“He could get in real trouble,” Gayle insisted. “It’s not OK to ogle girls and hug everyone. But he can’t stop.”
“Gayle, he’s a good kid. He’s just going through puberty. Everyone does,” Carrie said. “This is nothing that people haven’t seen before. You have to give him a chance. Go to parties. If he can’t handle it, don’t stay long. But at least let him have the chance.”
Gayle was silent. Am I keeping him out of these situations because it’s hard for him or because it’s hard for me? she wondered. Maybe I’m being selfish. I can’t just be Grizzly Adams and take him to live with me on the side of a mountain.
Carrie went on in a gentler tone: “You didn’t ask for this. You didn’t ask to have a child who has special needs, and you didn’t ask to do it alone. But you’re doing a great job. You’re doing a better job raising him than a lot of kids who have two parents.”
That eased the sting a little, but Gayle was still shaken by the conversation. She replayed it in her mind all day, feeling guilty for even hinting that she might be embarrassed by her son. She still wasn’t convinced that this was true, either consciously or unconsciously. But she found some truth in Carrie’s point about giving Eli the chance to experience life firsthand, even if it wasn’t easy or pleasant. She wasn’t helping him by sheltering him from the real world, whether it was out of embarrassment or protectiveness.
In the end she concluded that Carrie was right: Eli could benefit from the typical high school experience, surrounded by a mix of people very different from himself, some of them kind and some of them cruel, just like in the real world. He had the right to learn from that experience, even if the lessons of the real world were often learned the hard way. Hiding him away wasn’t the answer. Eli deserved to see the world as it really was, and the world needed to see him for himself.
* * *
THE NEXT DAY WAS EASTER, and Eli was anxiously looking forward to a family brunch at Mimi’s house. That night, while Gayle sat on the living room couch, absently leafing through a stack of mail and mulling over the troubling discussion she’d had with Carrie, Eli rocked back and forth in the blue armchair next to her, flicking strips of paper over a tea light and pretending they were flames.
“Who’s going to wake me up tomorrow, Mom?” he asked with concern, as if he might sleep all day and miss the fun.
“Who do you think is going to wake you up?” she asked, looking up from the mail. “Who always wakes you up?”
“You, Mom!”
She laughed. “If somebody else comes into your room and wakes you up, we’re going to be in big trouble.”
He went back to flicking his flames while Gayle sorted the mail into piles. A few minutes later he asked again.
“Mom, can you wake me up tomorrow, on Sunday?”
“Yes,” she said.
“ ’Cause we gotta go to Mimi’s,” he explained.
“Gotcha,” she said.
“I hope the Easter Bunny brings me a battery-operated fan from Walmart!” he exclaimed. “And some peanut M&M’s.”
Gayle turned to look at him, surprised. She could never be sure in what ways he had become a teenager and in what ways he was still an overgrown toddler.
“You really think there’s a big bunny?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“That comes hopping down the street?”
“Yes,” Eli said emphatically. “I want him to!”
Eventually, convinced that Gayle would not forget to wake him in the morning and take him to the Easter party, Eli trudged upstairs to bed.
Gayle remembered a previous Easter when he had acted up so much that she barely got to speak to anyone else. She spent the whole day racing after him, scolding him for throwing himself into the arms of family friends and generally making a nuisance of himself. She was so visibly unhappy that her mother accused her of being a wet blanket, bringing down the rest of the party. “If you’re that miserable,” Mimi had said, “Just go home.” Gayle vowed not to let herself be miserable this year. Eli is who he is, she reminded herself. And I’m not going to hide.
A few minutes after disappearing into his bedroom, Eli reappeared in the living room. His ability to read Gayle’s mind, or at least her mood, was uncanny: he seemed to know that something was bothering her, even though she’d tried her best to conceal it.
“Mom, I want to say hi to you,” he announced, smiling beatifically.
“It’s late, Eli. You’re supposed to be in bed,” she said.
