Of Aspergers and Robots (They Just Might Both be Capable of Emotions)

I ended my previous post with a word in about the importance of emotions and a sense of humor even in seemingly strictly rational endeavors and I thought that the topic deserved some further discussion. As with most Aspergers, I struggle against a public perception that we are simply rational automatons, robots without emotions. Anyone who has ever spent time with Aspergers knows that this is false. Asperger syndrome is not the lack of emotions; it is the inability to effectively display emotion in a manner understandable to others. In other words, it is the "disability" of neurotypicals, who cannot understand our emotions to the same extent that we seem to be hopeless at deciphering their emotions. By emotions, I mean in the positive sense of being able to desire, hope and even find joy and in the negative sense to be able to have one's feelings hurt, to be afraid, and even at times to fall into despair. The hallmark of all of these things is that in of themselves they are not rational, not subject to rational control (in terms of feelings, not actions), and have no direct Utilitarian value.

There are a number of reasons why Aspergers come across as lacking emotions. The first is that we relate to the world primarily in terms of information and not social connections. So Aspergers have an affinity for strings of information, in my case primarily history, but also politics and even the lyrics of Broadway musicals (I can remember lyrics, I just cannot sing them). The obvious conclusion from seeing someone spouting information is that such a person is precisely that, just information without emotion; what a robot would do. This is only enhanced by the fact that most Aspergers do not convey facial expressions in the same way and to the same extent as neurotypicals. Just as Aspergers have trouble reading neurotypical body language, neurotypicals have trouble reading Asperger body language. (I will leave it as an open question as to whether Aspergers fail to read body language due to not having developed one of their own or whether they do not develop conventional body language due to their inability to read the body language of others.)

What should strike one as odd about this seemingly common-sense view of Aspergers as information-spewing robots is that it fails to explain why an Asperger would bother going through the effort of learning the information and passing it along? Might I suggest that the reason why Aspergers do this is that it makes them happy in the same irrational way that neurotypicals find happiness in the mere presence of friends and in having a relationship with them? The very act of being a "robot" it turns out is only possible for one with emotions.

One has to understand that the Asperger experience is profoundly one not of lacking emotions, but of having emotions and not having them being understood while at the same time being held hostage to the emotional demands of others. Is it any wonder that one might wish from time to time to cut away one's heart and be just pure reason? Aspergers learn from early on to attempt to distinguish between emotions and reason. Reason is that which you have some hope of being able to convey to others so that they will listen. Recently I was sitting in a lounge when I overheard a meeting for a planned student trip to Germany. What struck me was the leader's continuous emphasis on the need to distinguish between reason and emotions. It is well and good for these students to find Germany and setting foot on German soil to be emotionally trying. No one is asking them to ever become comfortable with Germany or ever wish to live there. That being said, it would not be appropriate to take these emotions out on Germans they meet, the vast majority of them being born after World War II and in no way responsible for the Holocaust. Possibly for the first time in their lives, these students were being asked to do what I do every day, recognize that their emotions have no validity outside of their own heads and cannot be used to gain moral leverage over others.

Probably the greatest proof that Aspergers have emotions is that, unfortunately, so many of us suffer from depression. It makes sense; you would also be depressed if you had to live your life cut off from other people in a world distinctively not made with you in mind. To be depressed means that you can be bothered by these things, something only possible with deep emotions. For this reason, I strongly relate to Marvin, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's depressed robot. With the exception of Arthur Dent, Marvin is the most poignantly human character in the series. If I am going to be stuck as a robot, I would hope to transcend my depressive existence by becoming Wall-E, a trash can robot, who says almost nothing but manages to be the fictional humanist hero of the decade.

A Gift for Rosh Hashana (Part II)

(Part I)

As I have mentioned in previous posts, this past summer I underwent a very difficult breakup with someone whom I loved completely and whom I thought I would marry and spend the rest of my life with. She was everything that I could have dreamed of; she was smart, well read and had a spunky personality. She was someone whom I could talk to for hours on end. She brought something out in me. She helped me become a more outgoing person and to open myself to the world. If nothing else I will always be grateful to her for that.

Because of my Asperger syndrome it is difficult for me to tell if people are upset with me or if a relationship is going south. I suspect, though, that even a neuro-typical would have been caught off guard in my situation. Last I checked if your girlfriend suddenly gets over her aversion to having you spend money on her, asks you to buy a plane ticket to visit her, has you take her to see a Broadway musical and gleefully tells you that if you were not religious you would so be getting laid then one assumes that things are in good shape. Be that as it may, she dumped me. She asked if we could still be friends and I agreed. I was angry and hurt but I sucked in my pride. I knew that she was going through some difficult times. She needed to simplify her life and I am what she simplified. She was having me pay the price for her mental stability but I agreed. If she needed me I would be there for her.

