by Oliver Sacks
The other side of a much-retarded development may be a continuing ability to develop social skills and perceptions throughout life, and the last twenty years have indeed been years of continuing development for Temple. Ten years ago, when she first started lecturing, I had been told, she often seemed not to be addressing the audience—she would have no eye contact and might actually be facing in another direction—and she could not take questions after the lecture. Now she spends almost 90 percent of her time on the road, lecturing around the world, sometimes about autism, sometimes about animal behavior. She has become much more fluent in her lecturing style, has more eye contact with the audience, and may even add humorous asides and improvisations; she answers—and, if need be, parries—questions easily. In her social life, she seems also to have developed, so that most recently, Temple told me, she has been able to enjoy spending time with two or three friends. But achieving genuine friendship, appreciating other people for their otherness, for their own minds, may be the most difficult of all achievements for an autistic person. Uta Frith, in Autism and Asperger Syndrome, writes, “Asperger syndrome individuals—do not seem to possess the knack of entering and maintaining intimate two-way personal relationships, whereas routine social interactions are well within their grasp.” Her colleague Peter Hobson writes of an intelligent but autistic man who could not comprehend the meaning of “a friend.” Yet it seemed to me, as I listened to her, that Temple, now in her forties, had grasped at least something of the nature of friendship.
On this note—we had been walking and talking for almost two hours—we finished our visit to the university farm and took a break for lunch. Temple, it seemed to me, was happy to stop talking, stop thinking for a while; there had been an almost ferocious intensity in the self-examination I had forced on her (although it was not unlike the self-examination she forces on herself daily, struggling, as always, to understand and live with autism in a non-autistic world). “Normality” had been revealed more and more, as we spoke, as a sort of front, or facade, for her, albeit a brave and often brilliant front, behind which she remained, in some ways, as far “outside”, as unconnected, as ever. “I can really relate to Data”, she said as we drove away from the farm. She is a “Star Trek” fan, as I am, and her favorite character is Data, an android who, for all his emotionlessness, has a great curiosity, a wistfulness, about being human. He observes human behavior minutely, and sometimes impersonates it, but longs, above all, to be human. A surprising number of people with autism identify with Data, or with his predecessor, Mr. Spock.
This was the case with the B.’s, the autistic family I had visited in California—the older son, like the parents, with Asperger’s syndrome, the younger with classical autism. When I first arrived at their house, the whole atmosphere was so “normal” that I wondered if I had been misinformed, or if I had not, perhaps, ended up at the wrong house, for there was nothing obviously “autistic” about them or it. It was only after I had settled down that I noticed the well-used trampoline, where the whole family, at times, likes to jump and flap their arms; the huge library of science fiction; 112 the strange cartoons pinned to the bathroom wall; and the ludicrously explicit directions, pinned up in the kitchen—for cooking, laying the table, and washing up—suggesting that these had to be performed in a fixed, formulaic way (this, I learned later, was an autistic in-joke).
112. Many high-functioning autistic people describe a great fondness for, almost an addiction to, alternative worlds, imaginary worlds such as those of C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, or worlds they imagine themselves. Thus both the B.’s and their older son have spent years constructing an imaginary world with its own landscapes and geography (endlessly mapped and drawn), its own languages, currencies, laws, and customs—a world in which fantasy and rigidity play equal parts. Thus days might be spent computing the total grain production or silver reserves in Leutheria, or designing a new flag, or calculating the complex factors determining the value of a thog—this occupies hours of the B.’s leisure time at home together, Mrs. B. providing the science and technology; Mr. B. the politics, languages, and social customs; and their son the natural features of the often-warring countries.
