent ignorance of grammar.”

A little later:

“And pray, sir, what do you think of Miss Morland’s gown?”

“It is very pretty, madam,” said he, gravely examining it; “but I do not think it will wash well; I am afraid it will fray.”

Everyday Hedonics

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Conversation on a Berkeley lawn:

Andrew Gelman: You’d think we prefer an upward spike in pleasure — we’re happier for a while, then return to normal — to a downward one, but the evidence isn’t clear.

Seth: I know someone who woke himself up so he could enjoy falling asleep.

Andrew: Really?

Seth: Yes, really.

Andrew: Was that you?

Seth: No, it wasn’t me.

Andrew: If I heard about someone doing that, I’d think it was you.

Phil Price: That’s brilliant, actually.

Leonard Mlodinow, author of Euclid’s Window (about geometry), Feynman’s Rainbow, and a forthcoming book on probability and chance, and co-author with Stephen Hawking of A Briefer History of Time, was the brilliant sleeper. (Not Montaigne.) He might have woken himself up while he was a grad student at Berkeley (in physics). After Berkeley, he became an assistant professor of physics at Caltech. He left Caltech to become a writer. As unorthodox in a big way as waking yourself up so that you can fall asleep is in a small way.

Please, Mr. Kirn, I Want a Summary

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Years ago, Bill McKibben gave a reading at Black Oak Books, a Berkeley bookstore. After the reading he chatted with a friend. The grade of B his book had received from Entertainment Weekly came up. “It settled arguments around the house about who’s the better writer,” McKibben said. His wife’s most recent book had gotten a B+. McKibben and his friend then decried the EW practice of giving grades to books as if they were term papers. Perhaps they called it “simplistic”.

Whereas I think EW has exactly the right idea. I liked Ha Jin’s Waiting. I respect Walter Kirn. I was pleased to see that Kirn reviews Ha Jin’s latest book, A Free Life, in the current New York Times Book Review but I became a little dismayed as I read Kirn’s review: What exactly was he trying to say?

Volatility, after all, is a measure of health in a free market, and the elementary algebra of Jin’s narrative pace — as slow, implacable and steady as interest accumulating in a savings account — implicitly promises that his dimes and quarters of mundane description and petty conflict will result in a full piggy bank for all. Neither does Jin give his people flaws or problems grave enough to threaten their well-being. Pingping’s chronic fretting is not disabling, and Nan’s nascent ambitions as a poet aren’t the kind that lead to leaps off bridges if they go unattained.

Huh? Kirn seems to be saying the novel is too predictable but I’m not quite sure. I would really have liked a grade at the end so that I could have figured out what Kirn thought overall.

Kirn wrote for Spy; I met him there once and told him I loved his article about “The First 100 Lies” (of the Bush pere presidency). Where is Review of Reviewers, one of Spy’s best features, when we need it?

Drugs and Depression

Seth Roberts1 Comment

The most gripping portions of Let Them Eat Prozac [by David Healy] narrate courtroom battles in which Big Pharma’s lawyers, parrying negligence suits by the bereaved, took this line of doubletalk to its limit by explaining SSRI-induced stabbings, shootings, and self-hangings by formerly peaceable individuals as manifestations of not-yet-subdued depression.

Yeah. From an excellent book review. The author of the review, an English professor, doesn’t understand methodology, but the facts are nicely presented. I assigned some of Healy’s book to my students. Healy did experiments that showed that Prozac caused suicidal thinking in a non-trivial fraction of ordinary people.

Gary Taubes Interview

Seth Roberts7 Comments

From the Los Angeles Times:

What is the evidence that the low-carb Atkins diet is healthy?

First, all you’re doing is not eating foods that none of us ate up until a few hundred or thousand years ago.

That’s a good way to put it. However, I wonder about processing: What about a food eaten thousands of years ago processed in a new way that increases speed of digestion? E.g., applesauce, orange juice. I believe fruit juice that tastes the same each time is very fattening, for example. Taubes says he lost about 12 pounds doing Atkins that he has kept it off. I lost and kept off the same amount of weight by reducing how much my food was processed. Oranges instead of orange juice. The whole interview is a summary of Taubes’ new book Good Calories, Bad Calories.

More Taubes links. Taubes on Larry King Live. Radio interview with Taubes about epidemiology. In this interview, around the 22:00 mark, Taubes makes some very interesting comments about the evidence against trans fats. He says all the evidence against trans fats comes from a data set (the Nurses Health Study) in which trans fat intake is completely confounded with processed-food intake.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

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Exit Wounds

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Tonight, by accident, I attended a talk by the Israeli artist Rutu Modan about her graphic novel Exit Wounds. I learned:

1. One day in 1914, Franz Kafka wrote in his diary, “Germany invaded Russia. Swimming lessons in the afternoon.”

2. Browsing at a flea market, she found an album of pictures of her dead father. Her family had given it away by mistake. When she told the seller about this, he raised the price from $4 to $150.

3. She wrote Exit Wounds in Hebrew but drew it in English. No kidding. She wrote the text in Hebrew and had it translated into English. The balloons where the words go were arranged to read from left to right. For a forthcoming Hebrew edition, she made mirror images of everything. There was just one problem: Cars were on the wrong side of the road. 150 panels (the hero is a taxi driver) have this problem. She has been forced to do some redrawing.