This “friendship” lasted for two weeks until suddenly she did the one thing that I had many times begged her never to do to me because it would put me in a dangerous depressive spiral; without any warning, she cut off all contact with me. Because of my Asperger syndrome, I am not good at dealing with issues up in the air; I need things said straight out. Because of my depression, I am very vulnerable to anything that hints of abandonment. (See here) For the next two weeks, I lived on the edge. Had she done this one thing that she knew could hurt me? Was she just busy? Was she just upset at me over something or did she decide she needed a bit of a breather from me? I did not want to bother her. By the end of this time period my depression had caught up with me and I crashed for several days. I tried talking to other people, but the person I really needed to speak to was her. The fact that I needed to speak to her but seemed unable to do so made everything all the worse. I ended up putting myself into the emergency room. Throughout my worst bouts of depression in high school, I had never once had to be put in a hospital. I tried getting in touch with her directly. That failed. I tried through intermediaries but to no avail. My rabbi even called her but she flipped him off as well.

Now Rosh Hashana is coming. I admit that I am tempted to pray that my girlfriend should take me back or that she should be run over by a truck. (I know that these represent opposite extremes, but that is the nature of love.) What I want for Rosh Hashana is just a chance to speak to her one more time so that I can forgive and be forgiven.

I do not understand what I have done to cause her to do this to me, but I assume there must be something. I do not believe that I am a saint; the fact that I have Asperger syndrome makes it quite likely that I did something hurtful without intending to. Strangely enough, I find the thought that I have wronged her to be comforting. If I have done something wrong then I can try to make it up to her; at the very least I could hope to ask her to forgive me and that she will consent. It is better than the alternative that I am the innocent victim of her malice. If she is simply a horrible evil person, who maliciously tried to hurt me, than I am stuck at a dead end. Being the completely righteous one may be empowering but it is rather lonely. What comfort is there in being justified in shaking your fist at the world?

Living in doubt, wondering if I had potentially done something wrong, though, is particularly debilitating for me. Am I such a monster that someone would find themselves unable to speak to me? I must be because otherwise she would have spoken to me; at the very least she would have sent me a message telling me that she was breaking off contact. But, if I am a monster, what is my crime? Is she afraid of me? When have I ever given her reason to think that I would hurt her? I am left with the specter of potential sins, which I cannot identify and therefore cannot banish, leaving them to haunt me.

In addition to being forgiven, I also want to forgive. Soon after I was cut off, I wrote a “J Accuse” letter, which set forth in very specific detail my case against her and how she “wronged” me. I was sorely tempted to post it, but I refrained from doing so. It would have been difficult to defend in terms of loshon hara, gossip, but what really stopped me was the realization that I would be defining myself in terms of hate and I would be stuck with that. I do not want the burden of carrying all this hate no matter how dearly I earned the right to carry them. It does not matter how right I am; this is a poison and I want nothing of it. I have no particular desire to remain part of her life. For all I care, she can go her way. I do wish, though, that we can go our separate ways as friends.

On Rosh Hashana, there is a custom called tashlich where we go to a body of water and cast bread crumbs into the water. This is to symbolize that our sins have been thrown away. I do not want to carry my sins and the sins of others against me. To the person whom I speak of, if you are reading this (I like to flatter myself that you might still actually read this blog) please understand. I do not want to fight you. I do not want to yell at you. I am not trying to convince you to come back to me or even to continue talking to me. All I want is to know is that you do not hate me that you forgive me for anything that I have done to you. I want to be free of my own anger against you, to say to you that I forgive you and mean it with all of my heart. Can we do a tashlich together? You can cast away all your claims against me and I can cast away all claims against you. And we can just let all of this float away so that all that would remain are the many happy memories that we shared. You could then go your way and I could go mine. We need never see or speak to each other again, but we would still be friends.

This Rosh Hashana all I want is to be forgiven and to forgive.

Going off to College with Asperger Syndrome

Our Asperger book club recently said farewell to one of our members, who is going off to college. People with Asperger syndrome have such a difficult time dealing with social situations and the absence of a stable structure to order their lives. So getting into college and being able to function in such an environment is a big deal and is something we actively work on. I am very proud of him and wish him success. Considering all this, it was big coincidence and a great delight to hear NPR’s All Things Considered doing a segment on people with Asperger syndrome going to college. The piece does a wonderful job going through the basic checklist of what parents and children have to deal with. This makes it useful not just for those dealing with Asperger syndrome but other disabilities as well. (Probably the most important thing to do is register yourself with your college's department of disabilities immediately. Do not wait until you actually have a problem.)

