“Tomorrow’s Child,” a story by Ray Bradbury, opens with Peter and Polly Horn traveling to a hospital for the birth of their first child. In their technological utopia, a helicopter conveys them across a sky spangled with rocket ships. An advanced birthing machine awaits, promising to eliminate Polly’s labor. At the moment of truth, however, the hospital’s machine malfunctions. She has delivered a healthy male infant. He weighs seven pounds, eight ounces, and sports a normal nervous system. There’s just one problem: the boy has been delivered into the fourth dimension. From outside the three-dimensional structure of human perception, he appears in the shape of a tiny blue pyramid, with three darting eyes and six wriggling limbs. The obstetrician says that the boy himself apprehends the phenomenal world around him cubically. The Horns name their discarnate issue Py and take him home. But the existential limbo fills them with anguish and repulses their friends and neighbors. Desperate from isolation, Peter and Polly return to the hospital intending to abandon Py to medical science. The obstetrician surprises them once more. He hasn’t figured out how to retrieve Py, but reverse-engineering the birthing machine could place them in the fourth dimension with him. They could perceive him as he really is. The price, of course, would be their own geometrical transfiguration. Peter would take the shape of a hexagon. Polly would look oblong. With heavy hearts they assent to the bargain, trading expulsion from membership in the human community for the joy of sharing in their child’s perception of reality. For parents and children wrestling with neurodevelopmental conditions today, Bradbury’s allegory has lost none of its poignancy. Autism, my son Misha’s primary diagnosis, constitutes “a whole mode of being” and “touches on the deepest questions of ontology,” as the neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote in 1995. If this is so, then the question is how people like Misha perceive the fundamental entities and properties of reality. “The ultimate understanding of autism may demand both technical advances and conceptual ones beyond anything we can now dream of,” Sacks wrote. He urged neurologists to limit the boundaries of “radical ontology” by shucking off their habits of detachment and accompanying their subjects in society. “If we hope to understand the autistic individual,” he contended, “nothing less than a total biography will do.” Thirty years later, one in every thirty-six children receive the diagnosis. Neurologists still confine their perception to the bell jars of the consulting room, while autism advocates promote “neurodiversity.” No advances, conceptual or technical, have struck up a symmetry between medical understanding and social belonging. “Tomorrow’s Child” today subsists in a permanent realm of uncertainty. [INSIGNIA]Misha is now eleven and lives with his sister and me in the very progressive city of Cambridge, Massachusetts. In photographs, his aspect betrays no abominations. He passes for any normal child his age (although, in my estimation, he’s handsomer than most). Tall and lithe, his hazel eyes are hooded by long lashes and framed by an oval visage. What his eyes perceive is anybody’s guess. His acuity rates 20/20. The signals that his brain gives to his ocular muscles, however, could be showing him a kaleidoscope everywhere he looks. He doesn’t say, as he has never uttered more than a handful of verbal approximations. Nor does he seem to reliably process speech directed to him. “What’s your name?” “Me.” “Can you say, ‘Misha’?” “Mi-ta.” “Excellent. How old are you?” — “Misha, are you eleven?” “T.” “Where you do live?” — “Misha, who am I?” “D.” “Very good. What is your sister’s name?” — “Do you have a sister?” — “Misha, can you say the name of your sister, Niusha?” “Yah-yah.” His body is bandy, strung together by a physiology that mismeasures stimuli from his environment. A meek style of movement during his infancy suggested that he was never in possession of his body. Crawling in the yard, he trembled before a quarter-inch decline from the sidewalk to the grass. He hung his head over the side of his stroller in the neighborhood and fixed his gaze on the spinning spokes. Arriving at playgrounds, he refused to dismount. He didn’t stand up until his eighteenth month, and then he toddled on his toes. He clung to the inner edges of sidewalks and dragged his palm across the streetscape, refashioning walls, doors, and fences into an extended guardrail. A neurologist diagnosed Misha with autism at the age of four. Additional diagnoses piled up over the next years: mixed expressive-receptive speech disorder; sensory processing disorder; cerebral vision impairment. Of causes and treatments, his specialists have never developed so much as a working hypothesis. Molecular sequencing has revealed two genetic mutations, neither previously reported. “Your son,” his geneticist avowed, “is on the far edge of science.” Misha is both profoundly disabled and benignly different. He doesn’t appear sick. He doesn’t appear well, either. The antinomies of his social being discharge their tension in a stigma that emerges during unrehearsed appearances in our community. He blisters the air with shrieks and squeals, huffing and hissing, pealing with laughter out of nowhere. A sublinguistic rhapsody, unclassifiable as well as unignorable, sets the soundtrack: “We-we-we-we-we-we-we”; “me-me-me-me-me-me-me”; “uh uh uh uh uh uh uh.” The signals that draw his stigma are both embodied and undecodable. I am resolved not to hide away Misha’s fugitive aspects. Only through contact with his given environment can he make a safe home for himself. Isolation within his sensorium would cause the anxiety that he bears on a good day to expand into a total loss of trust in his own being. “Loneliness,” as Hannah Arendt once observed, constitutes “the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.” In a city of heavy objects constantly in motion, Misha exhibits no capacity for self-preservation. We were crossing Beacon Street in Inman Square one weekday afternoon. He flew to the passenger door of a car as it slowed before the
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence