This is a fairly long video (8:35), and the opening 5 minutes in her language (which, as someone on YouTube says, sounds like Sigur Ros) may fascinate you or weird you out, but hang on until 5:20 when she starts her translation. Here's an excerpt:

"My language is not about designing words or even visual symbols for people to interpret. It is about being in a constant conversation with every aspect of my environment, reacting physically to all parts of my surroundings. ... Far from being purposeless, the way that I move is an ongoing response to what is going around me. Ironically, the way that I move when responding to everything around me is described as being in a world of my own. Whereas if I interact with a much more limited set of responses and only react to a much more limited part of my surroundings, people claim that I am opening up to true interaction with the world."

And I know there has been some debate about posting videos about people who are different here. silentmiaow (aka ballastexistenz) produced this video herself, and states clearly what her motivation is:

"The first part is in my "native language," and then the second part provides a translation, or at least an explanation. This is not a look-at-the-autie gawking freakshow as much as it is a statement about what gets considered thought, intelligence, personhood, language, and communication, and what does not."

Her YouTube index of films is here. Her personal site is here.

Maudlin if you are interested in this phenomenon i.e. how autistics relate to their environs, you should check out Horizon's "The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow" at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1063749803579204077. I think Benjee sifted it before but I can't find it.

I just watched an episode of Errol Morris' First Person that covered it as well. There she talked about how as an autistic her entire thoughts were based in images, so abstract ideas like love and such would totally fly over her head. She began to reach an understanding of these concepts by creating memory images for them, that she could associate with the abstract concepts.

Fascinating nonetheless.

Err, it wasn't benjee who sifted the Grandin video. And it's linked at the bottom of this page. :-)

I want to see that Errol Morris film, though. I wasn't aware of it before -- thanks!

Amazing, did she have help with her translation? (with vocabulary?) It would be interesting to know how she was educated.

Great find,Maudlin

Opps sorry Maudlin!

swampgirl, she's using a voice processor to output her typing, but I don't know if she can't speak or won't speak, although she may address this on her personal site, which I've barely started reading.

I wonder how she was educated, too, and how her experience in acquiring English paralleled the experience of Deaf people educated in ASL or similar signing systems.

I've posted this at MetaFilter, too, and it looks as if a debate on the nature of language is already starting up. elpapacito just found this from her blog:

I did that video “In My Language” that I posted recently. I’ve gotten some interesting responses.

Several people said their autistic children (and one non-autistic sibling) wanted to watch it over and over again. One of them had a son who never hums at all, but hummed the tune from the video all day after he watched it. Others hummed along too. The parents described their children’s reactions as interested, mesmerized, and transfixed.

This is a common reaction between autistic people, I’ve noticed. We do have ways of communicating with things around us that are mutually comprehensible for many of us (not all of us, and not all the same things are comprehensible, there seem to be groupings in that regard). Our interests and our reactions are not random, purposeless, or useless, and are certainly not ugly things to be hidden away or trained out of.

S'alright, farhad. I won't even ask you to change your avi as penance. :-)

This chick is annoying!

I got my first job when I was eight, paid by a special education teacher to be a para for the less violent children as the adult para's typically handled the biters. It was a very bizarre experience being the first 'normal' child many in the class had ever played with. Bizzare in how other normal kids reacted to them, and it was all out of lack of knowledge.

Autism is more widespread than many people care to think, and isn't just restircted to the realms of lack of verbal cognition and stimming (repeated physical stimulation).

Annoying Budzos, kinda like one liners without any real substance. /poke /poke

Quite interesting and well-composed. She delves very deeply into Philosophy and the nature of being which I could never have expected from just viewing and listening to the first 6 minutes. I hope her statement can enlighten many of us who are, in our own ways, ignorant of and bigoted toward others who are harmless to society, but don't fit the moulds of Ken Carson and Barbara Millicent Roberts.

The MeFi thread I started on this has been surprisingly active and productive. Not only has a friend of Amanda Baggs (silentmiaow) dropped by, but Amanda herself has joined the conversation here.

I find it fascinating to consider the implications of communication without speech. It's interesting to note that several cultures make a big deal out of communication via body language, or how even the absence of communication at all can convey a message. In Rising Sun, Crichton writes of a "conversation" between Capt. Connor and a Japanese businessman from whom he's trying to extract information, in which an entire 5 minutes went with no speech, yet Connor leaves with a great deal of insight on what he was seeking.

I'm losing my train of thought due to the hour, but I'll definitely continue following your thread, Maudlin!

I see no-one here has ventured to field question towards her conclusions, namely her dismissal of the usefullness of 'fitting in' in the context of a highly social society. So, maybe some brief 'devil's advocate' comments to mix into the pot...

