From Barton's website:
"One night in the studio I downloaded some of the DNA data sequence from the International Genome Project website. On a whim I entered the first couple of lines from the sequence for chromosome 1 into my midi sequencer, Xx. The resulting rhythmic and pitch pattern seized my musical imagination and I began making very simple expansions and contractions of the pattern, careful not to disturb the basic relationships."
It sounds kinda freaky, actually, but I've heard a lot worse at open mic night...
Die-hard gamers are too busy gaming. Don't forget about those of us who love gaming but not to the exclusion of all else... I go through gaming phases and then through phases in which I read 3 books a week, then through phases where I obsess about something like neurology or Ajax.
Online zines like The Escapist exist for those of us who have hooks into the gaming world but don't live and breathe MMORPGs.
If you've read Malcolm Gladwell's best-seller The Tipping Point, you'll recall the discussion of Sesame Street and the controversy about having muppets interacting with human beings on the show. The initial idea was that kids minds are not sophisticated enough to distinguish between fantasy and reality, and that mixing fantastical monster muppets in with actual humans would at best confuse the kids and, at worst, mess with their concept of reality.
In fact, they discovered that kids are perfectly capable of distinguishing fantasy from reality, and separating play-acting from real life. Thus Big Bird walks down the street with Maria; the kids were enthralled with Big Bird precisely because they knew him to be outside of reality.
Kids use stories and play-acting all the time to help themselves understand reality. Whether or not games are dangerous or should be controlled by legislation, it certainly should NOT be because of some notion that kids think that Super Mario is really coming over for dinner tonight.
Autistic wrote: "Maybe the way to work with it is to understand which input are best perceved by the person, what gets his attention most effectively, and try to set up communication through that channel."
Yes! That would certainly fit with my (brief) experience. The communication problems aren't necessarily related to the input devices (i.e. the senses themselves are receiving visual, auditory, tactile information fine), but stem from different processing than so-called neurotypicals. If you understand the different processing, then communicating becomes somewhat like encrypting and decrypting a message -- you figure out the key, all of a sudden what seemed incomprehsible is simple and obvious.
A couple of weeks ago we came to the conclusion that my girlfriend's father is high-functioning autistic (maybe Aspberger's, maybe something else). He's in his late 70's and in failing health, and it wasn't until he started living with us full time that we were able to put the pieces together and realize his self-absorption wasn't a character flaw, it was due to genuine neurological impairment. In his own capacity, he's actually highly involved in the world around him, just in a different way than we would normally expect. It's revolutionized how we deal with him and has made our lives unbelievably easier -- literally overnight.
What fascinates me about autism is that humans are, as a species, highly social. We evolved for social interactions, with extraordinary sensitivity to eye contact, microexpressions, and the subtlest social cues. Thus there's a strange double-bind with autism: It impairs an individual's ability to understand and participate in "normal" social interactions, and at the same time the people around the autistic individual (especially someone high-functioning) are impaired in their ability to perceive the autism because they are putting "social explanations" to the autistic person's behavior: he's rude, he's egomaniacal, he's a slob, he's lazy, he's stupid. When in reality the person's behavior is following an internal logic that leaves out social phenomena like sarcasm, subtle social cues, eye contact and microexpressions, and curiosity about melodrama. The autistic person, once understood, can actually be refreshingly direct and can contribute a lot through their increased capacities, such as long-term information recall, honesty, and attention to detail.
My gf's father's family would appear to be autistic with the possible exception of one sister; one brother was probably autistic complicated by schizophrenia (which seems to share neuropathology) and killed himself at a young age. Both parents were likely autistic as well, certainly the mother. Environmental factors would seem not to be the culprit since each person in the family was born in a different location. Neither parent was well-educated, though the autistic sister was an accomplished pattern-cutter and later got a college degree. My gf's father does have a Ph.D. in education and was a chemistry professor for years, but his education was hard-won due to writing and social difficulties. He still has extraordinarily factual recall but has a very difficult time synthesizing diverse facts and struggles to understand the conclusions that scientists reach when the line of thought is not simple and obvious.
