Tone Deafness

This guy doesn't think anyone is tone deaf, yet he's the one who made me think I am.

The video depicts a talk by a guy trying to convince everyone to love classical music. Or more properly, make us realize that we already do love classical music and don't know it yet. (You may want to go and watch the video now.)

Firstly, he depicts the development of a hypothetical child learning piano. The 7 year old, to me, sounds really halting, but all the other ages sound equally good, except that the 11 year old is suddenly better.

And then he gets to the really annoying bit. He talks about different categories of people in relation to classical music, and the last category are 'people who think they're tone deaf'. He says you can't be tone deaf, and to illustrate that, he talks about all the things a tone deaf person would struggle with. Here's the list:

• you couldn't change the gear on your car - I'm assuming he means by sound, like how my Dad can tell by sound when I need to shift gears. I shift gears by watching my spedometer, not by listening to the engine. Sometimes I notice the engine sound changes just before Dad tells me to shift gears, but usually it sounds no different. (Then again, I might change in this once I'm a more experienced driver, since I do just have my learner's.)
• you couldn't tell the difference between somebody from Texas and somebody from Rome - Here I disagree. There's a lot more to accent than tone. If you can recognize phonemes you can tell when someone uses the 'wrong' phonemes or leaves them out, you can distinguish many accents. I do notice a twangy sound to Texas and a musical sound to Rome, but with many less obvious differences I'm a lot poorer at distinguishing accents than most people. Boston versus New York, for example, I can't tell. Or Australia versus Cockney.
• you couldn't recognize different voices on the telephone - I can recognize immediate family, and people with very distinctive voices, but I confuse people very readily over the phone if they don't introduce themselves. Then again, other people confuse me with Mom, so maybe that's not that unusual.
• you couldn't tell what mood a person's in by their voice - Yep, autistic. I can tell things like yelling, talking fast or slow, but I find telling how other people are feeling is a lot more difficult for me than it is for most people.

So I'm tone deaf, or at least tone hearing-impaired. And this guy doesn't think I exist. (His arrogance is also extremely annoying.)

Then the piece by Chopin. The BC thing, which he says the C should make the B sad, it doesn't really sound sad to me. I've learnt to recognize that it's supposed to seem sad when you have that kind of combination, and I can hear a difference between it and a 'happy' combination, but it doesn't have any emotional meaning for me.

I also don't expect anything next after BAGF. When the entire room hummed a next note, it really didn't make sense to me where they could've gotten that note. When he's doing the 'wrong' chords and then the right one, I can hear a difference, but neither sounds any better. The 'right' chord doesn't seem satisfying or anything.

And when he asks me to think of someone I loved who is dead, I found it extremely difficult to keep both that and the music in mind. I kept visualizing Timmy (my favorite cat) and tuning out the music altogether, then thinking about the music and forgetting to keep Timmy in mind, and constantly vacillating between the two. My brother says to him the music became the 'background music' for a mental movie about Timmy. His only criticism was that Timmy's meows don't harmonize well with Chopin.

To me, classical music is mainly just noise. I can hear some differences in it if I focus, but it doesn't hold any meaning to me. I do like music with lyrics, because I like the lyrics. But music without lyrics (or with lyrics in another language) is just noise to me. And that's why I say I'm tone deaf.

The Things I Love

The next disability blog carnival, hosted by David Hingsburger, has the topic of 'the love we have for the things that make the world accessible for us'.

This is a tricky one for me, because I use very little adaptive equipment. Accessibility for high functioning autism is not primarily achieved through adaptive equipment, it's achieved through people. Tolerating a lack of eye contact or other unusual nonverbal behavior, using literal speech, explaining things directly that others pick up implicitly, not getting offended by our innocent social gaffes, warning us of upcoming changes in plans... Most of these things can't be done by a piece of equipment - they must be done by the people we interact with.

