'One's own world'

IN A PREVIOUS column I wrote about special children, kids who require more intensive care than usual from the family and other caregivers because the child's physical or mental development may be "slower" than usual. I've put "slower" in quotation marks because the term can be relative. The efforts to understand special children have spurred research in genetics, neurology, developmental psychology, with findings that should make us question our definitions about what is "normal."

Let's take autism as a starting point for discussions. The medical reference Merck Manual defines autism as "a disorder in which a young child can't develop normal social relationships, behaves in compulsive and ritualistic ways, and usually fails to develop normal intelligence."

In extreme cases, a person with autism completely cuts himself (most cases of autism involve males) off from the world, compulsively pursuing particular interests and sometimes exhibiting amazing skills in a specific field, for example, painting, music or numbers. The term "idiot savant" has sometimes been used to describe autistic people with outstanding skills, for example, performing very complex mathematical operations without pen and paper.

Dustin Hoffman played a person with autism in "The Rain Man," showing how an autistic person can reach adulthood and function fairly well, but also sometimes infuriating people around them when they go into one of their compulsive phases, for example, memorizing phone numbers or addresses in a directory.

What's interesting is that researchers are now wondering if autism is part of a continuum of conditions that one would refer to as being a nerd or geek, people who you have to drag away from their books and computers.

A condition called Asperger Syndrome may be part of this continuum. People with this syndrome, like the autistic, are unable to read the human face and its emotions. Like the autistic, they exhibit compulsive behavior. Lawrence Osborne writes about the syndrome in his book "American Normal," describing children who would memorize entire TV shows word for word, or the address, phone number and zip code of every member of the US Congress.

Osborne describes people with Asperger Syndrome as possibly a form of "high-functioning autism." Unlike the autistic, people with Asperger Syndrome score very well in intelligence tests. Osborne names Albert Einstein, Thomas Jefferson, the composer Bela Bartok and even Microsoft magnate Bill Gates as possibly having Asperger's.

Without doubt, there are many Filipino children with autism, or Asperger's, but many will be labeled "weird" or worse, "retarded" and "mentally unbalanced" because they are born into families without access to information about these conditions.

The labels of "normal" and "abnormal" are relative, almost arbitrary. Time magazine recently featured child prodigies and, when you think about it, there may be societies, including our own, where a child may be seen as abnormal, too, simply because he or she is "too bright."

Given this possible continuum of "geeky" conditions, we begin now to ask what exactly is "normal."

Tagalog offers us the phrase "may sariling mundo" (having one's own world) as a more appropriate description of these conditions. Having one's own world defies comparisons and labels of normal and abnormal.

In evolutionary terms, one can see that "geeky" conditions may in fact have been necessary for humanity to survive. I often wonder if perhaps it was Stone Age geeks -- the autistic and Aspergers included -- who discovered fire, or made the first tools or cave paintings. While our other "normal" ancestors were busy partying and having a good time, it was the geeks and nerds who would, with their own little worlds, go off staring at the stones and seeing a possible tool in them.

It's these geeks who make the world run, facts and figures dancing in their heads as they retreat into the laboratories that are their world. We usually think of geeks mainly as absent-minded scientists, but I am certain that among artists, there are many "high-functioning autistics" as well, people who see and hear differently, and are therefore able to produce those awesome paintings and symphonies and books. Why, sometimes (okay, often), I think many writers (throw in an occasional columnist) are probably high-functioning autistics, too.

Most geeks eventually adapt to society and the world. Special children are seen as more "difficult" because they resist the world. Yet even among these special kids, you'll find they're perhaps not that "abnormal," at least in relation to other children. I get stories all the time from parents of special children about how younger siblings seem to bond so well with an elder brother or sister with Down's Syndrome, autism, or one of the other developmental "disorders."

I am certain this is because young children have not picked up biases about what's normal and what's not. After all, all children have their own worlds but learn to leave those worlds behind early in life. Sadly, becoming "normal" also often includes an acquisition of social prejudices, shunning others who are "different" and stay in their own worlds.

It may not be enough to just care for special children. As we become more enlightened, integrating them into society, we might discover more about what it means to be human. In living with special children or special adults, we learn not just to be tolerant of differences among people, but to tap into, and marvel at, the diversity of ways in which humans make sense of the world around us.