Autistic people and music

[Spotted Horses]

I find that this goes too far. I do agree that "masking" is a poor word for it since "masking" implies an intention to conceal. But I also think that the notion of a spectrum is useful. For example, some people who are fully capable of social function still have some of the sensory elements of the autistic brain (e.g., finding certain fabrics intolerable to wear, feeling overcome by sensory overload at a concert or movie or loud bar). There are many, many, many disorders that present along a spectrum. Schizophrenia can start out fairly slowly before presenting in full on adulthood. Depression comes in different degrees and intensities, anxiety disorders do not always manifest as crippling panic attacks, cancer comes in stages, etc.

Yes, most diseases can be viewed as a spectrum with varying severity. Diabetes can range from tending to have elevated blood sugar to taking one bite of a cupcake and you're dead. It is at least one dimensional and involves failure to manage blood sugar. The Autism "spectrum" is more like an Autism cloud.

[Florestan]

Can I ask how old he is?

He's 14. The poblem is that autistic symptoms appeared very early but for a few long years his parents refused to acknowledge he has a problem and take him to doctors and specialized therapy*. Today he's better than in his early years but still dysfunctional socially. He speaks little and much of what he says is intelligible only to his parents. His conversation is limited to saying hello and asking people how much they weigh. He needs assistance for going to, and coming back from, school. Going out of the house on his own for playing or shopping is out of the question. If I may ask, is this, or ever was, the case with you or @71 dB ?

* I know of another pair whose child displayed autistic symptoms early and they immediately took him to doctors and therapy. (I don't know his age but he's older than the boy above). Today he's relatively okay and socially functional.

Anyway, here's what CDC says about autism ( https://www.cdc.gov/autism/about/index.html ) :

People with ASD often have problems with social communication and interaction, and restricted or repetitive behaviors or interests. People with ASD may also have different ways of learning, moving, or paying attention. These characteristics can make life very challenging. It is important to note that some people without ASD might also have some of these symptoms.

The last phrase is relevant to the discussion at hand.

[71 dB]

That's nonsense. I have a friend whose son was professionally diagnosed with autism and besides interacting with his parents in ways which only they can understand, he can't function socially even at low levels, let alone high ones. And it's not like he's intellectually disabled, he reads popular science books and know by heart all the capitals of the world. The whole "autistic spectrum" thing is pure hogwash, just like saying there's a "schizophrenic spectrum". If you are socially functional you're not autistic and vice versa. "Masking" is not something genuinely autistic people are interested in, let alone capable of. They are what they are and can't mask it in any way, not in the least because they probably don't even perceive their condition as abnormal. You most likely confuse "autism" with introversion.

Nonsense perhaps, but not my nonsense. As I said above, I prefer the term Asperger's to high functioning Autism.

People with severe autism certainly can't mask. Masking is done by people with high functioning autism and especially by females. The reason for this is that women are expected to be social extroverts so there is a need for masking.

I am very introverted, but introversion alone does not explain my experiences in life. Asperger's does. For example, I can be social in small groups of people (2-3 people), but if it is 10 people, my social skills become inadequate and I am totally lost. This is an Asperger's trait.

[71 dB]

He's 14. The poblem is that autistic symptoms appeared very early but for a few long years his parents refused to acknowledge he has a problem and take him to doctors and specialized therapy*. Today he's better than in his early years but still dysfunctional socially. He speaks little and much of what he says is intelligible only to his parents. His conversation is limited to saying hello and asking people how much they weigh. He needs assistance for going to, and coming back from, school. Going out of the house on his own for playing or shopping is out of the question. If I may ask, is this, or ever was, the case with you or @71 dB ?

No, this has never been the case with me. Clearly this individual has much more severe form of Autism as I have. My symptoms were no big deal in childhood. I was weird and different, but so what? It was in adulthood, when my symptoms started to be a problem, because the society sets stricter expectations on individuals and being weird and different is often seen as a problem. Especially work-life has been quite difficult for me, because it is based so heavily on practises suited for extroverted normies.

