Ask A Genius 122 – Alonzo, Kim, Daniel
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/03/19
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Rick Rosner: To go back to the dreams and schizophrenia stuff, we can look at autism. Where some people like to say, and people like to say a lot of stuff because autism has a history of people saying wrong stuff about it, people present it as a problem in processing sensory input. But autism, like schizophrenia, comes in different flavors, where on the Asperger range of autism, it’s not pure chaos.
It can be a different distribution of mental resources. So a kid can be bad at social cues, but awesome at math or visual arts. Like Alonzo Clemens, I am probably slightly messing up his name. The guy lives in Boulder. From memory, he can do, from images, or knock out a horse that is anatomically accurate with clay, or any other animal. But he’s in a group home or was in a group home in the past for people.
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RR: Alonzo Clemens has a hard time. He’s a really nice guy. He can’t function on his own in society. He’s gotten better over time. But missing a lot of social coping skills. Photographic visual and dextral-finger memory or animal anatomy. Then you have, Kim Peek is it who is autistic with all sorts of numerical processing skills?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Memory in General.
RR: “Rain Man,” the guy Rain Man was based off of.
SDJ: Daniel Tammet too.
RR: So these people, something is—you can look at it.
SDJ: You have also argued for yourself on that spectrum.
RR: Yea, but just a little bit.
SDJ: This is no formal diagnosis, but just self-diagnosis.
RR: I was nerdy. Asperger’s, it was less so now. But it has been de-emphasized from autism. Like 10 years ago, it was one of the biggest self-diagnosed mental problems out there. A super model could say, “Oh yea, I was really awkward in junior high. I probably have Asperger’s.” It’s like, “No, everybody’s awkward in junior high – 6’1” super model who is dating Orlando Bloom.”
SDJ: [Laughing]
RR: My guess is that you can look at various disorders or phenomena in the brain as whether they are disruptive at the smallest—you can look at the size in the brain of the disruption. Taking LSD is like sand-blasting a jigsaw puzzle, so the image becomes less legible as opposed to some forms of schizophrenia, and autism, where it is more a problem with pieces are missing or tabs between pieces are missing. So they can’t be connected properly.
But the problem exists among systems on a larger scale. So I think I’ve said a lot of twaddle here. But I guess the one idea that might stand up is that you can look at consciousness, and phenomena, and disorders of consciousness as whether consciousness is disrupted on the tiniest possible scale – LSD or other possible drugs that make it hard for the cell-to-cell mechanisms to function properly – versus disorders on a larger scale that disrupt communication more among large clusters of cells that are arranged in expert subsystems. Or maybe, it is all twaddle. I don’t know.
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