Autism

* WISDOM TROVE *

1:A person with autism lives in his own world, while a person with Asperger's lives in our world, in a way of his own choosing ~ nicholas-sparks, @wisdomtrove

* NEWFULLDB 2.4M *

1:Together, we’ll beat autism. ~ Ted Lindsay,

2:Autism is part of who I am. ~ Temple Grandin,

3:Autism is a very serious condition. ~ George Osborne,

4:Autism is an extremely variable disorder. ~ Temple Grandin,

5:autism is more like retina patterns than measles ~ Naoki Higashida,

6:My autism is part of who I am, not all of who I am. ~ Ellen Notbohm,

7:The autism spectrum is multidimensional, not linear ~ Julie Buxbaum,

8:Autism is not a disability, it's a different ability. ~ Stuart Duncan,

9:Half of Silicon Valley's got a little bit of autism. ~ Temple Grandin,

10:People with autism aren't interested in social chit-chat. ~ Temple Grandin,

11:There’s so much evidence vaccines could be the cause of autism, ~ Katy Evans,

12:I have friends struggling with autism, juvenile diabetes. ~ Nicole Ari Parker,

13:I do not suffer from Autism, but I do suffer from the way you treat me. ~ Brad Pitt,

14:One in 150 kids is autistic these days. The autism spectrum is growing. ~ Luke Ford,

15:Autism; It's not new just because you haven't heard of it until now. ~ Stuart Duncan,

16:I am also a believer in an integrated treatment approach to autism. ~ Temple Grandin,

17:Autism is not a choice. Acceptance is. Imagine if the opposite was true. ~ Stuart Duncan,

18:If you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism. ~ Stephen Shore,

19:Heaven, for me, is one focused project - it's like a weird form of autism. ~ Jon Krakauer,

20:People think about autism as something with kids. Well, those kids grow up. ~ Jason Katims,

21:It seems that for success in science or art, a dash of autism is essential. ~ Hans Asperger,

22:The worst thing you can do is nothing. (re: teaching children with autism) ~ Temple Grandin,

23:It is never too late to expand the mind of a person on the autism spectrum. ~ Temple Grandin,

24:Children with Autism aren't missing. Instead, they are off making discoveries ~ Jacob Barnett,

25:The genetics of autism are real, but there are also environmental triggers. ~ Elizabeth Emken,

26:Shit, if I can teach you precalc, I can teach anybody. like maybe kids with autism. ~ John Green,

27:Without a doubt in my mind, I believe that vaccinations triggered Evan's autism. ~ Jenny McCarthy,

28:Autism, as far as I understand it, is about not being given the rule book at birth. ~ Keith Stuart,

29:If you give us a safe vaccine, we'll use it. It shouldn't be polio versus autism. ~ Jenny McCarthy,

30:I more the "Autism World" gets imploded with politics the less voices will be heard. ~ Paul Isaacs,

31:Ketogenic therapy shows promise for autism, fibromyalgia, chronic pain, and migraines. ~ Jimmy Moore,

32:Autism is the filter through which all my other senses must pass, both input and output. ~ Stuart Duncan,

33:My son has autism, and I founded the government relations department at Autism Speaks. ~ Elizabeth Emken,

34:If I could snap my fingers and be nonautistic, I would not. Autism is part of what I am. ~ Temple Grandin,

35:If you have autism in the family history, you still vaccinate. Delay it a bit, space them out. ~ Temple Grandin,

36:Sometimes we forget about common sense. Autism is used too much as an excuse for bad behavior. ~ Temple Grandin,

37:Autism isn't your fault. Each child has the ability to grow. Those words saved me from a dark place. ~ Keiko Tobe,

38:Never underestimate someone with Autism, because there could be Brilliance struggling to get out. ~ Stuart Duncan,

39:I did want to acknowledge and confirm the fact that my son does, indeed, have an autism diagnosis. ~ Jenny McCarthy,

40:As a parent with a child with autism, its been really tough to experience your child having autism. ~ Deron Williams,

41:Hugs may come less frequently from someone with autism but when they do, you know it means everything. ~ Stuart Duncan,

42:I've been interested in autism since I've known about it, which is more or less since I've been writing. ~ William Gibson,

43:It's not just the child that has autism. It's the whole family that has autism. It's not a one person thing. ~ Ted Lindsay,

44:I look at autism like a bus accident, and you don't become cured from a bus accident, but you can recover. ~ Jenny McCarthy,

45:The child who lives with autism may look “normal,” but his behavior can be perplexing and downright unruly. ~ Ellen Notbohm,

46:perception of intention and emotion is irresistible; only people afflicted by autism do not experience it. ~ Daniel Kahneman,

47:His eyes saved him. What they insisted on seeing and reporting to him took him out of the autism of terror. ~ Ursula K Le Guin,

48:People talk about curing autism. But if you got rid of all those traits, who's going to make the next computer? ~ Temple Grandin,

49:The perception of intention and emotion is irresistible; only people afflicted by autism do not experience it. ~ Daniel Kahneman,

50:As a scientist leading a funding agency for autism research, I think of autism as a neurodevelopmental disorder. ~ Thomas R Insel,

51:Never ask for someone's thoughts on autism unless you are prepared to hear a story that doesn't resemble your own. ~ Stuart Duncan,

52:Many of these individuals agree that sensory issues are the primary challenge of autism in their daily lives. There ~ Temple Grandin,

53:Savant syndrome and autism, I think, are not disorders of brain structure, but they're disorders of brain function. ~ Darold Treffert,

54:We have pills for headaches. We have antidepressants for sadness. We had God for believers. We have nothing for autism. ~ Lisa Genova,

55:I think that the definition of autism is too broad. You got to remember, autism definition is a behavioral profiling. ~ Temple Grandin,

56:The more the "Autism World" is invested in politics it will continue to implode and more voices will be lost as a result ~ Paul Isaacs,

57:Autism, like a rainbow, has a bright side and a dark side and even though it can mean rough weather, it can be beautiful! ~ Stuart Duncan,

58:My little brother is autistic, so I would love to be involved in a charity for autism, but I haven't found the right one yet. ~ Nikki Reed,

59:If you can't see the gift in having a child with autism, you're focusing too much on the autism and not enough on the child. ~ Stuart Duncan,

