An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales

by Oliver Sacks

  “Cattle are disturbed by the same sorts of sounds as autistic people—high-pitched sounds, air hissing, or sudden loud noises; they cannot adapt to these”, Temple told me. “But they are not bothered by low-pitched, rumbling noises. They are disturbed by high visual contrasts, shadows or sudden movements. A light touch will make them pull away, a firm touch calms them. The way I would pull away from being touched is the way a wild cow will pull away—getting me used to being touched is very similar to taming a wild cow.” It was precisely her sense of the common ground (in terms of basic sensations and feelings) between animals and people that allowed her to show such sensitivity to animals, and to insist so forcefully on their humane management.

  She had been primed to this knowledge, she felt, partly through the experience of her own autism and partly because she came from a long line of farmers and, as a child, had spent much of her time on farms. And her own mode of thinking allowed her no escape from these realities. “If you’re a visual thinker, it’s easier to identify with animals”, she said as we drove to the farm. “If all your thought processes are in language, how could you imagine that cattle think? But if you think in pictures—”

  Temple has always been a powerful visualizer. She was astonished when she discovered that her own near-hallucinatory power of visual imagery was not universal—that there were others who, apparently, had other ways to think. She is still very puzzled by this. “How do you think?” she kept asking me. But she had no sense that she could draw, make blueprints, until she was twenty-eight, when she met a draftsman and watched him drawing plans. “I saw how he did it”, she told me. “I went and got exactly the same instruments and pencils as he used—a point-five-millimeter HB pencel—and then I started pretending I was him. The drawing did itself, and when it was all done I couldn’t believe I’d done it. I didn’t have to learn how to draw or design, I pretended I was David—I appropriated him, drawing and all.” 108

  108. At first it seemed, from what Temple told me, that the “appropriated” David, and his skill, had been swallowed whole, existed only as a sort of implant or foreign body within her and was only slowly integrated to become part of her. Another gifted (and poetic) autistic woman has compared herself, in this regard, to a boa constrictor, swallowing entire animals whole, but only very slowly being able to assimilate them. Sometimes the swallowed role or skill seems not to be properly assimilated or integrated and may be lost or expelled as suddenly as it was acquired—thus the tendency (especially marked in younger autistic savants) to engulf complex skills or personas or masses of information wholesale, to juggle with these for a while, and then suddenly to relinquish or forget them with such completeness that they seem to pass through without leaving any residue whatever (such unincorporated behaviors and convulsive mimeses are sometimes seen in people with severe Tourette’s syndrome).

  Much more complex are the situations where behaviors, and indeed entire personas, are retained as a sort of pseudopersonality. The taking on of exaggerated, stereotypic, almost cartoonlike sexual demeanors (mimicked or caricatured from comic strips or soap operas on TV) is sometimes seen in adolescents with autism. Donna Williams, in her fascinating personal narratives (Nobody Nowhere and Somebody Somewhere) describes how she “adopted” two personas, Carol and Willie, and thought and spoke through them, in the many years when she had only a rudimentary identity herself.

  Temple constantly runs “simulations”, as she calls them, in her head: “I visualize the animal entering the chute, from different angles, different distances, zooming in or wide angle, even from a helicopter view—or I turn myself into an animal, and feel what it would feel entering the chute.”

  But if one thinks only in pictures, I could not help reflecting, one might not understand what nonvisual thinking was like, and one would miss the richness and ambiguity, the cultural presuppositions, the depth, of language. All autistics, Temple had said earlier, were intensely visual thinkers, like her. If this was true, was it, I wondered, more than a coincidence? Was Temple’s intense visuality a vital clue to her autism?

  A cattle farm, even a large one, is often a quiet place, but when we arrived we could hear a great tumult of bellowing. “They must have separated the calves from the cows this morning”, Temple said, and, indeed, this was what had happened. We saw one cow outside the stockade, roaming, looking for her calf, and bellowing. “That’s not a happy cow”, Temple said. “That’s one sad, unhappy, upset cow. She wants her baby. Bellowing for it, hunting for it. She’ll forget for a while, then start again. It’s like grieving, mourning—not much written about it. People don’t like to allow them thoughts or feelings. Skinner wouldn’t allow them.”

  As an undergraduate in New Hampshire, she had written to B.F. Skinner, the great behaviorist, and finally she had visited him. “It was like having an audience with God”, she said. “It was a letdown. He was just a regular human being. He said, ‘We don’t have to know how the brain works—it’s just a matter of conditioned reflexes.’ No way I could believe it was just stimulus-response.” The Skinner era, Temple concluded, was one that denied feelings to animals and rationalized regarding them as automata; it was an era of exceptional cruelty, both in animal experimentation and in the management of farms and slaughterhouses. She had read somewhere that behaviorism was an uncaring science, and this was exactly how she herself felt about it. Her own aspiration was to bring a vivid sense of animals’ feelings back into husbandry.

