03-05-2006, 08:19 PM
Kamran Nazeer is neither idiot, nor genius. And the same goes for the other 'problem kids' he went to school with in New York, and who he recently tracked down for his moving memoir about living with autism
Phil Hogan
Sunday March 5, 2006
The Observer
Kamran Nazeer is autistic, though you wouldn't know it. He doesn't fill his days taking photographs of electricity pylons or reciting the 767 times table. He couldn't draw an uncanny likeness of Rouen cathedral after seeing it once from the window of a fast-moving train. Though cases of 'autistic savants' are well documented, one gets the sense from Nazeer's hopeful and honest book, Send in the Idiots, that he has little patience for the cliches of autism, born of our appetite for human freakishness and nurtured in recent times by movies such as Rain Man, Forrest Gump and Snowcake, a new film shown last month at the Berlin film festival with Sigourney Weaver as an autistic woman who eats snow and enjoys trampolining. Even so, I can't stop myself asking him, when we meet for morning coffee in a London club, if he has any extreme hobbies.
He laughs. 'I don't think so.'
'Obsessive tidiness?' I ask.
'I am odd about little things,' he says. 'Like there was a drop of water on the table just now, which I cleaned off. I do things like that a lot. I'll probably keep moving this cup around, because I'll want to get that bit in the right place.'
That's more like it, though not very startling. In the introduction to his book, recalling the pioneering autism unit of the school he attended in New York, we see a glimpse of him as a four-year-old amid his peers, clinging to the safety of his favourite white stripe on the classroom rug.
The succeeding chapters move to more recent times, tracking down those former schoolfellows to find out where they ended up. We meet Andre, a computer scientist who communicates his vexed thoughts through a collection of handmade puppets; and there's Randall, a city courier who, traffic allowing, cycles his route with his eyes closed; and Craig, chief disrupter of those infant classes back in New York, now a political speechwriter in Washington whose big problem is forming lasting relationships. One, Elizabeth, committed suicide after developing further psychiatric conditions.
But I suggest that in foregrounding these lives, fascinating as they are, Nazeer's own has been pushed to the margins. Was this a conscious decision? 'It just seemed a natural thing to write about,' he says. 'And when I started going back and meeting these people, their stories were so compelling, it was irresistible. It was only when I finished writing the book that I realised that there wasn't as much of me in it as I'd expected.'
Today, Nazeer, at 28, is a Whitehall civil servant, a policy adviser. Obviously something went right. He is softly spoken, but not diffident; forthcoming, but also receptive; amusing and readily amused; friendly and befriendable. Most important, he is fluent in the give and take of conversation, the spark of reciprocation that for most of us illuminates our social dealings but which remains the central mystery to those affected by a disorder often described as 'mind blindness' - an inability to intuit what someone else might be thinking or feeling. Indeed, the prevailing orthodoxy based on experiments suggests that severely affected children are unaware that other people have minds at all.
On both points, Nazeer is sceptical, arguing that autistic children may suffer from 'test anxiety' and start learning to 'second guess' examiners; also that non-autistic three-year-olds fare little better in tests. 'And,' he says, 'none of us has direct insight of someone else's feelings. We don't know when someone is in pain. We think they are in pain because we see them react. Autistic people don't pick up on those cues. It's not that they are incapable. They might be noticing instead the pattern of coals in the fireplace or the details on the lamp and so on.'
It's the attention to detail that slows you down, he says. To the tormented souls at the dark end of the autism spectrum, everything is detail. They lack category awareness. They can't see the wood for the trees, or the trees for the bark, or the bark for the wavy lines. Their minds are so consumed by the struggle to take meaning from life's blizzard of information that what other people are up to is of no more consequence than the movement of the planets.
And yes, though further down the line from these random fixations of autism (the repetitive behaviour, the lining things up, the ritual counting), we might more happily discover astonishing feats of memory and musical prowess. The occupants at both extremes are driven by the same pursuit of rules, form, order and sequence.