60:A person with autism lives in his own world, while a person with Asperger's lives in our world, in a way of his own choosing ~ Nicholas Sparks,

61:Remember a person with Autism isn't a set of symptoms or statistics always remember and remind them that they're a person first. ~ Paul Isaacs,

62:There's no black and white dividing line between a mild Aspergers, which is the mild autism, and computer engineer, for example. ~ Temple Grandin,

63:I decided to study special education and fell in love with working with individuals with autism. That's what I planned to do with my life. ~ Clay Aiken,

64:Let me see if I can put this in scientific terms: Think of autism like a fart, and vaccines are the finger you pull to make it happen. ~ Jenny McCarthy,

65:There tends to be a lot of autism around the tech centers... when you concentrate the geeks, you're concentrating the autism genetics. ~ Temple Grandin,

66:Yes some people say ignorant things about autism but silencing them solves nothing. They need to be educated. That's how things change. ~ Stuart Duncan,

67:From a scientific standpoint, Aspergers and autism are one syndrome. Aspergers is part of the autism spectrum, not a separate disorder. ~ Temple Grandin,

68:Having a child with Autism can mess with your head: You feel like you can move mountains for them yet you're powerless at the same time. ~ Stuart Duncan,

69:Musk sits somewhere on the autism spectrum and that he has trouble considering other people’s emotions and caring about their well-being. ~ Ashlee Vance,

70:William Stillman's Autism and the God Connection is a sensitive and illuminating work which could dramatically change how we view autism. ~ Carol Bowman,

71:One of the hardest things for a person with autism to do is believe in themselves. But autistics have every right to be as proud as anyone. ~ Stuart Duncan,

72:All my life, I have been working with children whose lives were destroyed because their mothers hated them.”
1981 re: cause of autism ~ Bruno Bettelheim,

73:Autism does exist on a spectrum, and there are so many manifestations of it, so many kinds of expressions of it. And every case is particular. ~ Claire Danes,

74:Those outside of autism need to understand this is an epidemic and we need more government funding, insurance coverage and education reform. ~ Jenny McCarthy,

75:If you ask 99.9 percent of parents who have children with autism if we'd rather have the measles versus autism, we'd sign up for the measles. ~ Jenny McCarthy,

76:It should be noted that a recent publication has shown that the prevalence of autism in African Americans is nearly 25% higher than that of whites ~ Anonymous,

77:Autism doesn't have to define a person. Artists with autism are like anyone else: They define themselves through hard work and individuality. ~ Adrienne Bailon,

78:I have a condition called Aspergers Syndrome, which is like a mild form of autism It means I don't interact properly in certain social situations. ~ Gary Numan,

79:Hope is the greatest thing for moms of autism. Hope is what gets us out of bed in the morning. I'm on a mission to tell parents that there is a way. ~ Jenny McCarthy,

80:Had I not been drawn out by interested grown-ups, I might well have drifted farther into the world of autism. I might have ceased to communicate. ~ John Elder Robison,

81:Autism is a complicated illness, and children with a variety of treatments and non-treatments show improvement over time, which is all to the good. ~ Harvey V Fineberg,

82:Who do you think made the first stone spears? The Asperger guy. If you were to get rid of all the autism genetics, there would be no more Silicon Valley. ~ Temple Grandin,

83:I have always gravitated towards children and teaching. I am now a special needs teacher working with children with Autism and it is very fulfilling for me. ~ Tania Marshall,

84:The charity was for the Autism Speaks Foundation. It was to support the biomedical research for the causes and treatments of autism in both children and adults. ~ Sandi Lynn,

85:Information on how to heal autism and how to possibly delay vaccines or prevent autism shouldn't come from me. It should come from the medical establishment. ~ Jenny McCarthy,

86:Dr. Balice-Gordon believes that a percentage, albeit a small one, of those diagnosed with autism and schizophrenia might in fact have an autoimmune disease. ~ Susannah Cahalan,

87:I believe there is a reason such as autism, severe manic-depression, and schizophrenia remain in our gene pool even though there is much suffering as a result. ~ Temple Grandin,

88:If by some magic, autism had been eradicated from the face of the Earth, then men would still be socializing in front of a wood fire at the entrance to a cave. ~ Temple Grandin,

89:The narrower we define autism, and the more strictly we control for particular behaviors, the more likely we are to find what I think are the subgroups of autism. ~ Darold Treffert,

90:Ordinarily, small children learn much about emotions by looking at the other person’s eyes, while those with autism avoid the eyes and so fail to get those lessons. ~ Daniel Goleman,

91:Do not fear people with Autism, embrace them, Do not spite people with Autism unite them, Do not deny people with Autism accept them for then their abilities will shine ~ Paul Isaacs,

92:The important thing is to bring people with Parkinson's into our world and for the public to have a real understanding of it, as they've beginning to have with autism. ~ Helen Mirren,

93:Autism's an important part of who I am, but I'm a college professor and an animal scientist first. And I wouldn't want to change 'cause I like the logical way I think. ~ Temple Grandin,

94:taught autistic children in Georgetown County and when asked about why he chose such a profession he would say, “After growing up in this family, I found autism refreshing. ~ Pat Conroy,

95:People with Asperger’s or autism expend a huge amount of mental energy each day coping with socializing, anxiety, change, sensory sensitivity, daily living skills and so on. ~ Laura James,

96:To measure the success of our societies, we should examine how well those with different abilities, including persons with autism, are integrated as full and valued members. ~ Ban Ki moon,

97:I think the argument that, when a cell senses danger, it changes its metabolism to protect itself makes a lot of sense — and it makes a lot of sense with what we see in autism. ~ Anonymous,

98:The idea that vaccines are a primary cause of autism is not as crackpot as some might wish. Autism's 60-fold rise in 30 years matches a tripling of the US vaccine schedule. ~ Jenny McCarthy,

99:Without intervention today, the cost of care for adults with autism will be significantly greater and the burden will no longer lie with the parents, but on our entire society. ~ Jenny McCarthy,

100:I have two young children with autism. What could they have ever done to deserve that? What kind of a God allows the innocent to suffer? It's a mystery. Yet still, I believe in God. ~ Fred Melamed,

