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Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: Autism in our times

Back on Monday, I was finishing up Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Blink, while the guys were over for the mobility homebrew hackathon. That was pretty geeky, and linked in quite well with a key thread in Gladwell’s book - autism and its impact on the world (guys, you know it’s true).

Having finished the book, it’s the parts about autism which have been turning about in my head this week, and elsewhere too - like in December’s Wired article on BitTorrent and Bram Cohen, its creator. Maybe it’s the new ADD pop-psych diagnosis.

Both before and during the sections on autism in our time, Gladwell discusses the work of psychology researcher Paul Ekman, bringing in Ekman’s core research in the display and perception of emotion on human faces. It’s deeply ironic that I recently read of the good doctor in a CIOMagazine article on How To Be A Mind Reader, which featured in their “Advanced Communications” section. I had quite a chuckle at this piece (which did not mention autism, but did have me thinking of Milton, the red Swingline stapler-obsessed geek from the film Office Space). I marveled at how surprisingly x3Cstrongx3Epracticalx3Cx2Fstrongx3E the piece was for tech managers. To be fair, I also made a mental note to pick up Ekman’s interactive training cd. Alas, my face is far too often a mirror of what I think, not very politic and horrible for poker! I just ordered the Ekman cd. I’ll let you know how it goes. Hopefully you’ll be able to ’see’ the difference&.

In Blink, Ekman’s work supports Gladwell’s hypothesis that in the mode that Gladwell characterizes as broadly “autistic” - we lose our ability to process the important metadata we get from human expressions. Metadata is a hot topic now, one many are intensely focused on, defining how we bring more of the richness of multi-contexted human experience to the web. Gladwell’s book is all the more timely for weaving these disparate concepts together to give more understanding into why we crave the kinds of interactions we do. We can see here why people strive to inject clumsy emoticons or emotion states into their chatter, why videoblogging (in my view) will end up being more relevant than podcasting. Text is efficient, but it is nice to inject into the system some of the metadata we require for full human processing.

This is broad strokes, consciousness stuff, but that’s how we change the way we see the world. It’s an interesting behavioral pattern to examine. Reading the book, I could see a lot of myself in the depictions of situations. My habits are often characterized by periods of hyperfocus where I block out details - even faces - to concentrate on the “important” stuff. Other times I’m hopelessly scattered, capable of darting between ideas and schemes; that is where I do my creative work. Arguably, it is during the autistic waning that I get the bulk of my work done, but it’s the fuzzy time that fuels the fire.

It seems wrong to simplify the world down to use medical diagnoses to encapsulate elemental human behavior, but I can appreciate the fact that it shifts the focus to the way in which we dehumanize things for processing simplicity. I have to believe that there’s more here that’s applicable for how software is developed. Are developers guided to make sure their coding decisions are linked back to the human factors?