“I can’t sleep. I just want to say hi.”
“You can say hi to me tomorrow,” she said. “Go on up to bed.”
He turned back toward the stairs and noticed a plastic milk jug on the dining table that Gayle had carved into a jack-o’-lantern for him.
“I can take this?” he asked, pointing to it.
“OK,” she said. “Sure.”
“Good night, my love!” he trilled, and happily scooped up the jack-o’-lantern.
Gayle watched him skip up the stairs to his bedroom, swinging his plastic jug, and felt her heart swell with the urge to protect him from the world’s tough lessons. She swallowed hard as the door shut behind him.
Twenty-One
Born to Be Kind
Parents of children with Williams syndrome often struggle to teach them how to be more like the rest of us. The rest of us don’t put much thought into learning to be more like them—but we might benefit from trying. Despite their disadvantages, people with Williams highlight some of humanity’s best features, normally obscured by the suspicion and selfishness we have acquired over eons of evolution in competition with each other.
It’s not quite fair to say that the world would be a better place if everyone had Williams, but it would unquestionably be friendlier. People with Williams don’t have to learn the Golden Rule; they don’t have to be taught about equality or inclusion. They’re born practicing these principles. Even babies with Williams are unconditionally affectionate. They demonstrate less separation anxiety when parted from their parents, less fear around strangers, and more interest in examining faces than do other infants at the same age.
To people with Williams, every face is a friendly face and every stranger a potential friend. In fact, a groundbreaking 2010 study found that people with Williams showed no signs of racial bias, making them the first group ever to demonstrate a complete lack of prejudice, since nearly everyone past the age of three reveals an implicit preference for his or her own ethnic group. Researchers concluded that people with Williams simply didn’t have the social fear that drives most of us to distinguish between in-groups and out-groups.
This kind of openness, however, is an evolutionary aberration. The fear of others who are different, and the discrimination it engenders, is deeply wired into our psyche—a vestige from our earliest genetic ancestors. Empathy, on the other hand, is a relatively recent evolutionary adaptation. It’s believed to have evolved with the first mammals, enabling mothers to care for their offspring, and later allowing groups of primates to organize into societies. Until the formation of mammalian social groups, empathy was useless at best in facilitating survival and reproduction.
Some scientists believe that the first seedlings of non-maternal empathy were planted between 15 million and 20 million years ago, when a genetic mutation gave certain forest-dwelling monkeys the ability to digest unripe fruit. As the science writer David Dobbs put it, “This left some of their cousins—the ancestors of chimps, gorillas, and humans—at a sharp disadvantage. Suddenly a lot of fruit was going missing before it ripened.”
To survive, these newly disadvantaged primates moved to the fringes of the forests, where there was less competition for food, partly because the border territories fell dangerously within feeding range of the savanna predators. They adapted by forming colonies for protection and, for what may have been the first time, learned to balance their individual needs with the overall good of the group. They formed bonds with other members, largely by groo
ming, an intimate act that flooded their brains with oxytocin. Those groups that cooperated better were more likely to survive, and thus empathy became an advantage that endured as the early hominids evolved.
Of course, there could be too much of a good thing: overabundant empathy backfired, costing an individual his chances of surviving and reproducing. Food was scarce, and the best mates were in high demand. Standing aside for the benefit of others made it less likely that a single ape would see his genes passed down. Somewhere along the evolutionary line, a balance was struck between selflessness and selfishness, giving the most successful primates (people included) the ability to both collaborate and compete with their brethren. “Every population had its ‘hawks’ and ‘doves,’ and the doves had a tough time staying alive,” writes primatologist Frans de Waal in his book Our Inner Ape. “In order to be successful, social animals need to be hawks as well as doves.”