In fact, when I think about what little adaptive equipment I do use, it's in very limited and exceptional circumstances. I get a room alone and computer for exams at university. I occasionally go to a Snoezelen room, which is a special sensory room for people with developmental disabilities to experience controlled sensory stimulation. Once, I used a wheelchair for a museum trip because standing too long is painful. For awhile I used a notebook to communicate when I was having a meltdown, but I lost the notebook and haven't had a meltdown that bad for a long time anyway. About the only thing I used on a daily basis was a beeping watch to help with poor time sense, but I mostly felt annoyance towards the thing. (It felt annoying on my arm, kept getting lost if I took it off, and made annoying sounds when the alarm went off, which was even more annoying because I kept forgetting to change the alarm when the corresponding event was over.)

My biggest source of accomodations, really, is my parents. But that's too easy. So instead, I'll talk about the things that I use, which aren't necessarily adaptive equipment (in that they don't compensate for disability), but are important for my functioning and enjoyment. And these are the things I do, in fact, feel genuine affection for.

Firstly, there are my pads of paper and my pens. I especially like black pens that write easily, and I get rather possessive of these and feel genuine sorrow when they die. My papers carry my stories, which channel the people I have created in my mind and the tales I can tell about them.

It's hard to describe how important my stories are to me. When I told them with twist tie people, those twist ties felt like an extension of myself - now my pads of paper do. (This is why it was so upsetting when my teachers would confiscate my twist ties and never give them back. If you do feel it's necessary to confiscate a child's possessions, give them back afterwards!)

There's also my jacket. I tend to wear a jacket in much warmer weather than most people. Partly, this is simply because I'm slow to adjust my clothing to the weather. But whereas I wear runners in fall about as much as I wear winter boots in spring, I start wearing my coat much earlier in fall and keep it on longer in spring. Only when the climate gets so hot that I can't tolerate it do I take my coat off.

My jacket is a shield from the world, because it blocks touch and some sights and sound (especially with my hood up) and the weight of it is comforting. A lot of people with sensory processing differences use a jacket to help with sensory regulation, so I guess maybe you could argue my jacket is adaptive equipment even though it's not intended that way. I like to wear large jackets - when I was younger, I wore an adult-sized jacket that I could fit my legs inside to curl up and keep warm.

My jacket is also a world I carry with me. I store a lot of things in my pockets. When I played with twist ties, my twist ties were kept in my pockets - both the creations and the unused twist ties. My papers don't fit in my pockets, but my pens do, as does the memory stick I've been typing up my finished stories onto. I also stick candies, notes on things like journal articles, and my ID cards in my pocket. As well as wrappers that I couldn't throw out at the time. The weight of my pockets adds to the comforting weight of my jacket, but more importantly, they contain all the small things that I want to have with me at any time. Someday, I'd like to have a jacket entirely covered in pockets, all zippable so things won't fall out.

The last 'thing' is the Internet. The Google homepage gives me a little feeling of happiness when I see it, because it's been my portal to wonderful discoveries. I was basically educated by the Internet. In school, most of my true learning took place in my free time when I googled things. When I was homeschooled, I spent almost all of every day on the computer, and my education came primarily from the results of Google searches. (Plus PubMed, of course.)

The university libraries give me a similar feeling as Google does. I spent many a happy hour curled into a corner of the library with a stack of books on my chosen topic. My Dad has a photo he took once when he came to fetch me from the Education library. Photos taken without the target's knowledge always seem to show the person's personality more clearly, and in this one, the joy of concentrated learning is plain in my demeanor. My idea of heaven is a library with every book ever written, and myself able to read any language.

These are the things I love.

Too Sensitive

How many times have I heard those words? 'You're too sensitive.' 'Don't take it personally.' 'Just ignore them.'

Those words always serve to invalidate my complaints. The problem is not the situation, it's my sensitivity. Never mind that many of those things bother other people as much as they bother me, such as with bullying.