She expresses her frustration with the way her language and the personal languages of others like herself are looked upon as useless by society, but she must realize the languages we are used to were generally determined by a community over a period of time (broad generalization, i know) with a massive load of rules supporting it in such a manner that a community can quickly share things like who, what, when, where, and why. That said, I don't know if 'language' is the appropriate word, in current western society, to discribe what seems to be music as cummunication.

Music is a huge part of the lives of many folks (certainly mine), and through music we very often find ourselves dancing around, moving things, and interacting with others on a social level beyond language that is unique yet universal, and as important to our society as the more directly rule-based languages. So, the direction I'm going with this comment is... what is the difference between music awareness and language awareness?

... because I think there is one,... and is that where myself and this woman differ?

this comment is already long without me going into more cruel topics, like fitting-in... maybe later.

oh, and I do agree it has some surface similarities to the 'hope-landic' of sigur ros (who i've seen perform), it sounds like the oft-caricatured aboriginal chants (sometimes with drums and movement) of native americans and countless other cultures whome we don't identify with modern culture.

bamdrew, she addresses many of those issues at MetaFilter, starting here and replying to other questions as well. (For one thing, her communication is not strictly aural, but is also gestural.)

Amazing, maudlin, congratulations!

i've been really torn about this for the past 2 days ... i've read her blog ... your thread on meta ... and there is a part of me that's just not sufficiently convinced. i know what she's written in her disclaimer and assumption ping-pong posts, but i feel that by posting that, she's keeping the nay-sayers at bay.

her aphasia and apraxia confound me as her 'elocution' (for lack of a better word) in written communication comes across as superb ... that being so, i have difficulty with the autistic 'label'. or is it a conscious choice she makes not to verbal communicate? i don't believe that is the case in this example.

i need to ruminate on this a bit more ...


~*We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.*~Sir Winston Churchill

thanks maudlin; I actually read her meta filter post before making my own, ... so i guess i should re-read it. I noted that dance, movement, and non-linguistic social interaction occur with the expression and appreciation of music, both when alone and in social settings.

Non-spectrum peoples are not blind to gestural information; I would watch foreign movies as a child and be able to describe the character and plot developments just from looking at solid actors and their interactions. My best friend and I joke about being on the same 'lambda' (wavelength... we're nerds) all the time, because we won't need to say things to both know the we know what the other is saying with a look and a shift of the face and posture.


(actually I came back to this post to share this, which I rememberd being in the queue a while back... http://www.videosift.com/video/Amazing-Little-Genius-Girl--2
a young girl who has an exceptionally linguistic mind)

What's with the geek tag?

messenger, I used "geek" in the sense of this video being a detailed set of explanations regarding a specific topic.

bamdrew, I think you raise a good point about the continuum of non-verbal language. Amanda is still active in that thread and has said that she's concerned that people are reluctant to disagree with her. She welcomes debate, so if you have a MeFi account (they're easy to get), why not bounce some ideas off her? Or try her personal site, if MeFi isn't for you.

I have to check out the video of that little girl -- thanks!

Having a long explanation does not make something geeky. Where did you get that definition? This can't be reduced to an explanation anyway; it's a call for understanding; a presentation of a philosophy of communication.

"Geek" is a term, usually a missive, reserved for people obsessed with things that are totally useless to the rest of the world (really dancing to DDR), obsessed with things that are mostly impractical to the rest of the world (building Stone Henge by yourself), or cool scientific stuff (http://www.videosift.com/video/Mythbusters-Breaking-Glass-With-Unaltered-Human-Voice">breaking glass with the human voice). These are geeky things. I can't think of anything less geeky than someone educating people on how to understand her.

It wasn't meant as an insult. Edited anyway.

blarg... i thought the sifters would want to talk about it, but mkay, maybe i'll write to her sometime.

I have a good friend who is a linguistics masters student, and shared this video and the metafilter link with her. She works primarily with autistic kids, and really enjoyed the video.

Thanks for the post!

I didn't really want to comment on this because people usually would take it the wrong way. I come from a family of doctors and I must say that in reality this is manifestation of a self indulgent way of trying to understand the world due to autism. That doesn't mean it's necessarily bad or good. It's simple a different form of adaptation to the world around us.

Language and communication only derive their power through one ability, that of being transferable and commonly understood by larger group of people. For example if we all could not agree on one definition of the truth we could not readily be able to discuss it. Because language is simply meant for one group of individuals to understand another.

