The Anti-Romantic Child

Priscilla Gilman, a specialist in Romantic poetry, recently published this extraordinary book about coming to terms with her "anti-Romantic" child and the joys associated with getting to know and fully appreciate her high-functioning autistic son, Benj. Wordsworth's poetry is her mainstay, and it is artfully interwoven throughout the text to demonstrate the signposts along the way while raising her challenging, but adored son.

In the beginning, as both she and her husband were highly educated, well-read folk, she was not overly surprised when Benj started reading letters at one year old, read fluently after turning 2, and could even read her dissertation aloud with fluency and perfect intonation when he was 2 1/2. The obsession with letters is humorously depicted as he reads everything in sight, shouting out the words on all the billboards from his car seat, reading all the packaging on food products at the supermarket. He loves songs and insists on their being sung word and pitch perfectly.

On the other hand, he has trouble chewing, doesn't like playing with toys, only lining them up. He is obsessed with ritual, order and sequence, clear signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Priscilla learns that Benj's incredible talent with letters is actually a disorder--hyperlexia--which is a sign of autism. Hyperlexia is the exact opposite of dyslexia. Whereas dyslexics have trouble decoding words when reading, they have excellent overall comprehension. Hyperlexics have almost supernormal abilities in decoding patterns in language but have trouble with comprehension.  For all his talent in reading, Benj has trouble processing spoken language and getting the gist of a complex narrative. He can't initiate a conversation, but he can recite verbatim lines of the most difficult poetry, even Shakespeare!

Most of what Benj says is "echolalia," that is, repeating what he has heard his parents say. He does not know how to use the pronoun "I." But, he can repeat anything he has heard or read in the past in a context where it can make sense in the present and comfort him.

I was fascinated with this book because the author writes so well, telling her story with immediacy, intimacy, fluency, and empathy. There is both humor and moments so sad or touching that you can't help but cry.

But I was also fascinated with Benj's mind, which I tried to decode using my knowledge of left/right hemispheric differences. Here's what I found:

Benj's symptoms show to me a left hemisphere (LH) that is way overactive while his right hemisphere (RH) is underactive in some ways, over in others. While he can read at a highly advanced level, he is severely lacking in social skills as well as some motor skills, such as chewing and going up and down steps. He's fabulous with details, but doesn't get the overall context. He can recite facts with extraordinary recall but cannot relate to imaginative play. He insists on the literal at all times and cannot understand metaphor or make novel sentences. His sense of self cannot be expressed in language as there is no "I." But, he is so overly sensitive to the environment that loud sounds, textures, and tastes can overwhelm him and make him panic.

What is so beautiful about his story, though, is how his mother and father work so hard to intervene once they understand their son's problems. With a dedication beyond what you can imagine, they persevere in their own private work with him, therapies, the best schools to make him blossom. He makes incredible progress over the course of the book, finding his "I," making friends, playing the guitar, performing in school concerts, even to the point of creating his own poetry. You root for Benj all along the way and come to love this optimistic and buoyant boy, who expresses his love for his mother, his father, his brother and his grandmother with a depth and with words so moving they break your heart. Priscilla's joy becomes your own.

This is a story of maternal devotion that can serve as a model for all of us. 

The Incredible Lightness of Being and Its Dark Antecedents

I've been studying the neurobiology of mystical states for about 15 years, since a dear friend of mine believed she was channeling angels after her mother died. To get the background of all this, see my Web site www.carolebrooksplatt.com. It's been a very long and complicated quest since I had no background in science. I have studied language and literature all my life and have a Ph.D. in French.

Oddly, what seemed to pull it all together for me was the movie, "Amélie," that I saw for about the tenth time last night. The beginning of the movie is a long narration with clever, off-beat imagery about a strange little girl who will grow up to be the equally strange young woman in the movie.

The beginning of the movie shows her troubled childhood, a distant father (a doctor) who only touches her once a month to give her a physical examination. She's so excited by this rare contact that her heart beats furiously and he diagnoses a heart condition. Her mother, an obsessive compulsive, is struck down one day in front of a church by the falling body of a Canadian tourist who decides to end it all in her great leap.

Now we have a sad, angry, motherless child, with a distant father, who is friendless at school. Amélie lives under a dark cloud with sprinkles of fantasy that keep her alive and the most amazing visual imagination that carries through to adulthood.

One day, she takes a blind man by the arm and describes the everyday wonders of the Paris street where they walk and she leaves him off at the métro. As she walks away, she has an incredible sense of lightness, the air she breathes is freer, clearer, the flowers smell much sweeter and everything has a sense of wonder about it. After long suffering, she tips into the nirvana zone with open-hearted compassion and a mission to help others.

This awakening, this incredible lightness of being, this compensation for the trauma of her life up to that point made total sense to me after my years of research into mystical states of consciousness. But it was after sleeping on it and awakening that fresh ideas came to me this morning.

Andrew Newberg has used neuroimaging to see into the brains of Buddhist monks and praying nuns before and during their religious practices. Michael Persinger has used electromagnetic stimulation to the temporal lobes to produce a "God" experience and gave questionnaires to college students to find out what kinds of people are more likely to sense an invisible presence near them. Newberg ends up wondering if certain people are predisposed to have mystical experiences because of their brain circuitry or if their long practice makes it happen. Persinger believes it's an overaroused right hemisphere that does it, especially in people who are interested in creative writing or do it themselves.

I have come to believe that childhood trauma, like Amélie suffered, physically changes the brain, in line with the research of Allan Schore and others. Newberg doesn't take into account the deprivations that monks and nuns suffer as part of their vocation and Persinger doesn't take into account why certain people are more drawn in the first place to poetry and prose. His "God" helmet works best on people with either the circuitry or previously held beliefs that can allow it to happen. I suggest that a genetic predisposition to more right hemispheric dominance along with childhood trauma can lead to brain processing that favors both mysticism and the paranormal, along with novel, creative ideas, more visual imagery and poetic language.

The brain's complex, interconnecting networks, when synchronized, can confer great talents and insights, often feeling or sounding as though they come from someone or somewhere else. We are the authors of our ideas, our feelings, our creativity, but as a consequence of what precedes them, the combined resonances in the books we have read, the movies we've seen, the people we have talked to, all of which can recombine during the dark night, when our senses have shut down, then bursting into consciousness in the morning. The new thread of ideas is tenuous, though, likely to evaporate in the dream mist unless we write it down as quickly as possible.