Morally Speaking...

 

SSC-004_RashadHayes_Mos Def tribute by Ssc_Too on Mixcloud

 (I was listening to this while writing, you may want to listen to this while you read. Or not.... Whatever, I don't care!! Also Check out creatingreciprocity.wordpress.com/, it's pure class like.)


 So if you didn't read that post, this post won't make a huge amount of sense but as you have a life that extends outside my blog I'll try to recap with as much brevity  as someone with a fondness for their own voice can muster... sorry.  Basically I was trying to articulate an issue that relates to difficulties in rapport building between people with ASD and "neuro-typical" people. I attempted to do this by referencing the concept of The Uncanny Valley. This is essentially an expression of how people are uncomfortable interacting with robots that look too human, because we know that they are not human even though they almost  perfectly resemble human beings. They still can not replicate the involuntary motions caused by "self talk" and internal processing that real humans learn to recognize in each other, essentially the process of inferring the emotions of another, or of "mind reading" or non verbal empathy. I once again Direct you to the past for the full "discussion" (Jesus, it's hard not to sound like a pompous ass... when you are a pompous ass... This one is very based on oppinion and inference, so I apologise now if anything said is offensive, or seems half cocked. Essentially I'm just trying to order my thoughts.)
   
     I have been thinking a lot about "Wrongness" a lot recently:
 
  If something is "wrong", it is incorrect, it is inappropriate or inefficient, it doesn't work. But also, if something is "wrong" it is often viewed as morally wrong or evil, (not always, I'm really trying to not over generalise here). By way of example, we all know of the story of the student who has been demonised by a teacher for scoring low on exams, or for not understanding a subject or many subjects, hell, go back far enough and children were physically chastised and forced to wear a special hat and sit separately from the rest of the class. Not only were his answers incorrect but he must have been morally wrong for not understanding, he must have been "bad" because "good" children learn well... Then Oswald Berkhan identified Dyslexia, and it took a really really long time but more and more educators started to understand that maybe having trouble at school is has more components then merely binary morality, and almost daily there are excellent examples of how a moralising approach to education and discipline is incorrect, it doesn't fit the situation, it is inappropriate or inefficient, it doesn't work... We are starting to come to grips with this idea, not fast enough, but we're getting there. But I think the reasons why we end up moralising, the reasons why we get angry have a lot to do with the Ideas I spoke about in the previous post, and maybe understanding what influences the emotions around wrongness could help us develop better ways of dealing with them without fueling the fire.

  I'd like to present you with an example:

   Imagine you are in the jungle, merrily trudging over ground you clearly have a right to trudge over because you are, after all, a human being and this means that one can jolly well roam where one jolly well wishes don'tcherknow. While basking in the "fact" that an all powerful deity, who, coincidentally, happens to look very much like your grandfather, after shaving had become to much of a bore for the old boy, put this jungle here for you to ramble, you are suddenly faced with a very large, very close Tiger. A tiger with a very different set of priorities and opinions on land rights. The rest of this story is very short and probably involves you being transported in handy bite size chunks from the jungle to a much darker and more humid locale and thus the circle of life continues.

   Now you have millions of years of experience and evolution impelling you to not enter blindly into a situation in which you may find a man eating tiger, a series of mechanisms in your brain who's purpose is to search out patterns that represent danger and so you are well within your rights to be a little upset that it has failed in it's job. But is the tiger wrong?Assuming it's working well, your brain works in part by generating feelings of fear and discomfort to impel you to not be in a context that may contain a man eating tiger, there has been some really great stuff published about this and I don't need to reiterate all of it here, but basically in order for an animal wired for empathy and exploration to avoid unnecessary risks and there by survive long enough to make adorable little copies of itself there must evolve an internal regulator that makes sure the rank and file to limit the amount of stupid risks we take, and part of this is a fear of that which is unknown so that as we explore, we can do so without taking unnecessary risks.

  It's these feelings of discomfort, the intuition that something is not conducive to our survival and propagation that inform our sense of what is right and wrong. To go back to the tiger, this is animal that you can verbally reason with, it will not empathise with your sorrow and fear, motivating it to not eat you. As I spoke about in the last post, people much smarter have used a lot of words to point out, that the vast majority of people love to anthropomorphise things that are not human, to apply words like evil to animals, because they can and will kill us without a second thought... Until we begun to understand that they are just simply animals responding to programing. Not evil, just behaving in the best way they can to get their needs met. People learned that if they enter the habitats of animals , being aware enough to not metaphorically tick the "food or threat" box in the animals brains then relationships of merit could be built. In other words, they move past "The Uncanny" and to override the discomfort and learn how to build rapport with the animal in question, a living brain with a different approach to empathy. What would happen if as a society we were to learn to override the discomfort presented by those with physical, mental or social disabilities, to turn off the moral filter?

