Alyssa Reads Memory Blunting: Ethical Analysis- cognitive liberty

 I read "Memory Blunting: Ethical Analysis" by the President's Council on Bioethics, excerpted from Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness (2003) and appearing in Neuroethics: An Introduction with Readings, edited by Martha J. Farah. I did so because I am taking a neuroethics class and we're supposed to show that we're thinking about neuroethics stuff at least a bit outside class. Also because I'm super-interested in how neuro-stuff (especially neurodivergence but really all things neuro-) is represented in fiction (especially young adult speculative fiction.) I'm pretty much chucking my notes (drawn parallels, expressions of annoyance, and the occasional "OK that's legitimate") on my blog because as important as a lab notebook is, I like notes that are typed and searchable. I started with some connections to Allegiant, then some thoughts on collective effects of blunting trauma. Now here's cognitive liberty.

The concerns about what we might do to others minds if it were an issue of what person X does/chooses for person X, not what we are choosing for others. Cognitive liberty. We don't seem to have a coherent definition of the self, and autonomy is complicated, but there is definitely a thing where a person either is or is not making the decisions about interventions taken (or not taken) on their own minds. Also on how folks define their own "true selves." What about who you are is important to you? Not what's important to me about who you are. Of course, that would stop us from moralizing over what experiences other people have are real and true vs. somehow fake. Changing one's own cognition by one's own choice isn't as acceptable as I think it should be. 

And yet, there may be a great cost to acting compassionately for those who suffer bad memories, if we do so by compromising the truthfulness of how they remember. We risk having them live falsely in order to cope, surviving by whatever means possible. (92)

Again, we do to them. Not, we offer them the option. Do we think we know better than them what's right for them? That way lies all sorts of abuse "for their own good." And ... do we really think everyone would choose to dull the pain of a memory or to forget it (remember also that those two things are not the same.) Because I don't think that. I think lots of people would, but not everyone. Despite (because of?) my arguments about cognitive autonomy leaning towards letting people choose to blunt the trauma,  I want the right to remember in my relatively unchanged way. It's just that the arguments run towards why everyone needs to be doing it that way, and I don't believe everyone needs to be remembering that way. I think enough people would choose to remember that we'd get whatever collective benefits the memory would provide, even if we let people choose to dull their pain. Not that I think the supposed benefits are nearly as strong as seems to be argued. Intentional ignorance is already a thing.

Divergent, Gattaca, and limitations "for your own good"

Last night I participated in the #FilmDis chat about human gene editing and GATTACA. Which, even though it's been a while since I saw the film (I think the last time was in 2010), I have opinions about. It's a film about eugenics, and in a very real sense it's about eliminating disability in most people but creating a new genetically inferior (disabled) underclass that looks a lot like the old one, people who couldn't afford to have their kids genetically selected birth this underclass. So do people who leave their children's genes up to luck. (AKA, the protagonists parents, at least the first time.) But the only person we see in the movie (which is largely about disability discrimination) who we'd discriminate against today? He's got an acquired disability. It's not genetic. And he's the one who's genetically valid, selling his genetic identity and thereby allowing the protagonist to get in the door to his dream job.

And Divergent is a series I have opinions about. I loved what looked like neurodivergent representation in the first two books, except for the part where I knew what was coming: the Divergent are secretly neurotypical and everyone who really fits a faction has "genetic damage" making them neurodivergent. And sure, we build a city in the end where no one really believes in genetic purity vs. genetic damage, but all through the series we're shown the functional superiority of Divergent people: Tris, do your Divergent magic, think like the Erudite and tell us what they'll do! Tris, come in first in initiation and have it clearly be about your Divergence. Or ... your neurotypicality.

So it's probably not shocking that I want to connect them? They've both got genetic engineering and discrimination based on genetic makeup. And I do:

A6 I want to link #GATTACA and #Divergent here. But I usually go to sleep over an hour ago so it's not working well. #filmdis

— Alyssa (@yes_thattoo) February 19, 2017

A6: I think it's both films limiting people based on perceived genetic defect in the name of wanting the best? #filmdis

— Alyssa (@yes_thattoo) February 19, 2017

You see, the entire idea of factions in Divergent is about behaviorally conditioning people to behave in ways that takes their presumed "damage" to an extreme, in a way that's hopefully useful. This ... actually reminds me of Specialisterne? More on that later, maybe. They think it's the kindest thing to do, giving people a way to be useful while using their supposed strengths (that are secretly still defects.) It's still limiting people based on an idea of what their potential is, for what is supposed to be their own good.