The unbridled empathy of Williams syndrome would have been both more and less disabling in the early days of humanity, when we lived in roving bands of forty to sixty members and communicated primarily through gestures, grunts, and body language. Cooperation was key in these tribes, and members, many of whom were related to one another, were unlikely to betray the trust of someone who trusted too much. The danger would have been when someone with the indiscriminate kindness of Williams encountered a new face, since members of other tribes were more likely to attack than befriend.
“Unlike other animals, the most lethal predators we faced were our own kind,” explain Maia Szalavitz and Bruce D. Perry, the authors of Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential—and Endangered. “Across generations, wariness of new individuals, groups, and ideas was built into the circuits of the human brain’s alarm response because those who had this wariness were more likely to survive to reproduce. It was just safer to assume danger—to expect the worst—than to count on the kindness of strangers.”
This instinct served us well, at least in our early days. In modern society we might be better served by shedding some of this ancestral paranoia. But in fact we have grown less trusting, not more, in recent decades. The number of Americans who agreed with the statement “Most people can be trusted” has plummeted over the years from a high of 77 percent in 1964, according to Robert D. Putnam, the author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. In 2012 a mere 24 percent of people surveyed agreed. And if we don’t feel we can trust our fellow humans, we aren’t likely to go out of our way to be kind to them.
Could we have evolved to be more empathetic if resources hadn’t been so scarce for our primate ancestors? Probably not, says evolutionary biologist Bernard Crespi, who has studied the origins of social behavior in Williams and autism. “How plentiful resources are is not really relevant, because fitness is always relative,” he explains. “Some individuals will always survive and reproduce better than others, due to the traits they express.” The only species that truly put others’ needs first are clonal groups, such as some aphids and certain ant colonies in which the worker caste cannot reproduce, making the success of the group paramount, Crespi says.
Among early humans, empathy and altruism helped more cooperative tribes prevail over tribes divided by selfishness and disloyalty. But within the tribes, and later within larger societies, some amount of selfishness was key to an individual’s success at passing on his DNA. These days we expect people to look out for themselves, so much so that we don’t quite know how to respond to true altruists. While it’s no surprise that we dislike people we consider selfish, one study revealed that we also show unexpected contempt for people who are too selfless. In the study, players in a game that involved sharing imaginary “public goods” had the option of banishing other players from future games. Unsurprisingly, most people banished free riders who took others’ goods but didn’t share their own. But they also consistently expelled players who gave more than they took, preferring partners who gave and took in relatively equal proportions. It was startling support for the theory that exceptional people face social rejection regardless of the ways in which they’re different. The social psychologists who ran the study concluded that selfless players were being punished for setting too high a social standard, demonstrating levels of generosity that the others weren’t willing to match. Their findings offer one explanation for why so many people seem uncomfortable with the outpouring of affection, compliments, and favors they receive from people with Williams syndrome: they set the bar too high. Few of us are able, or willing, to reciprocate.
But people with Williams tend not to recognize when they’re being regarded with contempt or disdain, or to change the behavior that elicits this response. Despite their acute empathy, they have a blind spot when it comes to negative or threatening emotions in others. They’re drawn to all people, at all times, no matter what mood those people might be in. In studies, adolescents with Williams were much more likely to judge people “approachable” when shown pictures of strangers making a variety of facial expressions—some of them menacing enough to put the rest of us on our guard. Teens without Williams were quick to notice a scowl or a furrowed brow, for example, and were keenly aware of the distinction between a happy smile and a mischievous smirk. But people with Williams didn’t always notice the difference. Even obviously angry faces failed to evoke fear in people with Williams, while non-Williams teens said they’d be eager to avoid the people making those faces. Unlike race blindness, this obliviousness to expression could be as dangerous today as it was hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Neurobiologists have traced the apparent absence of social fear to abnormalities in the amygdalae of people with Williams. These almond-shaped clusters of nuclei, buried deep in the brain, help process emotions and regulate our fight-or-flight response to danger. In people with Williams, they react more dramatically than normal to images of disasters, such as fires or plane crashes, which researchers think may explain why people with Williams often develop anxiety disorders. Conversely, they respond with abnormal indifference to images of people making fearful or angry facial expressions. The amygdalae of people without Williams tend to be extremely sensitive to those expressions, since we have evolved to see them as warnings. Getting too close to a hostile person, or an aggressive ape, probably cost many of our ancestors their lives. Seeing a look of panic on someone else’s face and starting to run probably saved the lives of many more.
