978-1572305441

Justin 29
Justin looked at me as if I were the stupidest person on earth. “No,”
he said. “They all sound quite different.” But he did not elaborate.
I asked him to bring some tapes to our next appointment, and we
spent the hour listening to them. He was right; all storms do sound different.
He pointed out the variation in the peals of thunder. There were
differences in volume, of course, but I had never heard the wide range
of pitch and rhythm. How amazing!
Justin has the capacity to hear things that I am incapable of hearing
naturally. It is this attention to perceptual detail that is so remarkable.
But in a more general sense, it’s the pleasure that the intricacy of detail
brings to people with ASD that is so extraordinary. Children with ASD
tend to love sounds, even more than typical children enjoy music. It is
pure acoustic sensation, the rhythm and pitch that attracts and holds
their attention. The words are of little interest, and the emotions conveyed
in the lyrics are quite irrelevant. Asking the child with autism the
meaning of a song will evoke little response over and above a repetition
of the lyrics. I remember one little boy with AS who enjoyed drumming
so much that he spent hours in the garage imitating the sound of the
rain falling on the roof by banging on a set of boxes of different sizes.
I love music too, and to that extent I am not immune, at least intellectually,
to the concept of experiencing pleasure at hearing pure
sounds. I can even enjoy listening to very modern atonal music for
short periods of time. But the music must have a narrative of some sort.
There has to be a reference to something outside the acoustic sensation;
the music must evoke emotions, images, or ideas. Without these external
referents, I get bored quickly. My attention span for pure acoustic
perception is very limited. I can force myself to pay more attention, but
the effort required is substantial, and I quickly become exhausted. In
my experience, most parents of children with ASD are just as mystified
by their child’s fascination with perceptual detail and quickly become
bored by paying attention to a single repetitive stimulus for long periods
of time.
For Justin, listening is effortless, and he is never bored by sound.
Thunder is a compelling experience, not a nuisance to be avoided. The
Dutch novelist Cees Noteboom writes that “boredom is the physical
sensation of chaos.” In precisely that way—as a physical sensation—
thunder is a deep and meaningful experience for Justin. It is the antithesis
of chaos; it is structure, routine, and the perception of ordered meaning.
As such, it provides Justin with genuine pleasure.
Justin gets bored by other things, to be sure. But these are often the