A Transparent Enigma
At 7 A.M. in a nondescript apartment in Hollywood, Calif., Tito Mukhopadhyay is hunched over his breakfast bowl, spooning milk and cereal into his mouth. His eyes flit around and his hand shakes. When he is finished, his mother, Soma Mukhopadhyay, pulls him off the chair and manhandles him into the shower, dashing in from time to time when he yells for assistance. Finally Tito emerges, dressed, to bend over Soma’s tiny frame so she can comb his thick black hair. Abruptly he charges out the door and half-walks, half-runs down the hallways until he is outside. Golden sunshine on his face, he flaps and spins his hands with absorption.
Later I ask him: “Would you like to be normal?” In rough but legible script, he scrawls: “Why should I be Dick and not Tito?”
At 15, Tito displays all the signs of classic “low-functioning” autism. Years ago in India, a doctor told his parents that the boy could not understand what was happening around him. “‘I understand very well,’ said the spirit in the boy,” he related in The Mind Tree, a book he penned between the ages of eight and 12. (Tito typically refers to himself in the third person.) Indeed, he wrote about having two distinct selves: a “thinking self—which was filled with learnings and feelings” and an “acting self” that was “weird and full of actions” occurring independently of his thoughts.
Autistic intelligence varies widely, from severe retardation to savant syndrome. Tito combines extreme neurological disability with an ability to write—and so can tell the world of a bizarre internal condition.
Wanting to talk, Tito once stood before a mirror pleading for his mouth to move. “All his image did was stare back,” he wrote. Parents often take an autistic’s unresponsiveness to be stubbornness; Tito’s writings dispel that notion. He has trouble moving his muscles at will, and now he speaks in barely intelligible grunts that his mother must often translate. He “saw himself as a hand or as a leg and would turn around to assemble his parts to the whole,” Tito explains of another typical activity, rotation. Spinning his hands helps him to become more aware of bodily sensations.
Conflicting and overwhelming sensory input seems to beset autistics, who respond by shutting off one or another sense at a time, notes neurologist Yorram S. Bonneh of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. Tito, for instance, routinely fails to hear and see someone at the same time and so avoids eye contact—a defining characteristic of autism. In 2001 Bonneh and others found that if Tito was presented with a bright red flash and a simultaneous voice saying “blue,” he responded, “I saw blue” or “I am confused.” He turned out to have a hierarchy of senses: hearing overrode vision, and both extinguished touch. Sometimes he could feel nothing at all with his fingers. Such startling effects as he displayed had hitherto remained hidden, for a low-functioning autistic does not normally cooperate with experimenters.
All the interfering signals lead to “a fragmented world perceived through isolated sense organs,” Tito has written. He comprehends the world by reading or when his mother reads aloud to him—physics, biology, poetry. “It is because of my learning of books, that I could tell that the environment was made of trees and air, living and nonliving, this and that,” he wrote.
Born in India, Tito learned to communicate through his mother’s unrelenting efforts. Living alone with her son in Indian cities that boasted autism specialists (Tito’s father worked in a distant town), Soma Mukhopadhyay, who is trained as a chemist and educator, tried every imaginable trick to get her strange child to respond. When one expert said Tito was retarded, she cried bitter tears and went to a different doctor. Her first success with Tito came after she found him staring at a calendar; she pointed at the numbers, saying them out loud. In one heady week before the age of four, Tito learned to add and subtract numbers and compose words by pointing to numbers and letters written on a board.
Because experts suspected Soma to be cueing Tito, she taught him to write. She tied a pencil to his hand and forced it to trace the alphabet until he could do it alone. Still, she observes him with profound intensity and snaps her fingers the moment Tito’s thoughts stray—which is all the time during my visit. He seems to be beset by random neural firings. If she didn’t intervene, Soma explains, he would write words from a different sentence in the middle of one he had already started.
“The fidelity of the method will be very, very difficult to replicate,” predicts Richard Mills of the National Autistic Society in London, who met Tito in Bangalore and introduced him to the Western world. Soma now works with several children in Los Angeles, using her so-called rapid prompting method, reportedly with spectacular success. She communicates using whichever sensory channel is open in a child, and he or she responds by pointing to letters or pictures. Often she enables the pointing by touching a hand or shoulder (according to Tito, touching allows a child to feel the body part and so control it), and she cuts off stray thoughts. Unfortunately, Mills points out, autism is bedeviled by claims of treatments that eventually evaporate, and Soma’s method has yet to be scientifically validated.
Even if they can communicate, few autistics are likely to reveal personae anywhere as complex as Tito’s. One day, he wrote, things become transparent: “A transparent room, then a transparent ceiling . . . and a transparent reflection of myself showing only the rainbow colours of my heart.” Experts long believed that autistics lack imagination and introspection. Lorna Wing, also at the National Autistic Society, explains that these qualities are in fact present but impaired—autistics tend to be uninterested in and unempathetic with others.
A popular theory, championed by Uta Frith of the Medical Research Council in London, holds that autistics lack an intuitive “theory of mind”—that is, they cannot automatically perceive what someone else is thinking. Not “getting” deception or nuance, they are straitlaced and humorless. Temple Grandin of the University of Illinois, for instance, is a high-functioning autistic whose phenomenal ability to visualize and to empathize with cows allowed her to design more humane slaughterhouses. In her fascinating book Thinking in Pictures, Grandin notes that she can comprehend others and even deceive people. Nevertheless, her understanding comes with sustained intellectual effort: she studies people as primatologists study chimpanzees.
Grandin’s book reads as if she were part robot—Tito’s, on the other hand, reads as if he were an unusually creative and perceptive child, albeit one to whom very odd things happen. The “theory of mind” idea fails to apply to Tito, states Michael Merzenich of the University of California at San Francisco. Wing counters that those who use language with ease, as Tito does, indeed perform well on tests of the theory of mind. But even Tito, she argues, has trouble applying his theory of mind to behave appropriately in complex social situations.
During an evening drive to the beach, the conversation somehow turns to Darwin. “You should say autistics are the most evolved of humans,” Tito opines. “It is a recent mutation.” I protest, startled at such a claim. “Just making fun. Can’t I make fun?” he replies abruptly—it was I who didn’t get it. After a while he adds that in my story I should “put the fun part, because it tells [about] the theory of mind.”
The beach is chilly, breezy and dark, but Tito strides ahead. After calling to him to stop, his mother rolls up his trouser legs. He enjoys “the water, the sound and the air” at the beach, he later explains. “I always like the air.” Facing the vast black ocean, Tito stands alone, bare toes dipped into the sand and surf, hands spinning and flapping.
--Originally published: Scientific American 290, 49-50. (June 2004)