   The moral rightness or wrongness of maladaptive behavior is, for the most part, the lens through which society views issues like educational discipline and psychological treatment but this is itself  maladaptive behavior informed by emotions produced by organs that were originally designed to keep monkeys safe. We're no longer monkeys, so maybe we should try to change the way we use this systems. Maybe using it in a way that leads medical professionals to speak only in terms of morbidities and not the people who are suffering, that leads a society to medicate and sedate people instead of trying to help them to live with dignity. To put this little boy in the corner instead of helping him do this...
                                                                                                             
    Now as I said above there is literally millions of years of evolution and habit behind this response, but maybe if we can change it now, and I know first hand people who have done it, if we can learn to see a context that is broader than immediate discomfort, to redefine what empathy and rapport actually means I think that could lead to a very different image of a human being living with dignity, one that includes more people.
 

"People fear what they do not understand and hate that which they can not conquer."

    -Andrew Smith-

 "But do we have to?"

    -The Thinking Troll- 

  

  .... Not strong

 Only aggressive Not free We only licensed Not compassioniate, only polite Now who the nicest? Not good but well behaved Chasin after death So we can call ourselves brave?...

(PS. This took a really long time to write, this was the other really good mix that I came across)

DJ Tamenpi - Jay Dilla Changed My Life Vol.1 (2006) by Sopedradamusical on Mixcloud

Aproaching the Uncanny

       (This has been a tough Idea to articulate, and so I'll be back to this post to edit it...   a lot.) 

 

There is an idea in robotics called The Uncanny Valley , and basically,  (so that you don't have to read the wikipedia article, although you totally should. Because you should, OK!?!) this articulates the fact that the more closely a robot physically resembles a human being, without being a human being, the less we likely we are to trust or form a bond with it.

For example:
  Imagine a Furby or Johnny 5 from the classic movie "Short Circuit", or Oon (if you don't know who that is... seriously, just get your shit together.). Generally speaking most people will be attracted to toys/robots like this because (again generally, I personally hate Furbies, but that's because I'm very sensitive to sound) we love to anthropomorphise things, to see human qualities in things that are clearly not human. We're programed from birth to seek out faces and we love to find things that loosely match that pattern. (unless we find it under the bed or in a closet, that's just messed up, right?)

 Now look at this giant ball of messed up:

  It's wrong. It has all the right shapes on the right surfaces, but it's still wrong. There is something about it that causes discomfort....

 Why am I blathering on about this? Because I want to talk about an extension of this that I has been bouncing around in my head.
 
    And it goes a little something like this....

  A huge amount of communication is non-verbal, it's about "mind reading", looking at the tiny movements of facial muscles, paying attention to intonation, even posture and inference from previous experience; a host of factors that only become more subtle and nuanced as the number of contexts in which people have interacted grows. The fact that automata can not (as yet, I don't wanna have to call in Deckard) display these micro expressions, because they lack the machinery that generates them, that's the human brain in case that wasn't clear, is a huge part of what generates the above mentioned discomfort.

  Part of what allows us to engage with other human beings is essentially the mechanics behind empathy, our high speed checking that they meet all prerequisite unknowns that lets our limbic system read these people as... well, people. We call it intuition, or being a "good judge of character" and those terms are as good as any to metaphorically describe reading non-verbal cues from someone to get a sense of them before they've had a chance to verbally account for themselves. Or, to use the vernacular, to lie about themselves.

 Now to get to something that resembles a point, from a distance. And in bad lighting.

 Imagine that you met a human being, an anatomically typical human being, but almost everything they did was wrong.  Not just the big stuff, like dressing incorrectly, which is not cute after a certain age, but everything, the physical movements, the facial expressions, everything. There was no way to empathize because what you were looking at could not be read, and nothing to suggest that this person seeks any empathy with you, this leads the amygdala, basically the part of the brain that controls the flight or fight response, to kick in, reading this person as an unknown and therefore a potential threat. But you're not looking at something that is inherently threatening, your looking at something that anatomically looks very much like you, and this can cause discomfort. You are looking at this person from one of the summits on either side of the uncanny valley, and in some cases you have just had your first interaction with an autistic person. (Jesus that took ages to get to, and that isn't even my final point.)

   For most of us, unless we have a mastered certain skills, interacting with autistic people is jarring before it becomes as rewarding as interacting with "neuro-typical" people, because learning their cues are off. So there is a name for why people feel awkward around people disabled in this way, something is wrong and we feel off, but we shouldn't so we feel more off, and until we get to really know the person in question, and develop enough context for their reactions to or actions in relation to things that feeling of "offness" continues.

