Alyssa Reads Uniquely Human: Part 3

I'm now reading Chapter 2. The previous part (Chapter 1) is here, and the start of my reading Uniquely Human is here.

I think I've put my finger on one of the things that's been bugging me. Yes, we go on to (at least partially) reframe the ways the students Dr. Prizant describes are acting, but it's still a behaviorizing (or sometimes partially behaviorizing) portrayal. The behaviorizing portrayal is then followed by investigating motivations on some level, but we're still starting with the standard tropes.

It's part of the general theme I've been coming to, where this is better than most autism narratives (I haven't thrown the book at the wall!) but there's a lot of "has a good idea but doesn't quite follow through on it."

Another example is the big idea of not thinking of autism as a bunch of symptoms/deficits. Yes, this is a good idea. But then, re: echolalia:

In children who can speak it is often among the first indicators to parents that something is amiss in a child, when, instead of responding or initiating with the child's own language, the child echoes words or phrases borrowed from others. (37).

Reaction the first: Uh isn't that describing a symptom or deficit.
Reaction the next: I think original language is what's really meant, echolalia is our language for a lot of us... (see also my echolalic poetry, here, here, and here. Really want to argue the recombinations aren't my own language, even if the pieces are echoed?)

Parents apparently worry that echolalia will mark kids as... quirky. Yeah, I've got a complicated relationship with that word. (Comparative and deceptive) safety, erasure, "soft" disclosure, so many meanings behind that word.

I'm not sure why the part of trying to stop echolalia that is worse is the part where it's on the path to learning more "standard" communication (what I assume he means when he says learning to communicate and connect, since he's said in other spots that echolalia is communcation) as opposed to the part where it's silencing current communication (which he also points out as a problem.)

In this chapter I finally get to see advice from an adult on the spectrum cited as such, where he's learning from us as the experts he says we are rather than from (more humanized than by most clinicians) objects of study. The tendency has definitely been to treat us as subjects that he observes, which, yes there's useful stuff to be gained from observation but it took a while to get to the "actually using information you can get by asking us" for a book that calls us experts.

I really do approve of his pointing out that for none of the children that he worked with was echolalia actually meaningless. This is important! He studied this fairly heavily, it seems, and I would love to grab the citations because as much as echolalia as communication is one of those things autistic adults have been saying since ever, I don't know of too many clinical/academic citations to back it up. Finding that we use echolalia for all the same reasons and functions neurotypical folks use more "standard" language for is a handy thing to be able to cite.

However: If we're going to call echolalia part of language/a language, maybe we shouldn't call it a path to acquiring language, with no modifier on language? Echolalia really can be a path to acquiring non-echolalic or less-obviously-echolalic language, but 1) it's made of words and 2) serves the purposes of language so it's already language, so we should really note what kind of language it can be part of acquiring. I'd like to point you to the last three full paragraphs of "If you don't use your words you won't be indistinguishable" now. Really the whole thing but those last three paragraphs are what's most relevant to my points here: less-obviously-echolalic language is not the same thing as not-scripting or not-echolalic language. It's often a defense to make the echolalic nature less obvious, because folks will often assume the speech is meaningless if they know the speaker is autistic and they recognize that it's an echo/reference. (As opposed to neurotypicals apparently being clever when they make references?) Privileging language that you can't tell is echolalic, whether or not it really is, ties in to that same problem. Stop that.

Similarly, we don't take our "turn" in the coversation by merely echoing and "not really respond" (47). Remember that echolalia as studied and described here is 1) made of words and phrases and 2) serves the purposes of language so it's already langauge and is a response. That doesn't mean it's not useful to break long and complex sentences into smaller chunks. It is. Doing so gives us a larger library of phrases to work with and recombine, if nothing else (and it probably helps with understanding in ways that make recombination easier anyways.)

Then we get a story where Dr. Prizant asks a student why they do something. Yay, asking us. (So when I started reading Folk Psychological Narratives, which I swear I will eventually finish and then poke holes in the places where it doesn't follow it's own logic when applied to autism either.... the point is Hutto repeatedly emphasizes that the best way to get information on why a person acted as they did is to ask them. There are times where that could not work, but autism is not inherently an exception.)

In Justin's story, I think that there is some interesting framing of motivations, or some interesting motivations, even if the actions are good. Justin was getting nervous, and he was scripting (and the script was noticeable because it was not normative for the situation,) seemingly out of anxiety. So:

To replace this unusual greeting with a more conventional one, his parents prepared an index card with reminders of what to say in social situations. (49).

So we're doing this to replace the unusual greeting? Not to ... help with the anxiety? (Which could absolutely have a side effect of a more conventional greeting happening.) Interesting priorities there. If we're doing it because of the greeting, that really is trying to get rid of autistic behaviors because they're noticeably autistic. If we're doing it because in this case the script is a sign of anxiety, we're trying to help reduce a source of stress. Rather different goals.

Continue to Part 4 here.

What if autistic people guess other's mental states MORE?

I've been (slowly) reading Daniel D. Hutto's book, Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons. I say slowly because, well, it's slow. It's meant for people who are much more able to handle (and thrive on) philosophy jargon, as opposed to my sometimes ability to essentially liveblog it and hope that what I wrote out in what amounts to a liveblog in my own language sticks.