And several times in Gattaca, we see Anton attempt to dissuade Vincent from his goals, in the name of "protecting" his "invalid" older brother. He should take the jobs that "invalids" can get, not try to go to space as he's always wanted. He should leave the company he works for. He should accept that his genetics really do make him inferior and work from there, for his own good (for his own safety.) And maybe it would be safer. (Isn't it usually safer, at least in some ways, to stick to the paths laid out for you as acceptable?) But this sort of limiting people for their own "good" and to keep them "safe" exists in the real world, for disabled people. And guess what? It's not actually safe!

So in both Divergent and Gattaca, we have people limiting others (or trying to) in the name of their own good. Adults who only want the best for us, hurting us because of what they do not know. (My fear is not of water, and now I remember Vincent and Anton competing in the water. He didn't save anything to get back.)

#Rhetoric and #Aphantasia (2/?, Faw and Galton)

I continue to look at the rhetoric around aphantasia, or not having a mind's eye. Part 1 is here. Now I'm looking at two papers written before the word "aphantasia" was coined. Both recognize that some people do have mental pictures (minds eye type stuff) and that some people don't, which involves recognizing some level of cognitive diversity. What people then do with the knowledge is another story. Galton is known for eugenics, after all.

So I'm starting with Bill Faw's paper, "Conflicting Intuitions May Be Based on Differing Abilities," which looks at the history of psychological/philosophical thought about mental imagery or the lack thereof. He points out a tendency for people to assume that everyone does this imagery (or doesn't do this imagery) the way the researcher them-self does(n't) do it. By and large, researchers assume it's a thing: most people can visualize things, after all. Faw claims, “Much of the current imaging literature either denies the existence of wakeful non-mental imagers, views non-imagers motivationally as 'repressors' or 'neurotic', or acknowledges them but does not fully incorporate them into their models.” 

Faw argues that the everyone uses mental images camp (thanks Aristotle) comes from two things: most people have mental images, and people tend to assume that what they do is what everyone does. Which leads me to ask regarding mental imagery what I've asked before regarding autism: theory of whose mind? (Sam mentions the incident in his thesis and on his blog.) Also, Faw is himself aphantasiac, or a non-mental-imager, as he calls it in his paper. (He's writing before the word aphantasia was coined. I kind of want to check if he's written on the topic since.) He describes reactions of disbelief from others, that non-imaging is even a thing, as well as challenges to the notion that he could know this about himself. Hello, parallels to autism with the “you can't know what it's like you be yourself” thing.

It does make skeptical sense to question whether people filling out a 5- or 7-scale survey all mean the same by ‘vague and dim’! But it seems untoward to dispute such strong statements of mental imaging abilities — and the lack thereof — as seen in the self-reports that Galton and I and many others have elicited. (16 in the ResearchGate PDF, probably 60 in the actual journal)

And that's the thing: I don't think people all mean the same thing by vague, dim, vivid, or any other inherently subjective descriptor. I (and Faw) do think there's a clear difference between "vivid" and "non-existent," though. Enough of a difference that assuming that everyone does (or doesn't do) mental imagery the same way seems ... less than logical? But it's something quite a few philosophers and psychologists seem to have been doing along the way.

Aristotle assumes “normal” thought involves imagery. (What the heck is normal? Hi, neurodiversity paradigm, it'd be nice to see you here.) Hobbes isn't talking about pictures so specifically, but does seem to hold that thinking/imagination depends on internal sensory creations. Locke writes of memory as re-experiencing or re-creating prior perceptions with the knowledge of having had them before. That's probably what my intro to neurobiology teacher meant by vivid recall, and it's not a thing I do except with sounds. Titchener describes his own mental imagery as a gallery and can not conceive of even small gaps in the streams of others imagery, assuming that his own experience is universal. (Theory of whose mind?) He was actually one of the respondents to Galton's survey, and he challenges the reports of other respondents who don't experience mental imagery.

Then he turns to the opposite intuition, where someone who describes what sounds like their own experience without conscious mental imagery (Watson, in this case) and assumes that this experience is the one that generalizes. (Theory of whose mind?) He denies mental imagery as being important to anyone and questions its very existence for most. And I do think generalizing ones own experience is a reasonable way to make guesses unless and until you get better information, but he's doing this in the face of a whole lot of descriptions of mental imagery by/from/for others. Interestingly, this guy was one of the big definers of behaviorist thought, and he claims thought as internal speech. (My thought is usually internal speech, but sometimes it's externalized typing or handwriting. Sometimes it's recognition of patterns that I then need to somehow translate into language in one of those forms.) That's the only person Faw describes as having rejected the importance and possibly existence of mental imagery, and even his descriptions of non-imaging are called ideological rejection by folks who assume we all have mental pictures.

