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Question 1 Why do babies cry?
Many people ask this question, and they usually mean to ask why babies must cry. Well, as far as I can tell, one must cry and wail when one has not other means of communication, as much from despair as from lack of ability to do otherwise. It is a terribly difficult thing to listen to anyone shout or cry, whether it is audible or comes via a different medium such as an essay or a punch to the face, but it certainly gets your attention. In order to have any hope of getting your needs met, emotional or otherwise, you must draw attention to them somehow.
Question 2 What would happen if you and another person switched bodies? This has been explored in movies like Freaky Friday and All of Me.
A young woman named Jeanna Giese was bitten by a bat and contracted rabies, and did not experience symptoms until it was too late to medicate her. Miraculously, she survived the disease because a doctor thought to try causing temporary brain death in order to give the body enough time to heal and fight back. She was then resuscitated and woke up, and eventually recovered. However, her parents say that she was not the same girl who went to sleep. Although shutting off Jeanna's brain for a short time allowed her to do the impossible—live through a disease that kills all who are not vaccinated against it—she did not come out unscathed. There was some degree of brain damage, and that change in turn changed Jeanna's personality. The same can be said for the victims of car accidents that resulted in head injuries. If the emotions center or the fear center of their brain is destroyed, they will not react to life the same way they did before, and so will cease being exactly who they were.
Our brains are the center of our universe, not houses that hold a single, static consciousness. They are the beginning and the end of all emotion, all action, and all perceptions. The brain has many tools that bring information to it—ears, eyes, touch, smell, taste, and so on—that occasionally fail, as is the case with colorblind people. It also has many appendages that act as tools for allowing it to interact with the outside world, the way a deep sea submarine has little grabbers. Every person has only their senses and their appendages to rely on when it comes to knowing what the world is, and then the brain must somehow interpret all the information accurately. For example, even if the eyes are physically working just fine, the brain can mix up what sensory input is coming in. This is called synesthesia, and people who have will experience one item of sensory input with both the usual sense and with a second sense the brain happens to land on. In many cases this comes in the form of hearing a sound that then prompts the perception of a color that is almost as vivid as a hallucination. This is not because the eyes are seeing these colors like they might had the person looked into a bright light; it is because a few lines crossed in their brain, causing the sight center of the brain to see these colors when it hears those noises. The brain took the information the senses gave it, then proceeded to do seemingly unnecessary things with that information. We not only rely on our many senses, but also on our brain's ability to process them correctly.
There was a series of Snickers candy bar commercials that I think are interesting. My favorite was about a football team huddling up and making a plan of action to beat the other team. All of the football players were in full gear and looked very serious, but in the midst of them stood Robin Williams in normal street clothes and trying to tell them what to do. He orders one player to make balloon animals and another to make tea cozies until they start asking if he is okay. After a bit, the referee interrupts his bad Russian general impression to tell him he needs to eat a Snickers. When Williams asks why, the referee responds, "You're not you when you're hungry." This may seem like a silly example, but many people do not feel like themselves until they have had their morning coffee, until they have had a full night's sleep, until they have had at least one beer, etc. They are craving something that will make their brain work better so they can do what they need to do.
The same thing happens when we become depressed, which may be the work of chemical activity more than outside triggers that make us sad. Why else would medication help? Sometimes brain activity is not normal by default. Robin Williams is actually a good example here too of someone with success and laughter surrounding him, yet a crushing inner depression that led him to committing suicide. Even if the trauma comes from outside ourselves, it still changes how our brain processes new information. PTSD can affect someone deeply too, and friends and family of a veteran might comment that their loved one is just not the same as they were before they went to war. In the same way we know that something simple like a bell is meant to get our attention, someone suffering from PTSD has learned that a loud noise means possible death and they react accordingly. They can look back at this behavior and know that it was unnecessary, yet they feel compelled to do it. A person who develops OCD will also react to certain things and feel compelled to follow certain behaviors even when they know that there is no need to, say, close the door four or five times when they leave the house. And of course there are the problems that come from brain damage. If the brain can be trained to do something irrational, then what sorts of extreme things might happen that person's behavior if the brain was physically changed from the inside? Or what if that brain was different from the average brain since the very beginning?
