Wordlessness

From Naoki Higashida's book  Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8 (trans David Mitchell & Keiko Yoshida)  giving you an insight in to the autistic mind.

"Back in the days when I had no ways to communicate at all – no writing, pointing on my alphabet grid or verbal expression – I was extremely lonely. People who have never experienced this will go through life never knowing how soul crushing the condition of wordlessness is. If I tried to describe what it’s like to be non-verbal in the World of the Verbal in a single word, I’d choose this one: agony. And yet, this is also true: if we know there is even a single person who understands what it’s like for us, that’s solace enough to give us hope. For a long time I was tormented by the question, How come I’m the only one here who can’t talk? Why me? I often used to dream that I was able to speak. This chapter might make uncomfortable reading for those of you who live and work alongside people with non-verbal autism, but I’d like you to remember: there are lots of us, and this is what we go through. None of which is to say that people who can’t communicate should automatically be relegated to being sorry objects of pity. By living with extreme hardships day in and day out, by constantly challenging and asking questions of themselves, they search for meaning in their own lives and many of them might, eventually, access a mode of fulfilment beyond the reach of neurotypical people. A worthwhile existence lies in playing whatever cards life has dealt you as skilfully as you can."

A look at some of the answers from his first book here including video. Some thoughts from David Mitchell and more on the second book to make into English.  A few thoughts from me. 

Clay play aphorism

Clay was an early love of mine. The physical. Working in three dimensons. Four dimensions if you account for how time interacts. Perhaps, there is even a fifth if you create collaboratively or along side others.

Writing is mainly solitary. Those who are pained by aloneness have solace in writing groups, but still it is rare to write in groups, it is not communal.

Artists also tend to paint alone, as do potters. However, some potters do share studios and there are studios who work together in making clay ware.

There is a quality, there is a timbre to work when you are working along side others. There is a conversation. That conversation can be a fifth dimension to work, whether intentional or simply fun!

I've dug out this clay I've had sitting around for several years now (maybe 6 years, I'm unsure). We've had a couple of sessions shaping clay. One with a couple of friends. In our chat, we happened upon a discussion on the nature of things.

Oscar suggested (in playful language rather than philosophy):

"Essence and evidence are brothers."

And in talking about how art was some times about trying to capture the essence of something or someone rather than the representational reality of a person's image.

We also decided:

"The essence of time. I've had it. I've lost it. We've had it. We've lost it."

Cross fertilise. Read about the autistic mind here and ideas on the arts here. On investing try a thought on stock valuations. 

Parenting Idea

An interest parenting idea contained within Coates telling of the black American experience.  The book is a must read to understand race in America, and thus America and why Black Lives Matter is an important movement. (Not a moment).

The idea is to write about why you did (cause trouble) what you did.

"When I was in trouble at school (which was quite often) she would make me write about it. The writing had to answer a series of questions: Why did I feel the need to talk at the same time as my teacher? Why did I not believe that my teacher was entitled to respect? How would I want someone to behave while I was talking? What would I do the next time I felt the urge to talk to my friends during a lesson? I have given you these same assignments. I gave them to you not because I thought they would curb your behavior—they certainly did not curb mine—but because these were the earliest acts of interrogation, of drawing myself into consciousness. Your grandmother was not teaching me how to behave in class. She was teaching me how to ruthlessly interrogate the subject that elicited the most sympathy and rationalizing—myself. Here was the lesson: I was not an innocent. My impulses were not filled with unfailing virtue. And feeling that I was as human as anyone, this must be true for other humans. If I was not innocent, then they were not innocent. Could this mix of motivation also affect the stories they tell? The cities they built? The country they claimed as given to them by God? Now the questions began burning in me. The materials for research were all around me, in the form of books assembled by your grandfather. He was then working at Howard University as a research librarian in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, one of the largest collections of Africana in the world. Your grandfather loved books and loves them to this day, and they were all over the house, books about black people, by black people, for black people spilling off shelves and out of the living room, boxed up in the basement. ..."

Arts.  Autism.  Investing.

Life Learnings

When to hold on. When to pivot. When to let go.

The rule is there is no rule. One size does not fit all.

In autism as in life.  In life as in art.  In art as in business.

More Answers from an autistic mind

Required Reading. Eloquent, visceral and transcendental. Naoki Higashida’s examination of his autistic world, its hopes  and hazards; its joys and tears; its insights and confusions; Naoki sheds a profound and revelatory light on the autistic mind.

Required reading for autism workers and those interested in the area. Everyone really. These two books The Reason I Jump (which I blog about here) and Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8 by Naoki Higashida trans David Mitchell & Keiko Yoshida.