We can give whatever names to things, but the main thing about this is that there are fundamental differences in people. I am very good at some things, but also hopelessly bad at some other things because of the fundamental structure of my brain. I learn new things differently from most people. This means most learning material is sub-optimal for me. I have noticed I need to "translate" typical learning material into the format my brain processes information before I can learn efficiently. This format is about having minimal amount of information, but maximal amount of logical connections. Often learning materials have tons of information (to be memorized!) without much logical connections. My brain loves logical connections, system thinking and patterns while hating memorization. For me it was very easy to understand at very young age that months are caused by the Moon orbiting Earth and that the seasons are cause by the tilt of the rotational axis of Earth, but I think I was 15 when I started to remember correctly all the names of the months in my own native language! I remembered the names, but not the correct order: January, February, March,...?...June, July,...?.?...December. I was always puzzled by how easily other kids seemed to learn this kind of stuff while struggling to understand what causes the seasons! Now I know it is all because of differences in the structure of my brain compared to "normies."

The point here is that I am an outlier when the whole population is analysed. There are other outliers that are different from me, but we are outliers compared to the "normies." The society may call me someone with Asperger's or someone with high functioning Autism. Those are just names. What matters is that I know/understand better nowadays how my brain functions differently from other people.

[Florestan]

am very introverted, but introversion alone does not explain my experiences in life. Asperger's does. For example, I can be social in small groups of people (2-3 people), but if it is 10 people, my social skills become inadequate and I am totally lost. This is an Asperger's trait.

Perhaps, but only a field professional (psychiatrist, psychologist) can accurately diagnose your condition. Absent such a diagnose, it's all a matter of speculation.

[lordlance]

I find this thread to emblematic of everything that is wrong with the current obsession with Autism as a cultural phenomenon. Any reasonable definition of Autism should include the statement that it is a physiological brain disorder (not a constellation of psychological quirks). Autism has been connected to the failure of the brain to prune neural networks during development, to deleterious mutations to genes involved in brain development in the fetus, and to abnormal hormone levels during fetal development. The current "spectrum" which ranges from individuals with mild social awkwardness to people who are profoundly disabled has made the definition of Autism so nebulous that it is meaningless. It has given rise to the myth that there is a epidemic of Autism, when the reality is that the definition of autism has been so dramatically broadened that it can be diagnosed in 1 in 50 in stead of 1 in 10,000. It has led to the popular canard that Autistic people "just process information differently," which is like saying that diabetic people "just process sugar differently." It has led to the phenomena of individuals self-diagnosing Autism as a rationalization of their experience or feeling of social awkwardness. And a person who has Autism, acmisnmimiscording to any meaningful definition, cannot "mask" their Autism.

Casual self-diagnosis is a problem, yes. As someone with clinical OCD, I know the severity it takes and why it's not 'quirky.' ADD, too, only recently am I truly realizing the ways it plays into my brain chemistry. Autism, and part of the reason why what @Florestan said isn't always true, I can't even get a proper diagnosis. I don't know what to tell you. Either the inclination of the doctors is lacking or since there is not some sort of rigorous test the way there is for OCD (and, believe me, OCD has a hell of a rigorous test.), the psychiatrists I dealt with seemed disinclined to really meaningfully engage with this. Possibly also because autism has no "cure" -- which sort of ties into why calling it a disorder is intrinsically a misnomer/offensive even. 

In any case, there are severity to things - simply sometimes zoning out once in a while is not ADD. The same way, introversion is not autism. It would be more constructive to ask why I know (not think) I have autism. (And really, it explains my whole life in a way that - again, sadly, earlier therapists clearly did not pick up on -- psychiatrists/psychologists are trained but they are not infallible.)

@Florestan The boat's sailed on debating whether autism is a spectrum. I am not really sure why you want to start that argument. High-functioning and low-functioning (as in your friend's son) isn't exactly revelatory, radical information -- nor is it pop psychology. 

Hell, literally in my family, my brother and I are both autistic and quite clearly he's much better at being "mainstream" (as I like to call it) or at least a version of him palatable for mass consumption. Me? Not so much.

[71 dB]

Perhaps, but only a field professional (psychiatrist, psychologist) can accurately diagnose your condition. Absent such a diagnose, it's all a matter of speculation.

Yes, and I have checked the possibilities. Unfortunately getting a professional diagnose is not easy at least in Finland. At one point I even emailed to an Autism organisation and never got any response from them. I think in Finland the mentality is that only severe cases are diagnosed and that's it. That's one reason why I never even suspected being autistic. I have only been treaded like a "normie", only weird, introverted and different. Only when my sister said to me she thinks I have Asperger's did I look into these things and found out Asperger traits suite well to me. I never wanted this, but it is what it is. The good thing about this all is that I understand other people much better. I know why they are different from me. The days of being confused are over. This is not only about having the correct diagnose. This is about knowing about autism and personality types.

