Monthly Archives: March 2017

Abstractability

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I’m reading a book by Temple Grandin called Animals in Translation, in which she tells about an affinity between animals and autistic people that doesn’t exist between animals and the rest of the human population. Because she herself has autism, this affinity has made possible her unusual career—and its contribution to all animal-centered occupations.

Dr. Grandin is a professor of animal science at Colorado State University and a designer of livestock-handling facilities for the meat-packing industry. She is also probably the most famous spokesperson for a population that rarely speaks for itself—autistic people—thanks to her own high-level intellect and the help and guidance of a number of mentors, starting with her mother. My interest in Animals in Translation is because of the fascination I already had with her previous books and her own story. This book is co-authored by Catherine Johnson, who I learned from the Internet is a writer specializing in neuropsychiatry who has written three previous books, and who has three sons, two of whom are autistic.

Dr. Grandin explains that all animals are visual thinkers, while most human beings are “verbal.” This has to do with differences in their sensory organs, especially vision, which correspond in each species to the usual conditions of that animal’s life: how it gets food, what dangers threaten it, and what its defense is against that danger. She says all humans who aren’t autistic suffer from “abstractability,” which prevents us from recognizing or understanding certain traits shared by all other animals. Autistic people, however, do understand these traits because they share them. She gave examples from her work of visual occurrences that wouldn’t bother most humans but that can halt a whole herd of animals, such as light sparkling on water or shadows moving on a wall. Because she could see the way the animals were seeing, Dr. Grandin was able to solve problems none of her co-workers understood. In these respects the autistic population falls somewhere between nonautistic humans and other animals.

Reading this book made me realize a trait of my own; I have learned that I am even more “abstractable” than the average human being—more verbal and far less visual. I have recognized this gradually over the years and see it more lately as I look back on my life. None of my favorite pursuits involve visual pleasure or artistic dexterity. I have had few hobbies; I don’t grow flowers or cook for pleasure or enjoy sewing or crafts, and often don’t notice what’s around me. My interests, and my abilities, are almost entirely abstract. What I’m interested in are people’s thoughts, their emotions, their interactions, their interpretations of what goes on, their problem-solving and knowledge-seeking, their ideas. And the tools of my interest are words. I read a lot. And not only have I always wanted to write, I have written reams, all my life, because I couldn’t help it any more than a natural athlete can help moving around.

How interesting our differences are, and how they matter when it comes to our life choices.

Old Old Age

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These are the conditions of everyone’s life:

There is always too much to do.

We are prisoners of what is happening to us, who we’re surrounded by, our health or sickness, wealth or poverty, family traits and emotions and conditions.

We are prisoners of our era, of what is known so far, of what is accepted as truth, of what is happening in the world and in the place where we live.

We’re prisoners of our flaws.

We’re prisoners of our bodies, their needs and demands and limitations.

And the same with our brains and traits and all that has influenced them, our superstitions, our self-concepts. What chance remark fixed a certain aphorism in our thinking so that we live by it from then on? What insult cracked our confidence forever?

We’re prisoners of everything we have done in the past, everything that’s happened to us, that has brought us to where we are at this moment.

But we who have lived a very long time are now looking back and seeing where we have been. We are set free in a new way, beginning to see new patterns and new truths that we couldn’t have seen before.

Old old age. What an adventure! What a gift!

An Illustrated Life

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A few months ago, I started having optical illusions—seeing things that weren’t there. For instance, when I was reading, images of flowers or vines or little colored feathery things would show up on the page exactly as though they were illustrations; in fact they looked like illustrations from a child’s picture book. They didn’t interfere with my reading, they just looked pretty, but they weren’t really there. Was this a new and fearsome stage of my glaucoma? I didn’t really think I was going crazy, but what was going on?

Then I started seeing the images in other places too. I might see a life-sized vine growing up from a planter on my deck, climbing the wall, coming through the picture window into the living room, winding around light fixtures and draping over the television set—and sometime later I would realize it was gone. And almost always, whenever I’m reading or writing, whole gardens of plants or vines will be on the page at least part of the time. In fact, there is a ferny plant of some kind in front of me right now as I type: lush green leaves, pinkish-white stems, all waving in a breeze that I can’t feel.

There was never anything alarming about the images—except, of course, their existence. Where were they coming from? What was the matter with my eyes, with my brain? Nothing I found on line about glaucoma mentioned anything like this.

Finally the other day I asked Google a different question. Without mentioning glaucoma, I asked What does it mean when I see things that aren’t there?

I was instantly rewarded with an explanation by the Discovery Eye Foundation, in the form of an interview between an eye doctor and a patient asking this same question. The patient was hesitant, afraid his hallucinations were a symptom of early dementia. But the doctor assured him they were not. Instead they were something called Charles Bonnet Syndrome after the doctor who had first identified it many years ago, and it is relatively common (between 10 and 40 percent) among patients who have “low vision” such as from macular degeneration (which I have had for many years).

The doctor listed six characteristics that will tell the patient it is this syndrome: (1) The images occur when you are fully conscious and wide awake, often during broad daylight; (2) You are aware that they are not real; (3) They occur in combination with normal perception; for example, you may see a sidewalk clearly but find it covered with dots, flowers, or faces; (4) They are visual only and do not occur with any sounds or other sensations; (5) They appear and disappear without obvious cause; and (6) They are amusing or annoying but not grotesque.

After all my anxiety, I couldn’t have made up a better, happier, more satisfactory answer for myself! I can’t imagine why I had never heard of this syndrome before in all my years of going to eye doctors. In the first place, how can this phenomenon happen? And in the second place, when something seems so miraculous, why isn’t it common knowledge?

Anyway, I’m just going to enjoy these lovely and surprising pictures that decorate my life these days. They remind me that every now and then, there’s nothing to worry about.

I Miss Email!

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I love email. What ever happened to it? You could type it on a real keyboard, you could read it in clear print, it was private, messages were as long as you wanted them to be, you could save them, forward them, search them, print them, send attachments with them, file them with their replies.

But they have gone the way of the postal mail that used to have such a big place in our lives. These days, my incoming emails consist mostly of promotions from online merchants, political and charitable bulletins with requests for donations, and the online ghost of my city’s formerly robust newspaper. When I do get actual personal emails from family or friends, they tend to be beautiful photos or collections of funny sayings, which I enjoy, but rarely any personal message.

What are my former correspondents doing? They’re texting. They’re tweeting. They’re posting on Facebook. I’ve tried all of these and found nothing I like or trust the way I do email. And tapping character by character on a tiny picture of a keyboard can’t take the place of using all my fingers to say what I think before I forget I was thinking it.

But that’s the problem. Everybody’s now using their smartphones for things I still do on my computer, or my landline telephone, or my calculator. Or they ask Google or Alexa or Cortina or Siri for anything they want to know. Nobody seems to be as bothered as I am by tiny print and tiny keyboards, tiny buttons and miniature screens.

No matter how determined we are to keep up as we get older, there’s an aptitude gap that just comes from different background experience. Things we used to be good at aren’t used or needed any more so our expertise doesn’t matter. I know how to run a mimeograph machine, look things up at the library, make cookies from scratch, but who cares? Even the computer skills I learned when I was working are obsolete now.

All the signs point to the fact that I’d better learn to text and tweet, and meet the gang on
Facebook. Those options must be fun or the people I miss wouldn’t be doing so much of them. And yes, I realize that some of them are even as old as I am.