NeuroTribes

When I was five years old, I was taking my electronic toys apart to see how they worked. (I also attempted to put them back together, with mixed results.) I have always been a voracious reader. I was reading college-level physics books bought at garage sales in the second grade. I used to annoy my father to no end wanting to build scale models of nuclear reactors, submarines, trains, anything you could think of. I have only had very small groups of close friends. I always considered that odd but never knew how to go about correcting it. Quite frankly, I find most people quite annoying and illogical—probably another common Asperger trait. :)

As they were clearly not psychotic, Asperger coined the term Autistischen Psychopathen (“autistic psychopathy”) to describe their condition, employing a nineteenth-century term for the hazy borderland between mental health and illness. He also employed the simpler term Autismus and referred to it as a “natural entity,” like a field biologist describing a life-form he’d discovered flourishing in plain sight.

He pointed out that the distinctive characteristics of this natural entity were already familiar in stock characters from pop culture like the “absentminded professor” and Count Bobby, a fictitious aristocrat who was the butt of many Austrian jokes. Crucially, Asperger also described Autismus as remaining “unmistakable and constant throughout the whole life-span,” and said that it encompassed an astonishingly broad cross section of people, from the most gifted to the most disabled. There seemed to be nearly as many varieties of Autismus as there were autistic people.

The range [of this type] encompasses all levels of ability from the highly original genius, through the weird eccentric who lives in a world of his own and achieves very little, down to the most severe, contact-disturbed, automaton-like mentally retarded individual . . . Autistic individuals are distinguished from each other not only by the degree of contact disturbance and the degree of intellectual ability, but also by their personality and their special interests, which are often outstandingly varied and original.

applied behavior analysis (ABA), a form of behavior modification based on the animal-learning theories of B. F. Skinner and pioneered as an early intervention for autism in the 1960s by psychologist Ivar Lovaas at the University of California in Los Angeles.

“Autism was until recently a rare disease, characterized by mental disorders that made the patient incapable of a normal life,” he wrote. “The main symptom was a failure to achieve or understand social relationships with other human beings. If Dirac was autistic, then the word ‘autism’ must have a different meaning.”

The authors of a major study published in Nature admitted that even the most common genetic factors brought to light in their research were found in less than 1 percent of the children in their sample. “Most individuals with autism are probably genetically quite unique,” said Stephen Scherer of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. UCLA neurogeneticist Stanley Nelson added, “If you had 100 kids with autism, you could have 100 different genetic causes.” A wry saying popular in the autistic community, “If you meet one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism,” turns out to be true even for molecular biologists.

prompting Forbes science writer Emily Willingham, the mother of an autistic son, to write a blog post with the headline, “This Just In . . . Being Alive Linked to Autism.”

“No two people with autism are the same: its precise form or expression is different in every case,” he wrote. “Moreover, there may be a most intricate (and potentially creative) interaction between the autistic traits and the other qualities of the individual. So, while a single glance may suffice for clinical diagnosis, if we hope to understand the autistic individual, nothing less than a total biography will do.”

French physicist Charles Augustin de Coulomb, though Cavendish thought of it first. His seminal discovery that water is not a monolithic element but composed of hydrogen and oxygen is usually attributed to Antoine Lavoisier

He was wholly engaged in his study of nature, which provided its own form of communion—if not with the souls of other people, then with the hidden forces behind the visible face of things.

transformed his whole environment into a playground for his keenly focused senses and intellect.