Slashdot Mirror
A guy did something similar with the human genome, translating sequences into music:
http://www.toddbarton.com/index2.asp
From Barton's website:
"One night in the studio I downloaded some of the DNA data sequence from the International Genome Project website. On a whim I entered the first couple of lines from the sequence for chromosome 1 into my midi sequencer, Xx. The resulting rhythmic and pitch pattern seized my musical imagination and I began making very simple expansions and contractions of the pattern, careful not to disturb the basic relationships."
It sounds kinda freaky, actually, but I've heard a lot worse at open mic night...
Die-hard gamers are too busy gaming. Don't forget about those of us who love gaming but not to the exclusion of all else... I go through gaming phases and then through phases in which I read 3 books a week, then through phases where I obsess about something like neurology or Ajax.
Online zines like The Escapist exist for those of us who have hooks into the gaming world but don't live and breathe MMORPGs.
If you've read Malcolm Gladwell's best-seller The Tipping Point, you'll recall the discussion of Sesame Street and the controversy about having muppets interacting with human beings on the show. The initial idea was that kids minds are not sophisticated enough to distinguish between fantasy and reality, and that mixing fantastical monster muppets in with actual humans would at best confuse the kids and, at worst, mess with their concept of reality.
In fact, they discovered that kids are perfectly capable of distinguishing fantasy from reality, and separating play-acting from real life. Thus Big Bird walks down the street with Maria; the kids were enthralled with Big Bird precisely because they knew him to be outside of reality.
Kids use stories and play-acting all the time to help themselves understand reality. Whether or not games are dangerous or should be controlled by legislation, it certainly should NOT be because of some notion that kids think that Super Mario is really coming over for dinner tonight.
Autistic wrote:
"Maybe the way to work with it is to understand which input are best perceved by the person, what gets his attention most effectively, and try to set up communication through that channel."
Yes! That would certainly fit with my (brief) experience. The communication problems aren't necessarily related to the input devices (i.e. the senses themselves are receiving visual, auditory, tactile information fine), but stem from different processing than so-called neurotypicals. If you understand the different processing, then communicating becomes somewhat like encrypting and decrypting a message -- you figure out the key, all of a sudden what seemed incomprehsible is simple and obvious.
A couple of weeks ago we came to the conclusion that my girlfriend's father is high-functioning autistic (maybe Aspberger's, maybe something else). He's in his late 70's and in failing health, and it wasn't until he started living with us full time that we were able to put the pieces together and realize his self-absorption wasn't a character flaw, it was due to genuine neurological impairment. In his own capacity, he's actually highly involved in the world around him, just in a different way than we would normally expect. It's revolutionized how we deal with him and has made our lives unbelievably easier -- literally overnight.
What fascinates me about autism is that humans are, as a species, highly social. We evolved for social interactions, with extraordinary sensitivity to eye contact, microexpressions, and the subtlest social cues. Thus there's a strange double-bind with autism: It impairs an individual's ability to understand and participate in "normal" social interactions, and at the same time the people around the autistic individual (especially someone high-functioning) are impaired in their ability to perceive the autism because they are putting "social explanations" to the autistic person's behavior: he's rude, he's egomaniacal, he's a slob, he's lazy, he's stupid. When in reality the person's behavior is following an internal logic that leaves out social phenomena like sarcasm, subtle social cues, eye contact and microexpressions, and curiosity about melodrama. The autistic person, once understood, can actually be refreshingly direct and can contribute a lot through their increased capacities, such as long-term information recall, honesty, and attention to detail.
My gf's father's family would appear to be autistic with the possible exception of one sister; one brother was probably autistic complicated by schizophrenia (which seems to share neuropathology) and killed himself at a young age. Both parents were likely autistic as well, certainly the mother. Environmental factors would seem not to be the culprit since each person in the family was born in a different location. Neither parent was well-educated, though the autistic sister was an accomplished pattern-cutter and later got a college degree. My gf's father does have a Ph.D. in education and was a chemistry professor for years, but his education was hard-won due to writing and social difficulties. He still has extraordinarily factual recall but has a very difficult time synthesizing diverse facts and struggles to understand the conclusions that scientists reach when the line of thought is not simple and obvious.