One study found a strong correlation between this weakened amygdala response and the increased tendency of people with Williams to approach strangers, reinforcing the theory that the amygdala normally plays an important role in helping us judge the safety of social situations. It’s an anatomical explanation for Gayle’s observation that Eli is curious about but not afraid of angry people. When he sees someone scowl or go red with rage, he stares intently and often tries to get closer for a better view—exactly the opposite of what most of us would do.
People with Williams also have a stronger-than-normal amygdala response to happy faces, meaning that they are much more attentive to these expressions than the rest of us. Eli is transfixed by smiling faces; seeing someone burst into laughter can stop him in his tracks. It’s another idiosyncrasy with little evolutionary value, since heightened awareness of joy has infinitely less bearing on survival than heightened awareness of danger. But it helps explain the intense urge of those with Williams to please other people, based on the sheer thrill of seeing them smile. And it demonstrates a marked difference from our own tendencies, which are more heavily steeped in social fear. If we notice someone laughing when we walk into a room, most of us initially wonder if the laughter is directed at us. Eli doesn’t. His impulse is to approach the person and ask to be let in on the joke.
So while people with Williams often seem uncannily good at sensing other people’s feelings, they aren’t quite as skilled as they appear in what psychologists call “theory of mind”: the ability to recognize that others have thoughts, feelings, and intentions that are
different from our own—and to make inferences based on that awareness. What’s missing is the ability to make the crucial cognitive leap between recognizing that someone is furious and deciding that it’s a good idea to get out of his way. While a 1998 study led by Helen Tager-Flusberg concluded that people with Williams did astoundingly well in tests of theory of mind, correctly interpreting complex mental states from nonverbal cues just as well as normal controls and much better than people with similar intellectual disabilities, she later clarified these findings. In a second study, published two years later, Tager-Flusberg made the case that theory of mind comprised two distinct abilities that activated different parts of the brain. One was a perceptual component: being able to “read the mind in the eyes,” or determine other people’s mental states based on their facial expressions. The other was a cognitive component: using this information to make inferences about other people’s beliefs or expectations, as well as to predict or explain their actions. People with Williams are adept at the former but not the latter, she found: they can read moods but not minds. For example, Tager-Flusberg presented her Williams subjects with an illustrated story about a girl who went for a walk in the park and saw a dog sitting in the grass. When the dog got up and barked, the girl ran away. Asked why the girl ran, people with Williams tended not to conclude that she was afraid of the dog but to offer factual observations like “That’s a big dog.” They were given another scenario featuring a boy who always brought his lunch to school. One morning, his mom made him a delicious lunch but he went to school without it. When asked why, they were less likely to guess that he had forgotten it and more likely to answer with irrelevant information, such as “His backpack is yellow.”
Faced with a real-life boy who had forgotten his lunch, most people with Williams could likely sense that he was sad, but they might not be able to put their finger on exactly why. And sociologists have found that just knowing how people feel doesn’t equate to social success. It’s the cognitive component, being able to interpret and respond to that knowledge, that determines whether other people identify you as “agreeable.” The adjective, in its sociological sense, is the single greatest predictor of strong relationships and a wide social circle. While people with Williams are usually warm, friendly, and caring, they aren’t always perceived as agreeable because they lack the social cognition that makes for complete theory of mind. They might want to cheer up the sad boy in the cafeteria, but it simply wouldn’t occur to them to offer him part of their sandwich. (If he asked for it, however, they’d be likely to happily hand over the whole thing.)
The Boy Who Loved Too Much Page 26