On a similar note, Faw suggests (following Thomas Leahey) that Watson might have been a strong auditory imager but weak or non- visual imager. Which is a funny way of writing about it, since I always thought imagery meant visual stuff, but there doesn't seem to be a word for any similar activity with the other senses. Now that's a fun question – why don't we have words for internally created sensory perceptions for hearing or smell? We do have the idea of songs getting stuck in our heads, so I don't think it's most people not having those sorts of perceptions. Since I describe my own non-imagery as “no minds eye” I would make a parallel description using the idea of a minds ear, nose, or tongue, but that doesn't quite work with tactile sensations.

Then he gets into Galton. I actually read Galton's 1880 paper, and my thoughts on it come next:

This paper is cited as being the first place where aphantasia is described. Galton had no problem calling it a mental deficiency (unlike the folks who coined the term in 2015; Faw refers to it a dis-ability in describing his own experience in 2009 and gets cited in 2015):

"They had a mental deficiency of which they were unaware, and naturally enough supposed that those who were normally endowed, were romancing." (302)

Remember that this guy is one of the big eugenics guys. Of course, he found this was most common in "men of science" and therefore had some motivation to find a reason that this was OK. Or not genetic, instead caused by disuse. Or both.

"Scientific men as a class have feeble powers of visual representation. There is no doubt whatever on the latter point, however it may be accounted for. My own conclusion is, that an over-readiness to perceive clear mental pictures is antagonistic to the acquirement of habits of highly generalised and abstract thought, and that if the faculty, of producing them was ever possessed by men who think hard, it is very apt to be lost by disuse ... I am however bound to say, that the missing faculty seems to be replaced so serviceably by other modes' of conception, chiefly I believe connected with the motor sense, that men who declare themselves entirely deficient in the power of seeing mental pictures can nevertheless give life-like descriptions of what they have seen, and can otherwise express themselves as if they were gifted with a vivid visual imagination." (304)

That doesn't stop him from calling it a feeble ability or a mental deficiency, but he talks about compensation as not just a possibility, but as something that definitely happens.

But what does Faw have to say about Galton? He points out that Galton's the one of the few who seems not to have assumed that his own experience of mental imagery or lack thereof is everyone's experience of mental imagery, and that this is good research. Which is true enough. I still don't trust Galton as far as I can throw his long-decayed corpse, because eugenics, but his thoughts on mental imagery seem to be better balanced than the other folks Faw's been reading.

George Betts made a scale to measure visual imagery and looks around to see how common aphantasia is. He finds 2% among his college students and 19% among other psychologists. Which means he, too, has to have worked under the assumption that variation is a thing.

Then we get more recent work which tries to check mental imagery objectively rather than based on subjective self-reports, alongside continued surveys of subjective reports that find people tending towards “vivid” imagery. (Ok, but I'm still only understanding vividness as a thing that I don't experience.) I assume that some of the assumptions that internal imagery is required for object recognition (I can do this), freehand drawing (I am terrible at this), and spatial reasoning tasks (I'm good at these) come into play with the supposedly objective measures, since Faw described this sort of conflation as an issue in much of the literature. Even Faw's eventual hypothesis of subliminal/unconscious imagery that doesn't reach the conscious level still seems to be working with the assumption that some sort of image-like process is needed. It does recognize that it doesn't require an actual image, which is nice (and which may relate to Faw being aphantasiac himself and therefore knowing it's possible!)

Works Cited

Faw, Bill. "Conflicting intuitions may be based on differing abilities: Evidence from mental imaging research." Journal of Consciousness Studies 16.4 (2009): 45-68.

Galton, Francis. "I.—Statistics of mental imagery." Mind 19 (1880): 301-318.

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#Rhetoric and #Aphantasia (1/2, not academia)

So I'm Autistic. I've seen all sorts of contradictory ways of thinking about autism. Somehow we both lack imagination and are lost in our own worlds? You kind of need to pick one, considering that making our own world involves imagination.

Well, about a year ago they gave a name to one of my other cognitive quirks. "Aphantasia" is now either an "intriguing variation in experience" (specifically stated not to be a disease!) which about 1 in 50 live with, or it's a "newly described condition" we'd like to investigate for insights into the imagination and ways to boost visual imagery (presumably in the folks who have such visual imagery) in order to "improve our memory, increase our empathy and even gain new treatments for conditions like addiction and anxiety."