But what if they really don't bother others as much? I've been told that I'm too sensitive about online flaming. When I'm the target of a flame war, I literally can't sleep. I almost quit a game I really like because the culture of the players is so unpleasant. Meanwhile, my brother gets it just as bad in that same game and just shrugs it off - the same boy who is chronically depressed from just watching bullying at school! If my brother can handle this, maybe the problem is me.

Except, I don't think what makes me more sensitive is really a bad thing. You see, many people tend to forget that online interactions have other people on the other side. I never do. When someone tells me hurtful things about my newly level 85 mage, I am acutely aware that this is a person, choosing to say these words to another person. To me.

And besides, even if I am too sensitive, so what? I can't turn it off. I tried, in the past, and it didn't work. They may not be expecting me to be that sensitive when they first say something hurtful, but once I've reacted, they know. They know that they have hurt me. They know I'm sensitive enough not to shrug it off.

Given that, it's a matter of ethics. Do you knowingly cause pain to a person, or don't you? If they playfully punched someone in the shoulder, and the person doubled over in pain and said they had arthritis in their shoulder, would they hit them again?

Watching A God At Work

I have just recently signed on as a backer to the Grandroids project. As a backer, I get access to a special website where Steve Grand provides detailed progress reports (for example, recently he got the motor system working and tested it out by giving the creature a seizure).

For those of you who don't know, 20 years ago Steve Grand made the first game of my favorite series, the Creatures series. In this series, you raise little creatures called norns (at least you're supposed to, but it's a very open-ended game so you could instead leave them struggle to survive on their own, do experiments on them, run game show type activities while getting forum members or blog commenters to vote on them, the possibilities are pretty much endless). It's not like most artificial pets games, for one big reason - the norns are alive. They have their own internal biochemistry - they digest food, breathe, get sick or poisoned, they even have ATP and ADP. They have a neural network brain that can learn from experience and decide what to do. And they have a genetics code that decides the structure of both, which is inherited from the parents but with a few random mutations - which means they can actually evolve.

However, this had to run on computers in the 1990s. So the norns are very simple creatures, by real-life standards (even though by digital standards they're the most complicated life simulation so far). A single worker ant would beat them in intelligence. Their biochemistry didn't require conservation of energy, so sooner or later they all evolve into immortals. (This is most well-known in Docking Station, where the warp system that allowed players to trade norns also allowed many generation lines that were far longer than the patience of any players.) Their motor control consisted of genes specifying animation poses and other genes stringing those poses together, allowing for some very unrealistic motor disabilities (such as a disability where, when angry, they'd step on the spot instead of moving forward, but any other time they walked fine).

That's where Grandroids comes in. Steve Grand no longer has anything to do with the Creatures franchise - this is his new project. The Grandroids (which will not be called that, by the way) will have most, if not all, of the above design issues fixed. They will have much more complex biochemistry, based on some of the features of real-life chemistry. They will have a motor system much like ours, meaning the kinds of motor disabilities they get will also be much like ours. And although we have no idea yet how smart they'll be, Steve Grand's goalpoint is orangutans, which are almost as smart as humans. Their genetics will also be more complicated, and at the same time more familiar to many users because it's more similar to mammalian genetics.

Some of the backers have jokingly compared Steve Grand to God, and vice versa. Which brings me to a new philosophical question. I don't know how smart the Grandroids will be, but either they, or some future project building on this one, might involve creatures smart enough to have their own culture, their own belief system, their own religion. They may be smart enough that people could tell them about Steve Grand, and they would understand that he created them. From their perspective, Steve Grand is, quite literally, God, with the players being lesser gods controlling their individual universes.

What impact would this knowledge have on their cultures? Certainly some players may tell them the story of Steve Grand, and others may not. Those who do tell the story will each tell it a little differently. What impact might that have?

