"I see everything."

You've probably met or may, in fact, know someone with Asperger's Syndrome. Perhaps he (for the condition is more common among men than women) stands a bit too close when he speaks to you, or overenunciates his words, or never smiles.Asperger's Syndrome is related to Autism and is characterized by normal to advanced intellectual capacity combined with atypical or underdeveloped social skills. One of the hallmarks of Asperger's is the inability to intuit other people's cognitive and emotional states from facial and gestural clues. I say intuit, because for the rest of us neurotypicals this ability is largely unconscious. If I say to you, "Oh sure, I love smoked eel," you will be able to intuit from the tone of my voice and the arch of my eyebrow that I am being sarcastic. For someone with Asperger's Syndrome those signals can go undetected.I've just finished reading Mark Haddon's amazing novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which is narrated in the first person by a fifteen-year-old boy with Asperger's Syndrome. As this extraordinary young man investigates the murder of a neighborhood dog, we get to spy on the world through his often bewildered mind. This is a boy who loves truth, in part because he can not understand the subtle deceits that make up social decorum. And what's most interesting of all is the fact that he sees everything. His brain does not filter and parse sensory information into relevant and irrelevant categories the way a neurotypical mind does. To Christopher, the fact that seven cows all facing east are chewing grass in the field visible through the train window is as immediate and important as the fact that the train has jumped the rails.(That was not a spoiler, by the way, just an example).Imagine what it would be like if everything in your field of vision, everything within earshot, every smell, and every tactile sensation was an equal player in your stream of consciousness. Now imagine how much fascinating detail you (if you are a neurotypical like me) miss out on because your unconscious mind is filing whole reams of detail into a cognitive dustbin.Makes you wonder.