However I will state that languages differ wildly in how they contextualize the world for example Benjamin Lee Whorf, a well-known linguist, used the Hopi language to exemplify his argument that one's world-view is affected by one's language and vice-versa. In an article, "An American Indian Model of the Universe", he writes:

"The metaphysics underlying our own language, thinking and modern culture... imposes upon the universe two grand COSMIC FORMS, space and time; static three-dimensional infinite space, and kinetic one-dimensional uniformly and perpetually flowing time."

Whorf says that the Hopi language expresses a different metaphysic altogether:

"It imposes upon the universe two grand cosmic forms, which... we may call MANIFESTED and MANIFESTING, or, again, OBJECTIVE and SUBJECTIVE"

Other linguists and philosophers are skeptical of Whorf's argument, either in general, or in its particular application to the Hopi language.

And such the movie In the Hopi language, the word Koyaanisqatsi means 'life of moral corruption and turmoil, life out of balance', and the film implies that modern humanity is living in such a way.

Basically in hopi a entire idea or way is captured in one word. The same is for people of the Innuit North who because of their life have over a dozen different ways of reffering to snow. It can be hard-snow, fallen-snow, sliding-snow and so on and so on.

Other languages differ in other ways, some having no concept of time, just seasons. There is no before or after, actions are acted upon. So language is a tool for expressing and contextualizing the world to be shared with others. So in regards to this aren't we simply delving into the mind of someone's unique way of precieving the world?

- durnk

I didn't see this video until just now, and I'm upvoting for the comments. To be honest, the argument she put forward, in the video and elsewhere, made me somewhat uncomfortable. I'm not exactly a stranger to autism and other ASD, but I've never heard anybody argue that language is relative in nature to the extent that it should be strange that a society would look upon a minority group as not fitting in due to its, well, inability to fit in.

As Farhad said, languages derive their power through their common usage and understanding. Considering that people are capable of functioning cohesively as a society in a large part due to their ability to communicate, I would say that the ability to communicate with others, or lack thereof, is a huge issue.

Interestingly, as Farhad also pointed out, the idea of a language restricting or guiding one's thoughts has been challenged by several noted linguists and cognitive scientists. I believe, although am not sure, that Stephen Pinker is one of these, in that he (or if not him, some other cog. sci.) explored through experiments with children and with monolingual subjects across several languages, whether thought patterns would be consistent regardless of language development or what language was known. According to the evidence presented, language as a function of thought is at least partially descriptive rather than normative.

This woman finds it strange that we should look at her as being "non-communicative", while we don't look at ourselves in the same way for not understanding her. Considering that language is useful merely because a de facto standard of syntax, grammar, and vocabulary can be learned, processed, and understood by many people, and that society, for all practical purposes, MUST use such a standard, then yes, it would not be logical to consider her communicative. Who, exactly, would she be communicating with, for example? Language implies a standard among a group of people. Her idea of language seems to be somehow extremely individualistic. For all practical purposes, it isn't.

I just don't see a reason to accept her conclusions. Anybody?

Language is used as a method of communication of specific ideas. Music can communicate, but not specific concepts, so it is not a language. I think her communication is closer to music than English. It's more like a jazz musician feeling the moment and doing some scat singing, or Clare Torry's amazing vocals in "Great Gig in the Sky." That said, I accept her argument that she is being judged unfairly by most people in society at large because they simply don't understand her. People look at her and think she's just crazy, making strange random noises and movements, and that she's incapable of processing thoughts in what we consider a rational way. Now I know better.

Hm, you're right messenger, her communication does seem more akin to music than language. I do agree that she might be judged unfairly by people because they just don't understand her. However, I don't feel that it's unfair that we consider it strange that she find herself unable to communicate as the majority of society she lives in does. I cannot believe that her "language" is as viable as a useful language as, say, English or French or Chinese.

I find it strange that she cannot communicate in the same way, but that's just a freak thing that happens. What she's getting at is that people judge her, and it's only because they don't understand her. If people understood that there actually was something quite cognitive going on inside her head (although it's not language nor even communication since the water/book/whatever is not sentient), they would treat her a lot differently.

http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-03/ff_autism

I dont have the power to *promote yet

Invocations (promote) cannot be called by Thylan because Thylan is not privileged - sorry.

*length=8:36

The duration of this video has been updated from unknown to 8:36 - length declared by geo321.

*promote

I found this after posting this today:

http://videosift.com/video/Severely-Autisic-Girl-Finds-Voice-and-Finds-Life

Striking to me how incredibly verbal and articulate both of them are.

Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Thursday, January 25th, 2007 4:55pm PST - promote requested by bareboards2.

It's GladOS!

*science
*brain
*femme
*water

Adding video to channels (Brain, Femme, Science, Water) - requested by Fusionaut.