Are Asperger's a Wild or Primitive Human Type?

This photo shows a protest against treatment of zoo animals, but I can say from experience that this is how Asperger people can feel in a world controlled by the social majority. Being caged is no more natural for us than it is for wild animals.

Why Don't Psychologists Like Facts?

Recognizing and embracing fact is necessary to understanding reality, but the complex system of  thought and activity that depends on factual evidence (The Scientific Method) is labeled "cognitive distortion" by psychologists. It is no mystery as to why science education in the U.S. is failing miserably.

Pain, Empathy and Emotion: Scientific Version

I want to go ahead today and add a response I posted on an Asperger website after another poster quoted from "The Simpsons." The idea in the quote relates to the Asperger / Social Majority conflict over emotion and a possible explanation for the misunderstanding.  

Homer to Marge: "You don't appear to be in any kind of physical pain, the only type of pain a man understands".

I am female, but I am unable to tell the difference between physical and emotional pain. There are times I've gone to a medical doctor, because I really can't figure out if I'm sick or upset. This led me to read about how the brain processes pain and "feels" emotions. Guess what? There is only one circuit for both - emotional pain is physical. How could it be otherwise unless you believe that emotions are supernatural, which I'm sure many social people believe.  

Only three or four emotions exist: the flight or fight response of aggression and fear; disgust, and pleasure. From my own experience, I suspect that Asberger individuals experience a default "neutral" state. Social children learn to diffuse and differentiate their basic pain responses and to give those new states names - it's a fundamental task of social training. This is especially true for females. Inflating and dispersing pain via hundreds of descriptive words serves to keep females confused, distracted from anger and fear, and obsessed with subtle differences and changes in social emotions. This socialization of pain keeps women powerless. Society teaches females to imagine that real physical responses are thousands of subtle and entangled emotions that don't really exist!

What I am suggesting is that Aspies experience basic physiological pain, not the "emotions" social children learn. Also that we have a neutral setting, which is our default setting. This benign state produces our familiar "blank reaction" when people say something unimportant or baffling. We just don't feel emotion/pain unless something in the environment triggers the fight or flight response or pleasure or disgust. Social people interpret our neutral setting as offensive; after all, to them, everything they say or do, and the reaction they get from people, is vital to the continuing existence of the universe. Social people assume that we don't care about human beings because we're not in their frantic (to us) emotional mode 24/7. Emotion for us isn't this fantastical overwhelming supernatural state that colors and controls the fate of mankind. For us it is pain or the absence of pain - and our response is most often flight.

I think this also may explain why Asperger individuals commonly suffer from anxiety. From the time we are young, social situations are fight or flight for us because we are rejected and treated badly. We are different, and social people react very negatively to that fact. Diversity is not really a social value.

If you whack a dog on the nose every time it gets up on the couch, and then force it to get up on the couch and whack it again for doing so, and repeat this cycle again and again, will that dog not soon be in a state of perpetual fear?

Support for the Asperger Experience of Emotion as Pain

FROM:  Your Brain: Your Pharmacist. Brain prescribes opioids for rejection – and rewards social acceptance with opioids! Posted on November 20, 2013 by consummatenovice

For the last decade researchers have found that emotional pain experienced from social rejection activates the same region of the brain that physical pain activates – the pain center. (see previous post "The Science of Pain, Empathy and Emotion) 

Scientists believe that since mammals live in social groups that are crucial to survival, social rejection is akin to a physical threat to our brain. A recent paper by Hsu et al. from the University of Michigan, has now shown that the same opioid receptors located in the brain’s pain center activated in response to physical pain are also activated by emotional pain and that the more opioid response an individual releases, the more that person scores high on the trait “resiliency”.  The study also found that the brain rewards social acceptance with activation of opioid receptors located elsewhere in the brain.

The brain protects itself from feeling too much physical pain by dosing itself with endogenous opioids. It lets you feel pain so you know that whatever it is you are doing should stop, but then alleviates its own pain by activating opioid receptors located in the pain center of the brain. Presumably, this neat self-soothing mechanism exists so when we get hurt we don’t just lie down and cry. (My personal experience points to the failure of this quenching or dampening of pain; the result is panic and anxiety that will escalate to unbearable levels.)