Once you accept that, you must accept that distinctions of 'dysfunctionality' and 'giftedness' are measured only by how they happen to fall on the scale of social usefulness. For autistic people of all stripes, chiselling away at something until shapes start to appear is a way of getting a handle on the world or at least of creating a space to inhabit.
But to speak in terms of madness or genius is to put autism beyond the scope of human agency and therefore to deny the possibility of change. As Nazeer puts it: 'This idea that they live in another world is quite pernicious. And just not true. They don't want to live in another world. They want to have conversations, they want to be involved in politics, they want to do the things everybody else does. There are pressure groups that believe autism is a special way of life and that when people try to treat autism, what they're doing is obliterating this specialness. But I dislike this sentimental idea that autistic people are somehow unreachable and that they should stay that way. Why should they?'
So, I ask, how was he reached?
It was no miracle. He followed the programme at his school. There was therapy and child psychologists. His parents helped, not just by working with educational tapes and other materials, but by refusing to put him under pressure. In the book, he recalls them once simply allowing him to wander about in the garden for two or three days instead of going to class. 'They were cool,' he says. 'They were pretty young when they had me. My mum was 21. They'd just moved to New York. They were just having a good time and suddenly they had a kid - and a problem kid, who doesn't talk, doesn't like being round other people, who likes to go and sit in the corner of the room. We had this apartment with laminated floors and I used to slide into the wall and bruise myself quite badly. So yes, they did incredibly well.'
Eventually, the family moved from New York to Jeddah (his father, Pakistani-born, was a banker) and finally to Glasgow, where, at the age of 16, Nazeer studied law at university (he also has a PhD from Cambridge). When he was growing up, the family would always sit down every evening and have long conversations, not about 'feelings', though, but politics or culture.
'That was a very explicit thing they decided to do, especially because of my problems. They knew that was an important thing for me to learn. It was never a threatening occasion. I think if it had always been about school - did you have a hard time today and so on - I would have felt awkward.'
He still finds talking about his feelings 'artificial'. He describes himself as 'analytical', drawn more to argument than affinity.
I can think of no better question than to ask him about 9/11. What was his first response to the horror in his old home town that day? Could he imagine the people trapped in the buildings?
He thinks hard. 'This is going to make me feel like a bad person. I wasn't thinking about the people in the buildings. My first response was what's this going to mean in geopolitical terms? I was thinking, here's a list of people who might have done it, here's what the consequences will be. The first time I had an emotional response was several days later when I heard about the people jumping to avoid being burnt.'
But improvement is ongoing, an arc of progress. Autism isn't curable, but things can be worked on. 'Raising my voice is still something I find very difficult to do,' he says. 'And I have to force myself to make eye contact.'
He copes well with most situations. In his book, he writes about the importance of finding 'local coherence', which is how psychologists describe the everyday strategies - a quirk, a familiar activity - that autistic people use to maintain focus, to avoid being distracted by the details. At the higher end of the spectrum, this might mean nothing more than having something to twiddle with (Nazeer favours a crocodile clip, though he doesn't have it with him today). Other situations require other strategies. If he's going to a pub, say, to meet new people - friends of friends - he might pause for a moment outside, pretending to make a phone call while he mentally prepares himself for entry.
He says he doesn't mind meeting new people, though, and that, if anything, he tends to overcompensate in his efforts not to leave them stranded in awkward silences. That sounds suspiciously like empathy. Not quite, he says. 'It's more that I worry that people will think less of me or feel more anxious around me because I'm autistic. I don't want that to be a factor, so I talk to make them feel comfortable.'
Despite his protestations, it strikes me that we should all be so socially maladroit. It doesn't seem possible that Nazeer's achievement is a trick - that what we call intuition can be reduced for the purpose of analysis to a molecular state and then rebuilt as a functioning model. And yet it works. The boy who used to run into the furniture is telling government ministers how to run the country.
Does he think of himself as a person with problems?