You can currently hear David Mitchel on Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8 on BBC Radio 4 playback(subject to geographic licence) until mid-August.   Mitchell and Higashida need no blurb from me, but it would go:

Eloquent, visceral and transcendental. Naoki Higashida’s examination of his autistic world, its hopes  and hazards; its joys and tears; its insights and confusions; Naoki sheds a profound and revelatory light on the autistic mind. Required Reading.

From the introduction by Mitchell:

“…The Reason I Jump has been translated into more than thirty languages. To the best of my knowledge, this makes Naoki Higashida the most widely translated living Japanese author after Haruki Murakami... My involvement in the promotion of The Reason I Jump, however, gave me a crash course in the politics of special needs. It is not for the faint-hearted. Entrenched opinion is well armed, and its default reaction to new ideas is often hostile. While The Reason I Jump enjoyed a positive reception, an accusation was levelled that nobody with ‘genuine’ severe autism could possibly have authored such articulate prose: never mind the YouTube clips showing Naoki authoring this same articulate prose. Therefore, Naoki must have been misdiagnosed and doesn’t have autism at all; or he’s an impostor at the Asperger’s Syndrome end of the spectrum, akin to the character Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory; or his books are written by someone else, possibly his mother. Or me. The New York Times reviewer cautioned the translators against ‘turning what we find into what we want’. (The subtext I can’t help but see here is, ‘These desperate parents won’t face the fact their son is a vegetable so their objectivity is compromised.’) Elsewhere, Naoki has been accused of seeking entry into the guru business. You really cannot win. Of course, Naoki hopes that his writing contributes to a better public understanding of autism, but he is all too aware of the limits imposed by autism upon his knowledge of the neurotypical world. Reading newspapers isn’t easy for him and politics can seem baffling. As an ex-pupil of a special needs school he knows that autism comes in many shapes and sizes, so his observations on autism won’t be, and can’t be, universally applicable. Naoki is nobody’s guru: he’ll answer questions as best he can, but you take what you need and leave the rest….“ 

As aside:

If Ta-Nehisi Coates can write about the African-American experience and through one voice make “the hazards and hopes of black male life”  “visceral, eloquent and beautifully redemptive” and thus “required reading”   (quote from Toni Morrison) then I think Naoki can for autism.   As aside,  I do think Coates is also required reading. Through both of those lenses (and with a dose of Andrew Solomon’s Far from the Tree) you can gather that perhaps an autist, a black American, a gay person, even a “genius” have most in common than you might think.  [More on this another day I hope]

Andrew Solomon quotes Nobel laureate Eric Kandel: “If we can understand autism, we can understand the brain.” Solomon adds: “That is a generous way of saying we will understand autism only when we understand the brain.” 

My most instructive experience of all was being told point-blank by a fellow contributor to a radio programme that The Reason I Jump couldn’t be genuine because Naoki employs metaphor, and people with severe autism can’t understand what a metaphor is, let alone create one. In fact, I’ve watched Naoki spell out similes and metaphors on his alphabet grid on a number of occasions, but that day I found myself in one of those no-win situations where protestations of probity only persuade your accusers that there’s no smoke without fire.”

Spike seems likely more verbal than Naoki or Mitchell’s son, but certainly on the magenta-yellow-splodge scale of speaking. And Spike has written this: 

“…Ultimately, I believe that while severe non-verbal autism does indeed look like a severe cognitive impairment, the truth is it’s not: it’s a severe sensory-processing and communicative impairment. These words hold a world of difference. To deny that a severely autistic brain may house a mind as curious and imaginative as anyone else’s is to perpetuate a ruinous falsehood. (The historical analogy is deafness, which from Aristotle’s era until the advent of sign language in the nineteenth century was also thought to be indicative of a severe cognitive impairment –hence the synonym for stupid, ‘dumb’.)…”

“…A person’s autism doesn’t conveniently peter out at a certain age, nor does it stop evolving. Our son is now eleven and we’ve already found this volume to be a useful source of insight into how adolescence can impact upon autism, as well as an indication of what to expect further ahead. Most of its short chapters were written by Naoki for his blog between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, though he often analyses his younger self from his more mature perspective. So we hope this new book will be of practical help for other ‘autism-insiders’ with both young and older teenagers on their hands….”