101:One of the most profound mysteries of autism has been the remarkable ability of most autistic people to excel at visual spatial skills while performing so poorly at verbal skills. ~ Temple Grandin,

102:I deliver babies for a living. I have certainly delivered more than 150 children in my lifetime, yet I'm always puzzled when I hear that one of those children I delivered has autism. ~ Manny Alvarez,

103:It’s become horribly and offensively popular to say that someone is on the autism spectrum, so all I’ll say is his inability to notice when I was crying had to be some kind of pathology. ~ Lena Dunham,

104:Reflecting on my Autism - The processing and communication issues that I have I look at it like this I have had set cards dealt to me and I'm going play them to the best of my abilities. ~ Paul Isaacs,

105:I think a brain can be made "more thinking" or made "more emotional." At what point does this become abnormal? Autism in its milder variants, I think, is part of normal human variation. ~ Temple Grandin,

106:The recent medical controversy over whether vaccinations cause autism reveals a habit of human cognition — thinking anecdotally comes naturally, whereas thinking scientifically does not. ~ Michael Shermer,

107:What would happen if the autism gene was eliminated from the gene pool? You would have a bunch of people standing around in a cave, chatting and socializing and not getting anything done. ~ Temple Grandin,

108:Before being a mental state of the schizophrenic who has made himself into an artificial person through autism, schizophrenia is the process of the production of desire and desiring-machines. ~ Gilles Deleuze,

109:The Tragedy isn't Autism - The Tragedy is the lack of understanding of Autism, Lack of resources, Interventions not being met with the person in mind and Assumptions being made about the person. ~ Paul Isaacs,

110:Vaccines are extremely well tested; their safety is well understood. The false allegations about vaccines causing autism have been disproven. But there are still echoes out there confusing people. ~ Bill Gates,

111:What would happen if the autism gene was eliminated from the gene pool?

You would have a bunch of people standing around in a cave, chatting and socializing and not getting anything done. ~ Temple Grandin,

112:I've got my one area I work in and I want to educate people about autism and I also want to improve, you know, animal handling and transport and make a real change out in the field on the ground. ~ Temple Grandin,

113:Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009) and Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior (Mariner Books, 2006). ~ W Bruce Cameron,

114:In dealing with autism, I'm certainly not saying we should lose sight of the need to work on deficits, But the focus on deficits is so intense and so automatic that people lose sight of the strengths. ~ Temple Grandin,

115:I strongly recommend that students with autism get involved in special interest clubs in some of the areas they naturally excel at. Being with people who share your interests makes socializing easier. ~ Temple Grandin,

116:Label-locked thinking can affect treatment. For instance, I heard a doctor say about a kid with gastrointestinal issues, “Oh, he has autism. That’s the problem”—and then he didn’t treat the GI problem. ~ Temple Grandin,

117:My son was diagnosed with autism. He's OK, he makes eye contact, but he doesn't talk. He needs eight hours a day of very intensive school, and you wouldn't even believe me if I told you how much it costs. ~ Steve Earle,

118:In fact, there are autism clusters, you know, around some of the big tech centers. You take two socially awkward computer programmers and put them together, that can kind of concentrate the autistic genes. ~ Temple Grandin,

119:I wished to God the doctor had handed me a pamphlet that said, 'Hey, sorry about the autism, but here's a step-by-step list on what to do next.' But doctors don't do that. They say 'sorry' and move you along. ~ Jenny McCarthy,

120:Think of it: a disability is usually defined in terms of what is missing. … But autism … is as much about what is abundant as what is missing, an over-expression of the very traits that make our species unique. ~ Paul Collins,

121:It's hard to forget hurtful things, isn't it? Children with autism have good memories. So it's much harder for them to forget bad experiences than it is for us. So fill them with as many good experiences as possible. ~ Keiko Tobe,

122:Working with children with autism has provided me with an opportunity to see the world in a different way. I see them strive to overcome obstacles and persevere, and learn to persevere myself. They are my inspiration. ~ Clay Aiken,

123:One area of study that still needs to be done is the kind of autism where kids have speech and they lose it. Some parents say it's happened right after vaccines. That group needs to be studied separately from others. ~ Temple Grandin,

124:There is a lot of fuss about whether or not Asperger's is on the autism spectrum, but to be honest, it doesn't matter. It's a term we use to get Jacob the accommodations he needs in school, not a label to explain who he is ~ Jodi Picoult,

125:One out of every six American women has so much mercury in her womb that her children are at risk for a grim inventory of diseases, including autism, blindness, mental retardation and heart, liver and kidney disease. ~ Robert F Kennedy Jr,

126:If you are accepting of the belief that life can be good even with autism, then they will think so, too. You are the most important person in your child's life, and you can make them believe that anything is possible. ~ Chantal Sicile Kira,

127:couldn’t change the brain I’d been born with, so instead I learned how to narrow the world with makeshift blinders, until all I noticed was what I wanted to notice. That’s autism, for those who’ve never been there themselves. ~ Jodi Picoult,

128:have become not just advocates, but emissaries. Being an autism parent today requires not only stamina, curiosity, creativity, patience, resilience, and diplomacy—but the courage to think expansively and to dream accordingly. ~ Ellen Notbohm,

129:My brother was diagnosed with autism, so it's something that hits close to home. And as I got older - especially when I started modeling and being in the city - I wanted to do help. I became involved with Autism Speaks. ~ Jacquelyn Jablonski,

130:This discussion of the failure of sufferers of autism to construct either a cultural role or robust cultural understanding raises another proposal that has become popular among some in the discussion of language evolution. ~ Daniel L Everett,

131:There is a small segment of people with autism that have savant skills, where they can memorize entire maps of whole entire city. They can do calendar calculations. And this is similar to some of the skills that animals have. ~ Temple Grandin,

132:For me and other people on the autism spectrum, sensory experiences that have little or no effect on neurotypical people can be severe life stressors for us. Loud noises hurt my ears like a dentist’s drill hitting a nerve. For ~ Temple Grandin,

133:his obsessive adherence to routine and preoccupation with a few obscure areas of interest led many psychologists to conclude that Halliday had suffered from Asperger’s syndrome, or from some other form of high-functioning autism.) ~ Ernest Cline,