The subject of the piece is Roger Diehl. He is starting school at Wisconsin. I feel a particular kinship with Roger because, besides for Asperger syndrome, Roger also suffers from clinical depression. The piece has a really telling Asperger/depression anecdote where Roger, as a child, inquires of his parents as to what would be the most effective way to commit suicide. How long would it take to die if you held a bag over your head? If you opened the door of a speeding car and jumped out would you die? From the perspective of Asperger syndrome this makes perfect sense. Committing suicide is a line of inquiry that interests some people so it is perfectly reasonable that someone should desire to gain information about it. For a child the most obvious people to gain information from are ones parents. So it makes perfect sense for a child to go over to his parents and ask them how to commit suicide.

As an interesting side note, Roger speaks in a rather distinctive fashion. He emphasizes the ends of words and goes up and the end of words. I also speak like this and I have heard other people with Asperger syndrome or on the autism spectrum speak this way as well. I am curious if this is something particular to those on the autism spectrum.

(I would like to thank a friend of mine, who shares one of the graduate offices, here on campus, with me. He knows that I have Asperger syndrome so he was kind enough to tell me about this segment.)

To be Cyrano de Bergerac

This past evening I went to see a production of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, which was put on in Schiller Park here in Columbus. I was familiar with the play from seeing the film version, starring Gerard Depardieu, in high school. This was free theater so I did not have too high expectations. While most of the actors were fairly mediocre, John Beeker, who played the title role, was outstanding. I would definitely pay good money to see him perform. The music was also very good. (It was taken from Cirque du Soleil’s KA.)

Cyrano de Bergerac (a real historical figure) is about a swashbuckling seventeenth-century swordsman (A character similar to Alexander Dumas’ three musketeers and, more recently, Arturo Perez-Reverte’s Captain Alatriste.) His sword is only matched by his wit and his skills as a poet, something he puts to good use in the play’s opening as he dispatches an opponent with his sword while composing a ballad to commemorate the occasion. Standing in Cyrano’s way are his tendency to speak his mind and thumb his nose at the rich and powerful, thus making for himself many enemies, and his literal long nose, which disfigures his face. Because of his nose, Cyrano finds himself unable to pursue his love, his cousin Roxane, for fear that she will laugh at him. Instead of pursuing her directly, he comes to do so indirectly when he befriends Christian, a fellow soldier in his company, who has also fallen in love with Roxane. Christian has a beautiful face but lacks the necessary skill with words to win Roxane. Enter Cyrano to fill the void; he writes the needed love letters and poems for Christian and even coaches him on what things to say to her. Cyrano and Christian make a perfect team; Christian provides the face and Cyrano provides the mouth. Unfortunately for Cyrano, though, it is Christian’s lips that get to kiss Roxane while he has to stand by as the loyal friend and watch.

As with most great characters, one comes to identify oneself with the Cyrano in a very personal way. I see a lot of myself in Cyrano or at least see in Cyrano something that I could and should be. Cyrano is a highly intelligent, witty, charming and likable individual, who tends to offend people. He is someone full of principles/pride and will sacrifice everything for them, though it is not always clear which one he is standing for. He is someone with a noble romantic soul with the capacity to love in ways that few can. Yet for all this, he is doomed in love because of his deformity, his nose. Cyrano’s nose, though, is really a stand-in for the injuries in Cyrano’s own mind. It is he who thinks of himself as ugly and incapable of pursuing love. While Cyrano’s nose holds him back it is also what allows him to love as intently as he does in the first place. One suspects that if Cyrano would not have become the gallant swordsman and romantic if he had been born with a regular nose. It is his nose that isolates him and makes him feel as intently as he does. Like Cyrano, I am witty, intelligent and charming, though I do tend to put these gifts to use by thumbing my nose at convention and playing by my own rules. While I am likable, I do tend to offend people. I think in terms of duty and obligation; I believe that I owe people a debt for their friendship. I have learned the hard way, though, that other people do not think in terms of duty and obligation and therefore do not feel they owe me anything for my friendship. I have a pretty enough face, but in the end, I am also scarred. Not by my nose but by my depression and Asperger Syndrome. These things have stopped me from finding love.

