Fascinating Strange And Wonderful

A truly gripping post at Lower Wisdom. The opener:

This post is more personal than normal, and very long. The current medical consensus is that autism is caused, in part, by a malfunction of the mirror neuron system. My personal experience growing up tends to support this theory.

I was born with an over-active empathy system. I would look at a person's face and feel exactly what that person was feeling. I couldn't inhibit it, so I was at the mercy of wherever my eyes landed. This was very stressful, and I spent a great deal of effort learning to avoid these involuntary empathies. I have many distinct memories of this learning process. For a young person, the easiest way to control my feelings was to control my eyes. I only looked at faces I could trust, and avoided the rest. Looking at faces was dangerous.

We grew up without a television. It was only when I was 16 that my mother explained why. When I was two years old, my parents had a TV. Apparently, some of the people on the TV would set me off, causing me to freak out inconsolably. My parents solved the problem by getting rid of the TV.

You'll definitely want to read the rest. To be honest, I might have been-- at least in my younger days-- one of those narcissistic teachers (referred to later in the post) who would have assumed that such behavior was directed personally at me. I'd like to think that I've changed, but I've never faced this sort of challenge as a teacher-- although I did come close re: a girl with Asperger's back in 2005, during my first or second semester at Sookdae. In that case, I didn't take the student's behavior personally, but I was initially surprised by it, having never dealt with it before.

My question to Mr. Allen, though, is whether he believes his empathic experiences truly reflect the interiority of the people whose faces he has beheld (and still beholds, since he seems able to switch his ability on and off). I ask, first, because plenty of Koreans consider themselves gifted with "nunchi"-- a sort of socially oriented percipience that's all about reading faces and situations, and responding to them accordingly. I tend to think that the proportion of "nunchi"-blessed Koreans isn't as high as Koreans think it is. What's really happening, in many cases, isn't veridical perception so much as a "reading into." This is most apparent in intercultural situations, where Koreans "think" they know what the foreigner is thinking, but in fact are off the mark-- sometimes by a substantial margin.

I also wonder about this ability because of what Mr. Allen writes later in his post: he recalls feeling empathy for cartoon characters. To me-- and I truly mean no offense by this, because I'm trying to be as clinical as I can, here-- this indicates an inability (during Mr. Allen's childhood, but not now) to separate reality from fantasy, and calls into question whether a person can really "look at a person's face and feel exactly what that person [is] feeling."

I'm not discounting the possibility of such empathy; in fact, at the risk of sounding condescending, I think it "is" possible to be super-empathic. It would be inconsistent of me to write a post about how the similarities of our internal wiring point to the idea that we experience the world in very similar ways, and then to turn around and question whether super-empathy is possible.

But the question remains, and I ask it out of personal curiosity: to what extent does such a level of empathy lead to veridical insights about others' interiority?



Origin: pickup-techniques.blogspot.com