Monthly Archives: October 2013

What are “intellect” and “instinct”?

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I named this blog based on a Hans Asperger quote:

Normal children acquire the necessary social habits without being consciously aware of them, they learn instinctively. It is these instinctive relations that are disturbed in autistic children. Social adaptation has to proceed via the intellect.

Other than the loaded language, this “sounds right” to me for my family’s particular experience of autism. But I’m not sure how to translate it into a precise, testable idea.

Countless different intuitions, scientific terms, and research results may relate. Here are some of the words I’ve discovered so far:

  • Intellect vs. instinct
  • “Book smarts” vs. “social/street smarts”
  • Conscious vs. unconscious
  • Explicit vs. implicit
  • By teaching vs. by osmosis
  • Systemizing vs. not-systemizing
  • Autism vs. schizotypy
  • Executive attention vs. default network
  • Denotation vs. connotation
  • Symbolic vs. indexical
  • Nonsocial vs. social
  • Left brain vs. right brain
  • Analytical vs. intuitive
  • Head vs. heart
  • Mind vs. body
  • Critical vs. generative thinking
  • Know-what vs. know-how
  • Thinking vs. doing
  • Explaining vs. practicing
  • Slow/system-2 vs. fast/system-1 thinking
  • Conscious choices vs. habit
  • Formal vs. tacit knowledge
  • Declarative vs. procedural memory
  • Modular vs. unstructured mental lexicon (from “The Hyper-Modular Associative Mind“, Kennett, Gold, and Faust, 2015)

It’s striking how many scientists, artists, and philosophers mention this dimension (or these dimensions) of human variation. And it’s striking how many different words there are in the list — which of them are the “right” words? How many would we need in a complete, but parsimonious, theory? Surely not all of them?

Some questions I can’t answer:

  • How can we describe this in a way that’s measurable, valid, and corresponds to physical (neurological) phenomena? What is this trait, or what are these multiple traits — if anything at all? Perhaps we’re looking at an appealing “folk” theory with no empirical substance?
  • Does this trait have anything to do with autism? How about to some of the autisms?

If you have good pointers on where to dig deeper, I would love to hear from you.

Many of the terms in my list above come from a particular intellectual source or tradition (though I mixed in some everyday words with the technical words).

I’d like to go through and give background on some of these, but it’s too much for one blog post, so I’ll save it.

Typically, books and papers referring to one of the terms in the list above do not mention the others. Often I think researchers are unaware of other potentially-relevant research.

Where am I coming from?

Long ago somewhere I can’t remember, I read a discussion of knowing what vs. knowing how. The author’s thought experiment was about walking. Imagine walking with conscious planning, thinking consciously about each muscle and movement involved. Attempting to do this makes us terrible at walking.

When I find myself struggling with social or motor skills, this is the feeling. My impression of my son is the same. Rather than trying something, playing, experimenting he wants the system first. First organize and analyze it, then carefully and cautiously we might try it.

A simple example. There’s a curriculum for writing called Handwriting Without Tears. Despite teaching himself to read when barely 2, my son refused to even try to write. Then someone showed him this curriculum in which letters are broken down into three named categories according to how you write them; and then each letter has numbered strokes to be done in sequence. Suddenly my son was interested in writing. He approached it by first memorizing the whole Handwriting Without Tears system, and only then was he willing to try to write. I believe this is not how most 3-year-olds work, but this is how he works.

It was very clear at age 2 that my son found memorizing organized information (and reviewing the memorized info) highly pleasurable. It’s his fun. And the same trait is evident in me and my father. Together with that, we seem to be indifferent to “play” in the usual sense. Before becoming a parent, I had no idea that these preferences appeared so early in life.

Research tells us that practice makes perfect, and that it’s useless or even harmful to be able to explain an action, vs. simply doing it. Moreover it’s exhausting. Conscious decision-making uses up resources in ways that autopilot actions do not. When introverts say social interaction “drains their energy,” could it have to do with a higher degree of conscious work?

But it’s not always a weakness. Imagine trying to program a computer to walk, or imagine a research scientist studying muscles. The same “overthinking” that makes one terrible at walking might make one pretty good at those tasks.

In everyday contexts “intellect” may be crippling pedantry, bogged down in irrelevant detail. In other contexts, an immersion in detail, combined with explicit reasoning from first principles, may be vital to understanding reality. Received wisdom, groupthink, and intuitive judgments often turn out to be flawed. Somebody has to go back and “think slowly” and figure it out.

One simple study (“Children with autism do not overimitate”) had to do with children copying “unnecessary” or “silly” actions. Given a demonstration by an adult, autistic kids would edit out pointless steps in the demonstrated procedure. Think about what’s required to do this: the procedure has to be reconstructed from first principles to edit the silly out. The autistic kids didn’t take someone’s word for it, they wanted to start over. (This study would be so much better if it went beyond “correlation with autism”.)