Mrs. B. spoke of herself, at one point, as “bordering on normality”, but then made clear what such “bordering” meant: “We know the rules and conventions of the ‘normal,’ but there is no actual transit. You act normal, you learn the rules, and obey them, but—”
“You learn to ape human behavior”, her husband interpolated. “I still don’t understand what’s behind the social conventions. You observe the front—but—”
The B.’s, then, had learned a front of normality, which was necessary, given their professional lives, their living in the suburbs and driving a car, their having a son in regular school, and so on. But they had no illusions about themselves. They recognized their own autism, and they had recognized each other’s, at college, with a sense of such affinity and delight that it was inevitable they would marry. “It was as if we had known each other for a million years”, Mrs. B. said. While they were well aware of many of the problems of their autism, they had a respect for their differentness, even a pride. Indeed, in some autistic people this sense of radical and ineradicable differentness is so profound as to lead them to regard themselves, half jokingly, almost as members of another species (“They beamed us down on the transporter together”, as the B.’s liked to say), and to feel that autism, while it may be seen as a medical condition, and pathologized as a syndrome, must also be seen as a whole mode of being, a deeply different mode or identity, one that needs to be conscious (and proud) of itself.
Temple’s attitudes seem similar to this: she is very aware (if only intellectually, inferentially) of what she is missing in life, but equally (and directly) aware of her strengths, too—her concentration, her intensity of thought, her single-mindedness, her tenacity; her incapacity for dissembling, her directness, her honesty. She suspects—and I, too, was coming more and more to suspect—that these strengths, the positive aspects of her autism, go with the negative ones. And yet there are times when she needs to forget that she is autistic, to feel at one with others, not outside, not different.
Having spent the morning among beef cattle, and planning to visit a slaughterhouse (or “meat-packing plant”, in the industry’s euphemism) in the afternoon, we found ourselves a little averse to meat and had a Mexican meal of rice and beans. After lunch, we drove to the airport and took a tiny commuter plane, then drove out to the plant. Temple was proud of its layout and wanted to show me how it looked. Such plants are closed to the public and maintain a high degree of security. Temple had designed the facilities a couple of years earlier and still had her overalls and I.D. with the plant’s insignia. But I was a problem: What was to be done with me? Temple had thought of this in the morning and had selected from her hat collection a sanitary engineer’s bright-yellow hard hat. She handed it to me, saying, “That’ll do. You look good in it. It goes with your khaki pants and shirt. You look exactly like a sanitary engineer.” (I blushed; no one had ever told me this before.) “Now all you have to do is behave like one, think like one.” I was astounded at this, for autistic people, it is said, have no pretend-play, and here Temple had, very coolly, and without the slightest hesitation, determined on a subterfuge and was all set to smuggle me into the plant.
Our entry, in the event, went off without trouble. Temple drove through the gate with a sublime air of confidence, waved cheerily to the security guard, and was as cheerily waved in. “Keep the hard hat on”, she said to me when we parked. “Keep it on the whole time. You’re a sanitary engineer here.”
We stopped to lean over the fence where the cattle are corralled outside the large plant building and then followed the path that the cattle follow when they go on their last journey, up and up a curving ramp leading into the main plant building—“the stairway to Heaven”, Temple called it. Here, again, I was puzzled. The autistic have difficulty with metaphor, it is said,
and never use irony. But, looking at Temple’s straight, serious expression, I was not sure that, for her, this was metaphor or irony. She had heard the phrase—perhaps it seemed to her literally true. She describes in her autobiography a similar literalization of a symbol when, as an adolescent, she heard a minister quote John 10:9—“I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved”—and the minister added, “Before each of you there is a door—opening into Heaven. Open it and be saved.” Temple writes:
Like many autistic children, everything was literal to me. My mind centered on one thing. Door. A door opening to Heaven—I had to find that door—The closet door, the bathroom door, the front door, the stable door—all were scrutinized and rejected as the door. Then one day—I noticed that an addition to our dorm was being constructed—A small platform extended out from the building and I climbed on it. And there was the door! It was a little wooden door that opened out onto the roof—A feeling of relief flooded me—A feeling of love and joy—I’d found it! The door to my Heaven.
Later, Temple told me that she believed in some sort of existence after death (even if it was only as “an energy impression” in the universe). Intensely conscious of animals’ emotions, their “humanity”, she had to grant them some sort of immortality, too.