134:In different places you run into myths around vaccination or around family planning. In the United States, one of the myths that existed for a long time, that has been completely debunked, was that autism was linked to a vaccine. ~ Melinda Gates,

135:Being exposed to a variety of people with autism is important because not all people on the spectrum are the same. Just because they share a label does not mean they will have anything in common or want to spend time together. ~ Chantal Sicile Kira,

136:When you take a drug to treat high blood pressure or diabetes, you have an objective test to measure blood pressure and the amount of sugar in the blood. It is straight-forward. With autism, you are looking for changes in behavior. ~ Temple Grandin,

137:My wife Cecily Adams was dying of cancer, my daughter Madeline was struggling to overcome an autism diagnosis, and my father was dying, all at the same time. Writing the journal was a cathartic experience, and an extremely positive one. ~ Jim Beaver,

138:obsessive adherence to routine and preoccupation with a few obscure areas of interest led many psychologists to conclude that Halliday had suffered from Asperger’s syndrome, or from some other form of high-functioning autism.) Despite ~ Ernest Cline,

139:The thing is, autism is a big spectrum. Going from folks who remain nonverbal, all the way up to, ya know, famous scientists and musicians. And we've got to work on strengths. We also have to work on teaching basic manners and skills. ~ Temple Grandin,

140:What is missing from today's dialogue is the effect autism is having on families, our society and what the unknown factors are. The 300lb. gorilla in the room is that our children with autism today will soon become adults with autism. ~ Jenny McCarthy,

141:If you start using a medication in a person with autism, you should see an obvious improvement in behavior in a short period of time. If you do not see an obvious improvement, they probably should not be taking the stuff. It is that simple. ~ Temple Grandin,

142:Corner one of the hundreds of doctors who specialize in autism recovery, and they'll tell you stories of dozens of kids in their practice who no longer have autism. Ask them to speak to the press and they'll run for the door. They know better. ~ Jenny McCarthy,

143:Not Speaking has no reflection on what is being thought on the inside, being a non-verbal person with Autism in my early years I've come to value words, they shouldn't be wasted nor abused they should be cherished used positively and productively. ~ Paul Isaacs,

144:The number of 8-year-olds with an autism spectrum disorder rose from 1 in 88 (or 11.3 per 1,000) in 2008 to 1 in 68 (14.7 per 1,000) in 2010, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates. An uptick in diagnoses, perhaps due to better ~ Anonymous,

145:Temple is a hero now to many in the autism community around the world, widely admired for forcing all of us to see autism and Asperger’s not as neurological deficits so much as different modes of being, ones with their own unique dispositions and needs. ~ Oliver Sacks,

146:But reading her journals has helped her to remember more than that morning. There was more to Anthony’s life than his death. And there was more to Anthony than his autism. So much more. She can think about Anthony now and not be consumed by autism or grief. ~ Lisa Genova,

147:My life - autism's an important part of it, but it bothers me when I see kids where autism and their autism is the only thing they think about. I'd rather have them think about, you know, some art work they were gonna do or some science they wanted to do. ~ Temple Grandin,

148:These diagnostic profiles like depression, ADHD, autism, dyslexia, it's half science and the other half is a committee of doctors bickering over what it should be, and it has changed. It's not precise like a diagnosis of tuberculosis would be very precise. ~ Temple Grandin,

149:Dr Andrew Wakefield, a Canadian-trained gastroenterologist, was vilified and eventually struck off by the General Medical Council (GMC) after rightly making a connection between mercury in vaccines and autism which has soared in unison with mercury in vaccines. ~ David Icke,

150:People are also dying from vaccinations. Evan, my son, died in front of me for two minutes. You ask any mother in the autism community if we'll take the flu, the measles, over autism and day of the week. I think they need to wake up and stop hurting our kids. ~ Jenny McCarthy,

151:Labeling a child’s mind as diseased—whether with autism, intellectual disabilities, or transgenderism—may reflect the discomfort that mind gives parents more than any discomfort it causes their child. Much gets corrected that might better have been left alone. ~ Andrew Solomon,

152:When I was diagnosed, mothers were blamed for causing autism. There was no autism support. They'd put autistic kids in institutions. I had severe autism. But my mom wouldn't accept that. I was put in speech therapy. My mother was always pushing me to do stuff. ~ Temple Grandin,

153:One of the places where research is needed is all the sensory problems. And you get sensory problems not just with autism, but with dyslexia, learning problems, ADHD, attention deficit, you know, things like sound sensitivity, problems with fluorescent lighting. ~ Temple Grandin,

154:A child gets vaccinated and soon after, autism symptoms emerge. The apparent cause-and-effect is understandable but erroneous - more a coincidence of the calendar and childhood developmental stages than anything else, as repeated and exhaustive studies have shown. ~ Jeffrey Kluger,

155:Autism's a very big spectrum. At one end of the spectrum, Einstein would probably be labeled autistic, Steve Jobs, half of Silicon Valley, you know, Van Gogh. And at the other end of the spectrum, you got much more severe handicaps where they never learn to speak. ~ Temple Grandin,

156:Parents have come to believe the following conditions are “normal” (as in, many people have them and there’s nothing that can be done) when, in fact, they are not: Colic Eczema Asthma Diabetes Allergies (food/environmental) ADHD Autism Learning disabilities Picky eating ~ Anonymous,

157:Steve Jobs was probably mildly on the autistic spectrum. Basically, you've probably known people who were geeky and socially awkward but very smart. When does geeks and nerds become autism? That's a gray area. Half the people in Silicon Valley probably have autism. ~ Temple Grandin,

158:We have learned that a majority of parents whose children have late-onset or acquired autism believe it is vaccine-related. They deserve answers. We have also learned that the parents have been our best investigators in looking for both causes of autism and for treatments. ~ Dan Burton,

159:People on the autism spectrum don't think the same way you do. In my life, people who made a difference were those who didn't see labels, who believed in building on what was there. These were people who didn't try to drag me into their world, but came into mine instead. ~ Temple Grandin,

160:I'm looking into different parts of Autism Speaks. There's a lot of focus on the first, early diagnosis of younger kids, which is amazing, but I'm wondering, what about these older kids? What happens with them? So I would like to try to find something that fits that. ~ Jacquelyn Jablonski,