The basic idea of aphantasia is that I don't have a mind's eye. (I do have a mind's ear, and absolutely get songs stuck in my head.) If you ask me to picture an object, I'll either sit quietly and then relay factual information about the type of object, or I'll bluntly tell you that I can't do that. Most creative exercises, there's a way around actually visualizing the thing. I can tell you this because I don't see images that are not literally in front of me, not when I'm awake. My mind just doesn't work that way. (So no, I don't think in pictures. I suspect that "no minds eye" and "thinking in pictures" is a combination you can't actually have in one person.)

And yes, I am interested in better understanding how my own mind works. I don't think that's unusual. Pop psychology exists, after all. And Tris, from Divergent, made her cooperation with Erudite's tests contingent on her getting to understand the results of the tests they were performing on her. She wanted to understand how her mind worked, and especially the ways her mind didn't follow the operating procedures she'd been implicitly taught were standard. But that's not why I'm following the discussion on aphantasia, really.

I'm watching the rhetoric.

Shortly after the publication of "Lives without Imagery -- Congenital Aphasia," a letter to the editor in Cortex authored by Adam Zeman, Michaela Dewar, and Segio Della Sala, we see a human interest story on aphantasia in the "future" section of BBC.com. We talk about one adult man who does not visualize, and we talk about the difficulty inherent in understanding the internal mental processes of another person. We see discussion of potential advantages of reduced or missing mental imagery -- not needing to re-watch disgusting or traumatic events, for one thing. It's mentioned that verbal and logical skills tend to get practiced more (hi, did you know that I'm a mathematician?)

This is also the article with the mention of treatments for other conditions -- anxiety and PTSD among them. Which ... well, I've got anxiety and already don't have any mental imagery. If reducing mental imagery helps some folks with anxiety, that's great but let's not pretend that will be a silver bullet, ethics around activating and suppressing cognitive abilities aside. (I think that it's fine to do so by the request/desire of the person whose head you're messing with, but there's a lot of space for coercion towards "typical" cognitive processes.) There's some talk about manipulating people's levels of mental imagery for various reasons, but it's in both directions. Despite calling aphantasia a newly described condition (as opposed to cognitive style/variant), this article is probably the furthest away from disability tropes of the BBC articles. (Which isn't that far.)

B percent live with, affects as many as X in Y. These are condition words, pathology words, but they show up in the article that calls aphantasia a variation and specifically states that it is not a disease. And the article's headline? "Aphantasia: I can't visualize my own children." It's in the "health" section. A professional describes the effect on memory more generally, and then three people give short descriptions. One talks about how he does things. Another talks about what he can't do. We close with another professional, speaking to medical history and to educational impacts. (As an aside, I hate mindmaps.) This article reads more like a personal interest story describing the experience of a disability than anything else. It wants to be a disability story, but this Adam Zeman guy who was first author on the congenital aphantasia study won't call it a disease.

Another piece in the health section discusses both aphantasia (not visualizing) and hyperphantasia (visualizing extra.) Zeman continues to insist that aphantasia is not a disorder, thank you very much. I'm sure he's seen enough of the discussion to realize that the way we talk about it is going that way. The discussion for aphantasia here is largely focused on what we can't do, though. His insistence reads as a bit incongruous with the way the rest of the article talks about aphantasia.

(If you want to call it a disability, or conditionally a disability, I'd give you that. The social model of disability, which recognizes interactions between people and their environments, is a thing. The insistence on visual methods of learning and things like mind maps is also a thing, and presumably just as inaccessible to other aphantasiacs as it is to me. Now we're bringing in ideas of neurodiversity, where a neurological type can be a disability without it being disordered. There's not just one right way for a mind to work)

Then there's the aphantasia forums. These started shortly after the first BBC articles, if I remember my timing correctly. I've got an account, and will probably be sharing my thoughts there too, but I honestly don't post much. There's places where people share articles about aphantasia, including ones they wrote themselves. There's crowd research. (I notice that one of the questions is about people having other cognitive disorders as well, which positions aphantasia implicitly as being a disorder.) I've seen general discussion where quite a few people talk about having trouble with mathematics, which is opposite what some of the published articles hypothesize (compensatory skills in logic, verbal stuff, and/or math.) That could be going in the direction of mutually contradictory stereotypes.

Blake focuses on the experience of realizing that the way his mind works is most definitively not how most people's minds work. It's almost an attempt to analyze the psychology of the visualizing majority from the outsider perspective of an aphantasiac. Which, I mean, if they're going to do that to how we think, yeah, let's do this. Let's add a wing to the Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical. We've got an Autistic wing and a Dyslexic wing, why not an Aphantasiac wing?