“For general readers, we hope the book will offer another opportunity to slip into an autistically wired brain……. The title Fall Down Seven Times, Get Up Eight is borrowed from a Japanese proverb about the merits of persistence, and the book offers experience, advice and hope. Its pages map the limits placed by non-verbal autism upon its author’s life, but also describe how Naoki has been able to transcend, renegotiate or just learn to live with those same limits. The book shows how a disability can be turned into a field of endeavour and the pursuit of a purposeful life. If this is possible for Naoki, it may be possible for others, too. Autism has a habit of making clean labels like ‘verbal’ and ‘non-verbal’ murky. With neuro-atypical people, communicative ability exists on a spectrum and not in a binary yes/ no position. Whenever I’m asked ‘Is your son verbal or not?’, in order to reply fully I have to explain that while his comprehension appears to be good and he can name many hundreds of objects in English and Japanese, his spoken communication is limited to a few phrases, and he’s never had a conversation longer than three or four exchanges of these phrases. I cannot know for sure whether he understands none, some or all of a conversation between third parties. If I could be sure, it wouldn’t be autism we were dealing with (and if I had £ 10 for every time I’ve said that last phrase, I could buy a mid-range family car). Autism is a relative thing as well as label-resistant. Compared to some of his peers who have never uttered a word in their lives, and indeed compared to Naoki, my son is rather verbal: but relative to his neurotypical contemporaries, he’s a step away from muteness. … One’s position on the verbal-non-verbal spectrum can fluctuate according to mood and stress, and shift in the long term. Naoki has only ever answered one of my questions aloud, without using his alphabet grid. We were at lunch. His answer was a simple ‘Yes’ and the whole table smiled in surprise at this achievement, Naoki included. (I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve forgotten the question.)… My own son is free from many of the classical autistic ‘tics’ that Naoki is burdened with, and over short periods he can even pass as neurotypical. In contrast, ten seconds in Naoki’s company is enough for his autism to become unmistakable. My son, however, shows no sign –yet –of being able to communicate the richness of his inner life in the way that Naoki can. Whose autism is more severe? An accurate answer isn’t straightforward. I accept that we need words for degrees of disability, but I’ve developed allergies to the current terminology of ‘severe’ versus ‘mild’ (redolent of colds and curries) or ‘high-functioning’ versus ‘low-functioning’ (Commander Data from Star Trek versus a 1980s home computer). Not long ago I met up with an old acquaintance whom I hadn’t seen since my son was diagnosed, who said –with the air of one who doesn’t waste time beating about the bush –‘So, I understand your son’s severely autistic?’ Apart from feeling a bit stung, I felt stumped by the paucity of the question. The severity of my son’s autism varies wildly from aspect to aspect –communicative, behavioural, self-management, sensory processing, gross and fine motor control. Other variables are mood, tiredness and even the time of year (watch out for November, after the clocks have been turned back an hour). Shorter answers to the question ‘How autistic is he or she?’ are blunt and reductive, yet their ramifications –in education, in the provision of disability-allowance –can be life altering. As I explained all this to my acquaintance, I wished that autistic severity and mildness could be calibrated in terms of ink-cartridge colours, with yellow at the Asperger’s end, magenta at the harder-core pole and cyan in the middle, as in: ‘Well, his autism’s functionally fairly cyan, but if people are telling him No! all the time it can get splotchy with magenta. Mind you, when he’s writing words on his Magna-Doodle or kicking ass at Temple Run on his iPad his autism glows canary yellow.’ That works for me: if it works for you, pass it on.”

“To conclude: the translators hope that Fall Down Seven Times, Get Up Eight will find a place in the growing corpus of ‘autism-witness’ texts that inform the public, help to dispel myths and misconceptions past their expiry dates, promote the cause of neurodiversity, and encourage people to think twice before using the word ‘autistic’ when they mean ‘anal’ or ‘up-tight’. Autism is a fact of our world, which shapes the lives of millions. We cannot change this fact, but we can change our attitudes.” David Mitchell Ireland, 2017.

I’ve included almost all his introduction (I hope Mitchell won’t mind) as it seems important to me, and hard to edit out the thread of his argument.

There’s more from the BBC on it being book of the week here.  There’s recent (July 2017) article from David Mitchell in the Guardian talkingabout autism and his wish list.

And I have written previously about Naoki’s first published book here.

Answers from an autistic boy

A glimpse inside the head of a 13-year-old autistic boy. The Reason I Jump: one boy's voice from the silence of autism by Naoki Higashida, David Mitchell, Keiko Yoshida. For parents, typicals, atypicals and everybody.  