 

Given the similarities in the experience of physical and emotional pain, scientists have hypothesized that emotional pain also results in opioid receptor activation. In this study, Hsu and Zubieta used a radiotracer specific for opioid receptors to visualize the release of endogenous opioids with PET imaging in response to stimuli.

Expectedly, rejected subjects felt more “sad and rejected” and less “happy and accepted,” while accepted subjects felt the opposite. Interestingly, subjects with high opioid activity rated themselves as lower in the “sad and rejected” scale. These findings suggest that individuals with a robust opioid response bounce back more quickly in the face social rejection. This data corroborates a study by Way et al. from 2009 which examined the differences in activation of the brain’s pain center in response to social rejection between people who have a normal opioid receptor gene and those who have a mutation in the receptor. The mutated receptor is thought to have greatly reduced function and carriers of this mutation have been shown to need greater amounts of opioids to treat physical pain (ex: post-surgical pain). Way and Eisenberg saw that carriers of the mutation had greater activation of the pain center than non-carriers.

These findings will hopefully lead to new therapies and interventions with individuals suffering from depression, social anxiety, and other psychological disorders.

Hsu, D. et al. Response of the μ-opioid system to social rejection and acceptance. Molecular psychiatry 18, 1211–7 (2013).

Eugenics aka "Good Birth" Cannot Be Ignored

Most Americans are unaware of the Eugenics movement in U.S. history, which was an attempt at improving the human species through selective reproduction. Superior people were encouraged to have children; inferior people were to be banned from reproducing. This goal of directing the future of human evolution was not promoted by mere crack pots or racists: laws were passed in many states which allowed the sterilization of an array of "unfit" humans; approximately 60,000 citizens were sterilized in 33 states. Those of us who have been diagnosed as autistic or Asperger, and our parents, friends and relatives, need to be aware of this movement, its history and the ongoing presence of ideas that support genetic discrimination.

Eugenics promoted the "weeding out" of defective humans through selective breeding. Only 'superior' humans would be allowed to have children - and defective humans prevented from having children. This movement was popular in the United States during the first half of the 20th C.

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Empathy; the Religion of Psychology

                                                     

The ease with which the psychological concept of Empathy has been co-opted as a religious / moral value, and infantilized in the process, suggests that rather than having a real existence, Empathy is supernatural. 

The unexplained transfer of emotions, thoughts and experiences between 'normal' humans, without any objective or explicit communication between them, would seem to require a magical transcendence of physical law. The public can be forgiven for assuming that Empathy powers miracles.                                        

Asperger's: An Unsought Individuality

Being diagnosed as Asberger's confers a strange unsought individuality.

We exist at the edge of the human domain, not looking inward to an anthropocentric land of incessant squabbles and breathtaking cruelty, but deeply, into the complex manifestation of matter and energy that is our earth. We also look outward to the inhuman universe, whatever it may be. We see what social humans refuse to see. Humans are not the summation of evolution, but one flicker in an emerging image.

 

 

Animals Granted Empathy by Psychologists

Animals granted Empathy

 

      

Animal not granted Empathy:
Autistic and Asperger children.                                                
                                                    
                                 

A Highly Recommended Website: Empathy Quotient Test Critiqued

The question of empathy - Who has it, who doesn't? is vital to the diagnosis that currently segregates autistic individuals, well as Asperger people, into a "developmentally defective" sub class of humans. 

The website www.autismandempathy.com which is edited and published by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg, provides an excellent and extensive critique of the Simon Baron-Cohen Empathy Quotient test, and the human rights implications presented by invalid assumptions behind the test. 

Rather than attempting to duplicate the wealth of information at this site,
I will, in the next post, present the Empathy Quotient test itself, complete with answers that I would supply, if given the opportunity to honestly and thoroughly do so, and with annotations regarding my reaction to the questions.  
 
Links to some additional articles:
On Not Being Human by Morton Ann Gernsbacher
Thinking About The Unthinkable by Lynne Soraya
The Empathy Issue is a Human Rights Issue by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg
Unwarranted Conclusions and the Potential for Harm: My Reply to Simon Baron-Cohen by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg
Deconstructing Autism as an Empathy Disorder: A Literature Review by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg
 
 

Boston Children's Hospital: Autism and Asperger's are Different

from: VECTOR Boston Children’s Hospital’s science and clinical innovation blog.