[Florestan]

Florestan The boat's sailed on debating whether autism is a spectrum. I am not really sure why you want to start that argument.

I started no argument. I just agreed with another poster that autism is so loosely defined currently as to become meaningless and, based on an example of professionally diagnosed autistic behavior, I stated my skepticism about labeling as genuinely autistic a behavior which in no way, or only mildly, results in social dysfunction. Besides, I answered a question addressed to me by another poster That is all. I have no interest in starting or pursuing an argument on the matter.

[Florestan]

Yes, and I have checked the possibilities. Unfortunately getting a professional diagnose is not easy at least in Finland.

I don't quite understand it. Are there no psychiatrists or psychologists in Finland? Or is it all but impossible to get an appointment with one of them in order to discuss your condition and ask for an assessment?

[JBS]

He's 14. The poblem is that autistic symptoms appeared very early but for a few long years his parents refused to acknowledge he has a problem and take him to doctors and specialized therapy*. Today he's better than in his early years but still dysfunctional socially. He speaks little and much of what he says is intelligible only to his parents. His conversation is limited to saying hello and asking people how much they weigh. He needs assistance for going to, and coming back from, school. Going out of the house on his own for playing or shopping is out of the question. If I may ask, is this, or ever was, the case with you or @71 dB ?

* I know of another pair whose child displayed autistic symptoms early and they immediately took him to doctors and therapy. (I don't know his age but he's older than the boy above). Today he's relatively okay and socially functional.

Anyway, here's what CDC says about autism ( https://www.cdc.gov/autism/about/index.html ) :

People with ASD often have problems with social communication and interaction, and restricted or repetitive behaviors or interests. People with ASD may also have different ways of learning, moving, or paying attention. These characteristics can make life very challenging. It is important to note that some people without ASD might also have some of these symptoms.

The last phrase is relevant to the discussion at hand.

I was never quite like that. Although well into adulthood a brief "hello" was the norm of my conversations, and my conversational fodder even now runs dry very quickly.

[steve ridgway]

Yes, and I have checked the possibilities. Unfortunately getting a professional diagnose is not easy at least in Finland. At one point I even emailed to an Autism organisation and never got any response from them. I think in Finland the mentality is that only severe cases are diagnosed and that's it. That's one reason why I never even suspected being autistic. I have only been treaded like a "normie", only weird, introverted and different. Only when my sister said to me she thinks I have Asperger's did I look into these things and found out Asperger traits suite well to me. I never wanted this, but it is what it is. The good thing about this all is that I understand other people much better. I know why they are different from me. The days of being confused are over. This is not only about having the correct diagnose. This is about knowing about autism and personality types.

It's great that this exploration has helped you understand the way your mind works, regardless of whether your self diagnosis agrees with the professionals. Perhaps it would be safer to say you have some traits "similar to" people on the autistic spectrum rather than pigeonhole yourself too tightly.

[Madiel]

To return somewhat to the musical question, I don't know that Liszt's long rambling claimed description of a piece is a very good example to use of program music. There is strong evidence that some of Liszt's symphonic poems were written first and then retrofitted with a program later - and in fact the brief Wikipedia article on Die Ideale describes it as an extreme example of the lengths Liszt would go to in making his music programmatic.

Whether that last assessment is correct I don't know (I haven't listened to the Liszt symphonic poems enough). I'd just make the point that Liszt is not a very good example of music where people actually accept that the music follows a program.  Although I would say some of Liszt's solo piano pieces show a connection between the music and the title.

It does depend on the extent to which you regard something as a program, but I'd say there's a clearer connection between the music and the extra-musical inspiration in Dvorak's symphonic poems, or Dukas' L'Apprenti sorcier, or even in some of Ravel's piano pieces. Or heck, try Vivaldi's Four Seasons.

