What is it like to be a Bean?

Post Reply New Topic

In an attempt to get my friends and family to gain a better understanding of my son I penned an essay/blog post a few months ago entitled "What is it like to be a Bean?" Our nick name for our son is The Bean, the title of the post borrows from a philosophy paper I studied at university by Thomas Nagal (What is it like to be a bat?). In this paper Nagal posits that because a bat experiences the world in a way that is very different to humans then we will never be able to understand what it is actually like to see the world through a sense like echolocation. No matter how much we understand about bat brain structure the knowledge of "what it is like to be a bat" will always be missing. Thinking about this paper made me wonder if there was as similar disconnect between me and my own son? His brain is different to most peoples but is it so different that I will never know "what it is like to be a Bean?"

http://autisticbean.wordpress.com/what- ... be-a-bean/

I am continually trying to evolve my thinking on these matters. So if any of you care to read the essay and comment I would appreciate any insights from any autistic people here, or any NT's for that matter.

I like your essay. It is interesting. Although the first thing I thought of when I read the title was completely unrelated. I don't know if you've read the Ender series but one of the books, Shadow of the Giant, mentions autism. The main character in this book was not Ender, but his friend Bean. Bean was special because he had had an experiment done on him that made him really intelligent but also had quite an impact on his growth. The quote is "Right now, to be candid, it seems to be almost malicious on the part of nature, as if there were some law that the price for the unleashing of human intellect is either autism or giantism." The Bean in the book had giantism but I thought it interesting that the author included autism in that quote because it isn't mentioned anywhere else in any of the other books in the series.

Anyways, in regards to your actual essay, you made some interesting points. My repetitive behaviours are not so much lining things up but more along the lines of listening to the same song a hundred times in a row and/or reading the same book several times over. I think I do it because I like the predictability. I feel better when I know what is coming next and exactly when it is coming. Which leads to a bit of a problem with my being able to tell time because I can get extremely anxious if something doesn't happen the minute I expect it to happen. For example, if someone says they will pick me up at 6 but they come even a few minutes late, I will be stimming like crazy to calm myself down from 6:01 until they arrive.