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Alyssa Reads The US Book

On September 26, my copy of The US Book, by Michael Scott Monje Jr, arrived. I started reading. I know that's the day it arrived because her poetry immediately got me writing, which she says is one of the best compliments her book could get. I was happy, because the writing induced by (starting to) read this book broke through a bit of writers block. After writing a good bit in June (honestly mostly yelling at Uniquely Human, but I was making words) I dropped off a good bit in July, then only managed to write here once each in August and September. (To be fair, there was some other writing happening in August. There was not in September.)

So you can thank The US Book for my presence here again.

Image of a very happy looking Alyssa holding a copy of The US Book

Also, those of you who know my art style might recognize that cover, partially. I did that line art. 

Now to the actual reading bit:

The line that got me writing again was "Speaking is a prison when it's the only thing you're given." As a part time typist who can always, always tell you more typing than speaking, I represent that statement. It was always assumed that speech would work, because it appeared to, but written English is my natural language in a way spoken English isn't. 

I don't know what word to best describe my reaction to the call for psychology, as rhetoric, to make use of neuroscience. Something positive, and with perhaps some pride because neuroscience is the thing I am studying for my doctorate while writing about rhetoric, representation, and neurodivergence on another side. (I can't call one action the center and all others the sides, but I can say that there are many sides to what I do.) I have to agree that neuroscience has a ways to grow, and I'd like to be part of that growing because seriously folks, there are always assumptions and narratives built in to our science and at least I will admit to my neurodivergent ones. 

Face My Morning Face remains as important as it was the day it went up on her blog, if not more so. I'm thinking more so, because of what it's led to since then.

I'm as proud of Look for our communications if you want us to bother with your language. being dedicated to me now as I was the day it went up on her blog, if not more so. (The dedication is on the blog, not in the book. That's OK. I remember, plus it's on the Internet.)

And maybe, just maybe, the taste of those two pieces, which appear in The US Book but which are also still free online for you to read, will whet your appetite for the rest. I know I'm pretty blatantly saying you should read this, if you can, but that's because I think you should. The US Book made me think, laugh, and write. 

And of course, I'm studying neuroscience without leaving behind my knowledge as an Autistic activist and scholar of how we speak and write about things. Or my knowledge as a mathematician, for that matter. That's where I learned to poke holes in arguments, after all. While I work, I need to remember:

• Reading My Own Screams
  
  "Speaking is a prison when it's the only thing you're given." 'Nough said.
  
• Uses of the Knife
  
  I need this to remember about psychology as rhetoric + needing neuroscience. What I am studying is real, and it's important, and it's narrative too. Remember where the narrative comes from, because ... some of it's coming from the same people who hate us (It's time to accept that they hate you.) I don't get to be "apolitical" (as in protecting the status quo or as in not paying attention) without being self-loathing or self-sabotaging.
  
• Look for our communications if you want us to bother with your language.
  
  Communication barriers have more than one side and all too often, the side that's working hardest to translate their communications are also the ones who are called inherently incomprehensible.
  
  When I am tired and anxiety is telling me that nothing matters, I can remember that I have already had an impact. Not one measured in the metrics of academia, but one measured in people and poetry. I know which one matters more to me (and it's the one I've already got. Not gonna lie, though, I'm aiming for both.)
  
• It's time to accept that they hate you.
  
  Put so well, what I fight, why I fight, and remember that I am not alone. I'm not. 

#Pokémon Go and #Autism

Like most games that get super popular, Pokémon Go has a lot of autistic people interested and playing. We play games, you know. And enjoy having fun.

Like most activities that have autistic participants, Pokémon is getting attention from autism "experts" and professionals. They want to know why we play (uh, it's fun... why do neurotypical people play?) They want to know what it "helps with", since apparently everything autistic people do (everything we're allowed to do by our all-knowing and compassionate caretakers?) must "help with" (reduce) some aspect of our autism.

I am, of course, less than thrilled about the assumptions involved here. There are plenty of things I do for reasons that differ from why neurotypical people do them, but that's not so much in the area of games. It's more in the area of "I said words because I meant those words, but apparently neurotypical people say those words as code for something else and what do I do if what I actually mean is those words, why do you neurotypical folk need to ruin useful statements with your codes???"

So, why do I play Pokémon Go?

Well, it's fun.

Also, it gets neurotypical people socializing in more autistic ways, which makes it a heck of a lot easier for me to understand them and interact with them. Let's turn the usual social skills paradigm where we assume it's the autistic person socializing "wrong" on its head and make a super popular game that encourages people to socialize autistically, thanks.