[Mister Sharpe]

This discussion reminds me of my dear father, dead some six years now, and although I doubt he was autistic or even on the spectrum, he did have some challenges interpreting things, often having to do with imagery.  There are many examples of this, but two come immediately to mind. Neil Diamond's song "I Am...I Said" contains a lyric that completely befuddled him: "I am...I said, To no one there, And no one heard at all - Not even the chair." "How dumb is that?" Dad exclaimed on more than one occasion, usually on listening to the song in the car. "Of course a chair can't hear!" The language of poetry was almost completely lost on him and he lived in a world that was literal to the max. Another example of a different sort: a local supermarket chain, to promote vegetable and fruit consumption, produced three colorful bags depicting brightly colored produce: "Eat Purple!" one of them proclaimed. (Red and Orange were the other colors). "What does that mean?" he asked, completely bafffled. He had no idea and when it was explained to him, he thought the concept stupid.   

[Madiel]

The "not even the chair" line has been regarded poorly by plenty of people. Including me. There is nothing remotely strange about considering it to be an example of a bad lyric written just for the sake of rhyming. A quick bit of googling will show it turning up on lists of bad lyrics.

Recognising that it's nonsensical is NOT an example of having difficulty interpreting, it shows an ability to interpret, rather than just mindlessly singing along because the tune is catchy. That's not having difficulty with poetry. That's recognising bad, clunky poetry.

Edit: In fact I found a source that claims Neil Diamond's record company were first in line to say it was a problem.

[Madiel]

I'd say both of the examples I've commented on are examples of the same error in logic.

Let's accept that a trait of autism is difficulty in "getting" certain things. It does not follow that if you don't "get" something, the fault lies with you.

It's perfectly possible that the fault lies with the thing you're trying to interpret. Liszt was not a flawless genius. Neil Diamond was not a flawless genius. The fact that they are/were famous and popular does not mean that everything they did was uniformly excellent and beyond criticism.

Even if there is evidence that you have difficulty interpreting things, you need to be open to the possibility that you're interpreting just fine, and you're looking at something that lots of "normal" people also think is a pile of nonsense.

Unless we want to go down the road of treating critical thinking skills as abnormal. Sometimes I do wonder.

[Mister Sharpe]

The "not even the chair" line has been regarded poorly by plenty of people. Including me. There is nothing remotely strange about considering it to be an example of a bad lyric written just for the sake of rhyming. A quick bit of googling will show it turning up on lists of bad lyrics.

Recognising that it's nonsensical is NOT an example of having difficulty interpreting, it shows an ability to interpret, rather than just mindlessly singing along because the tune is catchy.

Edit: In fact I found a source that claims Neil Diamond's record company were first in line to say it was a problem.

Poetry is often nonsensical in literal terms. And that is one of its finest features. I don't think a case can be made for Diamond's lyric to be great poetry (some have tried, Rolling Stone referred to that song's lyrics as being excellent), but poetry nevertheless it is in depicting what the Telegraph called the songwriter's "raging existential angst." A completely deaf and unsympathetic chair emphatically reinforces the notion that absolutely no one is listening to or caring about Diamond's plight (it is reportedly one of his most personal songs).  My father, bless him, lacked the ability to interpret, much less appreciate, such things, to make metaphoric connections. Nor could he understand Donovan's "The moon is like a boat, my love, a lemon peel afloat..." This was a universe that was alien to him.  He also, interestingly, could not spell.  But at math, he was a whiz.

[Madiel]

Poetry is often nonsensical in literal terms. And that is one of its finest features. I don't think a case can be made for Diamond's lyric to be great poetry (some have tried, Rolling Stone referred to that song's lyrics as being excellent), but poetry nevertheless it is in depicting what the Telegraph called the songwriter's "raging existential angst." A completely deaf and unsympathetic chair emphatically reinforces the notion that absolutely no one is listening to or caring about Diamond's plight (it is reportedly one of his most personal songs).  My father, bless him, lacked the ability to interpret, much less appreciate, such things, to make metaphoric connections. Nor could he understand Donovan's "The moon is like a boat, my love, a lemon peel afloat..." This was a universe that was alien to him.  He also, interestingly, could not spell.  But at math, he was a whiz.

The "ability" of people to make things fit a pre-existing narrative and explain away problems is well established in psychology. This does not mean that people who refuse to do so are somehow lacking.

Saying that poetry is often nonsensical in literal terms is frankly a means of waving away criticism and preventing the possibility that there is good poetry and bad poetry. It's not even accurate. Poetry uses metaphor and allusion. This is not the same as "nonsensical". It's also not the same as groping for a rhyme.