161:I don't think I have ever been as inspired by any character that I have played. I was deeply moved by Temple's courage and her resourcefulness.. She is really pioneering in both the world of autism and animal rights. She has encouraged an incredibly positive change in the world. ~ Claire Danes,

162:I'm seeing too many kids where they get fixated on their own autism. I'd rather have them get fixated that they like programming computers or they like art or they want to sing in the church choir or they want to train dogs, you know, something that they can turn into a career. ~ Temple Grandin,

163:When you see an object, it seems that you see it as an entire thing first, and only afterwards do its details follow on. But for people with autism, the details jump straight out at us first of all, and then only gradually, detail by detail, does the whole image float up into focus. ~ Naoki Higashida,

164:When we come to research, if we want to find out the cause of autism, we're going to have to be much more specific, and that's why when it comes to research, I'm fairly strict with respect to criteria. When it comes to treatment, I'm much more open to not making that differentiation. ~ Darold Treffert,

165:If you compare the number of children who are diagnosed as autistic64 to the frequency with which the term autism has been used in American newspapers,65 you’ll find that there is an almost perfect one-to-one correspondence (figure 7-4), with both having increased markedly in recent years. ~ Nate Silver,

166:Some autistic people have savant skills. All autistic people do not have savant skills. Autism is a very variable disorder varying all the way from Einstein, emollient scientist, just a little bit of the trait, many scientist and engineers, down to somebody that's going to remain nonverbal. ~ Temple Grandin,

167:The books said that the problem with autism was in the brain, and that made me feel like a faulty computer, something that should be sent back or scrapped. All the interventions, all the training, were like software designed to make a bad computer work right. It never does, and neither did I. ~ Elizabeth Moon,

168:There is a perception that because individuals with autism have challenges in the area of communication and social skills, they are not interested in having friends. This is not so. Adults with autism may be socially isolated, but it is not always indicative of a preference for solitude. ~ Chantal Sicile Kira,

169:I know children regress after vaccination because it happened to my own son. Why aren't there any tests out there on the safety of how vaccines are administered in the real world, six at a time? Why have only two of the 36 shots our kids receive been looked at for their relationship to autism? ~ Jenny McCarthy,

170:I look at the successful people that have, you know, high functioning autism and Asperger's, they're ones where maybe the parents were in the computer industry and they just taught the kids programming at, you know, age eight and nine and they just went on into the industry with their parents. ~ Temple Grandin,

171:Lets get into talking about how autism is similar animal behavior. The thing is I dont think in a language, and animals dont think in a language. Its sensory based thinking, thinking in pictures, thinking in smells, thinking in touches. Its putting these sensory based memories into categories. ~ Temple Grandin,

172:Parents of recovered children, and I've met hundreds, all share the same experience of doubters and deniers telling us our child must have never even had autism or that the recovery was simply nature's course. We all know better, and frankly we're too busy helping other parents to really care. ~ Jenny McCarthy,

173:When something is "all in your mind," people tend to think that it's willful, that it's something you could control if only you tried harder or if you had been trained differently. I'm hoping that the newfound certainty that autism is in your brain and in your genes will affect public attitudes. ~ Temple Grandin,

174:I can explain how a person with autism thinks. I am very, very interested in how people think. It's been a gradual process of learning more and more about how my thinking process is different. You know it's bottom up - you take specific examples to make concepts and then I put them in categories. ~ Temple Grandin,

175:In 1998, Wakefield published in the prestigious British medical journal the Lancet a scientific paper that linked childhood measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccines to autism. The paper gave Wakefield instant celebrity because it crystallized the amorphous public fear of poison by science. ~ Shawn Lawrence Otto,

176:We are talking only to ourselves. We are not talking to the rivers, we are not listening to the wind and stars. We have broken the great conversation. By breaking that conversation we have shattered the universe. All the disasters that are happening now are a consequence of that spiritual 'autism.' ~ Thomas Berry,

177:Mild autism can give you a genius like Einstein. If you have severe autism, you could remain nonverbal. You don't want people to be on the severe end of the spectrum. But if you got rid of all the autism genetics, you wouldn't have science or art. All you would have is a bunch of social 'yak yaks.' ~ Temple Grandin,

178:If you Google some sites about the link between vaccines and autism, you can very quickly find that Google is repeating back to you your view about whether that link exists and not what scientists know, which is that there isn't a link between vaccines and autism. It's a feedback loop that's invisible. ~ Eli Pariser,

179:We can either continue to collectively stand on the sidelines and debate what is causing autism and if it is an epidemic or we can get on the field and start addressing the real problem - a generation of children with autism. We are not focusing enough on prevention, treatments and support services. ~ Jenny McCarthy,

180:Antiscience advocates on the left could be just as vicious as the right’s climate deniers when scientists pointed out that their ideas that cell phones cause brain cancer, vaccines cause autism, genetically modified crops are unhealthy to eat, and similar notions were not supported by the evidence. ~ Shawn Lawrence Otto,

181:I was nonverbal until I was four years old. Back in the 50s, I was the kind of kid they used to just put away in an institution. But then you get the milder autism where there's no speech delay, but they're socially awkward. Those kids were around when I was a child. They were just called geeks and nerds. ~ Temple Grandin,

182:At the age of three, Tito Mukhopadhyay was diagnosed with severe autism, but his mother, Soma, refused to accept the conventional wisdom of the time that her son would be unable to interact with the outside world. She read to him, taught him to write in English, and challenged him to write his own stories. ~ Temple Grandin,

183:I have a fairly strict definition of early infantile autism. That is not to say that people who don't meet that classic description don't have autism, but we might do well to narrow our definitions, and our samples, down to groups that are very similar, because I think you're more likely to find the cause. ~ Darold Treffert,

184:Autism is a neurological disorder. It's not caused by bad parenting. It's caused by, you know, abnormal development in the brain. The emotional circuits in the brain are abnormal. And there also are differences in the white matter, which is the brain's computer cables that hook up the different brain departments. ~ Temple Grandin,

185:I had never had any experience of autism before and I would come home and look at my son, Billy, who is now two, and be absolutely paranoid, particularly because he loves Thomas the Tank Engine, and lots of autys love Thomas. But he is not very good at pointing, and autistic children absolutely love pointing. ~ Helena Bonham Carter,

