It's All How You Look At It

When I take Melissa to the clinic, I try to read some, and because it is a scientific place, there’s usually some science magazines around. One of them had an article on Asperger’s Syndrome, a type of autism where the person can function, but has limited social skills. The article I read said something about kids with Asperger’s being able to judge as well as the general population a person’s trustworthiness by looking at their face. (Generally speaking it is assumed that part of the problem of Asperger’s Syndrome is the inability to read social clues in faces). And then it made some comment about how kids with Asperger’s Syndrome can see fine details in a picture, but will miss the whole. The example was that if you show someone with Asperger’s a large “S” that is made of nothing but small h’s, they will quickly perceive the h’s but not the larger picture they are making, “S.”

So, as things turn out, one of the boys I work with at the school has Asperger’s. Let’s call him Eddy. He’s a fun kid. I work with him on learning French, and he has an amazing ability to hear and repeat, even getting the accent right. Of course, you never know what he’ll ask you to teach him to say, like when he asked me how to say, “Farewell, my alien brethren…”

One day we got to talking about his science fair project—determining if body language can give a clue to whether or not someone is telling the truth. Interesting—people with asperger’s can still gauge trustworthiness and perhaps are more keyed in to details like aspects of body language that a person without Asperger’s might lose in seeing the “big picture.” It’ll be neat to see how it works out.

And then, we’re going down the hall and we pass some artwork. One class had put up construction paper with cut-out shapes glued on. Neat stuff, lots of colors. And then we saw why—there was a big poster of one of Matisse’s paper cut-outs. I was tying it back to our French lesson and remarking that the work is about 10 ft tall and 5 ft wide when Eddy says, “Look! Fish! A Seahorse! Jellyfish! Eels!” Now, if you have ever seen a Matisse cut-out, you know it’s fairly abstract. (A friend of mine gave me a print of Matisse’s “Winepress,” and it took me awhile to figure out why it was called that.) I look at the bottom to see the title. “Beasts of the Sea.” I asked Eddy if he had read that. “No,” he said, “but it’s a good title…”

p/g,

Aaron