Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant (31 page)

BOOK: Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant

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I have several plans for the future. One is to continue to help charities, such as the National Autistic Society and the National Society for Epilepsy, that are important to me. When I give a talk on behalf of a charity in front of lots of people I sit or stand in such a way as to be able to see Neil in the audience, and I imagine that I’m talking just to him. Then I don’t feel so nervous.

I also plan to continue working with scientists and researchers to find out more about my brain and how exactly it works. Following my pi record and the
Brainman
documentary I was inundated with requests to study me from scientists from all over the world. In 2004 I met the world’s foremost expert in savant syndrome, Dr Darold Treffert, in Wisconsin in the USA. It was during this meeting that I was told that I matched the condition’s diagnostic criteria. Since then, I have contributed regularly to various scientific research projects. Here are two examples of recent studies:

In 2004, Professor Daniel Bor of the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge performed an analysis of my digit span – the ability to process sequential numerical information and recall it in the correct order. For each part of the test I was seated in front of a computer screen onto which sequences of numbers were displayed one at a time at a rate of a digit per half-second. After each sequence I was asked to type the numbers into the computer. My recorded digit span was 12 digits, twice the normal range of 5–7 digits. When the computer displayed numbers that had been randomly coloured, to see if they interfered with my synaesthesia, my performance dropped to between 10–11 digits. Professor Bor said that he had never tested anyone before with a digit span above 9 and that my score was extremely rare.

Neil Smith, Professor of Linguistics at University College in London carried out an experiment in the summer of 2005 which looked at how I process certain types of sentence constructions. The sentences all involved what language scientists call ‘metalinguistic negation’, where the negation works not through the words in the sentence but by how it is expressed. For example, when shown to most people, the sentence ‘John isn’t tall, he’s a giant,’ is completely understandable; John is of such height that he can’t just be described as tall. However, I only understood this distinction because it was carefully explained to me. The experiment showed that I found such sentences contradictory and difficult to analyse successfully. This is a common problem for individuals on the autistic spectrum, due to the literalness of our thinking and comprehension processes.

There is another way in which I hope that my abilities might help others in the future, by encouraging a wider appreciation of different ways of learning. Visual learning aids can be beneficial to many ‘neurotypical’ learners, as well as those on the autistic spectrum. For example, using different colours to mark words as noun, verb or adjective can provide a simple and effective introduction to grammar. Similarly, in the online language courses I wrote for my website, new vocabulary is presented with the letters of the words in different sizes, helping to give each word a unique shape. Low-frequency letters such as q, w, x and z are printed small, while medium-frequency letters such as b, c, f and h appear in standard size and high-frequency letters (vowels and consonants such as l, r, s and t) are largest. So the German word
zerquetschen
(‘to squash’) is introduced as
z
er
q
uetschen
, the French word
vieux
(‘old’) as
v
ieu
x
and the Spanish
conozco
(‘I know’) as
cono
z
co
.

Any aspirations I have for my personal life are really simple: to continue working hard in my relationship with Neil, to carry on practising my communication skills and learning from my mistakes, and taking one day at a time. I also hope to become closer still to my family and friends and that through this book they will know and understand me at least a little better.

I still remember vividly the experience I had as a teenager lying on the floor of my room staring up at the ceiling. I was trying to picture the universe in my head, to have a concrete understanding of what ‘everything’ was. In my mind I travelled to the edges of existence and looked over them, wondering what I would find. In that instant I felt really unwell and I could feel my heart beating hard inside me, because for the first time I had realised that thought and logic had limits and could only take a person so far. This realisation frightened me and it took me a long time to come to terms with it.

Many people are surprised when they learn that I am a Christian. They imagine that being autistic makes it difficult or impossible to believe in God or explore spiritual issues. It is certainly true that my Asperger’s makes it harder for me to have empathy or think abstractly, but it hasn’t prevented me from thinking about deeper questions concerning such things as life and death, love and relationships. In fact, many people with autism do find benefits in religious belief or spirituality. Religion’s emphasis on ritual, for example, is helpful for individuals with autistic spectrum disorders, who need stability and consistency. In a chapter of her autobiography entitled
Stairway to Heaven: Religion and Belief
, Temple Grandin, an autistic writer and professor of animal science, describes her view of God as an ordering force in the universe. Her religious beliefs stem from her experience of working in the slaughter industry and the feeling she had that there must be something sacred about dying.