David Mitchell's introduction to the book. It starts: "The thirteen-year-old author of this book invites you, his reader, to imagine a daily life in which your faculty of speech is taken away. Explaining that you’re hungry, or tired, or in pain, is now as beyond your powers as a chat with a friend. I’d like to push the thought-experiment a little further. Now imagine that after you lose your ability to communicate, the editor-in-residence who orders your thoughts walks out without notice. The chances are that you never knew this mind-editor existed, but now that he or she has gone, you realize too late how the editor allowed your mind to function for all these years. A dam-burst of ideas, memories, impulses and thoughts is cascading over you, unstoppably. Your editor controlled this flow, diverting the vast majority away, and recommending just a tiny number for your conscious consideration. But now you’re on your own."

From the book:
WHY DO PEOPLE WITH AUTISM TALK SO LOUDLY AND WEIRDLY?
...Honest, I want to be nice and calm and quiet too! But even if we’re ordered to keep our mouths shut or to be quiet we simply don’t know how. Our voices are like our breathing, I feel, just coming out of our mouths, unconsciously...

WHY DO YOU ASK THE SAME QUESTIONS OVER AND OVER?
...The reason why? Because I very quickly forget what it is I’ve just heard. Inside my head there really isn’t such a big difference between what I was told just now, and what I heard a long, long time ago. So I do understand things, but my way of remembering them works differently from everyone else’s. I imagine a normal person’s memory is arranged continuously, like a line. My memory, however, is more like a pool of dots. I’m always ‘picking up’ these dots –by asking my questions –so I can arrive back at the memory that the dots represent...

...it lets us play with words. We aren’t good at conversation, and however hard we try, we’ll never speak as effortlessly as you do. The big exception, however, is words or phrases we’re very familiar with. Repeating these is great fun. It’s like a game of catch with a ball. Unlike the words we’re ordered to say, repeating questions we already know the answers to can be a pleasure –it’s playing with sound and rhythm.

WHY DO YOU DO THINGS YOU SHOULDN’T EVEN WHEN YOU’VE BEEN TOLD A MILLION TIMES NOT TO? ‘
...How many times do I have to tell you?!’ Us people with autism hear that all the time. Me, I’m always being told off for doing the same old things. It may look as if we’re being bad out of naughtiness, but honestly, we’re not.

...we feel terrible that yet again we’ve done what we’ve been told not to. But when the chance comes once more, we’ve pretty much forgotten about the last time and we just get carried away yet again. It’s as if something that isn’t us is urging us on. You must be thinking: ‘Is he never going to learn?’ We know we’re making you sad and upset, but it’s as if we don’t have any say in it, I’m afraid, and that’s the way it is. But please, whatever you do, don’t give up on us. We need your help.
 

WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE ‘NORMAL’?
...for ages and ages I badly wanted to be normal, too. Living with special needs is so depressing and so relentless; I used to think it’d be the best thing if I could...But now if somebody developed a medicine to cure autism, I might well choose to stay as I am. Why have I come round to thinking this way? To give the short version, I’ve learnt that every human being, with or without disabilities, needs to strive to do their best, and by striving for happiness you will arrive at happiness. For us, you see, having autism is normal –so we can’t know for sure what your ‘normal’ is even like.

But so long as we can learn to love ourselves, I’m not sure how much it matters whether we’re normal or autistic.

WHY CAN YOU NEVER STAY STILL? My body’s always moving about. I just can’t stay still. When I’m not moving, it feels as if my soul is detaching itself from my body, and this makes me so jumpy and scared that I can’t stay where I am. I’m always on the lookout for an exit. But even though I’m forever wanting to be some place else, I can never actually find my way there. I’m always struggling inside my own body, and staying still really hammers it home that I’m trapped here. But as long as I’m in a state of motion, I’m able to relax a little bit.

WHY DON’T YOU MAKE EYE CONTACT WHEN YOU’RE TALKING?

...True, we don’t look at people’s eyes very much. ‘Look whoever you’re talking with properly in the eye,’ I’ve been told, again and again and again, but I still can’t do it. To me, making eye contact with someone I’m talking to feels a bit creepy, so I tend to avoid it. Then, where exactly am I looking? You might well suppose that we’re just looking down, or at the general background. But you’d be wrong. What we’re actually looking at is the other person’s voice. Voices may not be visible things, but we’re trying to listen to the other person with all of our sense organs. When we’re fully focused on working out what the heck it is you’re saying, our sense of sight sort of zones out. If you can’t make out what it is you’re seeing, it’s the same as not seeing anything at all. What’s bothered me for a long time is this idea people have, that so long as we’re keeping eye contact while they’re talking to us, that alone means we’re taking in every word. Ha! If only that was all it took, my disability would have been cured a long, long time ago …
 