Here's what I mean when I say that it encourages autistic socialization:

1. This isn't random small talk. "Hi, there's an Eevee over here!" makes a perfectly acceptable introduction to a fellow Pokémon Go player. Or when you meet one at a gym, "What team?" Straight to the point.
1. It's centered around a single shared interest. That interest is Pokémon (Go).
   
2. Eye contact is not an expected thing on any side. This is centered around a game played on our phones or tablets, so it's completely expected and accepted that we are looking at our phones or tablets, not at the people we're talking too. Great!
   
3. Pokémon was created by an autistic guy. He likes bugs. Why did you think "bug" was a type in Pokémon?

So let's turn that question around: Why do neurotypical people play Pokémon Go? What does it help them with? I welcome input from parents, professionals, and of course, those with neurotypicality themselves. But only when they are self-narrating zoo exhibits. I don't really think those with neurotypicality can speak to the general neurotypical experience :p

(And yes, that's what you sound like when you add a note about autistic contributors at the end of your calls for contributions.)

Theory of Mind Inside Out Note

I am (very slowly, partially because I've got a ton to do and partially because I have trouble with the way most philosophy-type academics write) piecing my way through Daniel Hutto's Folk Psychological Narratives. It's led to my writing thinky thoughts here before.

Well, I just found a paper that I think connects. It did, of course, study just the DMAB folks and is presumably going to be full of pathology language, but it talks about autistic people using more deliberative reasoning where we go through all the steps instead of stuff being instinctive. That paper is here: Reasoning on the Autism Spectrum: A Dual Process Theory Account.

Since Hutto's argument for why he thinks people don't typically reason out why other people acted as they did/attempt to explicitly figure out the mental states of others is that it'd involve more mental effort, and since autistic people tend to describe spending a lot of energy trying to understand the actions of others, I think we get a lot more practice at deliberative reasoning out of social interaction, which is then more tiring, but also since we have more practice at it we might use it more in other domains. 

Computers and Writing Session D5, Friday May 29 3:00-4:15pm, Disability and Universal Access.

I attended the Computers and Writing conference at University of Wisconsin-Stout. One of the panels where I took pretty good notes was session D5, Friday May 29 3:00-4:15pm, Disability and Universal Access. I'm now posting my write-up of the panel and my notes. 

Here's the nicer write-up, which I also added to the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative's Wiki. Maybe someone else will edit it with additional information, so that may not remain the same as what's below.

This panel began with Steven Hammer of Saint Joseph's University presenting on “The Sounds of Access: Disability, Art, and Open Source DIT (do-it-together) Interventions.” Hammer's presentation is concerned with Western art history and multimedia writing's tendency to ignore the perspectives and contributions of disabled people, and with the tendency towards a deficit model. He notes that after a diagnosis, there is a prognosis, which rather than simply describing what life will or could be like, it uses a presumed (and now unavailable) norm as a basis and describes how life will be different from that norm due to the diagnosis.

He suggests, rather than asking about how only certain people with certain diagnoses have bodies which are failing or considering how all bodies will eventually fail, asking “how are you failing right now?” He proposes that we consider the medicines we are taking to keep our bodies running every day.

With this question, however, Hammer mentions the risk that people will presume their experiences of bodily failure is equivalent to that of people with disabilities, who face oppression and marginalization based on their abilities in addition to the primarily practical concerns of keeping their bodyminds running.

Hammer then spoke about projects done together which use open source and glitch-theory methods to increase the accessibility of artistic production. One such project was his work on instruments for Arduino.

Hammer also drew a connection between Alexei Kruchenykh's idea of developing a language with no fixed meanings and his communication with his son, where the sounds are not words and the meanings might change from day to day.

After Hammer's talk, Samuel Harvey from Saint Cloud State University spoke on “Autism, Neurodiversity, and Identity Formation Through the Internet.” Harvey's talk covered the history of work on identity formation and on theory of mind, including the relations of these issues to autistic people. Noting that work on identity formation presumes that identity formation rests upon social interaction and the ability to understand what others are thinking (Theory of Mind,) and that autism comes with difficulties in social interaction, he asks what this would mean for identity formation in autistic people.

From there, he continues on to enthymemic dehumanization of people, particularly autistic people, where statements about identity formation, humanity, and theory of mind are made which logically lead to (never explicitly stated) denial of identity or humanity to marginalized people. The two primary examples Harvey notes are: 1) If identity formation depends on an understanding of what others think, or a theory of mind, and autistic people lack a theory of mind, then autistic people would be unable to develop an identity, and 2) If theory of mind is innate to humans, and certain groups are found not to have a theory of mind, that members of those groups are not human.