  There is another side to this that has been bouncing around in my head for the last couple of weeks: If you are looking out from the uncanny valley then surely the feeling is the same as if you are looking in?
Now I could be off here, I mean Autism literally means morbid self absorption, but to an autist we are similar but wrong, the reason that autistic behavior seems wrong is that autistic people don't understand why we behave they way we do. There are studies that indicate when autistic people are asked to match emotions from faces, i.e. from a photo, or just to infer from looking at someone, their amygdala fires (the fight or flight area of the brain I was talking about earlier), the very act of trying to "mind read" is threatening to autistic people.

  It causes discomfort.... and honestly, I think that coming to understand that discomfort will be a huge part of helping autistic people to live with dignity in the years to come, as this becomes a more relevant to how we teach an increasing population of People with autistic spectrum disorder.


 When I've recovered from writing this, and stopped returning to edit it I'll write about what I think that teaching could look like. but now it's late. But I would like to leave you with what it looks like once you get to the other side of the "Valley"

  And I'll probably just let that speak for itself.
















...Gently whispered hope....

Man... Awesome stuff is awesome.

Si and Johan, Les Evaux.

 So, I've noticed a couple of things about my blogging habits:

 1: I only blog properly (as in regularly and in a way that I enjoy) when Traveling.

  2: I only blog properly when single.

 This worries because it may mean that I use blogging as a substitute for geographic security and emotional intimacy, which could mean that I don't really feel like I have a home and want a spouse who just lets me talk all the time and only replies to me through comments left after the fact...
or it could just mean I express myself clearer when I'm on the move?... (sigh)....

   In other, more valuable news, establishing a relationship with Simon has been a pretty rich experience. I've been here a month and I feel like we have a relationship now, between us and not necessarily dependent on others and learning about how to build rapport non-verbally has been both challenging and ...exhilarating? That's probably the wrong word but I can't really think of a better one. Which given where I'm going with this is somewhat apt.
 
   I'm good at people, partly because I think they are awesome, every single one of 'em a miracle! Seriously, have you seen your brain? Trust me it's awesome. I've worked at this, no master manipulator me, but I consider the paying of "high quality" attention to people to be skill, one that I enjoy practicing, and one that I very much hope to get better at as opportunities present them selves. I must state at this stage, that I'm full sure there are a ton of folks out there who will think what I have just said is both incorrect and arrogant, and they're right, I'm an arrogant tit, and thats why working at the skill of really exchanging attention with people is so important to me, because big parts of it don't come naturally to me, it's challenging.

 The tools I use for this however, like humour, eye contact, physical gestures or contact, they don't really mean a huge amount to a mostly non verbal autistic person.  Simon's language use is very dependent on his emotional well being at any given time, at times he is smiley, quiet and affectionate, at others he is emitting a high pitched whine similar to a baby's cry, but coming from a 22 year old voice box, at then again he can make noises that, once you know him you know, mean things; approximations of words, or just sounds he likes you to make and he wants you to make with him. And at worst there are expressions of pain, or rage or frustration that are very difficult to deal with. Difficult because it is very hard to know whats caused it and how you can help, and that causes greater frustration, and sometimes the only way he can express that is physically, and he's very very strong.

  Getting to know Si has seemed to me to be an exercise in listening and repeating, in appropriately matching what is coming from him and trying to echo or respond as it's needed. This very clearly links to the pattern matching and mirroring used for  rapport building in counseling, but with counseling you can use words, explain how you feel, or what you want or and idea, here, for the most part its seems, like there aren't any. Si responds to how you respond to him, to his joy or his pain, to his affection or his confusion. Not the words you use in response, but to the way your muscles move, to the shape your eyes and mouth take, to the position of your hands. And even then, all this only happens when he is "externally focused",  which, in fairness is most of the time with Simon. The locked compulsive behavior seems to come in bursts, when overly tired or stressed, but he does seem to look outside him self, even if whats stressing him is a part of his physical sense, I think the hardest thing I've had to deal with so far is Simon with a full blown headache.

Taking a photo of that smile is tough, but it's here if you look

When the rapport works though! When Simon is in a good mood, he seems to want to share it with everyone, he focuses a smile on you that you wouldn't believe, and the most gentle of hands engulfs yours, momentarily, there and then gone, but very lasting. It feel's like you are really meeting the emotional truth of another person, without words to muddy the muddy the translation from feeling to sentiment to shared idea to shared state.
It's a new experience for me, trying to figure out how I can internalize and use it is somewhat challenging, but probably vital.


