Donna Williams (1992), in her remarkable account of her own autistic life, highlights her inability to generalize, to recognize types of situation so that learned responses to one situation can be transferred to another. Being highly intelligent, she could quickly learn the rules of conduct in a given milieu, especially when they were explained to her, but she couldn’t relate them to a different milieu:
My behavior puzzled others, but theirs puzzled me, too. It was not so much that I had no regard for their rules as that I couldn’t keep up with the many rules for each specific situation. I could put things into categories, but this type of generalizing was very hard to grasp.
Categorizing things was not a problem for her – autistics can deal very well, and often become obsessed, with inanimate objects, which they can count on not to startle them – but categorizing rules is far more difficult for hypersensitive people who are chronically overstimulated. Temple Grandin (1996) gives a similar impression of what it’s like to be autistic.
But something like this experience happens to anyone whose guidance system loses its integrity and becomes merely complicated, an ever-growing pile of miscellaneous precepts. “Learning the rules” then amounts to an accumulation of particular laws rather than a continuing modulation of the inner logos which makes sense of the world. The result of this information overload is an ever-spreading sense of anxiety. In the religious context, Isaiah 28:11-13 (RSV) describes it this way:
Nay, but by men of strange lips
and with an alien tongue
the Lord will speak to this people,
to whom he has said,
This is rest;
give rest to the weary;
and this is repose’;
yet they would not hear.
Therefore the word of the Lord will be to them
precept upon precept, precept upon precept,
line upon line, line upon line,
here a little, and there a little;
that they might go, and fall backward, and be broken, and snared, and taken.