Harvey also notes issues with the current methods of testing theory of mind, primarily the Sally-Anne test, in that passing these tests depends on linguistic ability and upon cultural factors. He finds that rather than being innate to humans, theory of mind is innate to dominant groups, who use it as a tool of oppression to rob people of identity, agency, and personhood.

The third planned speaker for the panel, Annika Konrad of University of Wisconsin-- Madison, did not appear to speak on “Visually Communicating Visual Impairments.”

Liberty Kohn of Winona State University spoke third, on “Sound Pedagogy: Sound Art as Rhetoric, Poetic, and a Voice in the Composition Classroom.” He explored audio assignments, noting that while it is common to assign students to read multiple kinds of media, if students are not also writing multiple kinds of media they are not participating in a fully multimedia experience. He spoke about meta-language, and having students make versions of audio both including and excluding the meta-language in their assignments, and of the rhetoric of these choices.

In addition, he covered the idea of teaching non-musicians to produce audio in the classroom, as audio assignments are currently primarily the domain of people whose areas of study relate directly to audio. 

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Now for the less polished notes I took during the session:

Session D5: Friday May 29, 2015, 3:00-4:15, Disability and Universal Access themed panel.

Steven Hammer, “The Sounds of Access: Disability, Art, and Open Source DIT (do-it-together) Interventions”

Diagnosis, puts a thing on us.

Prognosis. Based on knowing that a person has a given thing. “What's life like based on what it could have been before.”

What does “no significant development” mean?

Asks, “How can we get beyond a deficit model?”

Amundon, 2000 “normal/abnormal is the basis of the deficit model.”

“human variation rather than pathology” Reid & Valle, 2004.

“[the] non-neutrality of techno-social artifacts and contexts... they are embedded... theya re not sterile, they're imperfect...” Cates 2014.

“from temporarily able bodies to always-already malfunctioning bodies” is on the presentation and he said it and I think that's original wording to Hammer. Also I like this wording.

Asking “how are you failing right now?” rather than the thought of this as “someday” your body will fail, think about the medicines you're taking.

Of course, we need to make sure people aren't concluding that they belong in disabled people's spaces because they have a headache or some such because that'd be fucked up.

Draws a parallel between Alexei Kruchenykh's idea of developing a language with no fixed meanings and his communication with his son, where the sounds are not words and the meanings might change from day to day.

The world is built for people who have an identity that is fucking fictional!

Samuel Harvey, “Autism, Neurodiversity, and Identity Formation Through the Internet”

Henderson, Davidson, Hemsworth, and Edwards 504?? Something Sam's citing.

“If identity is formed through communicating with others, and autistic people struggle with communicating with others...” [Ask Sam if I can see his slides after?]

Samuel brings up the possibility of written language as a discourse where autistic people could develop their identities.

Davidson 796. “NT conversations have a very fast-paces rhythym...”

Erikson+Cohen=> identity is formed by having a theory of mind.

First two publications of theory of mind, the titles are Does the X have a “Theory of Mind”?, with Chimpanzee and then Autistic Child. Erm erm erm.

Enthymemic dehumanization, leads to Autistic people not being able to have identities because we lack a theory of mind... yup.

Theory of mind innate in humans, bunch of folks don't, therefore those groups aren't human.

Yeargeau+Heilker state that autistic people have our own rhetoric and language, oh hey, that fucks up our test results in the area of language.

Halle and Tager Flusberg (2003), Lohman and Tomasello (2003) as cited in Miller.

Folks like to claim that language has no impact on the results of the test, which 1) Wrong, and 2) claims the test is arhetorical.

Tons of other factors wind up actually messing with theory of mind results. Whoops. Cultural stuff, socioeconomic stuff, linguistic stuff, and also quite a few kinds of neurodivergence.

Theory of mind is (maybe) innate in dominant groups, used to fuck over the disadvantaged groups.

“Theory of mind is innate in dominant groups, it is a tool of oppression meant to rob people (mostly autistics) of identity, agency, and even personhood.”

Harvey thinks theory of mind is a theory of the minds of dominant group members. That is, the folks who have a theory of mind don't actually have it about members of the groups said to “lack” a theory of mind.

Some Joking Nerdery

I'm taking a graduate linear algebra class this semester. (I'm also taking difference equations, which looks a lot like more advanced linear algebra, at least while it's linear.) During the "lets go through all the stuff you probably learned in undergrad, then forgot, but kinda want to know for this class" phase, one of the things we've covered is linear transformations. T is the variable typically assigned. Linear transformations have kernels/null spaces, which is the stuff from the first set that gets sent to the "zero" point of the second set. These get denoted by a cursive N.

