As I mentioned yesterday, I started reading Proust was a Neuroscientist. The intriguing premise of this book is that discoveries in neuroscience have their parallels in arts and literature. Today I wish to address the author’s treatment of the writer and poet, Walt Whitman, how it applies to neuroscience and explore whether Whitman’s approach can shed any light on study of autism.

Whitman’s volume of poetry, Leaves of Grass, is an exploration of his own body and soul. He saw the “body and soul as inextricably ‘interwetted.'” [1] This unification of the human being was quite different than Descarte’s philosophy that the body was mechanical and separate from the stuff of the soul. The dualism of body separated from mind has been a real problem for neuroscientists ever since.

There is a debate about the philosophical validity of studying different parts of the brain in isolation. Results of studies on parts of the brain cannot be extrapolated to the brain as a whole. [2]

Professor Noë in his book, Out of Our Heads agrees with Whitman in stating that the body is not separate from the mind, in his description of consciousness as ‘more like dancing than digestion’.

How does this relate to autism?

The idea that the body and mind are integrated and the fact that there are individuals with different abilities to communicate or understand are not in conflict. Each person has a different mind/body configuration. The only way to understand another is through a commonly understood way to communicate. When this is absent, the other is truly difficult to understand. According to Noë, “It can seem, then, that the closest we can come to knowing other minds, in a theoretical respectable way is having some account according to which behavior and neural activity provide criteria of a person’s psychological state.” [3]

Understanding an autistic person as a whole is very difficult indeed when most is below the surface and not subject to query.