'Well, I'm just publishing my first book. I have a pretty nice job. I have a great girlfriend...'
He smiles and shrugs. Which seems to say it all.
Phil Hogan
Sunday March 5, 2006
The Observer
Kamran Nazeer is autistic, though you wouldn't know it. He doesn't fill his days taking photographs of electricity pylons or reciting the 767 times table. He couldn't draw an uncanny likeness of Rouen cathedral after seeing it once from the window of a fast-moving train. Though cases of 'autistic savants' are well documented, one gets the sense from Nazeer's hopeful and honest book, Send in the Idiots, that he has little patience for the cliches of autism, born of our appetite for human freakishness and nurtured in recent times by movies such as Rain Man, Forrest Gump and Snowcake, a new film shown last month at the Berlin film festival with Sigourney Weaver as an autistic woman who eats snow and enjoys trampolining. Even so, I can't stop myself asking him, when we meet for morning coffee in a London club, if he has any extreme hobbies.
He laughs. 'I don't think so.'
'Obsessive tidiness?' I ask.
'I am odd about little things,' he says. 'Like there was a drop of water on the table just now, which I cleaned off. I do things like that a lot. I'll probably keep moving this cup around, because I'll want to get that bit in the right place.'
That's more like it, though not very startling. In the introduction to his book, recalling the pioneering autism unit of the school he attended in New York, we see a glimpse of him as a four-year-old amid his peers, clinging to the safety of his favourite white stripe on the classroom rug.
The succeeding chapters move to more recent times, tracking down those former schoolfellows to find out where they ended up. We meet Andre, a computer scientist who communicates his vexed thoughts through a collection of handmade puppets; and there's Randall, a city courier who, traffic allowing, cycles his route with his eyes closed; and Craig, chief disrupter of those infant classes back in New York, now a political speechwriter in Washington whose big problem is forming lasting relationships. One, Elizabeth, committed suicide after developing further psychiatric conditions.
But I suggest that in foregrounding these lives, fascinating as they are, Nazeer's own has been pushed to the margins. Was this a conscious decision? 'It just seemed a natural thing to write about,' he says. 'And when I started going back and meeting these people, their stories were so compelling, it was irresistible. It was only when I finished writing the book that I realised that there wasn't as much of me in it as I'd expected.'
Today, Nazeer, at 28, is a Whitehall civil servant, a policy adviser. Obviously something went right. He is softly spoken, but not diffident; forthcoming, but also receptive; amusing and readily amused; friendly and befriendable. Most important, he is fluent in the give and take of conversation, the spark of reciprocation that for most of us illuminates our social dealings but which remains the central mystery to those affected by a disorder often described as 'mind blindness' - an inability to intuit what someone else might be thinking or feeling. Indeed, the prevailing orthodoxy based on experiments suggests that severely affected children are unaware that other people have minds at all.
On both points, Nazeer is sceptical, arguing that autistic children may suffer from 'test anxiety' and start learning to 'second guess' examiners; also that non-autistic three-year-olds fare little better in tests. 'And,' he says, 'none of us has direct insight of someone else's feelings. We don't know when someone is in pain. We think they are in pain because we see them react. Autistic people don't pick up on those cues. It's not that they are incapable. They might be noticing instead the pattern of coals in the fireplace or the details on the lamp and so on.'
It's the attention to detail that slows you down, he says. To the tormented souls at the dark end of the autism spectrum, everything is detail. They lack category awareness. They can't see the wood for the trees, or the trees for the bark, or the bark for the wavy lines. Their minds are so consumed by the struggle to take meaning from life's blizzard of information that what other people are up to is of no more consequence than the movement of the planets.
And yes, though further down the line from these random fixations of autism (the repetitive behaviour, the lining things up, the ritual counting), we might more happily discover astonishing feats of memory and musical prowess. The occupants at both extremes are driven by the same pursuit of rules, form, order and sequence.
