Well it seems language is just one (a very effective one, albeit) way of communication-
Music has the power to change the world– it certainly has the power to effect our thoughts and emotions.
Mathematics is an other way of communicating– it is in some way a language of its own.
I sure Stephen Pinker will have some ideas about it–I wish I was free tomorrow to join the chat.
there are people who have Synesthesia: the ability to hear colors and/or taste shapes. (Or more generally, to experience sense sensations more extensively– One example has a child pick up a baby block– and say "its Yellow" (the wooden block had several pastel colors, but no yellow)– his father corrected–"cubes are ochre, which is a special kind of yellow" The mother thought the whole incident strange!
While I do not experience synesthesia, – I certain realize that sometimes, my perceptions of things are different than others. – and in another thread, someone sited someone who found the diphthong oi to be painful– it might be that they too, had a form of synesthesia.
There is a book "the man who tastes shapes" (Google brought up a lot of sites on synesthesia, but not the book in the first 20 entries)about the subject. –Synesthesia tends to run in families too– It is somewhere on the continuum of how our senses work, not autism– but not "normal"..
And Sparteye, while it is sometime true that having a name for something can help in dealing with it– it is a double edged sword.
We think we know what autism (or schizophrenia) is– and use our definition to make judgements. But both are in someways just part of the human continuum– your son is perhaps 3 or 4 standard deviations from the norm in certain things (and maybe dead the norm for others; height, weight, or eruption time for teeth) We need people like him that to soften the edges of the bell curve of normal.
prejudice make us want to tighten up the bell curve, and bring the extremes closer to the mean– but I think the human reality is a very broad flat curve.. with extremes very far from the mean– and still part of the continuum.
Naming things is one way we enforce our prejudices.
