Having a son with autism has been a fascinating window into the human brain. He cannot, or at least does not, register when he is keeping the bus driver and all the other kids waiting. It fails to put a spring in his step as he trots down the sidewalk. Still he feels compelled to follow his teacher's instructions to the letter, such as never
wearing the same jeans two days in a row. Yet recently he has begun to fabricate. This morning he did not want to go to school and announced that his back hurt. I was unimpressed by the bid for staying home but I was tickled that he has escaped literalism.
I watched a talk by a man who looks too young to be so smart.
David Eagleman wrote a
book about the Secret Lives of the Brain and begins with the analogy of a fish in a bowl. A guppy would be hard pressed to comprehend that he is in water, because his entire experience is in water. It is only when a bubble floats by that he begins to entertain the vague possibility of the wateriness of his world.
We too are surrounded by our own ubiquitous reality, yet cannot muster the distance to notice it. One wife told me that she grew up in a family where
cars that make quirky noises were standard. She was used to it since all their vehicles were at least fas old as the teenagers getting learner's permits. But her spouse was raised in an upgrade-every-two-years kind of household. A clunk in the engine was cause for alarm.
Umwelt is the label that tries to capture the predicament of not knowing what we don't know. All of us have blind spots, whether it is the way we spend money or the way we navigate sickness.
Perhaps it makes sense to realize that there is a whole world outside our personal goldfish bowl.
