Ways Of Knowing

I’ve been talking about the Affective Context Model for around 15 years now. In that time I have only ever come across one person who sounded as if they were saying something similar – the author Daniel Tammet.

In his TED speech he argues that "our personal perceptions... are at the heart of how we acquire knowledge. Aesthetic judgments, rather than abstract reasoning, guide and shape the process by which we all come to know what we know. I'm an extreme example of this."

The Affective Context Model suggests that we encode our experience of the world as reactions - emotional reactions - that become increasingly sophisticated as we develop. Our minds become something like an 'emotional retina', capturing a myriad of subtle emotional reactions to stimuli, and using these reactions to conjure up our recollections (which is why they are always inaccurate to some extent).

The mind does this because it is bombarded with huge amounts of information, and needs a hyper-efficient way to store the things that are important. But what is important? Our innate reactions to events initially steer our cognitive processes and are subsequently shaped by our culture and role: a tree-surgeon remembers a street differently, they literally feel differently about what they see.

So Daniel asks 'can you feel where on the number line the solution is likely to fall?' because Daniel also feels that we process numbers (and words) on an instinctive level. He believes this because he has a very subtle set of feelings towards numbers - feelings which allow him, an autistic savant, far greater aptitude for mental arithmetic.

But note that Daniel is not suggesting that, as an autistic, his mind works 'differently', rather he suggests that, by being an 'extreme example' he is able to see more clearly a mechanism that underpins all perception.

My hypothesis is that this is because social cognition in large part obscures the way people process and encode information; in the non-autistic affective significance is skewed towards social interaction and social situations - non-autistics tell stories about the things people said at the weekend.

By contrast the autistic attaches no special importance to other people. Freed from this constraint they are able to attach affective significance to experiences of all kinds, in some cases developing a corresponding aptitude for encoding sounds, numbers or images at a higher degree of resolution. Most autistics are not savants but - I would argue - feel far more strongly and subtly about the details of their world - such as food or sound or routine - that it is hard to function around people with dulled senses, for whom social interaction rules. Autistics live, if you like, in a china-shop populated by bulls - people forever smashing the delicate things that they can't appreciate.

Let me say it differently: I know that you feel differently about the number 4 and the number 7 - about the number 18 and 1066. But I guess you feel the same about the numbers 3164 and 7524 - they both feel like 'fairly big' numbers, right? But an autistic may feel as strongly about the difference between the two as you do between 8 and 18. You have a sense of the shape of 8 and 18 and of how they fit.

As Daniel says, what we think of as 'knowledge' is really comprised of aesthetic judgements. And I think that by 'aesthetic judgements' Daniel intends something very close to my 'affective context'.

As Daniel says, we come to know the world through 'intuitively absorbing the relationships' between objects, events and forces in our world.

But this begs the very question that I have been trying to answer: what is the fundamental mechanism for this process? 

My answer is that it is emotion - our affective reaction to things, and that this same mechanism is used by all creatures capable of cognition. Our emotional reactions to things are far more subtle and powerful than we ever imagined. They are the building blocks of 'intuition' (and of 'System 1'). They are the basic operating system.

Humans do not have a 'special way of knowing'. Language itself, often used as evidence of the specialness of homo sapiens, is fundamentally linked to our intuitions - our feelings about the world - as Daniel suggests. The discriminations we make about our world are probably more subtle than those made by a squirrel (in most regards) just as the discriminations made by autistics are more subtle than those made by non-autistics, but the same mechanism of perceiving, encoding, and processing experience applies.

To express it aphoristically: we think only to the extent that we feel.