Book Discussion

I've had a lot of library books in the house lately, and since my housemate is the one picking the books out in large part, I'm getting to read books that I would not normally be compelled to grab off the shelf.

One of these books was Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. It was all about the power of the instinctual decision.

The early part of the book was fascinating and drew the most interest. He discussed a study where the subjects had sensors attached to their hands to measure sweat and temperature changes, and then he had them play a card game involving monetary gain and loss. There were two decks, red and blue. The red deck produced big wins and big losses, and the blue deck produced mostly moderate wins. There were more losses in the red than the blue, and overall, the only way to have a net gain was to switch to using only blue cards. The study measured when the players made that realization on a subconscious and conscious level. The sensors measured tension (through sweat) when a player touched a red card only a few cards into the game! The player began to instinctually avoid those red cards about ten cards into the game, and consciously realized that the red cards were a bad bet after about 40 cards.

Then he starts to turn this interesting phenomenon into a Theory of Everything. It's hard to tell what his thesis is - he argues that instinctual judgments are valuable, and then he warns of their danger, and then he argues again that they are valuable, but only for people who are already experts. Then he says that we all have the power of instinctual judgment. I kept waiting for him to tie all of these contradictions together neatly, but that moment didn't come.

What came instead was a shoddy link to autism. He talks about face blindness and uses as his subject an autistic man who watches Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and is lost in regards to the plot because he does not pick up the subtle facial clues the characters are providing.
Then the scientist who has studied this autistic man goes on to tell Gladwell that his patient sees no difference between people and objects. (This same doctor says, and I paraphrase because the book is back at the library, that he needs to define the world for his patient because his patient cannot define the world for himself. This patient lives independently and has several advanced degrees, so I would argue that while he may be socially impaired, he does not need his world "defined for him" in such a patronizing manner.) Gladwell seems to adopt the "no difference between people and objects" line as one of his takeaways on autism, and decides to link this dubious theory back to acts of violence under stress.

Seriously. Gladwell had spent an earlier chapter talking about the police officers that shot Amadou Diallo, and wondered why the hell the four of them collectively built up an image of a dangerous man out of a guy who was standing quietly in his doorway. It was a fascinating question. Gladwell's answer seems to be that in the tense moments leading up to the shooting, the officers developed a mind blindness and did not view Diallo objectively. Gladwell linked the physiological changes (heart rate, impaired vision, increased adrenaline) that occur under stress to being autistic. (I believe that his cute phrase was "temporary autism,"), further stressing that the officers did not see Diallo as anything more than an object. That caused them to open fire.

If that were the case, why don't we hear about autistic people going on murderous rampages when threatened? I think that the autistic response to stress would fall much more readily into "flight" than "fight." Fight is a last resort, only used to get someone in your immediate vicinity out of it. That withdrawal into stimming, although seemingly public in nature, is a way to pull the sensory world inward and reinforce that wall between the world inside of the mind and everything else outside of it.

Perhaps I'm wrong. Gladwell might do well to examine this point further, although I hope he'd let someone on the ASD spectrum consult with him on how to produce the study. (An aside - I don't remember Gladwell ever quoting the autistic patient he refers to directly, instead taking all of his quotes from the patient's doctor.) Here's my proposal - test people on the ASD spectrum and neurotypicals side by side in stress situations in a virtual reality simulation. Put them in a VR hallway with several escape routes. Give them a VR weapon. In the first run through, tell them that there is a gunman, but don't show him. Just replicate the sound of his footsteps and the distant firing of guns. See if people take the chance to escape or purposely hunt down the gunman. In the next round, make him visible. Who panics and shoots the gun, and who still chooses to run? Do another round where he is heard, but not seen. Do another round where a person appears, but they're not a gunman, they're an innocent bystander. Who shoots the elderly shopper, and who stops in time or simply runs away? In the next round, change the escape route so that in order to escape, the person has to run closer to the sounds of gunshots in order to get through the door. Who shoots, who hides, who makes it successfully through the door?