  Seeing the grieving cow and hearing the bereft bellows angered Temple and turned her mind toward inhumanities in slaughter. She had nothing to do with chickens, she said, but the killing of chickens was particularly loathsome. “When it’s time for chickens to go to McNuggetland, they pick ‘em up, hang ‘em upside down, cut their throats.” A similar shackling of cattle, and hanging them upside down so that the blood rushes to their heads before their throats are cut, is a common sight in old kosher slaughterhouses, she said. “Sometimes their legs get broken, they scream in pain and terror.” Mercifully, such practices are now starting to change. Properly performed, “slaughter is more humane than nature”, she went on. “Eight seconds after the throat’s cut, endorphins are released; the animal dies without pain. It is similar in nature, after sheep have been ripped up by coyotes. Nature has done this to ease the pain of a dying animal.” What is terrible, the more so because it is avoidable, she feels, is pain and cruelty, the introduction of fear and stress before the lethal cutting; and it is this that she is most concerned to prevent. “I want to reform the meat industry. The activists want to shut it down”, she said, and added, “I don’t like radical anything, left or right. I have a radical dislike of radicals.”

  Away from the bellowing of the separated calves and mothers, whose distress Temple seemed to feel in her bones, we found a calm, quiet area of the farm, where cattle were browsing placidly. Temple knelt and held out some hay, and a cow came over to her and took the hay, nudging her hand with its soft muzzle. A soft, happy look came over Temple’s face. “Now I’m at home”, she said. “When I’m with cattle, it’s not at all cognitive. I know what the cow’s feeling.”

  The cattle seemed to sense this, sensed her calm, her confidence, and came up to her hand. They did not come up to me, sensing, perhaps, the unease of the city dweller, who, living mostly in a world of cultural conventions and signals, is unsure how to behave with huge, nonverbal animals.

  “It’s different with people”, she went on, repeating her earlier remark about feeling like an anthropologist on Mars. “Studying the people there, trying to figure out the natives. But I don’t feel like that with animals.”

  I was struck by the enormous difference, the gulf, between Temple’s immediate, intuitive recognition of animal moods and signs and her extraordinary difficulties understanding human beings, their codes and signals, the way they conduct themselves. One cannot say that she is devoid of feeling or has a fundamental lack of sympathy. On the contrary, her sense of animals’ moods and feelings is so s
trong that these almost take possession of her, overwhelm her at times. She feels she can have sympathy for what is physical or physiological—for an animal’s pain or terror—but lacks empathy for people’s states of mind and perspectives. 109

  109. She was deeply affected, physically shocked, when, during our talk, I imitated a young man with extremely severe Tourette’s syndrome-how, with violent tics, he had put out his own eyes. Expressions of raw impulse, violence, pain, she perceived, reacted to, straightaway. I was reminded of how, in a completely benign way, Shane, with his Tourette’s, had got through to the autistic children at Camp Winston, at a level of emotion and animal sympathy, a level more elemental, more directly conveyable, than that of complex states of mind and perspectives.

  When she was younger, she was hardly able to interpret even the simplest expressions of emotion; she learned to “decode” them later, without necessarily feeling them. (Similarly, Dr. Hermelin, in London, had told me a story about an intelligent autistic girl of twelve who came to her and said, of another student, “Joanie is making a funny noise.” Upon going to investigate, Hermelin found Joanie crying bitterly. The meaning of weeping had been completely missed by the autistic girl: she had merely registered it as something physical, “a funny noise.” I was reminded, too, of Jessy Park, and how she was fascinated by the fact that onions could make one weep but was totally unable to comprehend that one could also weep for joy.) 110

  110. Some autistic people keep dogs, as blind or deaf people may do, to assist their perceptions—in this case, social perceptions. They may use dogs to “read” the minds and intentions of visitors, which they may feel unable to do themselves. I know two autistic people who regard their dogs as having “telepathic” abilities, but of course the abilities of their dogs are merely normal canine ones—and indeed normal human ones—which they themselves lack.

  “I can tell if a human being is angry”, she told me, “or if he’s smiling.” At the level of the sensorimotor, the concrete, the unmediated, the animal, Temple has no difficulty. But what about children, I asked her. Were they not intermediate between animals and adults? On the contrary, Temple said, she had great difficulties with children—trying to talk with them, to join in their games (she could not even play peekaboo with a baby, she said, because she would get the timing all wrong)—as she had had such difficulties herself as a child. Children, she feels, are already far advanced, by the age of three or four, along a path that she, as an autistic person, has never advanced far on. Little children, she feels, already “understand” other human beings in a way she can never hope to.

  What is it, then, I pressed her further, that goes on between normal people, from which she feels herself excluded? It has to do, she has inferred, with an implicit knowledge of social conventions and codes, of cultural presuppositions of every sort. This implicit knowledge, which every normal person accumulates and generates throughout life on the basis of experience and encounters with others, Temple seems to be largely devoid of. Lacking it, she has instead to “compute” others’ intentions and states of mind, to try to make algorithmic, explicit, what for the rest of us is second nature. She herself, she infers, may never have had the normal social experiences from which a normal social knowledge is constructed. And it may be from this, too, that her difficulties with gesture and language stem—difficulties that were devastating when she was a near-speechless child, and also in the early days of speech, when she mixed all her pronouns up, not able to grasp the different meanings of “you” and “I”, depending on context.