186:I’ve said many times that statistics reveal a surprising city: one that has more movie theaters than Paris, more abortions than London, more universities than New York. Where nighttime has become sparse, desolate, the kingdom of only a few. Where violence rules, corners us, silences us into a kind of autism. ~ Paco Ignacio Taibo II,

187:Despite what parents have been told by doctors and the mainstream media, there is science to suggest that vaccines are linked to ADHD[1], autism, asthma, and a number of other serious chronic conditions. In no way have these questions been settled, and in no way has a vaccine-autism link been debunked, as is often stated. ~ Anonymous,

188:All royalties from this edition of Chip Crockett’s Christmas Carol will go to Autism Speaks in Anne Marie Murphy’s name. You can learn more about this organization, or contribute individually to Anne Marie’s tribute page, at the links below. Elizabeth Hand General information on Autism Speaks Anne Marie Murphy’s tribute page ~ Anonymous,

189:There wasn't enough room to leap, but I knew just by the watching how he danced from one foot to the next, he'd leap like a deer.
The most amazing thing was the lack of tics. They were just gone, leaving behind a gorgeous man who would never be normal. Not because of the autism, but because he was too extraordinary. ~ Adrienne Wilder,

190:There are still so many unanswered questions about what causes autism and other developmental disorders on the spectrum. So it is vital that we continue to research and educate ourselves in the hopes that we may begin to understand the challenges that these children and their families continue to face with each passing day. ~ Manny Alvarez,

191:That night, my heart softened around Wills's autism. Clearly, Katherine had been right. I couldn't isolate him. As painful as it was to watch him paralyzed with fright, I knew that he was happier when he tried. Not showing up was admitting defeat. Admitting that he couldn't do it. Admitting that the autism was bigger than him. ~ Monica Holloway,

192:When the link between the use of unsafe, mercury-laden vaccine and autism, ADHD, asthma, allergies and diabetes becomes undeniable, mainstream medicine will be sporting a huge, self-inflicted and well-deserved black eye. Then will come the billion-dollar awards, by enraged juries, to the children and their families. I can't wait. ~ Bernard Rimland,

193:believe that some kids who are in the middle to more high-functioning range of the autism continuum, like me, do not receive the proper stimulation and end up turning inward to such an extent that they can’t function in society, even though they may be incredibly brilliant in some narrowly defined field, like abstract mathematics. ~ John Elder Robison,

194:Comparing children of a 45-year-old dad to those of a 24-year-old father it indicated: autism was more than three times as likely a 13-fold increased risk of ADHD double the risk of a psychotic disorder 25 times more likely to have bipolar disorder 2.5 times more likely to have suicidal behaviour or problems with drugs lower scores at school ~ Anonymous,

195:I believe that some kids who are in the middle to more high-functioning range of the autism continuum, like me, do not receive the proper stimulation and end up turning inward to such an extent that they can’t function in society, even though they may be incredibly brilliant in some narrowly defined field, like abstract mathematics. ~ John Elder Robison,

196:People with autism lack theory of mind but not empathy, while people with psychopathy lack empathy but not theory of mind. Without empathy you can still have sympathy, though—the ability to retrieve emotional memories, including those that can predict what painful event is probably about to befall another person, and the will to help that person. ~ James Fallon,

197:People with autism lack theory of mind but not empathy, while people with psychopathy lack empathy but not theory of mind. Without empathy you can still have sympathy, though—the ability to retrieve emotional memories, including those that can predict what painful event is probably about to befall another person, and the will to help that person. ~ James Fallon,

198:The word “autism” still conveys a fixed and dreadful meaning to most people—they visualize a child mute, rocking, screaming, inaccessible, cut off from human contact. And we almost always speak of autistic children, never of autistic adults, as if such children never grew up, or were somehow mysteriously spirited off the planet, out of society. ~ Temple Grandin,

199:They claim that autism naturally occurs at about 18 months, when the MMR is routinely given, so the association is merely coincidental and not causal. But the onset of autism at 18 months is a recent development. Autism starting at 18 months rose very sharply in the mid-1980s, when the MMR vaccine came into wide use. A coincidence? Hardly! ~ Bernard Rimland,

200:People with autism don't need wheelchairs, artifical legs, or a guide dog. Their prosthesis is people,' says Ruth Christ Sullivan, Ph.D., a founder of the Autism Society of America (ASA), and I could agree with her more. Having good direct support staff in your loved one's life is what makes the difference between a good life and a dismal one. ~ Chantal Sicile Kira,

201:You take somebody - one person has definitely got autism, you got another person that maybe has some of those traits and maybe there's some anxiety, depression, some epilepsy or something in the family history. Put them together, you're more likely to have a severely autistic kid than if you don't have any neurological problems in the family history. ~ Temple Grandin,

202:Parents don't particularly care whether it's early infantile autism or whatever label the clinicians have put on it. All they want is treatment, and they want what's best for their child, whatever that is. And when it comes to treatment, it may be that there's much more shared interventions that don't make any difference what label we're putting on it. ~ Darold Treffert,

203:The human brain is hardwired with a fervent desire to make sense of the world, to create connections between events whether they exist or not. From a rationalist’s standpoint, it’s something of a design flaw. It’s what led ancient people to believe if they danced a certain way, the rain would fall. It’s what led modern people to believe vaccines caused autism. ~ Brad Parks,

204:If I didn't know better, I'd think I suffer from some sort of Tourette's-autism hybrid, but Dr. Pat insists I can control the impulse to say whatever pops into my head. That it's, like, a defensive mechanism, not a biological imperative. Therapists think everything is a defense mechanism. Just my thinking that in my head, right now, is a defense mechanism. ~ Corey Ann Haydu,

205:I think one of the problems with the definition of autism is we keep expanding it. It started as "early infantile autism", and then it became "autism", and now it's "autism spectrum disorder". I'm not opposed to that from the standpoint of trying to broaden our vistas, and so forth. But from a research point of view, the term autism is lost in specificity. ~ Darold Treffert,

206:The chemtrails can cause all these things. Autism. It's not just vaccines that have gone wrong. The chemtrails that are causing all this that you see flying above you. You've seen 'em, folks, streaks. Usually behind airplanes. That's why they're called chemtrails. Contrails. You think they're contrails, but they're actually very insidious things, chemtrails. ~ Rush Limbaugh,

207:Why couldn’t they do that? Why couldn’t they hold on to each other and block out the world? Why couldn’t they surrender to what they couldn’t control? Why weren’t they brave enough to celebrate a life that included autism? She wanted to, and she thinks she eventually got there, but it took her too long. Just as she was ready to dance, the music stopped playing. ~ Lisa Genova,

208:Egalitarianism & Equalism – Is That The Way Forward For Autism? I do not believe in militancy I am not a culturist nor a curist in the "Autism World".