Furthermore, each player has a different playing style, which will have a different impact on their lives. They may have a kind, nurturing god who cures their sick, teaches their young and protects them all from the dangers in their world. They may have an absentee god who hatches the first generation and then has minimal involvement, returning much later when the wolfling run is over. They may have a newbie god who tries to care for them but speaks gibberish to them, confuses them by calling things by the wrong names, and punishes or rewards them pretty much at random. They may have a mad scientist god who hatches children with serious disabilities, puts them through weird tests, or creates strange new objects for them to interact with (some of which may be intentionally or unintentionally harmful). They may even have a sadistic god who enjoys watching them suffer, and who only helps them in order to ensure that they survive for more torture.

Each of those gods will bring a very different experience, and this, too, might shape their culture. If, like Christians, they see god as an attachment figure, they may react the same way that they would to a caring or neglectful parent. (I'm guessing the first generation especially may see us that way, given that we'd be their only parents.) This may impact on how they treat their own children (assuming they raise their children, unlike norns). Or they may view god more like a king, and see in their god's actions the way an authority figure should manage their underlings.

If multiple players share the same world, or if they get traded or warped between players, they may even see different gods managing things very differently. For example, some norn torturers posted norns they'd tortured on their websites, and other players downloaded these norns and tried to rehabilitate them. It's pretty much lost on norns, but maybe these Grandroids would come to interesting insights based on this contrast.

Lastly, what impact might this have on human culture? If Grandroids becomes well known, will it cause a shift in how we view life? Will religious people draw parallels between Steve Grand or Grandroids players and their own God, for example wonder if God is giving us a wolfling run and the end times will come when he decides to return and see what we've evolved into? Will ethicists speculate on what rights Grandroids deserve, similar to how they speculate about animals? Will researchers write papers using Grandroids as analogues to humans? Lastly, what will the next generation think? People who played Creatures as children are now adults. When the people who played Grandroids as kids have grown up, how will they see life and the universe?

I don't know the answers to any of these questions. And some of them may be my imagination running wild, and the Grandroids won't be in a position to raise those questions. But still, it's incredible to watch new life being made, and wonder about the meaning of life.

Pacifist Ponies

Lately, I've gotten to be a fan of the TV show My Little Ponies: Friendship Is Magic. Normally, I wouldn't even consider watching My Little Ponies, because I thought of it as just a little kids' show. But when Amanda Baggs wrote a blog entry about how one of their episodes showed something important about relating to animals, I decided to give the show a try.

And I found out that it's really good. Better than many 'more adult' shows that I've enjoyed.

They have consistent characters.They have plots that aren't always wrapped up in a single episode. They have protagonists who aren't always right, and when they're wrong, they're wrong in ways that make sense for that character. They have an interesting world that works on different rules from our own, but remains internally consistent. They have characters who see their own world as the norm instead of seeming transplanted from our world.

And with all that, they also have a strongly positive moral message.

Most TV shows, whether for kids or adults, have certain kinds of problems always being solved by violence. Kids' shows usually involve beating bad guys up, adult shows often involve killing said bad guys. Violence is also the solution to a good guy turning bad - you beat them up and restrain them, then fix whatever is wrong with them against their will.

My least favorite My Little Ponies episode(s), the two-parter Return of Harmony, is what made me realize this most clearly. That episode, unlike the rest of the series, does solve the problems with violence. The contrast made me appreciate the other episodes even more - even the first season's two-parter, with its own big bad, is resolved peacefully.

Resolving conflicts peacefully is not only a good moral example, it also requires more creativity. A violent solution is always basically the same, while every peaceful solution is unique. In the superhero and crime-fighting shows I usually watch, very often I know exactly how the story will end - the hero will beat up the bad guy. In My Little Ponies, in constrast, I'm never quite sure how they will resolve the conflict.

