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| Birth of the new man - Salvador Dali |
An old friend confided to me that he has Asperger's Syndrome. Aspergers is a Personality Development Disorder (PDD) that has much in common with high functioning autism. Asperger's syndrome affects from 0.024% to 0.36% of children. It is more common in males than in females, and usually is first diagnosed in children between the ages of 2 and 6 years. Asperger's individuals usually have problems with social interactions, exhibit repetitive motions like hand wringing similar to OCD, display ritualistic behaviors, physical clumsiness and communication difficulties.
I always just thought my friend was shy but he explained to me how his unique persona manifests and takes shape. He has problems talking to more than one or two people at a time and reading people's faces and intentions. A product of a military home, he was often bullied in new locales, lacking the sensitivity to understand whom to trust. This caused him to limit his social interactions. He said that he was clumsy as a youth. If he is in a room of multiple people, he focuses on one person and everything else becomes a loud drone.
I appreciate my friend and am happy that he has allowed me back into his life. He has the greatest gift we can have, the ability to experience joy.
The second individual is a very successful CEO of a worldwide company who came in with his wife to buy a painting, their second from me. I asked him what he thought of the paintings and he looked at me blankly. He told me that he didn't have the facility to derive happiness from visual cues. He said that ideas were what motivated him. He pointed at his watch and said the facility to understand how processes worked, like the watch mechanism, gave him happiness. He could look at paintings clinically but they had absolutely no emotional resonation with him. He apparently lacked the innate machinery to appreciate aesthetic beauty.
This really intrigued me and I delved further. He also got no satisfaction from music, either, or food. I finally pinned him down on sunsets. He said that sunsets were okay. I am not sure if he was just throwing me a bone. What interested me is that I realized that I am the kind of person who experiences the world through my senses, taste, visual, hearing, touch, I am really a sensualist. But there are apparently people out there who process completely differently than I do. This man is completely cerebral and vive la différence. While my innate sense of composition drives my being to a certain extent, such motivations are meaningless to this man.
The third individual is a lovely woman who I have run into the last several years and am just getting to know better. She has very rare traits called prosopognosia or prosopamnesia, the inability to recognize or remember faces. This trait, in varying levels, affects up to 2.5% of the world's population. I looked into the disorder on Wiki:
Apperceptive prosopagnosia is thought to be a disorder of some of the earliest processes in the face perception system. People with this disorder cannot make any sense of faces and are unable to make same-different judgments when they are presented with pictures of different faces. They may also be unable to work out attributes such as age or gender from a face. However, they may be able to recognize people based on non-face clues such as their clothing, hairstyle or voice.
Associative prosopagnosia is thought to be an impairment to the links between early face perception processes and the semantic information we hold about people in our memories. People with this form of the disorder may be able to say whether photos of people's faces are the same or different and derive the age and gender from a face (suggesting they can make sense of some face information) but may not be able to subsequently identify the person or provide any information about them such as their name, occupation, or when they were last encountered. They may be able to recognize and produce such information based on non-face information such as voice, hair, or even particularly distinctive facial features (such as a distinctive moustache) that does not require the structure of the face to be understood. Typically such people do not report that 'faces make no sense' but simply that they do not look distinctive in any way.
Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is a face-recognition deficit that is lifelong, manifesting in early childhood, and that cannot be attributed to acquired brain damage. However, a number of studies have found functional deficits in DP both on the basis of EEG measures and fMRI. It has been suggested that a genetic factor is responsible for the condition.
There seem to be two categories of DP patients:
- patients who are impaired in basic face processing (age estimation, judgment of facial affect) and also show deficits on other forms of visual processing;
- patients with pure face-recognition impairments in the presence of intact basic visual processing.
The first group of patients fail to obtain view-centered descriptions. According to the Bruce and Young model of face recognition, these are precursors of the more abstract expression-independent descriptions. View-centered descriptions do not seem to be specific for faces, as the patients with impairments of processing the physical aspects of faces also show difficulties in non-facial tasks like object recognition or tests of visuo-spatial abilities.
However, there is as yet only limited evidence for a classification into different subtypes.
There are many developmental disorders that incorporate within themselves an increased likelihood that the person will have differences in face perception, of which the person may or may not be aware. That is to say, the person may or may not have insight in the clinical sense of the word. However, the mechanism by which these effects take place is largely unknown. A partial list of some disorders that often have prosopagnosiac components would include nonverbal learning disorder, Williams syndrome, and autism spectrum disorders in general. However, these types of disorders are very complicated, so arbitrary assumptions should be avoided.
My friend has to build a complicated internal database of cues in order to recognize familiar faces. It gets easier as she gets to know someone. Interestingly, she also spoke of Aspergers, and my first friend also talked about his own facial mapping problems. And she also talked about being bullied herself and her own flight urge like the first individual. The question has to be raised if the problems are soley those of nature or nurture.
In addition, she has a hyper-attenuated sense of smell, which causes her to be repulsed by certain smells and people. I appreciate that she has confided in me, as the rest of the people have and assure them that they will remain anonymous.
Lacking the perceptual equipment to discern the difference between friend or foe, is it any wonder that these friends seek refuge in a safe island away from potential threats? What an outsider might see as shyness and aloofness in reality is a screen erected by their psyches to protect them.
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I have another friend whose five year old daughter has been diagnosed with aspergers and autism as well. Like these folks, she seemed perfectly normal to me. She came into the gallery and was just a joy, loving the visual stimulation and being very communicative. He was amazed as well, because she had the tendency to curl up in a fetal ball at home. Her therapist said that she had a positive breakout experience in my gallery, something that I am proud of.
I celebrate the differences that my friends have with me and the fact that we all can process life so differently from one another. I am an information processor, the closer to the tap the better. But I can now better understand why some people need a filter and to keep their distance. Hopefully we can all develop more empathy for those of us with these uncommon gifts and traits.
1 comment:
"i have to rearrange their faces and give them all another name"
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