Thursday, October 26, 2006

Are we mentally disordered?

The “Rain Man” movie I saw recently gave a ray of curiosity on the peculiar psychological behavior exhibited by a character in that movie. This motivated me to investigate further into various psychological behaviors. In this article, I briefly outline my investigations and findings in this area.

Generally, society consists of individuals ranging from Autistic Savants to Associative types. Normally, individuals at the extreme psychological characteristics are very rare, and are ignored mostly. However, such peculiar behaviors are worth spotting because of their amazing mental capabilities. This article is specifically about them.

Autistic savants have peculiar mental disorder with extraordinary mental capabilities not found in common people. People showing extreme autism are considered as idiots/mad; they don't behave normally like most people do. They, in fact, are highly focused with tunnel vision on the events. That gives them an edge to have great photographic memory (can count the bunch of fallen match sticks in a glance). They can remember names of all the people they met, long string of numbers, random shuffled deck of cards, and also complex musical patterns. They can recall the things as fast as they remember them. Some savants have impressive mathematical abilities: multiplying 250 digit number and 157 digit number in few seconds and can perform many more complex arithmetic operations. However, possessing such abnormal talents bound to have lot of pressure from the society, as they are made to perform aggressively with their skills . Those incapable of dealing with it may fade away soon mostly by suicidal attempts. Finally, autistic people perform poorly in other aspects of life. And, they may not fare well in the areas where the normal behavior will suffice.

Those people fall between autism and normal band show exceptional talents/skills in one area and mediocre in other areas - e.g. Mozart (Musical genius). Society honors such people as they live normally and simultaneously perform exceptionally well in the area they are very much into. Recent research shows that savant skills can be temporarily acquired in a normal individual by disrupting left-front part of the brain – using magnetic stimulation.

On the other hand, extreme associative types perform complex associations of events which normal people feel difficult to think or even imagine about. They are considered as very creative as they develop great things motivated from a completely different thing one had never imagined before. For example: James watt built a steam engine by observing the lid flapping on a tea kettle. Einstein is a famous example of Associative type. One could find many such historic innovations happened by associating two different areas. Anything beyond creativity is mad. Some mad people do a random talk, though they are logical in their association of thoughts, normal people find it illogical. They some times frustrate people by change topics frequently during discussion. This is due to the fact that their brains have lot of associations than required. And every small incident may trigger multiple areas in their brain.

Many of us fall in some slice of the mental behavioral band. Anything abnormal is considered as a mental disorder. This might be due to the environmental factors we brought-up in. And also due to our diet nutritional content, parental care etc. Moreover, some of the psychological disorders occurred due to improper cell mutations during our birth process may influence the behavior of an individual's life. Each person is biologically different from others, and lives in his own illusion and perspective of the world. Perhaps, he is right in it! Each one of us has some mental disorderliness with a degree of variation from normal -- some are exceptionally good and some are tragically bad.

Finally, I would like to highlight few more points. Many of us might have heard about small kids (< 5 yrs) performing calendar arithmetic (What day of the week was Mar 29, 1981?). My question is: why such kids don’t become great executives, businessmen, or researchers later? The pity thing, many of us ignore, is such kids can only do calendar arithmetic! They are Autistic Savants. Parents failing to recognize this create misfortune to the kid. Secondly, our great human computer Shakuntala Devi can never become like a great mathematician Ramanujan. She can only perform fast arithmetic, unlike Ramanujan, who can build great theories over numbers.

Hope my article broadens the people’s thinking about great performers and non-performers in the world.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to my colleague for providing me useful insights.