Like many people with autism, my religious activity is primarily intellectual rather than social or emotional. When I was at secondary school, I had no interest in religious education and was dismissive of the possibility of a god or that religion could be beneficial to people’s lives. This was because God was not something that I could see or hear or feel, and because the religious arguments that I read and heard did not make any sense to me. The turning point came with my discovery of the writings of G.K. Chesterton, an English author and journalist who wrote extensively about his Christian beliefs in the early part the twentieth century.

Chesterton was a remarkable person. At school, his teachers described him as a dreamer and ‘not on the same plane as the rest’, while as a teenager he set up a debating club with friends, sometimes arguing an idea for hours at a time; he and his brother Cecil once argued for eighteen hours and thirteen minutes. He could quote whole chapters of Dickens and other authors from memory and remembered the plots of all the 10,000 novels he had evaluated as a publisher’s reader. His secretaries reported that he would dictate one essay while simultaneously writing another by hand on a different subject. Yet he was always getting lost, so absorbed in his thoughts that he would sometimes have to telegram his wife to help him get back home. He also had a fascination for the everyday things around him, writing in a letter to his wife: ‘I do not think there is anyone who takes quite such a fierce pleasure in things, being themselves, as I do. The startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me. The fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud.’ It’s possible that Chesterton was on the higher-functioning end of the autistic spectrum himself; certainly I have always felt close to him from reading about his experiences and ideas.

Reading Chesterton as a teenager helped me to arrive at an intellectual understanding of God and Christianity. The concept of the Trinity, of God as composed of a living and loving relationship, was something that I could picture in my head and that made sense to me. I was also fascinated by the idea of the Incarnation, of God revealing Himself to the world in tangible, human form as Jesus Christ. Even so, it was not until I was twenty-three that I decided to participate in a course at a local church, aimed at teaching the basics of Christianity in weekly, social meetings. Each week I would come to the meeting and exhaust my fellow group members by asking question after question. I wasn’t interested in praying for guidance or listening to the experiences of others, but in getting answers to my questions. Fortunately, Chesterton answered each of them for me in his books. At Christmas 2002 I became a Christian.

My autism can sometimes make it difficult for me to understand how other people might think or feel in any given situation. For this reason, my moral values are based more on ideas that are logical, make sense to me and that I have thought through carefully, than on the ability to ‘walk in another person’s shoes’. I know to treat each person I meet with kindness and respect, because I believe that each person is unique and created in God’s image.

I do not often attend church, because I can become uncomfortable with having lots of people sitting and standing around me. However, on the few occasions when I have been inside a church I have found the experience very interesting and affecting. The architecture is often complex and beautiful and I really like having lots of space above my head as I look up at the high ceilings. As in childhood, I enjoy listening to hymns being sung. Music definitely helps me to experience feelings that can be described as religious, such as of unity and transcendence. My favourite song is ‘Ave Maria’. Whenever I hear it, I feel completely wrapped up inside the flow of the music.

Some of my favourite stories are from the Bible, such as the story of David and Goliath. Many of them use symbolic and picturesque language that I can visualise and that helps me to understand the narratives. There are many beautiful and inspiring passages in the Bible, but one I especially like is the following from 1 Corinthians: ‘Love is patient, love is kind. Love is not envious, jealous or boastful. It is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own ways. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice at wrong and wrong-doing, but rejoices in right and truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. So faith, hope and love abide these three. But the greatest of these is love.’

Everyone is said to have a perfect moment once in a while, an experience of complete peace and connection, like looking out from the top of the Eiffel Tower or watching a falling star high in the night sky. I do not have many such moments, but Neil says that is okay because being rare is what makes them so special. My most recent came one weekend last summer at home – they often happen to me while I am at home – after a meal I had cooked and eaten with Neil. We were sitting together in the living room, feeling full and happy. All of a sudden I experienced a kind of self-forgetting and in that brief, shining moment all my anxiety and awkwardness seemed to disappear. I turned to Neil and asked him if he had felt the same sensation and he said he had.

I imagine these moments as fragments or splinters scattered across a lifetime. If a person could somehow collect them all up and stick them together he would have a perfect hour or even a perfect day. And I think in that hour or day he would be closer to the mystery of what it is to be human. It would be like having a glimpse of heaven.