Neurotribes

Highlights

• Autistic children have the ability to see things and events around them from a new point of view, which often shows surprising maturity. This ability, which remains throughout life, can in favorable cases lead to exceptional achievements which others may never attain. Abstraction ability, for instance, is a prerequisite for scientific endeavor. Indeed, we find numerous autistic individuals among distinguished scientists.
• It seems that for success in science and art, a dash of autism is essential. For success, the necessary ingredient may be an ability to turn away from the everyday world, from the simply practical, an ability to re-think a subject with originality so as to create in new untrodden ways.
• The good and bad in a person, their potential for success or failure, their aptitudes and deficits—they are mutually conditional, arising from the same source
  • Note: Quote by Hans Asperger
• The thrill of being part of something that few people could appreciate was particularly keen for those who had spent their lives being ridiculed.
• Felsenstein describes the first time he successfully programmed a computer to type the letter A as a “transcendent experience.”
• “punishment, unlike reinforcement, works to the disadvantage of both the punished organism and the punishing agency.”
• Nothing exists until it has a name. —LORNA WING
• “It was very romantic,” Lorna told me. “We were both assigned the same dead body.”
• Lorna introduced a new diagnostic label, conscious of the social stigma that the word autism carried. This was less a strictly empirical decision on her part and more like smart marketing.
  • Note: Lorna Wing introduced the term Asperger’s Syndrome
• Parents without special experience tend to overlook or reject the idea of autism for their socially gauche, naïve, talkative, clumsy child, or adult, who is intensely interested in the times of tides around the coast of Great Britain, the need for the abolition of British Summer Time, or the names and relationships of all the characters who have ever appeared in a television soap opera, such as Coronation Street. The suggestion that their child may have an interesting condition called Asperger’s syndrome is more acceptable.
• Ultimately, she adopted the term autism spectrum. She liked the sound of it, which evoked pleasing images of rainbows and other phenomena that attest to the infinitely various creativity of nature.
  • Note: She = Lorna Wing
• Before the 1970s, most kids with learning disabilities were admitted to special schools, vocational training centers, and institutions without being referred to a specialist for a specific diagnosis.
• By the 1990s, however, referral to a specialist before applying for services had become the rule rather than the exception.
• In 1991, autism was included in IDEA as its own category of disability for the first time, which enabled children with a diagnosis to gain access to individualized instruction and other services.
• Before the 1980s, autistic kids were generally considered “untestable” in America.
• The fact that this accomplished and articulate industrial designer was unable to speak until age three and struggled with severe behavioral issues through her teens suggested that labels like high-functioning and low-functioning were too simplistic.
  • Note: Temple Grandin
• She pointedly referred to her autism as a “handicap” rather than a mental illness, invoking the humanizing language of disability over the stigmatizing lexicon of psychiatry.
• Grandin proposed that people with autism, dyslexia, and other cognitive differences could make contributions to society that so-called normal people are incapable of making.
• Aware adults with autism and their parents are often angry about autism. They may ask why nature or God created such horrible conditions as autism, manic depression, and schizophrenia. However, if the genes that caused these conditions were eliminated there might be a terrible price to pay. It is possible that persons with bits of these traits are more creative, or possibly even geniuses. If science eliminated these genes, maybe the whole world would be taken over by accountants.
• At home with other members of their tribe, in an environment designed for their comfort, they didn’t feel disabled; they just felt different from their neighbors.
• When other kids bullied him, which happened often, his mother would say, “Be nice to them and they’ll be friends with you.” But he couldn’t figure out why he was expected to want to be friends with people who treated him so cruelly.
• He realized that the same behaviors that had been viewed for so long as inherently antisocial could become social in a group of autistic adults, particularly if there were no clinicians around to pronounce them pathological.
• “We talk about left-handed people, not ‘people with left-handedness,’ and about athletic or musical people, not about ‘people with athleticism’ or ‘people with musicality’ … It is only when someone has decided that the characteristic being referred to is negative that suddenly people want to separate it from the person.”
• Sinclair described autism instead as “a way of being … [that] colors every experience, every sensation, perception, thought, emotion, and encounter, every aspect of existence.”
• This is what we hear when you mourn over our existence. This is what we hear when you pray for a cure. This is what we know, when you tell us of your fondest hopes and dreams for us: that your greatest wish is that one day we will cease to be, and strangers you can love will move in behind our faces.
  • Note: Jim Sinclair
• “Just how handicapping the limitations of disability become depends either on how well the environment is adapted to the range of people who use it, or on the opportunities they have had to learn to cope with it, or both.”
  • Note: Ann Shearer
• Neurodiversity may be every bit as crucial for the human race as biodiversity is for life in general.
• Instead of comparing his arc of development to an idealized set of milestones, they have come to accept that he is unfolding at his own pace. Two steps forward and three steps back—and then, one day, a hurtling leap into his own future, as if he’d been saving it up.
• We need all hands on deck to right the ship of humanity. —ZOSIA ZAKS