I'm only bothering at all because the ideas in the preface looked interesting, and I'm only able to at all because this one is better than most about using words I can understand and providing examples I can understand.

Right now, I want to talk about an idea that reading his stuff has let me work through a bit better. Here's some of the stuff from him that I'm looking at:

1. It makes sense to ask if we even seek to understand people using predictions and explanations anyways. “For one thing, it is not plausible that we could take a detached interest in the movements of all those we encounter, for to do so would surely sap our intellectual resources” (250.)
2. Hutto repeatedly points out that speculating on others reasons for their actions, even when we have evidence to support us, is unlikely to get us the right reasons, and that while the person's own explanation for why they acted isn't 100% foolproof, it's way more likely to be accurate than the guess is. I think I have this in my notes 3-4 times and I'm still on chapter 1 (and its endnotes.)
3. In some cases, a person's beliefs and desires could be sufficiently different from those expected that knowing what they were doesn't actually help make their actions understandable. It just moves the confusion from “Why did you do that?” to “Why would you think/want that?” In that case, further explanation, using cultural differences or individual differences, is needed to understand. (Paraphrase from a paragraph on pages 7-8.)
4. Stories can help us understand unusual actions: they can either show us why the reasoning behind an action is actually familiar or they can make it familiar. (Summary of a paragraph on page 8.)
5. “Sometimes the behavior of others is so erratic that we have no option but to regard those individuals in the same light as we do objects” (8.)

I think that covers the ideas and quotes I'm using for this bit.

Anyways.

Now for immediate responses I had to each of those things.

1. I've seen a lot of autistic people write that trying to understand what others are doing, trying to understand social situations, is exhausting. It's cognitively taxing! As an autistic person, I'm going to agree. Handling social situations does “sap [my] intellectual resources.”
2. And people insisting on taking that kind of spectator guessing without listening to the person's explanation when trying to explain the actions of neurodivergent people (my experience would be as an autistic person) is basically using this kind of logic. No wonder it doesn't go well! Folks, we already know it doesn't work that great when it's within the same culture and neurotype! (Grumble grumble theory of mind grumble grumble doesn't know what it's like to be themselves grumble grumble nonsense.)
3. Oh, you mean like people thinking big parties are fun? Or that strobe lights are fun? Or that fluorescent lights were a reasonable idea? Or one of any number of ways that sensory processing and general cognitive differences mean that people's wants could be different to the point of not being able to understand them.
4. Huh. So that's going to tie into representation stuff for all the groups ever. If there aren't stories about neurodivergent people acting for reasons that make sense to neurodivergent people, then it'll be harder for folks to understand the reasons neurodivergent people might have for doing things. Which goes back into thinking we're not understandable. I guess I'll keep writing fiction with autistic characters, especially protagonists, who don't die, get cured, or get sent away.
5. THIS IS NOT AN AUTISTIC PERSON SAYING THIS. THIS IS A PRESUMABLY NEUROTYPICAL ACADEMIC SAYING THAT WE SOMETIMES REGARD PEOPLE IN THE SAME LIGHT AS OBJECTS. Now that that's been established:
   1. The reason given that we would do so is when their actions are super-duper not understandable to us. Super-duper not understandable, not even a little bit sense-making.
      
      
   2. Isn't it people in privileged and majority groups who tend to have trouble seeing members of oppressed and minority groups as human? And the stories are about the people in the privileged and majority groups, so... yeah, actually this totally fits.

Now, I have some connections between the things!

Hear me out.

What if it's not that autistic people have some sort of inability to use folk psychology or theory of mind or any of those other things? What if it's that the reasons for doing things that make automatic or near automatic sense to autistic people are sufficiently different from the ones that make automatic or near automatic sense to neurotypical people that we have to resort to those kinds of guesses more? Then we run into the fact that no one is actually very good at those guesses.

And what if we resort to those guesses because the reasons that make sense to the dominant neurotypical culture are supposed to be “obvious” and we get laughed at (and probably still not answered) when we ask?

What if the idea that autistic people see others as objects... is because that's what most people do, at least a little bit, when their actions are super-duper impossible to understand, and the differences aren't being explained in ways that make sense to us? (I mean, also autistic people generally don't actually think of other people as objects.)

What if the exhaustion that autistic people often have trying to do social things is because, unlike people who are close enough to the mythical exactly average neurology that these expectations can be picked up by osmosis, we do have to use the kind of prediction and explanation that Hutto was arguing against on page 250, and he's right that the problem with doing that is exhaustion?

What if a willingness to explain the reasons and cultural underpinnings on the neurotypical side, and a willingness to listen to the neurominority-side explanations, could go further to solve the supposed lack of theory of mind or inability to use folk psychology (different things according to Hutto, and both things that I think aren't what's going on) than any amount of “therapy” to teach those skills ever could, because those skills weren't what was missing?

And by what if, I totally mean that I think those are what's going on. And I know other neurodivergent people have thought of a lot of these things before, but I think the specific way of looking at it through Hutto's ideas of folk psychology stuff and challenging how the neurotypical folk do things might be new. Also the turning theory of mind upside down and saying that  maybe we resort to that more, and that since it's not that reliable for anyone, that's part of where social differences are coming from. (Which would make the social differences a lot less "core" to autism than they're usually treated as.)

Work Cited

Hutto, Daniel D. Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2008. Print.