Autism and Asperger’s are different… at least on EEG by Nancy Fliesler on August 15, 2013

Asperger’s syndrome vs. autism spectrum disorders:
This histogram separates children with Asperger’s (in red) from those with autism spectrum disorders (green) based on EEG coherence variables. Although there is overlap with high-functioning autism, the Asperger’s children clearly form a distinct group. (Courtesy BMC Medicine)

Is it Asperger’s syndrome or is it autism? Since there are no objective diagnostic measures, the diagnosis is often rather squishy, based on how individual clinicians interpret a child’s behavior. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, fourth edition (DSM-IV), early problems with language development are an indicator of autism; if there are behavioral symptoms but no early language problems, the child has Asperger’s. However, if the diagnosis is made late, parents’ recall of early language development may be fuzzy.

Under the new DSM-V, published in May, Asperger’s is included under the general “autism spectrum disorders (ASD)” umbrella. This has raised concerns among families who feel their children with Asperger’s have unique needs that won’t be met in classroom programs designed for autism.

Frank Duffy, MD, a neurologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, believes it’s possible to objectively differentiate Asperger’s from ASDs using a new wrinkle on an old technology. Originally trained as an engineer, Duffy is expert at interpreting electroencephalography (EEG) signals—the wiggly lines that represent electrical activity in the brain.

He’s devised computational techniques that measure the degree of synchrony among signals gathered from 24 different electrodes on different parts of the scalp.

These “coherence” patterns, though not evident to the eye, reflect how the brain is wired, and how it processes and integrates information. And they clearly reveal different patterns of brain connections in children with Asperger’s as compared to children with autism.

“It’s very easy to separate Asperger’s from autism patients by EEG measures,” Duffy asserts. “We could eventually come to the point where diagnostic differences are defined directly by differences in brain activity.”

First, we need to rewind to last year, when Duffy presented results from studying 430 children, ages 2 to 12, with “classic” autism and comparing them with 554 neurotypical controls. The autism diagnoses relied upon the DSM-IV, the Autism Diagnostic Interview, Revised and/or the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule. Children with Asperger’s syndrome or very low or high-functioning autism were excluded. In the end, Duffy computed EEG coherence readings for more than 4,000 possible combinations of electrodes.

In the autism group, coherence tended to be reduced in brain areas at short distances from each other, while long-distance coherence was sometimes reduced, sometimes increased. Ultimately, Duffy found several dozen coherence factors that consistently distinguished the children with autism from the controls with more than 90 percent sensitivity. 

BMC Medicine: Autism and Aspergers are Different on EEG

Autism and Asperger’s are different… at least on EEG by Nancy Fliesler on August 15, 2013

The Asperger’s difference

In the new study, published July 31 in the open-access journal BMC Medicine, Duffy compared these two groups with an additional 26 children meeting behavioral criteria for Asperger’s.

Using 40 coherence factors, Duffy’s algorithm classified 25 of the 26—96 percent—as belonging to the autism sample. So clearly, the children with Asperger’s were closer to the autism profile than to the neurotypical controls. However, further coherence analysis correctly classified 24 of the 26 children—92 percent—as having clinical Asperger’s syndrome as distinct from ASDs. These classifications held up on repeated analyses.

What was different in the Asperger’s group? Duffy zeroed in on four EEG coherence factors (Factors 3, 15, 33 and 40) that best distinguished them from the group with ASDs. This graphic illustrates the differences in brain connectivity; imagine you’re looking down at the brain from above (see the nose at the top of each “head”):

The red and black dots indicate electrodes. Red lines between the dots indicate increased coherence between pairs of signals in the Asperger’s group, and blue-green lines indicate decreased coherence in the Asperger’s group.

So what does this mean?

Duffy hypothesizes that Factor 15, indicating reduced connectivity in the arcuate fasciculus, a brain structure involved in language, indicates a language deficiency, but that the Asperger’s brain compensates for this with increased connectivity in the left temporal region (Factor 3), allowing children to acquire language skills.

“Children with Asperger’s have very unique aspects to their language,” says Duffy. “The difference in coherence may account for their more stylized, literal use of language.”

As for Factors 33 and 40, which each show reduced coherence values in the Asperger’s group, Duffy proposes that they correspond to differences in visual-spatial functioning and in right-hemisphere areas thought to be involved in perceiving social and language nuance.

All this, of course, invites further investigation. Duffy is planning another study using coherence factors to distinguish children with autism from those with global developmental delay, which can often look like autism. With a larger sample size, he hopes to investigate whether there are differences between Asperger’s syndrome and high-functioning autism.