We walked slowly up by the side of the gently curving, high-walled ramp, where cattle walk in single file, blithely unconscious of what is to come, up to the stunner, with its lethal bolt. Temple has been a pioneer in the design of such ramps, and her name is associated, in the trade, with the introduction of curved chutes. As we ascended the catwalk, looking over the chute’s walls, Temple told me of their special virtues, how curved chutes prevented the animals from seeing what was at the other end of the ramp until they were almost there (thus preventing any apprehension) and, at the same time, took advantage of the cow’s natural tendency to circle. The high walls prevented upsetting distractions and served to concentrate the animals on their walk.
At the top of the ramp, inside the building, the animals found themselves moved, almost insensibly, onto a conveyor belt running under their bellies. (This “double-rail restrainer” was another innovation of Temple’s.) A few seconds later, the animal is instantly killed by a bolt shot by compressed air through the brain. A very similar system, Temple told me, might be used for hogs as well, though typically these would be killed by electrical stunning, not a bolt. She added an interesting gloss: “An electroshock machine”—such as is used in some psychiatric facilities—“and a hog stunner have almost exactly the same parameters: around one ampere, at three hundred volts.” A slight misplacement of the leads, she added, and the patient would be killed, stunned, like a hog. She was a bit shocked, she allowed, when she realized this.
I got a sense of horror as Temple showed me the stunner, but the cattle, she assured me, had no intimation, no apprehension, of what was to happen to them; her whole effort, indeed, was to remove anything that could frighten or stress the animals, so that they could go peacefully, gently, unknowingly, to their death. But I still felt queasy about the whole thing. How did she feel, how did others feel, working in such places?
Temple has explored this and has written a classic paper on the subject. 113
113. Her article, “Behavior of Slaughter Plant and Auction Employees Toward the Animals”, appeared in Anthrozoos: A Multidisciplinary Journal on the Interactions of People, Animals, and Environment in the spring of 1988.
Some employees in slaughterhouses, she notes, rapidly develop a protective hardness and start killing animals in a purely mechanical way: “The person doing the killing approaches his job as if he was stapling boxes moving along a conveyor belt. He has no emotions about his act.” Others, she reveals, “start to enjoy killing and—torment the animals on purpose.” Speaking of these attitudes turned Temple’s mind to a parallel: “I find a very high correlation”, she said, “between the way animals are treated and the handicapped—Georgia is a snake pit—they treat [handicapped people] worse than animals—Capital-punishment states are the worst animal states and the worst for the handicapped.”
All this makes Temple passionately angry, and passionately concerned for humane reform: she wants to reform the treatment of the handicapped, especially the autistic, as she wants to reform the treatment of cattle in the meat industry. (The only fitting approach to killing animals, the only one that shows respect for the animal, Temple feels, is the ritual or “sacred” one.)
It was an enormous relief getting out of the slaughter plant, away from the hideous smell, which seemed to permeate every inch of the place and had made me hold my stomach and my breath sometimes in an effort not to puke; an enormous relief, once we were outside, to breathe the sharp, clear air, untainted with the smell of blood and offal; an enormous relief, morally, to get away from the idea of killing. I asked Temple about this as we drove away. “Nobody should kill animals all the time”, she said, and she told me she had written much on the importance of rotating personnel, so that they would not be constantly employed in killing, bleeding, or driving. She herself is in need of other atmospheres and occupations, and these form a vital and altogether pleasanter part of her life. Her understanding of the psychology and behavior of herd animals is sought not only by feedlots and slaughterhouses all over the world but by sheep shearers as far away as New Zealand, and by game parks and zoos. I had the feeling that she might like to spend time on the African veldt, as a consultant on elephant herds and prey animals like antelopes and wildebeest. But would she, I wondered, be able to understand apes (who have some “theory of mind”) as well as she understood cattle? Or would she find them bewildering, impenetrable, the way she found children and other human beings? (“With farm animals, I feel their behavior”, she said later. “With primates I intellectually understand their interactions.”)
