A Reckoning With Anomaly and Ability

Four Caryatids at the Erechteum, Acropolis, Athens Greece

Source: Jebulon/Wikimedia Commons

When I was 16, the theater director Peter Sellars paid a visit to my English class in Austria. He is an unusual man who revels in his iconoclasm. He commanded our full attention. On the chalkboard, with r’s as involuted as an Ionic column, he lettered a phrase: “reversal and recognition.” This is Aristotle’s notion of peripeteia and anagnorisis, a juncture at which one sees the world as it is, usually in stark, ironic opposition to all that one once believed.

This idea tapped a dialectic calibrated to my narrative-hungry brain. “Reversal and recognition” was not just a plot device deployed by the Athenian tragedians, Aeschylus Sophocles and Euripedes. It was also, fittingly, the opposite of tragedy: a heuristic to make sense of life itself: a way to understand the minds that I met, the one that I inhabited, and the short life that I had lived thus far. The hand that one was dealt could be reframed in any direction. It could be re-conceptualized to emphasize the positive cards one held, or, more intriguingly, the positive qualities of mind one possessed that might not exist without a corresponding deficit. My adolescent struggles were recast in Grecian bronze; I had become stronger by enduring them.

So began a lifelong fascination with neurobiological trade-offs and the conditions under which they present. For two decades I've written about the overlap between ability and anomaly in various arenas, from psychologists or psychiatrists who have psychiatric diagnoses to the way that extreme cognitive styles set the stage for conditions including autism, schizophrenia and mathematical genius.

In the September print edition, author John Elder Robison considers that in his case, autism is both a deficit and a gift: “99 percent of the world’s problems may not require a mind like mine, but 1 percent do.” The cognitive scientist Joscha Bach both embraces and rails against the pursuit of happiness. And then there is Oscar, the pseudonymous 14-year-old who has struggled his entire life with ADHD and ODD (oppositional defiant disorder). One would be hard-pressed to articulate an upside to Oscar’s situation. He’s told his mother that he can’t have children of his own because he does not want to bequeath them a mind like his. Oscar and his family speak with courage and dignity about a set of circumstances that garner little public sympathy or support. We are a culture that goes to great lengths to protect and aid children, but those efforts come to an abrupt halt when the problematic behavior is directed outward at adults, instead of merely causing problems for the child. ODD, alas, does both in spades.

After that epiphany in English class, it took years of encounters with individuals whose minds defy easy summary, encounters with cases such as Oscar’s, and an understanding of scientific literature, for me to concede that nature does not cleave the mind elegantly. Evolution is a messy process of mutation and selective retention; there is no reason to expect an organism to possess strengths and special abilities because challenges also exist. Many conditions have little or no upside.

But I maintain a belief in a type of payoff, more existential than neurodevelopmental. Rumi said that “the broken place is where the light enters,” and in this sense there’s another way to think about behavioral anomalies, especially those that cause suffering. This upside proceeds from the connections between people and between the elements of one’s own narrative. A “different” cognitive operating system confers a degree of empathy for all who struggle with difference. And isn’t that ultimately each and every one of us?