But in the meantime, since EEGs are relatively cheap diagnostic tools, Duffy feels they could eventually be developed to provide a diagnostic tool for autism in settings where there aren’t enough skilled behavioral clinicians, such as developing countries and certain underserved parts of the U.S.

“With some public and private support, I believe this could potentially be translated into a practical tool within my lifetime,” he says.

Citation:
Duffy FH, Shankardass A, McAnulty GB, & Als H (2013). The relationship of Asperger’s syndrome to autism: a preliminary EEG coherence study. BMC medicine, 11 PMID: 23902729

Birth Trauma: Is this any way to start life?

Is medical intervention in premature infants causing more brain damage and suffering than it prevents?

At what cost does society indulge in the irrational belief that "we" know better than nature what is good for our species and that emotion must be the primary consideration in medical decisions? 

What level of corporate profit justifies inflicting trauma on a fetus that will negatively affect it, its family and society for a lifetime?   

How many cases of neurologically-based brain
disorders are the result of poor societal decisions?

How Aspies React to Neurotypicals

This is truly how many Aspies feel when having to listen to neurotypicals speak.

Social Beliefs vs. Scientific Reality

Factual reality is fundamental to the Asperger understanding of our world. The social majority believe that they live in a magical universe. The supernatural dimension, which social people believe to be real, is a product of the human brain, and exists nowhere else.  

This divide is very serious and cannot be smoothed over by social clichés.

"Is all this thinking really necessary?" - My Mother

I thought too much. How do I know? My mother told me so. It began when I was very young and I could not stop doing it. My mind chewed on everything that came my way. Why this? Why that? I was told that thinking too much was unattractive in a small girl who ought to keep her mind on what other people thought and keep her opinions to herself. My mother told me that this negation of self was vital to securing my future as a wife, who must adopt her husband's thoughts, at least in public. It seemed to me that childhood was only a perverse rehearsal for the death of the intellect in this life, and for pot luck suppers in the next. 

 

An afterlife? I rejected the idea as silly. How could adults who worked during the week as engineers, accountants, and teachers, turn into pudding heads on Sunday? Did they believe the nonsense about invisible beings that lived in the sky, or were they pretending in front of us kids? If it was a pretense, why would they lie to their children?

There I was, barely aware of myself as a human being and with a huge mystery already pecking away at my mind. Why did this extraordinary gulf exist between how I experienced the world and how everyone around me claimed life worked? Why were children asked to be inventive and creative, and then told not to ask questions and to merely repeat ‘correct’ answers? This absurd situation taught me that I didn’t exist: only the ability to reflect what was told to me by others could make me acceptable.

Egalitarian Equality vs. Social Inequality - The Pyramid

In the day to day experience of an Asperger child, moments of peace are rare. Whatever you are thinking or doing, someone, either a parent or teacher or maybe another child, will interrupt you to ask that you participate in some activity, such as playing a game with a group of children. If you don’t respond, or you resist their prodding, or you state clear and repeated rejections of the idea, initial friendly overtures will turn into harsh words and disapproval. The adult will express personal disappointment in your reluctance and increase the pressure.

The simple enjoyable act of reading or thinking has now become a problem. The adult considers that whatever you are doing is not only unimportant, but it makes them unhappy and you are responsible for their unhappiness. You are told that choosing to be alone means that you are depressed or unhappy and that joining the group will cheer you up, which isn’t true. If you protest that what you are reading, or drawing or building is more interesting than what the other children are doing, you are apt to be yelled at and physically relocated like a disobedient dog. Waves of anger that were hidden beneath the adult’s formerly soft persuasive words hit like a shock wave. The other children see all this and learn one of life’s big lessons. Obey and conform. The effect of being used to demonstrate this social principal is visceral and devastating.

It is said that Aspergers people can’t infer what is going on in another person’s mind, but the big messages are clear to us. People will only like you if you obey their instructions, tell them what they want to hear, and not when you get around to it, but right now! Obedience demonstrates that a person will subordinate his or her happiness and well-being to the group. Rules are often designed to insult and confuse people, to challenge their morality or sense of fair play, for the purpose of testing their willingness to shed their individual identity and follow the herd. The Aspergers brain simply doesn’t understand this social compulsion, not because we are dumb, defective, dangerous or disabled, but because inequality of status is alien to our egalitarian need for fair play, justice and reason.

