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This American Life (NPR)-developmental disorders

Posted by Eddie Sylvano on May 19, 2003, at 10:56:21

Did anyone else happen to catch yesterday's "This American Life"? You can listen to it here: http://www.thislife.org/ra/207.ram
The show's focus was on people with developmental disorders. The first segment was an inspirational piece on mentally retarded people who produced a movie (among other things). It was nice. What interested me, however, were the last couple of segments about more emotionally disturbed individuals. One of the subjects was a 7 year old boy who suffers from a genetic defect, leaving him with a faulty heart, deformed brain, and rapid cycling bipolar disorder. The kid had it horrible! He would torture animals, destroy everything he could get his hands on, self-injure, became obsessed with death, black holes eating the universe, people being killed by evil ceiling fans. It just went on and on. This kid was totally, totally out of his own control, and darker than the back holes he obsessed about. It was an extremely sad story. Anyway, his mother finally decided one day that perhaps it wasn't her bad parenting causing this, and took him into a pdoc, who gave him Zyprexa. Surprise! He got better instantly, and his life is changed. The mother (and the NPR reporter) seemed flabbergasted by this.
The segement after this was about a 37 year old retarded man who had been doing relatively well until a couple of years ago, when he suddenly withdrew from everyone (quit his job, stopped activities, didn't talk much). The guy had such an unusual disorder at birth that it was named after him. Still, when this sudden change happened, everyone was mystified as to why. "What made him do this? What was he thinking?" was the question brought up throughout the segment. "We've asked him dozens of times." It never once occured to anyone that it *wasn't* a social event or decision on his part. Everyone in these stories looks for a personal reason for behavior; a rational motivation on the part of the person in question. So ingrained is the idea of volition in all forms of action that no one considered the idea that these people were damaged to the point that any semblance of volition is gone. These people aren't making decisions. They're an exaggeration of the processes that drive us all, and maybe we don't want to accept that. It makes total sense to me that our brains are automatic. There is no magical hand outside of the physical structure that is *us*, which makes decisions. We're all automatons in a sense, but very sophisticated ones. When the processes aren't working right, it becomes more obvious that we're our brains, and not vice versa. If the brain isn't working, neither are we. We're like HAL at the end of 2001, as Dave pulls out the modules and our simpler rules become manifest. I don't think people will ever accept this fact, much like we still cling to the idea that as a species, we're divinely exaulted with a soul. We're not special, we're just complex, and it's a convincing ontological illusion. Until we appeciate that fact, we're always going to be chasing ghosts in the machine as we attempt to understand ourselves and our problems.


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poster:Eddie Sylvano thread:227629
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