Defensive shutdown

I recently read an excellent book called The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time about a teenage boy with autism. This isn't a book review, but I thought that the novel highlighted things about Modern Living Syndrome that most people might not see without stepping outside their own worldview for a moment.

One thing that distinguishes autistic people from neurotypical folks is that autistic people do not have the filters that allow most people to function in everyday life by stripping away nonessential information. One scene in the book has Chris, the teenage narrator, venturing on his own for the first time outside the bounds of his own neighbourhood. He's OK at home and at school, he explains, because he's seen everything there before. He already knows how many tiles are on the bathroom floor, so when he goes back he only has to notice the things that have changed. He doesn't have the option, as most of us do, of not seeing those things. Inside the train station, he's bombarded with signs, billboards, adverts, newspaper headlines, people rushing about in disorder. It's too much. He stands still for two hours, trying to process everything, until eventually a concerned policeman approaches him.

I don't have autism, so I can rely on my filters to get me through crowds, to home in on the part of the webpage that contains the answer to my search question, to ignore adverts and hear announcements that pertain to me. But it's getting harder and harder. Sometimes it takes a few moments for the filters to switch on. Today, I went for lunch with a friend from work to a restaurant where the whole back section is devoted to game machines. The restroom is skilfully situated at the very back of this section, so I might be tempted out of a few quarters between entrée and dessert. When I stepped from the bar section to the game section, I had to stand for a few seconds and actively put up the filters, shore up my defenses, choose one thing to listen to (the music on the PA) and one thing to look at (the neon sign reading 'ladies'). During those few seconds, I felt exposed, disorientated, resentful.

Advertisers, email spammers and scammers, telemarketers, solicitors, junk mailers all spend fortunes developing ways to bypass my filters, to come up with ways of tricking me into thinking that their message is for me. I wish my brain browser came with a pop-up blocker.

It's harder and harder to find the balance. You probably have a spam filter on your email, maybe of the sort that keeps spam on your server rather than sending it to your client; you might not even have a 'junk' folder where you can sort through, looking for false-positives. Sometimes someone calls you up asking why you never respond to email, and you realise that their messages were filtered as spam and never reached your eyeballs. I really would rather miss out on a hundred great deals if it meant never having to deal with this again, if it meant I could have my brain back.

On the other hand, perhaps this is why every day there is someone who stands in front of the fax machine, in front of the sign where I have posted detailed instructions on how to use the fax machine, and asks me whether or not they have to press 9.