I am a "Neutral" This means that all views and realities are taken into account with equal measure the one thing that binds us is that we all human and it is important to acknowledge all human realities. ~ Paul Isaacs,

209:The ultimate goal of parents, educators, and professionals who interact with children with autism is to unlock their potential to become self-reliant, fully-integrated, contributing members of society. We have the power to unlock this potential by implementing an effectively structured intervention—that which takes the development of the whole child into account. ~ Karina Poirier,

210:Autism is a big continuum, going from someone who remains nonverbal, all the way up to geniuses on Silicon Valley. And some kids are visual thinkers like me. Other kids are pattern thinkers - your mathematicians, your programmers. And there are others, they are word thinkers. Uneven skills. You need to take the thing that they're good at and you need to work on developing it. ~ Temple Grandin,

211:I'll tell you what autism is. In 99 percent of the cases, it's a brat who hasn't been told to cut the act out. That's what autism is. What do you mean they scream and they're silent? They don't have a father around to tell them, 'Don't act like a moron. You'll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don't sit there crying and screaming, idiot.' ~ Michael Savage,

212:In an ideal world the scientist should find a method to prevent the most severe forms of autism but allow the milder forms to survive. After all, the really social people did not invent the first stone spear. It was probably invented by an Aspie who chipped away at rocks while the other people socialized around the campfire. Without autism traits we might still be living in caves. ~ Temple Grandin,

213:Savant syndrome is not a disorder in the same way as autism is a disorder or dementia is a disorder. Savant syndrome are some conditions that are superimposed and grafted on to some underlying disability. So savant syndrome is not a disease or disorder in and of itself. It is a collection of characteristics, or symptoms, or behaviors that have grafted on to the underlying disability. ~ Darold Treffert,

214:Imprisoned in a flattened universe bounded by the screen of the spectacle that has enthralled him, the spectator knows no one but the fictitious speakers who subject him to a one-way monologue about their commodities and the politics of their commodities. The spectacle as a whole serves as his looking glass. What he sees there are dramatizations of illusory escapes from a universal autism. ~ Guy Debord,

215:I think that if I could do any sort of research of autism that I wanted to do, at this point I would take a sample of classic, early infantile autism persons and compare them with what I call "classic late onset autism", individuals. I think we will find that the cause of those youngsters with autism who have autism from birth is probably different than those who have late onset autism. ~ Darold Treffert,

216:One thing I'd like to just keep on doing is I want to educate people about animal behavior and about autism. I've been doing autism talks for the last 20 years and there still are people out there that do not want to, they can't recognize that these sensory problems are real. That, for some of these kids when that fire alarm goes off, that really hurts the ears, it's a really real thing. ~ Temple Grandin,

217:Like the word “radiation,” the word “mercury” had come to mean “poison” to the semi-science-literate, and no distinction was made between the toxic form of mercury (methylmercury) and the ethylmercury that was safely used in vaccines. Antimercury advocacy groups sprang up, even though the symptoms of mercury poisoning are nothing like autism and there was no evidence to support any link. ~ Shawn Lawrence Otto,

218:The cliche about autism is that the syndrome impedes the ability to love, and I began this research interested in how much a parent could contrive to love a child who could not return the affection. Autistic children often seem to inhabit a world on which external cues have limited impact; they may seem to be neither comforted by nor engaged with their parents are not motivated to gratify them. ~ Andrew Solomon,

219:It is important to note that the stress we feel as parents is not generated by our adult child with autism, but rather from the failings of the systems in place that are supposedly there to help us. There are caring people in the systems, yet often the lack of options and foresight and inability to plan ahead or provide options for our loved ones are accepted as normal by the systems in place. ~ Chantal Sicile Kira,

220:Adults often think that fair means impartial, equitable, unbiased. Family rules, school rules, and team rules apply to each sibling, student, or teammate equally. But autism un- levels the playing field. It potholes the field. All things are not being equal. So our thinking on the subject of fair must change. Here it is: Fair does not mean everything is equal. Fair is when everyone gets what they need. ~ Ellen Notbohm,

221:To give the short version, I've learnt that every human being, with or without disabilities, needs to strive to do their best, and by striving for happiness you will arrive at happiness. For us, you see, having autism is normal -- so we can't know for sure what your 'normal' is even like. But so long as we can learn to love ourselves, I'm not sure how much it matters whether we're normal or austitic. ~ Naoki Higashida,

222:It's always nice when someone reaches out and says, "I have an autistic brother," or "I have someone else." Some people are really sweet and they're like, "Aw, you're my role model, thank you for doing this." This is why I do it. I want to use being involved in this Autism Speaks charity and take advantage of my contacts in order to raise awareness. It's something I've been wanting to do for so long. ~ Jacquelyn Jablonski,

223:Men with more “masculine” 2D:4D ratios tend toward higher levels of aggression and math scores; more assertive personalities; higher rates of ADHD and autism (diseases with strong male biases); and decreased risk of depression and anxiety (disorders with a female skew). The faces and handwriting of such men are judged to be more “masculine.” Furthermore, some reports show a decreased likelihood of being gay. ~ Robert M Sapolsky,

224:What is of essential importance is the impact that being autistic has on a person at any given time. This can range from horrifically negative right through to sublimely positive -- and sometimes both can be found in the same individual. So, if this dramatic difference can be seen at different times in the same person -- what 'grade' is that person? Clearly, this is where the whole notion of 'autism severity' crumbles. ~ Luke Beardon,

