Norman Doidge

ost autistic children have an IQ of less than 70. They have major problems connecting socially to others and may, in severe cases, treat people like inanimate objects, neither greeting them nor acknowledging them as human beings. At times it seems that autistics don’t have a sense that “other minds” exist in the world.

Human beings exhibit an extraordinary degree of sexual plasticity compared with other creatures. We vary in what we like to do with our partners in a sexual act.

romantic love began to gain social approval in the aristocracies and courts of Europe only in the twelfth century—originally between an unmarried man and a married woman, either adulterous or unconsummated, usually ending badly. Only with the spread of democratic ideals of individualism did the idea that lovers ought to be able to choose spouses for themselves take firmer hold and gradually begin to seem completely natural and inalienable.