Human Mechanics

Within the first three pages of Mark Haddon’s, “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time”, I have already found myself questioning the complexity of human emotions.  The ability to feel a wide range of emotions, and to depict those emotions in the people one is surrounded by, is something that the majority of individuals take for granted.  Christopher Boone’s statement that “people’s faces move very quickly” (page 3) was amusing to me—yet at the same time it made me question what it is that connects the thoughts and feelings we experience psychologically to our physical portrayals of those thoughts and feelings. Humans legitimately are machines of sorts that take information, use the brain to process it and then react to it in the way that they feel programmed to.

Having picked up this novel already knowing that it is about a boy with autism, and then stumbling upon this initial realization about the way emotions play out in the minds of human beings, I have presented myself with a question: Do those who have autism really have a 'disability' or do they simply process information in a more systematic way?

Perhaps those who read that question could argue that the logic needed to approach the question would imply that humans lack the very 'aliveness' or 'humanness' that makes them different from other species.  The root idea that the question gets at is that humans are reactionary and predictable instead of complex. However, I think it is this very idea that we could just be systematic creatures that ultimately makes us complex.