Autism Vox

He Hears Everything

by Kristina Chew, PhD on June 27th, 2007

Some years ago while visiting us at the beach, Jim’s best friend—an artist named Mike—-upbraided us for talking about Charlie in the third person in Charlie’s own presence: “Never talk about him in front of himself!”

At the time, I pointed out how Charlie only seemed able to follow directions that we had spent hours teaching him, or to recognize that “table” meant the four-legged thing we ate on as a result of showing him numerous photos of tables and saying variations on “point to the table!”, “touch the table!”, etc.. We kept our sentences short and direct, and our articulation clear (and we tried to talk slowly, something that Jim and I have to remind ourselves to do). Mike spoke so in earnest—he had raised two children—-and he sought so hard to engage Charlie by building with his blocks and using his hands to dig Charlie a pool by the water (which Charlie did not so much as look at)—that his words rang in our heads.

And so we began to watch what we said. If I found myself saying “Charlie can’t do this yet,” I would stop myself and try to rephrase my words with a “you”; I said to myself, how do I feel when someone talks about me in my presence and uses the third person?

When Charlie was around 6 and 7 years old, Jim and I agreed: We would presume that Charlie, however little his facial expression registered this, understood everything he heard—we would “presume competence” in him. More than a few peple rolled their eyes when we protested, “He really does understand!”—at least, I pointed out, Charlie knows when people are talking about him in their presence, and he can detect people’s emotions via their tone and pitch of voice and body language.

So a philosopher’s arguement for why babies are more conscious than adults intrgues me. As The Splintered Mind describes University of California at Berkeley philosophy professor Alison Gopnik’s view for why babies are not “crying carrots” (as some philosophers and doctors suggest):

Gopnik argues that babies are not only conscious, they are more conscious than adults. Her argument for this view begins with the idea that people in general — adults, that is — have more conscious experience of what they attend to than of what they disregard. We have either no experience, or limited experience, of the hum of the refrigerator in the background or the feeling of the shoes on our feet, until we stop to think about it. In contrast, when we expertly and automatically do something routine (such as driving to work on the usual route) we are often barely conscious at all, it seems. (I think the issue is complex, though.)

When we attend to something, the brain regions involved exhibit more cholinergic activity, become more plastic and open to new information. We learn more and lay down new memories. What we don’t attend to, we often hardly learn about at all.

Baby brains, Gopnik says, exhibit a much broader plasticity than adults’ and have a general neurochemistry similar to the neurochemistry involved in adult attention. Babies learn more quickly than we do, and about more things, and pick up more incidental knowledge outside a narrow band of attention. Gopnik suggests that we think of attention, in adults, as something like a mechanism that turns part of our mature and slow-changing brains, for a brief period, flexible, quick learning, and plastic — baby-like — while suppressing change in the rest of the brain.

So what is it like to be a baby? According to Gopnik, it’s something like attending to everything at once: There’s much less of the reflexive and ignored, the non-conscious, the automatic and expert. She suggests that the closest approximation adults typically get to baby-like experience is when they are in completely novel environments, such as very different cultures, where everything is new.

The Frontal Cortex referred to Gopnik’s argument in a post entitled Are Babies Extra-Conscious?. I was intrigued by Gopnik’s views not only for the suggestion that babies are much more aware of things than thought, but also because of her suggestion of a baby’s experience as “attending to everything at once” and “less of the reflexive and ignored, the non-conscious, the automatic and expert.” I do not know what it is like to be Charlie, but there have been times—-when we are in a store like Target, or in the house that he has never been in before, that he seems to freeze and just stare and so to speak “shut down”—as if there is too much all around him and he is overwhelmed to take it all in. Sometimes he then sounds his distress and a quick exit is necessary; other times he stays, but puts his head down and frowns. (He seems quite content in a completely chaotic place like a crowded New York subway car, though.)

I don’t mean at all to imply that Charlie, or any autistic child, is “babyish”—-but rather that, even if a person cannot tell you in words what they understand, or does not respond in expected ways to a request, this does not mean they do not understand.

Share This

Related Stories

This Might Sting
The Sound Space of the Brain
Batman has autism?
Brain Functioning and Blindsight
Social Networks and the Increase in Autism

POSTED IN: Baby, Neuroscience, Parenting, Philosophy