And furthermore, in most TV shows, almost all conflicts result from villains. In contrast, most My Little Ponies episodes have conflicts arising from good characters who make mistakes. One episode involved TwilightSparkle, a diligent student, panicking because she doesn't have a lesson about friendship to write to her teacher this week. She is catastrophizing about how her teacher (the princess of the realm) will react to her being late with her letter, and running around town looking for a problem she can help a friend with. It gets to the point where she decides if she can't find a problem to solve, she'll make one. This is not a villain deciding to try to drive a wedge between friends in order to be evil. Instead, it's a good character getting herself into a mess and doing something bad because in her current mental state that's what makes the most sense. (The lesson for that episode isn't for TwilightSparkle, but for everyone else - even if a friend seems to be overreacting, you should take their concerns seriously because it's real to them.)

Karla Homolka and Co-Offenders

Recently, I found a Cracked article titled 5 Horrific Serial Killers (Who Are Free Right Now). The only woman on the list is Karla Homolka from Canada, a serial killer co-offender.

Karla Homolka met Paul Bernado when she was 17 and he was 23. Shortly before their marriage, Paul Bernado became obsessed with her younger sister Tammy and convinced her to help him rape her. They drugged Tammy and both of them raped her, and she choked on her own vomit and died. The two later kidnapped, raped and murdered two other young women before the police were onto them.

All three attacks were instigated by Paul Bernado. He also physically abused Karla, at one point beating her with a flashlight until she was covered in bruises. Paul Bernado also did several separate crimes - a series of rapes. Karla Homolka claimed that Paul Bernado forced her into participating in the killings.

Now, it's unclear if this is true. Paul Bernado gave a conflicting account that claimed that while he and Karla both participated in kidnapping and rape, Karla did the killings of her own initiative when he was out of the room. It all depends who you believe more. But much of the public outcry over Karla Homolka's shorter sentence, including the Cracked article, is based on the assumption that if she didn't want to be a party to murder, she would have gone to the police.

Stanley Milgram originally made a similar assumption. He designed a study in which the participant, designated the 'teacher', attempted to teach a word list to the 'learner' using steadily escalating electric shocks. The learner was in fact a confederate, was not receiving any shocks, and was instructed to progressively make mistakes, protest the situation, and then eventually fall silent (suggesting the possibility of serious injury). Milgram predicted that only a small number of people would proceed until the experimenter agreed to stop - most, he felt, would refuse at some point.

He was wrong. Fully 65% of people showed full obediance to the experimenter. Of those who broke off the experiment, all had progressed at least to the point where the learner fell silent. Repeat studies have confirmed this finding, as well as extending it to a situation where three 'teachers' (two confederates and the subject) conferred about shock and the two confederates both pushed for a steady increase.

Of course, there are numerous differences between the situation of Milgram's subjects and that of Karla Homolka. But the differences go both ways. On the one hand, the subjects in Milgram's study were not directly faced with their victims, since the learner was in another room. The experimenter, a scientist with a respected university, promised that no harm would come to the subject. And the participants believed that good would come out of the study, since it would advance scientific knowledge. None of this appeared to be true for Karla Homolka.

However, the experimenter had no power to punish the teacher in any way, whereas Paul Bernado clearly could cause harm to Karla Homolka. The subjects had no prior attachment to the experimenter, whereas Karla Homolka was in love with Paul Bernado. Furthermore, once she'd done the first attempted rape of Tammy, going to the police would have involved confessing to her own wrongdoings as well.

If Karla Homolka's account is to be believed, therefore, she was not so strange as people think. Many people, in a similar situation, might do the same thing. Not that her behavior was in any way morally right. But it was not necessarily the behavior of a psychopath. It could have simply been the behavior of an overly loyal person, or perhaps a coward.

Not-So-Friendly Teamwork

As a kid in school, I felt bad about groaning inwardly whenever a team-based game was announced in gym class, and cheering inwardly about 'every man for himself' type games. I'd been taught that team games had all these virtues - building comradery, teaching people to work together, encouraging cooperation - did I not appreciate those virtues? Was I a selfish person because I didn't want to be on a team?

No. I'd simply noticed something. When we played games where every player succeeded or failed independently, no one cared if I did poorly. I'm not a very athletic person, never have been. I can't consistently hit a semi with a ball, much less another person. When I played only for myself, that never mattered. I could fail most of the game and still have lots of fun.