Once you accept that, you must accept that distinctions of 'dysfunctionality' and 'giftedness' are measured only by how they happen to fall on the scale of social usefulness. For autistic people of all stripes, chiselling away at something until shapes start to appear is a way of getting a handle on the world or at least of creating a space to inhabit.
But to speak in terms of madness or genius is to put autism beyond the scope of human agency and therefore to deny the possibility of change. As Nazeer puts it: 'This idea that they live in another world is quite pernicious. And just not true. They don't want to live in another world. They want to have conversations, they want to be involved in politics, they want to do the things everybody else does. There are pressure groups that believe autism is a special way of life and that when people try to treat autism, what they're doing is obliterating this specialness. But I dislike this sentimental idea that autistic people are somehow unreachable and that they should stay that way. Why should they?'
So, I ask, how was he reached?
It was no miracle. He followed the programme at his school. There was therapy and child psychologists. His parents helped, not just by working with educational tapes and other materials, but by refusing to put him under pressure. In the book, he recalls them once simply allowing him to wander about in the garden for two or three days instead of going to class. 'They were cool,' he says. 'They were pretty young when they had me. My mum was 21. They'd just moved to New York. They were just having a good time and suddenly they had a kid - and a problem kid, who doesn't talk, doesn't like being round other people, who likes to go and sit in the corner of the room. We had this apartment with laminated floors and I used to slide into the wall and bruise myself quite badly. So yes, they did incredibly well.'
Eventually, the family moved from New York to Jeddah (his father, Pakistani-born, was a banker) and finally to Glasgow, where, at the age of 16, Nazeer studied law at university (he also has a PhD from Cambridge). When he was growing up, the family would always sit down every evening and have long conversations, not about 'feelings', though, but politics or culture.
'That was a very explicit thing they decided to do, especially because of my problems. They knew that was an important thing for me to learn. It was never a threatening occasion. I think if it had always been about school - did you have a hard time today and so on - I would have felt awkward.'
He still finds talking about his feelings 'artificial'. He describes himself as 'analytical', drawn more to argument than affinity.
I can think of no better question than to ask him about 9/11. What was his first response to the horror in his old home town that day? Could he imagine the people trapped in the buildings?
He thinks hard. 'This is going to make me feel like a bad person. I wasn't thinking about the people in the buildings. My first response was what's this going to mean in geopolitical terms? I was thinking, here's a list of people who might have done it, here's what the consequences will be. The first time I had an emotional response was several days later when I heard about the people jumping to avoid being burnt.'
But improvement is ongoing, an arc of progress. Autism isn't curable, but things can be worked on. 'Raising my voice is still something I find very difficult to do,' he says. 'And I have to force myself to make eye contact.'
He copes well with most situations. In his book, he writes about the importance of finding 'local coherence', which is how psychologists describe the everyday strategies - a quirk, a familiar activity - that autistic people use to maintain focus, to avoid being distracted by the details. At the higher end of the spectrum, this might mean nothing more than having something to twiddle with (Nazeer favours a crocodile clip, though he doesn't have it with him today). Other situations require other strategies. If he's going to a pub, say, to meet new people - friends of friends - he might pause for a moment outside, pretending to make a phone call while he mentally prepares himself for entry.
He says he doesn't mind meeting new people, though, and that, if anything, he tends to overcompensate in his efforts not to leave them stranded in awkward silences. That sounds suspiciously like empathy. Not quite, he says. 'It's more that I worry that people will think less of me or feel more anxious around me because I'm autistic. I don't want that to be a factor, so I talk to make them feel comfortable.'
Despite his protestations, it strikes me that we should all be so socially maladroit. It doesn't seem possible that Nazeer's achievement is a trick - that what we call intuition can be reduced for the purpose of analysis to a molecular state and then rebuilt as a functioning model. And yet it works. The boy who used to run into the furniture is telling government ministers how to run the country.
Does he think of himself as a person with problems?
'Well, I'm just publishing my first book. I have a pretty nice job. I have a great girlfriend...'
He smiles and shrugs. Which seems to say it all.