It is a pattern that has repeated itself several times already, the last time just recently, where a woman has been attracted to me by my wit and charm only to flee as soon as she came to see my depression and Asperger Syndrome and how it affects my life. The irony here is that I owe the wit and charm that attracted them in the first place to the same depression and Asperger Syndrome that robs me in the end. My wit and charm is simply the light side of my depression and Asperger Syndrome and is as much a part of them as the dark side which people have no difficulty labeling as such. My depression and Asperger Syndrome isolate me and keep me away from love but my isolation serves also to make me acutely aware of love and my need for it. I look hungrily at all the normal people out there who seem to have little difficulty with love yet fail to truly appreciate it. I wonder what it would be like to be normal. Utterly boring, I suspect, though they do, by and large, seem to be happy.

At one point in the play, Cyrano is challenged whether he is being Don Quixote, fighting windmills. I have, in my time, been faced with that challenge. As much as I may love the musical the Man of La Mancha, I have no wish to be Don Quixote. I will settle for being Cyrano de Bergerac.

Battling Depression with Some Help from Harry Potter and Thomas Covenant

In the Harry Potter series, Harry has to battle creatures known as Dementors. Dementors are hooded corpse-like beings that guard the wizard prison, Azkaban. They attack their victims psychologically. The Dementors embody fear and make their victims confront their worst memories. Most of the prisoners in Azkaban eventually go insane from their torments. As their ultimate weapon, Dementors can even suck out the soul of their victim. J. K. Rowling is someone who has suffered from depression and I suspect that it may have influenced her description of Dementor attacks. It is a spot-on description of what an attack of depression is like. One is hit by this overwhelming wave of despair which ensnares you so that it is difficult to even move. All of your worst memories, everything that you fear, start playing over and over in your head. There is nothing you can do about it; you are completely helpless in front of it. Given enough time, depression can destroy your sanity and even drive you to suicide.

What do I fear? I fear that, despite all my charm and intelligence, I am ultimately unlovable and that people will simply use me for as long as it suits them and then toss me aside when I am no longer convenient. The fact that I have Asperger Syndrome and have a difficult time making and keeping social contacts obviously plays a role in this. I readily admit that none of this is rational. Intellectually, I know that people are not out to get me or hurt me, but that is of little use when facing an attack of depression. My depression feeds off of those moments in my life which seem to reflect this notion of people using me and abandoning me. In particular, what haunts my depressive phases are the various times when women in my life suddenly broke off, when I thought things were good, and would not even speak to me and explain why they were doing this. I have been left with things that I needed to say to them, but which they would not let no matter how much I begged. So I am left with these conversations in my head, where they go around and around, tormenting me. This again has a lot to do with Asperger Syndrome. I cannot deal with things being left hanging and I need things to be put in some sort of language format for it to be real to me.

Harry uses a Patronus charm to ward off the Dementors. A Patronus is the manifestation of a happy memory and of joy. Harry’s Patronus takes the form of a stag. I have no Patronus to protect me from depression. What I do have is my sense of humor and my willingness to laugh at myself. I know that everything that I feel is just in my head and is not real. I know that all this is absurd. To refer to another dark creature from Harry Potter, the Boggart; Boggarts take the form of whatever the person fears. It can be defeated if its victim can find it absurd enough to laugh at. Similarly, the ability to see the absurdity of depression and laugh at it makes it powerless. This is, of course, easier said than done. The moments when I can just chase my depression back and beat it down are sweet but rare.

I live with my depression, keeping it at bay, in a similar fashion to how Thomas Covenant, the main character of Stephen Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever deals with his leprosy. Covenant is able to survive as a leper, one, because he knows that it is not his fault and, two, because he accepts the fact that there is nothing he can do about it. This shields him from the full emotional impact of what has happened to him. Since he is not at fault, he cannot be blamed for what happened to him. His leprosy is not a punishment from God. His wife leaving him and taking their child away had nothing to do with him being a bad person. He did nothing to cause the people of the town to shun him and force him to live by himself. The fact that he is powerless to cure himself also shields him from blame. If he could cure himself then the fact that he did not means that he failed to do something and is, therefore, at fault.

I did nothing to bring about my depression; it is just a glitch in my brain chemistry. No one can blame me for it. They could have just as easily been afflicted with it, and with as good a reason, as me. Also, there is nothing I can do about it; there is no cure. Since there is no cure, I am not responsible for curing myself and the fact that I have not cured myself is not my fault. This creates a separation between me and my depression and keeps me from having to face its full torment, allowing me to live my life in some relative measure of peace.