[Florestan]

Replace "nonsense" with "oxymoron" and there are plenty of famous examples. For instance:

Corneille:

Cette obscure clarté qui tombe des étoiles

Shakespeare:

O brawling love! O loving hate!
  O anything of nothing first create!
O heavy lightness, serious vanity!
  Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!
  Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!
This love feel I, that feel no love in this.

Byron:

For checker'd as is seen our human lot
    With good, and bad, and worse, alike prolific
Of melancholy merriment, to quote
    Too much of one sort would be soporific

I, for one, can easily imagine someone who has no feeling for poetry, and no knowledge of how it works, crying "Nonsense!".

[Spotted Horses]

Florestan The boat's sailed on debating whether autism is a spectrum. I am not really sure why you want to start that argument. High-functioning and low-functioning (as in your friend's son) isn't exactly revelatory, radical information -- nor is it pop psychology.

The idea of a spectrum was introduced in the most recent revision of the DSM (the diagnostic reference manual).

Many diseases present as a spectrum. A person with diabetes may have a mild case that where management of diet is an effective treatment. A person can have a severe case where aggressive management using insulin injections is required. It is a one dimensional scale where body's management of blood sugar is compromised. People can suffer from depression with various levels of severity, there is a threshold where major depressive disorder is diagnosed. People can have manic-depressive disorder with varying levels of severity. Hypertension, which can range from slightly elevated blood pressure which will tend to cause other chronic conditions, or extreme hypertension, which can directly result in a stroke. In these cases the problem is well defined with a sliding scale of severity.

The Autism spectrum is more like an Autism nebula. It is not a single scale of severity, there are multiple traits which alone or in combination will give a diagnosis of ASD. Before the spectrum was introduced the diagnostic criteria was much more focused.

Autism emerges around age 3, when instinctive behaviors fade away and are replaced by learned behaviors in a neurotypical person. In an individual with autism the learned behaviors fail to emerge, leaving the individual with severe deficits.

Delay, deficit or complete failure to develop language (expressive and/or receptive)
Sensory obsession, resulting in self-stimulation as a primary activity.
Failure to develop basic manifestations of empathy (shared attention, eye contact, etc)
Failure of executive function.
Regression, where skills present when the individual is a toddler disappear.

The last of these is the true hallmark of Autism, as it was originally defined. I find it absurd to say that a person who, in adulthood, manifests a mild form or one of the deficits listed above has the same disorder as a person which has Autism as it was originally defined.

I wouldn't say that people currently diagnosed on the mild side of the Autism spectrum don't have a disorder. But I find it absurd to say it is the same disorder.

The recent SPARC study correlated presentations of Autism with genetic profile and found four distinct clusters of genetic mutations which were associated with four different presentations of the disease. In particular, people with severe Autism, as it was originally defined, had a unique cluster of genetic mutations, with a high prevalence of de novo mutations. To say that the people who meet the original diagnostic criteria have the same disorder as people who are socially awkward or can't tolerate the feeling of wool on their skin is nuts, in my view.

[Madiel]

Replace "nonsense" with "oxymoron" and there are plenty of famous examples. For instance:

Corneille:

Cette obscure clarté qui tombe des étoiles

Shakespeare:

O brawling love! O loving hate!
  O anything of nothing first create!
O heavy lightness, serious vanity!
  Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!
  Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!
This love feel I, that feel no love in this.

Byron:

For checker'd as is seen our human lot
    With good, and bad, and worse, alike prolific
Of melancholy merriment, to quote
    Too much of one sort would be soporific

I, for one, can easily imagine someone who has no feeling for poetry, and no knowledge of how it works, crying "Nonsense!".

Yeah... you realise it's a person who is CLAIMING a feeling for poetry who is saying that poetry is often nonsensical? You've just made the exact opposite case.

Anyway, there is a big difference between saying something about poetry in general, and saying something about a particular poem (or song lyric). The fact that poems might do a variety of things artistically does not preclude a particular poem just being clunky and unplanned. The fact that a skilled poet might do a series of these oxymorons doesn't preclude the possibility of someone misusing a word because they have its meaning wrong.

Neil Diamond fans have a tendency to justify the chair line by going into the symbolism of giving the chair a voice. People who aren't Neil Diamond fans are more likely to consider the possibility that he really, really needed a word that rhymed with "there".