Yesterday Simon and I went on a walk, on a route he know's well, in the middle of which is a restaurant that sells chips, so Simon likes it, The photo above is taken on one of the last stages of that walk. It was a walk with Si, parts were good, parts were bad, but the most interesting thing was how Johan (one of the people who works with Si) responded. He recognized that Si wasn't just complaining, or playing with sounds, he recognized that Si was in discomfort, from the sound, the look in his eyes, the frequency of his compulsive behavior and the length of his rest periods. Thats the level of subtlety that I would like to reach, but that only comes with time I suppose. It's great to know that you can get there, it just means I have to be one Humble Mo-fo though.

  During one of the rest periods on this walk, I found myself on my own waiting for Si and Johan to come out of the restrooms, and a young girl, no more than 3 and a half, who had seen Si upset earlier in the day and then seem him happy and "singing" to himself later on asked me what he was doing, in french. I responded in french, I explained that he was whats called an Autist, and that means he see's the world differently and can't speak like we do. She then explained that I was crushing the flowers because I was to big, and, upon my apologizing and moving, she explained that she could sit there because she was smaller then me, and that the other people were her mom, her De-De (I believe her aupair) and her petite soeur, that her name was Lisa and that she would like to know my name. 

Lisa is pictured below just before she said good bye to me in perfect english.

  

                                                                      Lisa is Awesome. 

   
 

    "It's more than acknowledging the nobility of others. It's about Humility, it's about knowing, when you get on a train, that any of those "others" around you could improve your understanding..."

 Natasha Robinson, 27th April 2012... Any day with a conversation like that is a good day.  






 Oh also! I found the blog of an awesome friend of mine, you should check it out it has much awesomeness on it. www.apresnovembre.com. 

By way of introduction.

We're Friends I swear.

  So mostly my Job consists of hangin' out with the young man pictured on the left of your screen. His name is Simon. Simon is  funny, bright eyed, caring, gentle, a serious fan of Disney films and profoundly Autistic.
  Simon has very little language and so he must express himself in other ways, mostly physical, and in the short time that I've been here, I think I've seen almost the whole range of his physical expression, except for the most extreme manifestations of his frustration or pain, which I'm told are not nice. But if you lived in a body that didn't make sense to you, surrounded by idiots who  were too loud, and didn't understand what you were trying to say no matter how nicely you ask for help, you'd get upset too, wouldn't you? Simon and I have had one run in a little like that, the long and short of it is; I took some of his crisps in the park one day, and now I know that one simply does not take any of Simons crisps if you don't want a good hand squeezin'!! My fault, now I know, sorry.


   A typical day for me and Simon involves food, Disney sing-a-long's and an excursion of some kind, twice a week to the swimming pool and the rest of the week on walks around Geneva or in parks near(ish) by. I'm a month in, and I have to say I'm liking Geneva, I feel like I can really serve here, not just in the House here but also amongst the Genevois Baha'is and beyond. I don't acctually have a huge amount of time left here but I feel like I can maybe make that time count, like I can leave the place better then I was when I found it.

  Well I gotta go walkies now, so I'll try to post up something again in the next week, I really need to keep this thing runnin at least while I'm here anyway, journaling feels weird, but somehow blogging is ok... go Figure. It's probably just because I need attention all the time to feel valid.

 Ok, talk soon gentle reader.
  All the best,
 Kev.
 

72 Soul - Sounds Like Spring by Laid Back on Mixcloud

This I like.

Seriously, I love it.

  I love this show, and all it represents.

So now I live in Geneva

A Room with a view.
Well... My room anyway.

  So now I live in Geneva... and that kinda just happened.
  Since last we met my life has changed very dramatically, too dramatically to go into, but the long and short of it is, I left theatre 2 years ago to get into psychology, and essentially that has led me to here; living with a family in Switzerland who have 2 autistic adult sons, one of whom, needs a little extra supervision.

  The experience so far has been exhilarating, and moving, and confirming, and has kinda left me with some ideas that I don't have words for, and more certainty around ideas I've read in the past.

  As most of you know I've been engrossed in the Human Givens form of therapy since 2010, and in working and living with bot an Aspie and someone with profound ASD I can see where the "Waterbaby Theory" and the Caetextia ideas came from. Getting to work hands on with these ideas, while still having time to read ("Reality is broken"; great book if you like humans and games) and getting to build a sense of rapport with these guys, not to mention the rest of the family has been intriguing, a little trying, but mostly just gratifying. The fact that they are both adults has added an interesting spin to this experience.
 
  I'd really like to use this blog as a place to work this out in my head, and to maintain it better then I have in the past, but we all know I've made that promise before, so lets see how that goes.

  Good luck and God bless gentle reader, hopefully I'll talk to you soon.