Actual vs. Virtual

The article "Virtual Laboratory" really struck a cord with me. The idea that virtual reality is in fact very real to us as humans was surprising to me; I always thought that I would be able to separate between virtual reality and reality. What stood out to me the most, however, was the stigma study in the article. The fact that we as humans react the way we do to just simple facial birthmarks shed a lot of light on Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime and why Haddon specifically did not state that Christopher was autistic. If we as humans react the way we do to virtual reality, it can be suggested that we do the same with literature; it seems that Haddon was trying to avoid that immediate stigma often associated with autism, and was trying to allow the reader to form their own opinion about Christopher as a character. If you take this article and translate it in such a way that it can be applied to literature, it definitely shines a lot of light as to why authors may write the way they do. In order to avoid stigmas and labels, authors may leave some ambiguity in regards to their characters to allow the reader to insinuate what characteristics of the characters are.

On a side note, I really wish that autism was not associated with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. I feel that my reading of the novel would have been completely different had I been able to read it with a clean slate and no pre-conceived notions.