In the first class of the semester, we were introduced to the concept of neurotypicality, and a simplified version of the perceptive reality of autistic people was offered to us. Since then, this idea of “chunking” stayed with me. He is a paraphrased version of what I got from it:
The neurotypical person apprehends reality by recognising objects,
persons, events (etc.) in his environment and automatically finding the
“appropriate” category to designate the subject. His understanding of the world
is highly classified and associative. Reality is divided into chunks that make
it easier to digest and understand.
The autistic, on the other hand, experiments
is environment through feelings, emotions and the exacerbation of his acute
senses. This way of navigating the world explains why it may take minutes for
an autistic person to recognize, for example, a chair, a face or the rain (Fall
Down, Higashida) in the way neurotypical people do.
Even knowing that this explication is only a simplified way of
understanding a complex situation, I can’t help but feel how binary it is. What
are the modalities of perception that exist between the chunk and the not-chunk? Are there different levels of
chunking? Can a neurotypical person go beyond the categorical understanding of
the chair and wonder about the way it
tastes or sounds, let’s say? What are the pathways that allow us to visit this place? (Unstrange Mind, Sparrow Jones)
Absolutely!
ReplyDeleteFor me there is no neurotypical person. Neurotypicality is a template, a tendency. The question is always - to what degree? What is lost on the assumptions of perception that tend toward the neurotypical?