Modern society is ruthlessly hierarchical and undemocratic. People are sorted by class and caste and culture, by wealth, by age, by gender, by the illegitimate concept of race. This state of human affairs is archaic and destructive of human potential when compared to the “flat earth” picture of reality in the Asperger mind.

C/ ushistory.org

This structure is alien to the Asperger perception of 'how it ought to be.'

The building of massive pyramids was the dominant activity of ancient agrarian cultures because the pyramid was a physical model of the social hierarchy by which those on top controlled the status of the population. The same archaic social pyramid is strictly enforced today; only the titles have changed. Most astonishing is the belief on the part of the social majority that this manmade pyramid of social inequality, and the suffering it causes to millions of human beings, is as valid as the Laws of Physics, and essential to the structure of the universe.

My Asperger Parent

Although undiagnosed, my father was a classic Asperger male who had a terrible time invoking his social rank as The Father. He made attempts to use his status to make me “do what I was told,” but this effort usually fell apart, because deep down he didn’t believe that this was a valid reason for a child to comply with a parent’s wishes. Our relationship wasn’t perfect, but it was thoroughly Asperger.

We developed a deep friendship precisely because he felt it necessary to explain that his requests and concerns had a rational basis such as safety or efficiency, or to quell worry on his part that I would make a mistake or a poor choice. His appeals to my practical good sense usually worked, but I never felt that I had to obey him just because he was my father. This encouraged me to make my own choices, good and bad, and to recover from my mistakes, a task that is infinitely difficult for a perfection-loving Asperger child. Honest exchange sometimes drove us apart, but I never doubted his affection or that he would be there when I needed help. He could and would set personal judgment aside. He wasn’t warm, emotional or full of praise. At times, overcome by frustration and anger at a social world he didn’t understand, he would vanish into the comforting order of nature and science. His knowledge base was phenomenal and he was never too busy to answer my limitless questions, sometimes imparting far more detail than I could possibly absorb. Best of all, he was like me and I was like him, but not exactly.

Each Aspergerger individual has his or her own personality and is affected differently by social constraints. Girls and women have traditionally been excluded from diagnosis and instead have been diagnosed with one or more mental illnesses, a situation that is improving. Females being overlooked as Aspergers can be partly explained by the traditional view that being female is in itself a disorder or defect in many religions and cultures, a social barrier that has been imposed as part of The Pyramid. Women are on the bottom by virtue of their 'crazy' gender.

 

It Was as if I Didn't Exist

Parents, teachers, pediatricians, psychiatrists, behaviorists, and other helper individuals see the problem of Asperger's children backwards to how the child experiences life. To the child, his or her differences, some of which are praised, such as intelligence, success in school, the ability to focus on a task, persistence of attention and novel manipulation of ideas, are then used to isolate or even exile him or her from society. How does one explain this ‘intelligence is good, but you are bad’ contradiction to a smart child?

The social person’s view is that this child does not conform to the scheduled physical, emotional, and mental behaviors that experts have decided are normal and necessary to being human, and therefore this child is abnormal - an unhappy and unnacceptable situation for the socially- obsessed majority. Variation from expectations (very narrow expectations at that) becomes the problem, and the child’s intelligence is judged to be strange, aberrant and a big part of the problem. The child’s intelligence, not as a thing-in-itself, but as a minority condition in society, is not seen as distinct from the emotional difficulties that an Asperger’s child does experience.   

In my case, teachers, the school principal, and our pediatrician briefly discussed what to do with me. Should I be bumped up a grade, be sent to a special school, or remain where I was? Their conclusion? Because I was socially backward I ought to stay with my age group in public school. Confinement among normal children would advance my behavior to some acceptable level and this would make me capable of functioning as a wife and mother. As for my intellectual abilities, these might be useful if I needed a job someday, that is, if my husband were to die.

This astonishing train of thought confirmed my observation that adults can be extraordinarily stupid and that their thinking cannot be trusted solely on their status as The Adult. The idea that contact with normal children would by some property of contagious magic make me normal, was ludicrous. The assumption that a female was fit only for marriage and motherhood, with a teaching job as a fall back to misfortune, sent a shockwave through my mind. The expectation of parents and teachers that I ought to be content, or even thrilled with such a future, demonstrated that none of these people knew anything about me. I was nothing but a source of irritation. Once a decision was made about ‘my problem’ I could be ignored.  

