So much of what we consider as normal behaviour, can be thrown into high relief by deviations that some people experience and are difficult for us to appreciate. We take so much of normal behaviour for granted. For example, during the last 40 years it has become obvious that those suffering from degrees of autism or Asperger's syndrome, can also show a remarkable variation, quite consistently, in the way they see the world, and that often these variations are also associated with problems of language. For example, they often exhibit an inability to fathom another person's intentions - how another person's mind works - or to fully engage socially; aspects of what have become embraced by the so called 'Theory of Mind'. Autists take language quite literally. They lack a sense of embarrassment; and have difficulty in understanding jokes  or vernacular speech.This all suggests there is a genetic content to these aspects of personality. It has also been suggested that it could even be a factor in understanding schizophrenia. With autism there is often an enhancement of the way the world is seen, that is a permanent part of a person's natural character. It has been vividly described by a few who are able to articulate their experiences.

Jasmine

Jasmine O'Neill described her world, movingly, in her book Through the Eyes of Aliens.

 I am a young woman with fairly severe classical Autism, and am a savant in writing, art, and music. I view my autism as something that is very beautiful - I am also mute, which is not due to mechanical inability to produce words and sounds. It is rather an emotional and cognitive issue. Language has a different usage for an autistic person than it has for a non-autistic person. It is more receptive than expressive generally. I take what is said by others very literally. My brain is unable to understand grey subtle areas in language. To me, certain words also have a private meaning different from their common definition. Music and emotion come instinctively to me. And so, the silent paper words I use are sparse, clear and musical. I identify with rhythm, including the rhythms in my body. I remain within my inner world at all times, enclosed in a protective bubble. I am an alien who peers out at another world with shy, introverted eyes.It's like living in a lovely sea shell...I've learnt to feel pride in my differences. I prefer to be who I am, for being different can be marvellous . I love my Autism. I accept my manic depression, but it does not always please me! I've an insatiable curiosity about things around me. All things are heightened for me, so what a regular person would be tickled with pleasure over, I'll be totally ecstatic. Likewise, someone else's small irritation will turn into a catastrophe for me, like a hundred nails screeching a blackboard. I  remember minute details. I'll notice if an object has been moved in a room. My eyes soak in colour. My hearing is highly acute, as is my smell. It's disturbing to see a blot of lint disrupting the perfect plane of a rug or bedcover. I am also fond of wandering a certain path through the house, and I absorb myself into the patterns of carpets in unfamiliar settings. It calms the anxiety I feel from being in a new environment. There are certain personal rituals I do simply for sensory pleasure. They include rhythmic movements and sounds I make to myself.I have a genius IQ, yet in other areas, such as auditory comprehension, figuring out other people's minds, deciphering the human code of behaviour, and remembering a long set of instructions, and knowing what people in a picture are doing, I am retarded. Isolation isn't desolation.., and my Autism is a gift that makes living even richer.

 There is more in those few comments, I feel, about the business of being human than in countless texts written in the name of psychology, philosophy or aesthetics. It is now thought that 1 in 100 of us show autistic symptoms to some degree, so perhaps Jasmine is just talking about the extremes of a universal variation existing right across the whole human race. Recently, it has been suggested that basic maleness and femaleness are related to these types of variation, for it is well known that autism has a sex-linked factor as there are far more boy autists than girls. Perhaps, we are all somewhere in the spectrum, just by showing personal variations in the way we see the world, and it is just the extreme variations that become obvious, and are labelled as 'inadequacies'. These experiences point to so many questions we should be asking, and should make us realise just how precarious, or tenuous, our connections with the external world really are, and with what we claim as 'reality' , or the absoluteness of some of our opinions - especially our values. It is not being suggested that it is solely the pecularities of language possessed that cause the pecularities in personality, only that clearly an underlying interdependence does appear to exist.

Wendy

There are other well-documented autistic lives. Wendy Lawson has written a poem describing her difficulty with comprehension of normal speech, such as a phrase like 'Sit down and sit up',  or 'Please pull the door after you as you leave', for example.

You'd think the buses would run on time

The lady says out loud.

You mark my words,

 it will be fine.

 The man yells from the crowd.

 I stared at each in disbelief,

 What is it that they mean?

The words we use to speak each day,

 Should say the things we need to say.

 But when in doubt I'll leave it out

 And choose instead another way.

Clearly, not everyone is so enamoured of metaphor as literary scholars would have us believe we should be!

 Jasmine states above, quite unaffectedly, that she is a savant in writing, art and music but it has long been known, that some people,  exhibiting autistic behaviour also, have shown dazzling feats of memory and calculation (see Scientific American, June 2002). The film Rain Man was inspired by Kim Peek who knows 7,600 books by heart , as well as every telephone area code, highway, zip code and television station in the U.S.

Leslie Lemke is blind and has never studied the piano, and, although he suffers from cerebral palsy, he composes music and is able to play thousands of pieces flawlessly from memory, even after hearing them only once. Even as early as 1789, Benjamin Rush, the father of American psychiatry, described the exploits of Thomas Fuller who, when asked how many seconds a man lived by the time he was 70 years, 17 days, and 12 hours old gave the correct answer of 2,210,500,800 in a minute and a half and he had taken into account the 17 leap years. We often overlook the real significance of such extreme deviation from the norm, adopting the rather simplistic attitude that it is only something to gawp at in astonishment. But the fact that it happens at all should remind us that our sense of 'normality' is very shallow-rooted, and that we should always be prepared to ask why such extreme ability is not more common, and to remember that the human mind does obviously possess a potential far in excess of that normally exhibited. We know not how or why this is so. Is there always a price to pay for having such precocious ability?

We will now look at the alternative ways in which language can be used, and how this has shaped the way we define concepts like art and science, as opposed to the general view that this dichotomy resides simply in what we are talking about.

©   Frank Evans 2009