On the Dangers of Having Unprotected Conversations with Guests You Meet at Your Aunt’s Sabbath Table: A Review of Unprotected

During my recent trip to Los Angeles, I stayed at my aunt and uncle. For the Sabbath meals, my aunt had a friend of her's over, Dr. Miriam Grossman. Dr. Grossman is a psychiatrist at UCLA. She and I got into a discussion about university life and political correctness and I mentioned a book that I had heard about called Unprotected, which attacked university health departments for allowing the cause of political correctness to get in the way of protecting the physical and mental health of their students. I had not read the book, but I had heard about it, as this book had become a hit in conservative circles. As it turns out Dr. Grossman happens to be the author of this book. I later got to see the Clare Booth Luce calendar, which featured her two spots away from Ann Coulter. A dubious honor I admit, but all the same not bad.

After the Sabbath was over, I ordered the book on Amazon and I got it soon after I got back from Los Angeles. It is a short book, at only 151 pages plus footnotes, and an easy read. The book is built around cases that Dr. Grossman has dealt with, working at UCLA, of students, who found themselves in various difficult situations, which Dr. Grossman believes came about as the result of less than medically sound advice given to these students from UCLA’s Student Health Services. For example, there is the case of Stacey, who got a Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) even though her boyfriend used a condom. There is also Heather, who shows symptoms of depression and had recently gotten into a “friends with benefits” relationship with a boy. Grossman argues that the people running Student Health Services purposely played down the potential physical and mental health risks to students such as these as part of their advocacy of “Safe-Sex.”

Besides for campus Student Health Services, Dr. Grossman lashes out against campus websites that dispense advice about sex. Her main target in this is Columbia University’s Go Ask Alice. I had actually been shown this site before, by a friend. Believe me, this is not a site for the prudish or squeamish. Ask Alice seems designed to be hauled out by conservatives in front of a congressional committee discussing whether or not to cut funding for public education. I do wish to point out that Ohio State’s sex-education website is, considering the world in which we live in, relatively responsible. It does a good job at keeping itself within the realm of medicine and out of our culture war.

There seem to be two parts to Dr. Grossman’s argument. The first is that Student Health Services are failing to properly educate students about the risks of sexual intercourse. In essence, Dr. Grossman is rehashing the abstinence movement’s case. I do not have a degree in modern medicine; I deal with people who lived in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and their ideas about the natural world. I, therefore, am not in a position to comment as to the level of risk involved in protected sex.

The second part to Dr. Grossman’s argument, and probably the most important, is that the Student Health Services across the country are being run by radical leftists who use their position, not to help students, but to refashion society according to their own agenda. If we do not accept this second part then there is little point to the book. If this was merely a matter of bad medical advice being distributed to students then one could simply deal with it as an internal professional matter, without going public and denouncing one’s own profession. In essence, for this book to work, one would have to prove there was a conspiracy at hand. The book comes up short on this front; there is no real damning evidence unearthed. The closest Dr. Grossman comes to this with a case in which the campus Student Health Services refused to give a Mormon woman, wishing to get pregnant for the sixth time, an appointment, in the near future, so she could get a prescription for the fertility drugs she wanted. This woman though was able to get an appointment by claiming that she wanted birth control pills. In defense of Dr. Grossman, I would point out that trying to make a case for a conspiracy would have taken this book down a far more polemical path. She clearly has tried to moderate her rhetoric and keep from sounding too shrill, i.e. like Ann Coulter.

There is a certain irony in this whole matter. If my understanding of the Health Services establishment is correct, their counter-argument against Dr. Grossman and the entire abstinence movement is that they, the Health Services establishment, are being forced to face down a conspiracy to promote a religious agenda. One of the main complaints against abstinence sex-education curriculums is that they contain faulty information. Recently there was a study finding serious flaws in two-thirds of the abstinence curriculums. Now, from the perspective of the opponents of the teaching of abstinence, these are not simply flaws. If they were they could simply be addressed as an internal matter. The real issue at hand is whether abstinence programs deliberately engage in misinformation in order to promote their religious agenda. In essence, their concerns mirror Dr. Grossman’s.

I would like to conclude with some questions for Dr. Grossman.

1) Do casual sexual encounters lead to depression or is it simply that people struggling with depression are more likely to seek out casual sexual encounters in order to relieve their symptoms? What evidence do you have for the former?

2) Is it possible that the reason why casual sexual encounters lead to depression in some people is that these people came from religious backgrounds, which taught them to believe that such actions are sinful and that these people still hold onto these beliefs or that these beliefs are still active within their subconsciouses? Could it be that it is guilt and not sex that is responsible for their depression? What evidence do you have to refute this argument?

3) If homosexuals really are at a much greater risk of being infected with HIV then why, if you look at the global spread of HIV, does it appear to “not discriminate” between heterosexuals and homosexuals?

What I am interested in is not a claim or a sound bite, but in some hard arguments and evidence that make sense to my academic, though not particularly scientific, frame of mind.