Temple’s deepest feelings are for cattle; she feels a tenderness, a compassion, for them that is akin to love. She spoke of this at length as we made our way to our next destination, a feedlot—how she sought gentleness, holding cattle in the chute, how she sought to transmit calmness to the animals, to bring them peace in the last moments of their lives. This, for her, is half-physical, half-sacred, this cradling of an animal in the last moments of its life, and it is something she endlessly tries to teach the people who operate the chutes in the slaughter plants. She told me a story of how one plant manager, while very defensive about being advised on this by her, was fascinated by her power to calm excited animals, and how, unknown to her, he had spied on her through a hole in the ceiling as she worked. This had occurred when she was consulting at a slaughterhouse in the South, and the entire scene, and its context, kept returning to her mind: she told me the story half a dozen times in the afternoon, each time at length, and in virtually the same words. I was struck both by the vividness of the re-experience, the memory, for her—it seemed to play itself in her mind with extraordinary detail—and by its unwavering quality. 114
114. The psychologist Frederic Bartlett writes of remembering as “reconstruction, ” but for Temple (as for Stephen), seemingly, this does not occur, or occurs to a much smaller extent than usual. Nor is memory, for her, entirely internalized as part of the self—thus her frequent allusions to “videotapes” and “computer records, ” and other external forms of memory storage.
Temple’s self-description here is intriguingly at odds with some of the current formulations of imagery and memory, as conceived by Damasio, Edelman, and others. Thus Damasio writes, in Descartes’ Error:
Images are not stored as facsimile pictures of things, or events, or words, or sentences. The brain does not file Polaroid pictures of people, objects, landscapes; nor does it store audiotapes of music and speech; it does not store films of scenes in our lives—In brief, there seems to be no permanently held pictures of anything, even miniaturized, no microfiches or microfilms, no hard copies.
“Yet this,” Damasio emphasizes, “must be reconciled with the sensation—that we can con
jure up such reproductions or facsimile images.”
One must wonder, if this is the case, whether Temple—and also Franco and Stephen (and Luria’s Mnemonist)—are merely, like the rest of us, susceptible to an illusion of reproduction, or whether in fact (as Jerome Bruner suggests) there may be in them some failure of integration of perceptual systems with higher integrative ones, and with concepts of self, so that relatively unprocessed, uninterpreted, unrevised images persist.
It was as if the original scene, its perception (with all its attendant feelings), was reproduced, replayed, with virtually no modification. This quality of memory (so akin to Stephen Wiltshire’s, in a way) seemed to me both prodigious and pathological—prodigious in its detail and pathological in its fixity, more akin to a computer record than to anything else. Such computational analogies, indeed, are frequently brought up by Temple herself: “My mind is like a CD-ROM in a computer—like a quick-access videotape. But once I get there, I have to play that whole part.” She could not just focus, for instance, on the cradling of an animal in its last moments; she had to play, in memory, the entire scene, from the animal entering the chute and progressing steadily (“no fast-forward, it takes about two minutes”) until the death of the animal and its collapse, after its throat has been cut. “I can do anything the computers in Jurassic Park do”, she continued. “I can do all that stuff in my head—I actually have that machine in my head. I run it in my mind. I play the tape—it’s a slow method of thinking.” But an ideal sort of thinking for much of her work. She designs the most elaborate facilities in her mind, visualizing every component of the system, juxtaposing them in different ways, viewing them from different angles, from near and far. Once the design is complete, she will “run a simulation” in her mind—that is, imagine the entire plant in operation. This simulation may show an unexpected problem, and when this happens she will pinpoint the problem, modify the design, do another simulation—several simulations, if need be—until the design is perfect. Only now, when all is clear in her mind, does she make an actual blueprint of it. No more attention is needed at this point; the rest is mechanical. “Once I get the basic thing laid out, I just put it on paper. I can listen to the TV. There’s no emotion in it. I just turn on my Sun workstation and do it.”