Skeptics question this method of communication to which Mitchell writes in his second book (more on this here): "...he has learned to communicate by ‘typing out’ sentences on an alphabet grid –a QWERTY keyboard layout drawn on a sheet of card with an added ‘YES’, ‘NO’ and ‘FINISHED’. Naoki voices the phonetic characters of the Japanese hiragana alphabet as he touches the corresponding Roman letters and builds up sentences, which a transcriber takes down. (Nobody else’s hand is near Naoki’s during this process, a point that alphabet-grid communicators in a sceptical world need to restate ad infinitum.) If this sounds like an arduous way to get your meaning across, you’re right, it is; in addition, Naoki’s autism bombards him with distractions and prompts him to get up mid-sentence, pace the room and gaze out of the window. He is easily ejected from his train of thought and forced to begin the sentence again. I’ve watched Naoki produce a complex sentence within sixty seconds, but I’ve also seen him take twenty minutes to complete a line of just a few words. By writing on a laptop Naoki can dispense with the human transcriber, but the screen and the text-converter (the drop-down menus required for writing Japanese) add a new layer of distraction. It was via his alphabet grid or his computer keyboard that Naoki wrote every sentence in this book. [the second] "

You can see this in this Japanese YouTube video below which captures part of the process and Naoki's autistic traits.

Other articles and links of note:  Guardian Interview with David Mitchell in 2013; and David Mitchell interview in 2013 below. There is also 

Autism. One more lesson.

The cow was as black as the sky.

The cow was as white as paper.

The cow was as soft as sofas.

The cow was as fluffy as toys.

The cow moos as armadillos. 

Autists have a remarkable ability to put the unexpected together and create images, words and ideas that are fresh and new.

These ideas stimulate us to places we would not find otherwise.

...quiet as a dark sky

shy as a train leaving...

If I could pursue more of this I would, if I could be half as inventive.

5 lessons Autism has Taught Me

Some thoughts on what we can learn from autism, ASD, written in the self-help leadership style.

Everybody is somebody's weirdo

What unites humanity is vast and wonderful.

In the tapestry that is being human, you will always find someone who will seem odd to you. Likewise, you will always be peculiar to someone else. That is no reason for fear or hatred.

In finding out how oddball you are to some people, you can grow a wider appreciation of your own biases.

We all have them. We are all human.

Patience is genius

A quick decision particularly over questions of limited materiality (a Jeff Besos type 2 decision) is efficient. However, I have found I have won out in many situations by exhibiting patience. More patience than my competitors. I can out-wait most. Some psychologist have called this "grit". Economists talk about taking time horizon risk. I call it what you learn by losing going toe to toe with an autist.   

Patience is a winning strategy

"Because everyone else does it" - is never a great reason

Autists reveal what are social norms because they often flout them (I won't go in to theories of why, just the empirical observation that they do). This in turn reveals that much more of the world is built upon social norms than I had thought.

We do things because other do things. Lemmings. Herd mentality. All well documented. Yet it goes deeper to matters you would not question until an autist throws it, into stark relief.

Why do boys wear blue and girls pink? They did not 80 years a go. It's a social norm created by marketeers. Why do we shake hands ? (In fact, in many cultures, we do not). Why don't we speak truth to power ? Most autists I observe do not lie. If a person is fat, why not say they are fat ? Is it more harmful to turn from the truth (of course, white lies have their place in typical society, but what effect does that have?) Question if something is right, do not rely on the fact that everyone else does it.

Follow your interests - you may discover the extraordinary

Autists often obsess. People on the autistic spectrum also seem to create break throughs or invent non-standard thinking more regularly than typicals. Gladwell has written about the 10,000 hours plus it takes to reach a 'genius' level.

You are unlikely to have a novel breakthrough just ploughing the same furrow. Neither will you master anything unless you keep at, perhaps long after others have fallen by the way side (cf. Patience as a strategy).

Autists will sail steadfastly obsessively on beyond where I thought I could tread. That inspires me to more, even if I have no comprehension of what that obsession might be. Prime numbers, Disney cartoons, the cracks in the street, the music in the air, train couplers....

Sure, if you like, go fail conventionally.

That is not the way of the autist.

How people react to autism/difference reveals the character of their humanity

Post an interview, some CEOs and managers will ask how the candidate treated the support staff along the way to the interview. I've heard many repeat the adage of how someone treats a waiter or receptionist reveals a true character.

This is heightened when facing difference. While we can be trained to be polite to waiters and receptionists, there's a routine we can follow. Throw in unexpected difference, an autist, a different culture, a deaf person, a conflict...

Grace under pressure

We can all learn that, and be better people for it.

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