978-1572305441

William 87
detail. At least that is how it is experienced by the person on the outside
of that private meaning.
I remember William once going through a period of calling all men
who visited the house “Mr. Pipes.” His mother told me that once he saw
an anatomical drawing of the inside of a person with the trachea and
lungs highlighted. Since seeing that picture he called all men “Mr.
Pipes.”
“Oh,” I said, “it’s like they are made of pipes as in the picture.”
“No,” he said, “they are Mr. Pipes.” In other words there was no appreciation
that the picture was a metaphor—that people might look like
they have pipes inside them but these were drawings used to represent
lungs. To William, people had pipes, people were pipes, pure and simple.
* * *
Metaphor creates new meaning by allowing us to experience and
understand one thing in terms of another. New meaning is conveyed by
an unfamiliar combination of familiar words. As a result, metaphors
also play a fundamental role in our understanding of the world by structuring
language, thought, feelings, and actions and making possible an
understanding of complexity, subtlety, and nuance. But children with
autism and AS live without metaphors, not only in their language but in
their understanding of the world. Living without metaphors is a common
theme that runs through many of the cognitive models we’ve been
exploring to explain the symptoms and behaviors of children and adults
with ASD—theory of mind, executive function deficits, and weak central
coherence (though perhaps not the concept of difficulty in disengaging
visual attention). Living without metaphors means there is no
distinction between the literal and the figurative; all is literal meaning.
Holding two meanings in place at the same time is just not possible.
One thing is not understood in terms of another; it is just understood as
it is. A facial expression does not imply an emotion, a figure does not
imply a ground, a solution that does not work does not imply that one
must look for another.
Living without metaphors may be sufficient for many things in
life—going to school, turning on the TV, or going shopping—the
instrumental demands of daily life. But it is insufficient for the more
complex demands of learning, for navigating the ambiguity of social
interactions, for self-reflection, and for generating novel ways to solve