But put me in a team, and the bullying starts. At best, I could just hide in the background and do nothing, and they might ignore me. More often, people would start getting mad at me whenever I missed a throw, claiming I was useless and so on. At the same time, the opposing team would be uncharacteristically nice to me, even though most of my usual bullies were boys and we usually played boys versus girls. In one game, where you had to steal balls from the opposing team's base and players who got caught were stuck at their base until rescued, I'd actually deliberately get myself caught so I could fool around on the football net framework thingy while joking around with the same boys who usually bullied me.

In World of Warcraft, my favorite part is questing. No one but me cares if I have to retry a quest boss 10 times in a row before I finally kill him. If the entire game consisted of questing, I would be much happier.

But it's a multiplayer game. And as such, there are times that I'm supposed to work with other players to complete various achievements - and even worse, this is the only way to get really good loot. The battlegrounds (where 15 or more Alliance fight 15 or more Horde) aren't that bad, because I can fade into the crowd and no one notices that I've spent most of the battleground waiting to resurrect. At worst people level criticisms at large categories of people (eg 'everyone who is dpsing in mid instead of going after the flag') and I usually am not doing the same thing as everyone else.

The worst are the dungeons. Five players form a team to take on very difficult monsters - three damage-dealers, one tank, and one healer. Occasionally, I get a good dungeon group, especially in the lower to middle levels. But very often, I find people looking around for someone to pick on (usually me) and verbally abusing them. People will inspect what gear you're wearing and if it's not (in their opinion) the optimum gear for your class and role, they'll freak out and try to get you kicked from the team. They will also kick people for using the wrong combinations of abilities, or sometimes for no apparent reason at all. Sometimes they'll kick a person for a failure that another person caused, such as kicking the healer for not healing when the tank didn't wait for the healer's mana to regenerate. Or kicking a tank for dying when the healer was trying to be a damage instead of healing. Or kick a damage for dying because the tank didn't keep the enemies off of him or her.

Honestly, if I heard that there was an offline version of World of Warcraft where all the other players are replaced by non-player characters who can do the same jobs, I would cheer. That would really make my day. Of course, far better would be if people could avoid freaking out over everything another player does that could possibly be criticized, but I don't know if that's even possible.

And I don't think it's coincidence that every game that people turn vicious in is a team game. And the fact that I hate all team games doesn't mean I'm not a team player or someone who appreciates cooperation and such. It's a reasonable reaction to the way teams tend to act.

I think it's the fact that in a team, your success or failure could depend on another person instead of on yourself. For psychologically healthy people, this isn't that big a deal, because failure isn't a big deal - it's just a game, after all. But for a perfectionist, failure is devastating. And if your success or failure depends on other people, then you may decide to scrutinize and criticise your teammates in the hopes that you can either get them to improve or (more likely) get them excluded from your team.

Of course, this is not an appropriate choice. If failing in a game is so devastating to your self-esteem, it's better just to not play. After all, though you may hate to hear these words, it's just a game.

And to school gym teachers (and video game designers) take note: team-based games aren't all good. They can bring out some really vicious behavior among the players. Personally, I would like team-based games banned from school altogether, and replaced with individual fitness activities. You can have them as optional extra-curricular activities, but don't ever force a kid to play them. You can use the individual activities to build team-game skills, such as dribbling. Better yet, you could actually teach motor skills instead of just calling for more effort (we wouldn't accept any other subject being taught so poorly). And not only will these changes greatly reduce gym class bullying, but they'll improve lifelong fitness. After all, how often are adults able to rustle up a large enough group to do a team game? Individual fitness activities can be done much more easily in adult life.

Meanwhile, I'm left wondering if World of Warcraft is worth all the hassle. I love the storyline, I love the gameplay style, but the other players have gotten me so miserable that I'm thinking maybe I should stop playing. At least until the next patch comes out and I have more questing zones for my max-level characters.