So the null set of a transformation T is  N_T. Now, the joke of NTs being null as in nothing is not even a little bit where I am going. Neurotypicality as a construct is pretty thoroughly terrible, yes, but calling a group of people, even privileged people "null space" as in nothing as the punch line is not my idea of joking nerdery.

Defining a function from people to something, like from people to some sort of directed distance from "exact average brain" or "the brain society is defined for" and pointing out that plenty of people are close enough to it to not have a problem, so are going to be close, but the null space isn't based on being close to the zero point. It's based on the function taking you to exactly the zero point. So  N_T being the empty set with no one in it because no one has exactly that idealized brain amuses me. (Even if it's not exactly one of the ways I think about neurotypicality/averages/social ideals, it's close enough to amuse me.)

The other idea I had was a space of neurotypes, where the zero point represents the idea of neurotypical as default (so basically this is a space that I don't really like, but I recognize it's how society tends to work.) Defining a function for that is honestly even weirder to me than defining it from people to the directed distance thing, though I could maybe make another function from that multi-dimensional directed distance thing to the neurotype labels the brains map to? In that case, N_T would actually be "close enough to that ideal to be privileged by it." That's fairly close to the other way I think about neurotypicality/averages/social ideals.

Neither of those things can actually work as linear transformations, at least partially because I don't think any of the people spaces work as vector spaces, and I'm not entirely sure that any of the spaces I'm mapping into work as vector spaces either, plus there isn't people addition to work like vector addition should. Also  N_T being the kernel of something instead of null space, cause that's two words for the same thing. Probably some funky associations there too.

Two New eThings and Happy Birthday to Me!

I am 22 today!
Woot.

I also have two new things out. (And if suggesting you get them because it's my birthday will work, then consider this said suggestion.)

The first is a short science fiction story.
There is an autistic character. There is a character who is technically a cyborg. There are a bunch of characters who are alien computers. There is no intersection between these categories, and I've been told there's some response to/coverage of the trope where the alien or the robot is like the autistic character.
It's also fun with a smuggler and her friend visiting a planet of sentient computers.

Where None Have Thought to Go is on Amazon.

Cover of "Where None Have Thought to Go." The background is the surface of a "planet" and stars, composite from photos courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech. There is a semi-transparent brain and computer chip combination superimposed over the stars, and the title and author are in white text. (Alyssa Hillary is the author.)

I also have a collection of poetry, Poems Can Be Fun(ny). 
It's about what the title suggests: original poetry, humor included.

Cover of "Poems Can Be Fun(ny)" by Alyssa Hillary. The background is an abstract geometric design in pink, blue, and purple by the author, and the title and author name are in black text.

All the things are here, just in case my other stuff sounds interesting. I do have another story with an autistic character already, and she has point of view for the whole story. I also have a (very short) story about a tomato and cheese soup ending the world by consuming it, if ridiculousity if your thing.

Now for stuff that's mostly not self-promotion, and mostly is life updatey stuff.

1) I know, I know. The last three days on my blog have been commercial-ish. Tomorrow's post and the next days post are written and scheduled, and they are not commercial at all.

2) I'm moving back to school today! I'm going to be a teaching assistant, teaching a section of precalculus. That's gonna be pretty cool.

3) Apparently The Queens Readers is just about ready, which is yay because I'm in it. I'm talking about neurodiversity in Tamora Pierce's work. The criticism parts just happened to not fit in with the rest of the essay according to the editors (not sure if I entirely trust that, but I really was disorganized and writing at the last minute so not sure that I distrust it either.) So I really do believe the positives that I said, just remember that there are also negatives that I didn't say. (Like chemical restraint in Cold Fire oh my god, but also realistic terribleness...)

4) I have a paper accepted for the INSPIRe conference that actually connects my disability side and my STEM side, so that's cool. I need to finish actually writing it though.

5) About a year ago, I was going ARGH about a thing with The Feminist Wire and their call for papers, which inspired a proposal for a text chapter. Well, the chapter got accepted and is a good bit of the way written.

6) That whole Accessing The Future thing I talked about the day before yesterday? I think I know what I'm submitting. It's in the same universe and a semi-sequel to Where None Have Thought to Go, but with a more mixed narrative format. (Presenting a piece of tech you see offered to the autistic character in the story to folks on Earth and watching the reactions from quite a few directions, essentially, with some additional side-plot themes that get some more into examining the alien/robot as autistic trope.)

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.