  It is extraordinary to hear Temple speak of this time, or to read of it in her book. When she was three, as an outside chance, although her family did not have much belief in its promise, she was sent to a special nursery school for disturbed and handicapped children, and a trial of speech therapy was suggested. Somehow, the school and the speech therapist got through to Temple, rescued her (she later came to feel) from the abyss, and started her on her slow emergence. She remained clearly autistic, but her new powers of language and communication now gave her an anchor, some ability to master what had been total chaos before. Her sensory system, with its violent oscillations of oversensitivity and undersensitivity, started to stabilize a little. There were many periods of backsliding and regression, but it is clear that by the age of six she had achieved fair language and, with this, had crossed the Rubicon that divides high-functioning people like her from low-functioning ones, who never achieve proper language or autonomy. With the access of language, the terrible triad of impairments—social, communicative, and imaginative—began to yield somewhat. Temple started having some contact with others, especially one or two teachers who could appreciate her intelligence, her specialness, and could withstand her pathology—her now-incessant talking and questioning, her strange fixations, her rages. No less crucial was the emergence of some genuine playfulness and creativity—painting, drawing, making cardboard models and sculptures, as well as “unique and creative ways of being naughty.” At eight, Temple was starting to achieve the pretend-play that normal children achieve as toddlers, but the lower-functioning autistic child never achieves at all.

  Her mother, an aunt, and several teachers were crucial, but also crucial, on the long journey up, was the slow development that many autistics show; autism, being a developmental disorder, tends to become less extreme as one grows older, and one may learn to cope with it better.

  Temple had longed for friends at school and would have been totally, fiercely loyal to a friend (for two or three years, she had an imaginary friend), but there was something about the way she talked, the way she acted, that seemed to alienate others, so that, while they admired her intelligence, they never accepted her as part of their community. “I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. I had an odd lack of awareness that I was different. I thought the other kids were different. I could never figure out why I didn’t fit in.” Something was going on between the other kids, something swift, subtle, constantly changing—an exchange of meanings, a negotiation, a swiftness of understanding so remarkable that sometimes she wondered if they were all telepathic. She is now aware of the existence of these social signals. She can infer them, she says, but she herself cannot perceive them, cannot participate in this magical communication directly, or conceive the many-leveled kaleidoscopic states of mind behind it. Knowing this intellectually, she does her best to compensate, bringing immense intellectual effort and computational power to bear on matters that others understand with unthinking ease. This is why she often feels excluded, an alien.

  A crucial event occurred when she was fifteen. She had become fascinated with the squeeze chutes used to hold cattle. A science teacher took her fixation seriously, instead of scoffing, and suggested she actually build her own squeeze chute. From this beginning, he guided her from particular considerations of farm animals and machinery to a general interest in biology and all science. And here Temple, still quite abnormal in her understanding of ordinary or social language—she still missed allusions, presuppositions, irony, metaphors, jokes—found the language of science and technology a huge relief. It was much clearer, much more explicit, with far less depending on unstated assumptions. Technical language was as easy for her as social language was difficult, and it now provided her with an entry into science.

  But if there was a resolution at this level, with the focusing of much of her intellectual and emotional energy on science, other tensions, anxieties—even agonies—remained. With the onset of adolescence, Temple started to confront the realization that she might never lead a “normal” life, or enjoy the “normal” satisfactions—love and friendship, recreation and society—that went with it. This realization may be devastating for gifted young autistic people at this stage and has been a cause of depression in some and even of suicide on occasion. Temple dealt with this realization partly by renunciation and dedication: she would be celibate, she decided, and would make science her whole life.

  Adolescence also taught h
er that not only her emotional state but her whole mental and physical being were very finely tuned and could easily be thrown out of balance by certain sensory stimuli, stress, exhaustion, or conflict. 111

  111. The provocative stimuli may be very different from one person to another: one autistic person will be intolerant of high-pitched noises, another of low-pitched noises, one of a fan, another of a washing machine. There may also be various visual, tactile, and olfactory idiosyncracies.

  The hormonal turbulences of adolescence, in particular, threw her up and down. But there was also a passion, an intensity, at this turbulent time; and it was only when she had finished college and was launched on her career, she said, that she could afford to calm down. Indeed, she felt she had to; otherwise her body would destroy itself. At this point, she started on a small dose of imipramine, a drug marketed as an antidepressant. In her book, Temple speaks of the pros and cons of this:

  Gone are the frenzied searches for the basic meaning of life. I no longer fixate on one thing since I am no longer driven. During the last four years I have written very few entries in my diary because the anti-depressant has taken away much of the fervor. With the passion subdued, my career and—business is going well. Since I am more relaxed, I get along better with people, and stress-related health problems, such as colitis, are gone. Yet if medication had been prescribed for me in my early twenties, I might not have accomplished as much as I have. The “nerves” and the fixations were great motivators until they tore my body apart with stress-related health problems.