There are some situations where «normal» people have a horrific lack of empathy. Some of this lack of empathy is beyond my comprehension. Time after time I read in the paper about a company that is in financial trouble and they need to ask the workers to take a cut in pay. The workers agree to a pay cut, but the chairman of the board gives himself a bonus. This often makes the workers really angry. The workers would be more willing to undergo hardship if their leader had some hardship. This is a situation where ego and emotion blinds empathy. Why does this blindness occur? Power and ego circuits that I do not have cause this blindness. These managers seem to be incapable of learning from this same mistake made by other companies. Possibly these managers do not have empathy because they do not directly see how the workers react. In most cases, he or she does not face them. New research is revealing how empathy works. Brain circuits called mirror areas are activated when a person sees another person hurt. These circuits enable a person to experience the other person's pain. Brain imaging studies by Finnish scientists have shown that the mirror circuits in people with Asperger's syndrome have less activation compared to normal people.
People have empathy when they directly experience suffering. In my work with restaurant companies, I have taken many top executives on their first tours to farms and slaughter plants. Prior to the site visits, animal welfare was just an abstract thing. After they saw suffering firsthand, they made big changes and forced their suppliers to comply with animal welfare guidelines. Executives who had been apathetic jumped into action. One of them was totally disgusted after he saw a half-dead dairy cow going into their product. My job was to implement an auditing system for measuring animal welfare standards in slaughter plants. There was only one executive who reacted differently. On the flight home he clapped on a headset and told silly airline pilot jokes. He wanted to avoid discussing his visit to a slaughter plant because his reaction had conflicted with his beliefs. His company is one of the few companies that has failed to implement strong welfare guidelines.
This brings up another human emotion that I do not understand: denial. Some parents with children who are still not talking until age four cannot admit to themselves that something is wrong. I do not understand this kind of emotional lock on logic. Children with autism have to be taught what it is like to be in another person's shoes in a very concrete way. When I threw dirt on another person, my mother explained that I should not throw dirt because I would not like it if they threw dirt on me.
I think there are different types of empathy For me to have empathy I have to visually put myself in the other person's place. I can really emphasize with a laid-off worker because I can visualize his family sitting at the dining room table trying to figure out how the bills will get paid. If the worker fails to pay the mortgage he will lose his house. I really relate to physical hardship. I have observed that normal people have bad visual empathy. They are often not able to perceive how another person would see something. Many people leave out essential details when they give driving directions because they are not able to imagine what the other driver would be seeing. People have told me that they do not get lost with my directions. Normal people have emotional empathy but some of them lack empathy for sensory over sensitivity in autistic people. Some of the best therapists who work with individuals with sensory problems can empathize with these difficulties because they themselves have struggled with sound, touch, or visual oversensitivity The people who have the best sensory empathy have experienced the pain or total sense of chaos caused by faulty sensory processing.
Sometimes Consequences are Needed
The subject of consequences is controversial. Some people think that nothing aversive should ever be done. I was always testing the limits. I knew that a tantrum in school had a penalty of no TV for one day. Discipline between home and school was consistent. Mother and the teachers were a team. I would have been out of control if there had been no consequences for bad behavior. Even though I was raised in a strict household, my abilities in art were always encouraged and never taken away as a punishment. I want to emphasize that I am totally against the use of aversives such as electric shocks. The repeated use of many aversives is wrong and abusive.
Positive methods should always be used for teaching and educating, but there are some situations where a single aversive event is needed to teach the child how another person feels. Three different teachers have told me that they had students who would constantly spit on them. They had tried all of the nonaversive methods such as ignoring it or explaining why they did not like it. Then one day after the teachers had been spat on one hundred times they got fed up and spat back. The child responded by saying, «Ick, I don't like that.» The teacher said, «Now you know how I feel when you spit on me.» In all three cases, the spitting stopped. Now the child really understood how it felt to the other person when he spat.
Emotional Brain Versus Thinking Brain Type
Simon Baron-Cohen of University of Cambridge in England introduced the idea of people as one of two emotional brain types. He states that people are either empathizers or systematizers. Empathizers are people who relate to other people through their emotions. Systematizers are people who are more interested in things than people. Normal people tend to be empathizers while people on the autism/Asperger's spectrum tend to be systematizers. I scored high on Baron-Cohen's test for being a systematizer. In the update of Chapter 1 I describe the three thinking types: visual, music and math, and verbal logic. Both emotional types of brain may have the different thinking types, but people in the autism/Asperger spectrum may have the most extreme variations of the thinking types. I hypothesize that some emotional circuits may fail to hook up and local networks in the «art» or «math» department may have extra connections. Brains will be highly variable depending on which «computer cables» get connected.
5
The Ways of the World
At age two and a half I was enrolled in a nursery school for speech — handicapped children. It was staffed by an older, experienced speech therapist and another teacher. Each child received one-to-one work with the therapist while the teacher worked with the other five children. The teachers there knew how much to intrude gently into my world to snap me out of my daydreams and make me pay attention. Too much intrusion would cause tantrums, but without intervention there would be no progress. Autistic children will remain in their own little worlds if left to their own devices.
I would tune out, shut off my ears, and daydream. My daydreams were like Technicolor movies in my head. I would also become completely absorbed in spinning a penny or studying the wood — grain pattern on my desktop. During these times the rest of the world disappeared, but then my speech teacher would gently grab my chin to pull me back into the real world.
When I was three my mother hired a governess to take care of my younger sister and me. This woman kept us constantly occupied with games and outdoor activities and was an important part of my education and treatment. She actively participated in everything we did to encourage me to stay connected. We would make snowmen, play ball, jump rope, and go skating and sledding. When I got a little older, she painted pictures with us, which helped develop my interest in art. It is important for an autistic child to have structured activities both at home and at school. Meals were always at the same time, and we were taught good table manners. Our governess taught me at an early age to be polite, and safety rules were drilled into my head. I was taught to look both ways before I crossed the street. All kids have to learn that the street is dangerous, but autistic children need to learn everything by rote. One or two warnings won't do.