My internal experience of myself and my particular connection to the world around me were nonexistent for them, and I was ‘dealt with’ as if these personal experiences didn’t exist – as if I didn’t exist. This is profound isolation, and in my view, is more devastating than the Asperger preference for spending time alone.

Too often the story is presented as one-sided, with the ‘problem’ located within the Asperger child or adult, who must be trained to perform social skills that satisfy society, with little recognition that the unhappy situation is the result of a failed dialog between the individual and society. This dialog, which is social, seems an odd concept for the social majority to fail to recognize and understand.  

Asperger's Love Physical Reality

Asperger types are described as incapable of being social or emotional, but this is a misunderstanding on the part of the social majority. Unlike standard social interaction, which is pro forma and fleeting, successful Asperger relationships are founded on intellectual give-and-take and may take long periods of time to develop. The focus is on shared interests rather than shared emotions. Honesty and trustworthiness are prime requirements and these personal characteristics are non negotiable, hence Aspersers people may have few friends. Being social for the sake of being social holds little to no appeal; an Asperger individual may put in an appearance at a gathering if necessary, but then vanish as quickly as possible. Constructing and maintaining a socially acceptable charade, especially in which one has no interest, is exhausting. Many of us don’t bother – which earns us the wrath of the socially addicted.

The Asperger ability to experience deep emotional attachments to animals, objects, equations, theories, and classes of things like transportation, machines, space exploration or numbers may seem improbable or impossible to neurotypicals, but it’s true. Some, like myself, feel that a specific landscape, or rock formation, or river, or mountain range – indeed the whole of nature’s manifestations, ‘speak to us’ emotionally or spiritually. This intense feeling of being embedded in the environment is possibly what animism was originally, before this intense identification became blurred with the magical fear that active spirits, which are capable of conscious acts of good and evil, interfere with human lives. The Asperger’s prime attachment is to physical reality and not to a manmade ‘supernatural’ dimension. 

It takes time for the Asperger ‘get to know you’ process to work and most social people just don’t have the time or interest to wait, or to participate in growing a relationship. Asperger individuals often don’t ‘get’ that the neurotypical person isn’t interested in getting to know them or anyone else for that matter. We do see that the social person wants immediate superficial attention. Status seeking neurotypicals are out to ‘score a hit’ and the less invested in time and sincerity the better. We instinctively don’t like this shallow treatment of human beings.

Surprisingly, what neurotypicals fail to understand is that permission to lie is apportioned according to one’s location on the pyramid, with those in power having almost unlimited sanction to lie without consequence. No one should be surprised therefore by rampant social and economic inequality, but amazingly, supposedly socially savvy neurotypicals don’t have a clue. It is a given that politicians lie to get elected and then promptly do whatever their funders have paid them to do. This has been happening election after election since politics (a social endeavor) appeared, and yet neurotypicals never catch on.

One way for an Asperger to cope with the social charade is to imagine that each and every neurotypical is running for an office – even if it’s a tiny niche somewhere in the vast social hierarchy, and that each exchange with another person is only a campaign stop. Unless you have (relative) wealth or power, you aren’t worth a second handshake.

Every Person Counts

An example of the fundamental mismatch between social expectations and Asperger behavior comes from my own childhood. My mother was socially conscious; my father was Asperger. My mother was upset whenever my father did something that did not further her social goals, such as his habit of talking to the ‘wrong people.’ Wherever we went, my father would disappear for a few minutes because he was bored or tired of waiting. I was usually sent to find him, and invariably he would be chatting with a stranger as if he had come upon a long lost friend. This infuriated my mother. Why would my father waste his time with nobodies like mechanics or janitors or poor people? She never understood that my father saw human beings as existing on an equal plane and that interest in another person can have no more motive than the pleasure of chewing the fat. It didn’t matter that my father had no prior relationship to the person; it didn’t matter that he would not see him or her again. Amazingly, my father would often find out within a few minutes more in-depth information about a person’s life than my supposedly empathetic ’people person’ mother could be bothered with. 
  

I often went missing too, becoming wrapped up in the impromptu conversation between my father and the stranger. I learned a great deal from these encounters, not only about wrong judgments about how people look, but that every person counts, regardless of their social status.