There are so many types of mental illness, there are so many types of physical trauma, and there are so many types of developmental differences. In the same way that we cannot say that all people with OCD are obsessive cleaners, we cannot say that all people who perceive the world differently from birth are retards. Intelligence and perception are two different things, and those are both different from physical disabilities. A person in a wheelchair is not automatically deaf or stupid. A person with synesthesia is not automatically crippled or wondrously creative. A person with a high IQ is not automatically able-bodied or colorblind. I believe Stephen Hawking is a good example. He may be in a wheelchair and uses facilitated communication (i.e. his computer), but he is by no means slow in the head. Another example is someone with Fragile X, which leaves the IQ at the same level as a five-year-old's, yet the body is perfectly fit. Basically, you cannot judge a book by its cover.
Perception issues more difficult to understand, and therefore make it harder to see the intelligence that may lie behind the strange social behavior, the odd physical movements, and the weird or completely lacking vocals. The example in the vein that is closest to me is autism. I have known DJ Savarese since I was nine years old and am quite accustomed to him having some of the best grades in school despite being almost completely non-verbal, struggling to use his hands, and often becoming overwhelmed by the world around him. I once had someone tell me that autism can feel like the world is in neon colors and no one else seems to notice how distracting they are. DJ had the support of his mother, the school, and his class aids and so was able to persevere through life's difficulties, which often come in the form of stares and accusations. If you click on DJ's name, I have added a link to his essay in The Iowa Review, in which he describes his experience with taking the ACT. He had to do it all by himself in order to prove that his typing/writing aids were not writing for him. This involved independently raising his hand and successfully pointing to the right answer on a large sheet of paper. DJ says that not having someone there to hold his hand makes it difficult for him to perceive where his hand is in space. In regards to speech, I have "heard" him say that his mouth feels a million miles away from his brain. In everyday life, DJ goes back and forth between working towards a goal and being distracted by some small thing, such as a bruise on his mother's arm that will not wash off. If we return to the submarine example, DJ can see and hear what is going on outside, but the controls for his grabbers are unbelievably difficult to use and certain fish keep insisting he look at them rather than the big picture or a more important fish. However, none of that changes the fact that the submarine driver is still whole, well, and smart despite being trapped inside.
The same goes for autism as for the other things I have mentioned: you cannot judge a book by its cover. I have also learned that you cannot judge it entirely based on your own experience. There is an autism spectrum, and two people can be as far away from each other as they are from average people. Not all autists are going to be artistic geniuses, eloquent writers, or great speakers. They may not even realize that they are different from other people because they are so high functioning. For example, I once watched a video about a man who did not know his brain worked differently until he was about fifty. On camera they demonstrated the difference by having him watch a short video while a computer tracked his eye movements. In the video, a man and a woman look at each other from across the room in a way that many people would immediately understand as being flirtatious. After a while of slowly getting closer to each other and looking at each other, they suddenly come together in a passionate kiss. The man watching the video admits that he was incredibly shocked by this twist ending. Upon reviewing his eye movements, experimenters can see that while most people would look at the actors' faces, he was mainly looking at whatever body parts were moving, such as their hands. Therefore, he did not pick up on the social cues.
Everyone's experience of life and perception is incredibly personal, to the point where many people become convinced that they are the only person in the world who feels that way. Teenagers think that their parents cannot possibly understand them because their situation is special. DJ's mother told me about a time when he thought perhaps I was autistic because I had admitted to getting nervous over something, and DJ thought he was the only person who felt nervous that way. A person with synesthesia will probably grow up thinking everyone sees or feels the world the way they do. Young children with missing limbs or facial scarring will not think about how they are different until they reach an age where they are actively looking at themselves in the mirror and comparing what they see to the other humans around them. I talked to one person whose father lost three of the fingers on his right hand in an accident, and for several years of childhood they believed that all fathers had only two fingers on their right hands.
In the beginning, I asked why babies cry, and I asked that question because autists and others struggling to bring their inner selves in contact with the outside world will sometimes scream or make strange sounds that startle the people around them. In the same way that we treat a baby with respect, we must treat these people with kindness and patience. In the same way that people without a vote will revolt against the regime that holds them back, an autist will fight the strange invisible walls that hold them back. We must all learn to put ourselves in others' shoes, even if those people seem utterly different from ourselves. If we can learn to accept that people from other cultures living in other places are still people, then surely we can understand that people living in different sorts of brains are still people.
