Why men are from Mars

Imagine you woke up one day and found you could not perceive people’s faces. All you could see was a blur where their features were supposed to be. You would soon realise that certain things you had always taken for granted were now difficult or even impossible. Being unable to read people’s expressions, you would find it hard to tell what they were thinking. Body language and voice would provide clues, but you would have to make a deliberate effort to understand whether the person you were speaking to was friendly, hostile, nervous, bored, joking, excited, sympathetic or whatever. The instantaneous, fluid interactions that characterise most human discourse would vanish for you, and you would begin to see other human beings as mere objects: unpredictably moving bags of flesh full of noise.

There is a group of people who exist in exactly this state: these are persons who suffer from autism. Oddly enough, the condition seems to be caused by too much brain growth during infancy: researchers suspect that this creates so many extra sensory neurons that the brain fails to form them into coherent networks. As a result, autistic people are extremely sensitive to light, sounds and textures. But autism exists on a spectrum: many autistic persons are quite retarded but some have normal or even superior mental abilities, save for social intelligence. Since human beings are the most social animals on the planet, however, an inability to interact socially is a serious disability.

Some autistic persons are idiot savants, like the character played by Dustin Hoffman in the movie Rainman, who was able to remember every airline disaster that ever happened and could do complex arithmetical calculations in his head. Some of them can draw exact reproductions of anything or play on the piano any song they hear. The neuropsychologist VS Ramachandran suggests that savant syndrome may be explained by the inability to censor daily experience: “…an autistic child is locked in a world where others are not welcome, save one or two channels to the outside.

The child’s ability to focus all her attention on a single subject to the exclusion of all else can lead to apparently exotic abilities…” Although they are retarded in their incapacity to socialise or to perform everyday tasks, it is possible for autistic people to lead normal lives if their condition is detected early enough and therapy started. Parents should take action if their child doesn’t babble by one year, or begins to develop language but stops suddenly, or avoids eye contact and cuddling.

And, despite Ramachandran’s politically-correct pronoun, autism is more likely to affect boys than girls, with males making up 80 percent of cases. This is most likely because the innate structure of the male brain makes the stronger sex more prone to autism. Certain male tendencies are exaggerated in autistic people, who often excel at mundane, detail-oriented tasks. This would suggest to anyone but a feminist that there are specific innate differences between males and females. Researchers have found that newborn girls gaze longer at faces than at mechanical mobiles, while boys do the reverse. Similarly, when adults are asked to interpret facial expressions, women do better than men. But when it comes to spatial and mechanical reasoning, males rule. Women are better at verbalising, men are better at throwing (except, of course, when women are quarrelling with their spouses, for then they become better at throwing too).

However, these different tendencies help explain why men and women are so often at odds. What women take for granted in terms of reading emotions, for instance, is for men a mighty feat: hence the reason women tell their men with genuine outrage, “If you don’t know what’s wrong, I’m not telling you!” and the men respond with perfect logic, “I am not a damn mind-reader!” Feminists, however, tend to argue that it is society, that nebulous entity, which conditions men to be violent, jealous, promiscuous, emotionally closed and even hyperactive, while concomitantly asserting that society also ensures that women are less inclined to be involved in public life, to be promoted, and less apt to do engineering or physics.

But the reality is that social mores to a great extent only reflect innate tendencies in men and women. This is not to say that one should blithely accept male violence or female docility: just because something is natural does not make it good. Nor does a biological underpinning mean that a particular trait is inflexible: male aggression is certainly tied to testosterone, but that aggression need not be expressed through physical violence. I am myself very aggressive, but my aggression is channelled into writing (especially when I’m writing about politicians, bigots, and fat men who wear Speedos at the beach).

Moreover, innate traits can even have counter-intuitive effects. Although females have an innate linguistic advantage over males, only one in 10 of history’s great writers are women and, even in today’s world where there are more female than male readers and publishing fashion favours women authors, the top writers are still mostly men. The explanation that “it’s still a man’s world” cannot hold water in this regard. Ambition and single-mindedness are necessary for success in any field and, generally speaking, men are more inclined to such characteristics than women.

There’s also the matter of mental illness. Although it is unlikely to be a simple causative factor, researcher A.M. Ludwig found that a majority of eminent writers suffer from various neuroses ranging from schizophrenia to bipolar illness to alcoholism: 74 percent of playwrights, 77 percent of fiction writers, and 87 percent of poets.  (In Trinidad, however, there often seems to be the trauma without the talent.) And I have noticed that certain autistic traits parallel those of the imaginative writer. Autistic people live in their own world: so too does the fiction-writer.

Autistic persons also concentrate on concrete details and are very literal: a good fiction writer is never abstract and, paradoxical though it might seem, one must have the capacity for literal-mindedness in order to play with words. But the skill a writer possesses that all autistic persons lack is the ability to understand social interaction. At any rate, autism demonstrates what is true of many, if not most, mental illnesses: that such pathologies are just extreme expressions of traits that all normal humans have. It’s a thought worth bearing in mind the next time you encounter a disturbed person.
E-mail: kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com
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