Even if we found that autism correlated with some measure of “intellect vs. instinct,” we wouldn’t know that this difference “was” autism; it could be a secondary effect. For example, humans seem to have an innate “reward system” encouraging them to practice through play (creating instinctive knowledge). A difference in relative reward from intellectual vs. instinctive activity could start a feedback loop leading to different levels of skill. Differences in relative reward could in turn have many causes… decreased enjoyment of play, increased enjoyment of intellectual systems, sensory aversives, who knows.

Some autistics describe experiences that seem similar to mine, for example I identified with Luna Lindsey’s post on reticulating splines. But many others focus more on sensory overload and anxiety, something I don’t identify with as much. More evidence that we need to talk about autisms, not a single autism.

Feedback loops, introversion, and autism

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In this article, Scott Barry Kaufman looks at a new study which may show evidence for intelligence as a feedback loop:

The researchers argue that their findings are best understood in terms of genotype-environment covariance, in which cognitive abilities and knowledge dynamically feed off each other. Those with a proclivity to engage in cognitive complexity will tend to seek out intellectually demanding environments. As they develop higher levels of cognitive ability, they will also tend to achieve relatively higher levels of knowledge. More knowledge will make it more likely that they will eventually end up in more cognitively demanding environments, which will facilitate the development of an even wider range of knowledge and skills. According to Kees-Jan Kan and colleagues, societal demands influence the development and interaction of multiple cognitive abilities and knowledge, thus causing positive correlations among each other, and giving rise to the general intelligence factor.

Scott talks about “Matthew effects” in his book,

… named for the biblical aphorism “For to him who has shall be given and he shall have abundance; but from him who does not have, even that which he has shall be taken away (Matthew 25:29).

The environment can take even a tiny genetic or environmental advantage and “multiply” it again and again as such interactions are reiterated through the course of one’s development. The other side of the coin is also possible, of course. A slight genetic or environmental disadvantage can lead a youngster to avoid situations where that difficulty would be revealed. Yet those are precisely the situations that would enable the child to practice the task and make up for the disadvantage. Instead, the child misses the boat while peers sail off ahead.

Often, we might attribute too much to innate traits rather than feedback loops and skill development, leading to a fixed rather than growth mindset. Let’s think about this beyond IQ, in the context of personality and autism.

For example, I would consider myself introverted, often defined as someone who loses energy during social interaction. Is this a fixed personality trait, or could it be a skills issue? What feedback loops might amplify avoidance of social interaction?

I “flunked” the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. As a child (like my son) I avoided the other preschoolers and didn’t practice interacting with them, which I believe contributed to social incompetence later on. Once I decided maybe I should talk to a peer, in elementary school perhaps, I sucked at it.

Eventually (young adulthood?) other people mostly plateaued on social skills and I sort of caught up… especially in professional contexts where I’ve had many chances to practice.

In personal friendship contexts, I haven’t caught up to the average person, and so far I’m not willing to do the enormous amount of work I believe I’d have to do to catch up. Not to mention the embarrassment and anxiety.

According to the mind in the eyes test, I still don’t know what people’s facial expressions mean, and in conversations I’m trying to figure out what the hell is going on when (I guess) others are not. (This is sort of like being colorblind; you can’t tell there’s an issue without comparing to others or taking a test.)

How much of the “introversion” may be due to someone working harder due to poor skills — working harder leading to loss of “energy” and no rewarding feeling of “flow”? To what extent are poor interaction skills from a lack of practice rather than innate difference?

I certainly believe in innate difference; I watched how my own son’s temperament was baked in from a very early age, and saw how his temperament led to avoiding peers. Most parents can relate.

But we’ve also seen that intensive early intervention works. We’ve asked our son to practice interacting over and over and over, building those skills up. Where some parents make their kids practice the violin, we’re making him practice playing with a friend. And he’s gotten much better at interacting — and also much more interested in and comfortable with doing it.

We’re asking him to practice hard in order to break the feedback loop. Early intervention isn’t about the time with the therapist per se, it’s about play and friendships for many years to come, and how all those opportunities to practice may lead to better adult skills and a better life.

Sometimes I speculate that not liking to practice or strongly preferring knowing-what to knowing-how could be an early trait in my family’s particular flavor of autism. Or put another way, since the purpose of play is practice, not liking to play leads to missing important skills. Could this create the correlation between social skills deficits and motor skills deficits? Both social and motor skills are know-how rather than know-what tasks, typically learned through play.

It’s very likely that other classic autistic traits are part of a feedback loop. Take eye contact. Does someone avoid eye contact because they don’t get any meaningful information from it, or do they not get meaningful information from facial expressions because they’ve rarely practiced looking at people’s eyes? It might be both, feeding on one another.

For social interaction in general, the worse you are at it, the less rewarding it is. When interaction attempts routinely fail or backfire, you’ll soon give up and stop practicing. (And when you do practice, it won’t be with the kind of playful mindset that best supports learning.)

(One caveat that could apply to all my posts: autism should be the autisms, and what I’m saying here is based on my family’s kind, whatever it turns out to be. For example, intensive early intervention has little effect on some kids in many studies, while it has dramatic effects on others. Nobody knows why.)