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November 6th, 2007
Back when Pink Floyd released The Wall, it made a sizeable impression.
I haven't thougth a lot about it since until, oddly, this morning. Which was when it finally occured to me, rather belatedly, that yeah, I did have a wall — but for the most part, I didn't build it. Oh, sure, I added a few refinements born of experience. (Never sit with your back to a door in a place where there are people you don't know and trust, for example.) But mostly, I was born with my wall. And I never even knew it.
You see, that's sort of what Asperger's is like, in some ways. A wall. But it's subtle. It's a glass wall. (Some of my readers will recognize I've mentioned the glass wall before.)
The great thing about a concrete wall is that you know it's there. It's obvious. A concrete wall can't hide; it can't be hidden and still work to divide one side from the other. Either it's there, or it isn't. But a glass wall ...
Imagine you have a wall of glass with a perfect 1.0 refractive index, as clear as air. You can't see it. You can see perfectly clearly what's on the other side of it. Perhaps it even has a few curious optical properties that allow you to see some things in more detail or more clarity than people on the outside can. But if that wall has been there all along, and is doing a perfect job of filtering something out ... scent, say ... you can't tell. Sure, someone who knows what a rose smells like might think it odd that three feet away from you, someone is holding a rose, and you can't smell it.
But if you've never been outside your glass wall, and there aren't any roses on your side, you don't know what a rose smells like. You've never smelled one. You don't see anything odd in that you can't smell anything, because you don't know you should be able to smell it. If you're paying attention, you may well notice that people outside your glass wall seem like they're reacting to something ... but whatever it is they're reacting to, you can't detect it. And if you ask them what's going on, ask them what's hidden, they don't understand what you're talking about — not least because you lack the words to express what you're trying to ask about. So sooner or later, you probably convince yourself you must be imagining it.
Meanwhile, folks outside the glass wall, who can't see it any more than you can, keep seeing that for some reason you don't react to the smell of a rose — or an apple, or a hot dog, or their favorite perfume. But they don't know that you're not smelling it because the smell is never reaching you, because they don't know about the glass wall either. Being able to smell the rose is so instinctive, so natural, that it never occurs to anyone to ask whether you can smell it too. So they just come to the conclusion that there's something wrong with you — maybe you're somehow a bit slow, or maybe you're just antisocial.
If the glass is clear enough, it can take a hell of a long time to figure out it's even there. Even after you face-plant on it a few times. (Or a few dozen.) There used to be much of a catch-22 situation. You couldn't recognize or detect the wall without the right set of tools, and the tools weren't out there because no-one knew that the glass walls were around, so no-one knew there needed to be a way to find them.
Tools to detect — and even measure — the glass walls are starting to become more readily available now. And even if we can't see the glass walls, we're starting to learn to recognize the signs that indicate where one may be. We're even starting to develop some theories about how the glass got there.
Unfortunately, so far, we're still mostly in the dark about how to break the glass. But we're trying. We're working on it.
What is the coefficient of fiction?