taking because this will make it easier to work with another person when they get older. Too many activities today are solitary. Special interest groups such as Star Trek conventions or historical societies are great places to network and find other people with similar interests. The people on the spectrum who are depressed and unhappy often have no interests they can share with another person.
There are some really smart Asperger's and high-functioning students who need to be removed from the social pressure cooker of high school. After all, socializing with teenagers is not an important life skill. I am a strong believer in mainstreaming elementary school students so they can socialize with normal children. Lower-functioning students often do fine in high school because it is obvious to the other students that they are handicapped and should not be teased. But for some high-functioning high school students, it might make sense for them to take classes online or at a community college.
Learning Manners and Social Survival
I think some of the high-functioning Asperger's people are having serious employment problems because today's society fails to teach social skills. A brilliant man with Asperger's was fired from a library job for making comments to fat patrons. Mother taught me that these kinds of comments are rude. Even though honesty is the best policy, my opinion about other people's appearance was usually not welcome. Through many specific examples, I developed a category of «rude honesty» when I needed to keep my mouth shut. All social skills were learned by being given many specific examples that I could put into categories such as «rude honesty,» «introduction routines with a new client,» «how to deal with coworker jealousy,» etc. As I gained more and more experience I placed each new social experience in the appropriate social file. Coworker jealousy was difficult to deal with. At one plant, a jealous engineer damaged some of my equipment. Today I have learned how to bring him into the project to make him feel a part of it. This will reduce jealousy. I have also learned to compliment the jealous person when they do good work. Today I just accept the fact that jealousy is a lousy human trait. To get a project done it has to be defused.
Social Skills Versus Social Relatedness
Learning social skills is like learning how to act in a play. Social skills can be taught but social emotional relatedness cannot be taught. Social skills and emotional relatedness are two different things. Often parents ask me, «Will my child have a true emotional relationship with me?» It is sometimes difficult for parents to accept that the brain of their child is wired differently. A social emotional relationship that is purely emotional may be of little interest to the child. Autism varies widely, and some individuals will be more emotionally related than others.
Modulating emotions is difficult for me. One time on a plane I laughed so hard at a movie that many people started staring at me. When I cry at a sad movie, I cry more than most people. My emotion is either turned on or all turned off. I have the four simple emotions of happy, sad, fearful, or angry. I never have mixtures of these emotions, but I can rapidly switch emotions.
After I was kicked out of a large girls' school for throwing a book at a girl who teased me, I learned to change anger to crying. I was unable to change the intensity of the emotion but I could switch to a different emotion. At my boarding school, horseback riding was taken away after I got into several fist fights due to teasing. Since I wanted to ride the horses, I immediately switched to crying. Switching to crying enabled me to not lose a job due to either hitting or throwing things. At the Swift Plant, I often retreated to the cattle yards to cry. Today any kind of violent behavior would not be tolerated in the workplace.
Subtle Emotional Cues
I was in my early '50s when I first learned about small eye signals. I did not understand why eye contact with so important. There was a whole secret world of eye movements that were unknown to me until I read Simon Baron-Cohen's book Mind Blindness. Tone of voice was the only subtle signal I picked up. Obviously I recognized strong emotion in other people when they expressed anger by yelling, sadness by crying, or happiness by laughing.
Mother has written about the difficulties with her marriage in her book A Thorn in My Pocket. When I was a child, I did not pick up on the emotional turmoil between my mother and father. I failed to recognize the signs of conflict because they were subtle. They seldom yelled at each other and they never hit each other or threw things.
What Does Research Show?
Hundreds of scientific papers have been written on abnormalities in face perception in autism. The bottom line is that in autistic people the amygdala (emotion center) is abnormal and people with autism use different brain circuits when they recognize faces. I still have embarrassing moments when I do not recognize the face of a person I met five minutes ago. I am able to recognize people I have been around for a long time. If a face has a really unique feature like a giant nose, I can remember that. The number of studies on face recognition and eye signals greatly outnumber papers on how people with autism think or perceive sensory input. Normal people are more interested in studying emotions rather than studying sensory problems or how savant skills work. I wish the scientists would spend more time on sensory problems. Severe problems with sensory oversensitivity wrecks the lives of many people on the spectrum. The most miserable individuals are the ones with such severe sensory problems that they cannot tolerate a restaurant or office. Socializing is impossible if your ears hurt from normal noise in movie theaters, sporting events, or busy streets.
8
A cow's eye view
One third of the cattle and hogs in the United States are handled in facilities I have designed. Throughout my career I have worked on systems to improve the treatment of livestock. The principle behind my designs is to use the animals' natural behavior patterns to encourage them to move willingly through the system. If an animal balks and refuses to walk through an alley, one needs to find out why it is scared and refuses to move. Unfortunately, people often try to correct these problems with force instead of by understanding the animal's behavior. My connection with these animals goes back to the time I first realized that the squeeze machine could help calm my anxiety. I have been seeing the world from their point of view ever since.
People ask me all the time whether the cattle know they are going to be slaughtered. What I have observed over the years and at many meat plants is that the things that frighten cattle usually have nothing to do with death. It is the little things that make them balk and refuse to move, such as seeing a small piece of chain hanging down from an alley fence. For instance, a lead animal will stop to look at a moving chain and move his head back and forth in rhythm with its swing. He isn't concerned about being slaughtered; he's afraid of a small piece of chain that jiggles and looks out of place.