225:In 1974, 1 in 5,000 children were diagnosed with autism. When I began writing this book in 2012, that number was estimated at 1 in 88. In early 2013, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released yet another statistic; 1 in 55 children are now diagnosed and identified as being on the autism spectrum. What has changed? Are there more autistic children being born now than ever before? Is there an epidemic? ~ Jeannie Davide Rivera,

226:The boy's mother said he was autistic and sometimes spaced out, staring at his hands, but because I didn't know what autism was, really, I figured he was more or less mesmerized by his existence. I was romanticizing the situation because the kid was probably distracting himself or daydreaming or something, but I thought maybe he was like Hamlet looking at his hands, thinking sincerely about what it means to have been born. ~ Donald Miller,

227:I have respect for mother nature's methods of robustness (billions of years allow most of what is fragile to break); classical thought is more robust (in its respect for the unknown, the epistemic humility) than the modern post-Enlightenment naïve pseudoscientific autism. Thus my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity's phoniness, nerdiness and philistinism ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,

228:There should be no single representation in the autism world. Think about this if someone got up on stage and talked about having “non-autistic syndrome” and made the assumption every one with this syndrome is the same we would be in big trouble. That applies to autism as well - it isn't one condition, there are profile differences between Autism and AS and all autism "fruits salads" are different. That is how diverse autism is. ~ Paul Isaacs,

229:There is a huge boom in autism right now because inattentive mothers and competitive dads want an explanation for why their dumb-ass kids can't compete academically, so they throw money into the happy laps of shrinks . . . to get back diagnoses that help explain away the deficiencies of their junior morons. I don't give a [bleep] what these crackerjack whack jobs tell you - yer kid is NOT autistic. He's just stupid. Or lazy. Or both. ~ Denis Leary,

230:The universe—in the shape of a butterfly. And then it all vanished. Spell, lights, magic, everything. She didn’t feel her legs crumple or the grass come up to meet her head. She only knew that it was over. -o0o- Witch chaos. Lauren pushed through the crowd surrounding Beth. “Don’t touch her.” Ginia looked up. “I have to check her channels.” It wasn’t her channels that were the problem. “It’s her autism we overloaded, not her magic. ~ Debora Geary,

231:So, obviously, autism - which is the key in this - is a very big problem. We need more studies about it. We certainly have to try to figure out what causes it and why and do something about it. But to tab it to vaccines, I think, is a real mistake. Not only is there no evidence, but what it leads to is larger numbers of unvaccinated children. And that's not only a problem for polio. It's a problem for a wide range of vaccine-preventable diseases. ~ David Oshinsky,

232:There's a famous expression that if you've met one person with autism, then... you've met one person with autism.
So you met me.
Just me.
Not a diagnosis.

I realize I hurt you. I forgot to think about you first. I did not put myself in your shoes, as the expression goes. (Though as a sidebar, I think wearing other people's shoes is kind of disgusting; I'm only okay with the concept metaphorically.)

So you know, you are all I think about. ~ Julie Buxbaum,

233:I'm actually working on with Autism Speaks. Since my brother's 18, I wanted to work on a program for these older kids. A lot of the schools' special education programs end when the kids are 21, like my brother's school. What is next for these kids? I want him to be constantly active, and not just sitting at home. I want him to be constantly growing and it would be amazing if the funds could go to something like jobs for these kids, or a home where they can be together. ~ Jacquelyn Jablonski,

234:The main problem, certainly, for the people who will not get vaccinated with Thimerosal, which was put into polio vaccine. And the belief was that it may cause autism. And there's been an awful lot done in terms of studies in Western Europe, Canada, the United States, and no correlation was found between Thimerosal and autism from those children who took vaccines. Indeed, when Thimerosal was taken out of many of these vaccines, the autism rate in the United States still rose. ~ David Oshinsky,

235:We have to be careful that we don't keep multiplying disorders and diluting them. I think there is a difference. People talk about Asperger's as high-functioning autism, which I think it is. But it does have some of its own characteristics, like the preservation of language, particularly, which may be right brain dysfunction instead of left brain dysfunction, and we lose something in that, as things lose their specificity, and we keep diluting things. I'm not sure that's helpful. ~ Darold Treffert,

236:Criticizing people, winding them up, making idiots of them or fooling them doesn't make people with autism laugh. What makes us smile from the inside is seeing something beautiful, or a memory makes us laugh. This generally happens when there's nobody watching us. And at night, on our own, we might burst out laughing underneath the duvet, or roar with later in an empty room ... When we don't need to think about other people or anything else, that's when we wear our aural expressions. ~ Naoki Higashida,

237:Up to two hundred genes can be implicated in autism, and some evidence suggests that you need several to manifest the syndrome. Sometimes, epistatic, or modifier, genes influence the expression of primary genes; sometimes environmental factors influence the expression of these genes. The closer the relationship between genotype and phenotype, the easier it is to discern. In autism, some people with a share genotype don't share a phenotype, and some with a shared phenotype don't share a genotype. ~ Andrew Solomon,

238:When parents say, ‘I wish my child did not have autism,’ what they’re really saying is, ‘I wish the autistic child I have did not exist, and I had a different (non-autistic) child instead.’ Read that again. 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. ~ Andrew Solomon,

239:The trauma of Down's syndrome is that it is present prenatally and can therefore undermine the early stages of bonding. The challenge of autism is that it sets in or is detected in the toddler years, and so transfigures the child to whom parents have already bonded. The shock of schizophrenia is that it manifests in late adolescence or early adulthood, and parents must accept that the child they have known and loved for more than a decade may be irrevocably lost, even as that child looks much the same as ever. ~ Andrew Solomon,

240:This is cool I have my Autism profile (information processing - visual, verbal, auditory, body, context blindnesses/deafnesses etc) and my Personhood which is Idiosyncratic/Solitary/Emotional personality traits these come from different places but "hold hands" personhood and Autism are different entities and can be separated in terms of context, understanding (differences between ASD and Personality) but they're within one person and I would always want to seen as someone for their personhood rather than my Autism. ~ Paul Isaacs,

241:A major cause of the Roman Empire's decline, after six centuries of world dominance was its replacement of stone aqueducts by lead pipes for the transport and supply of drinking water. Roman engineers, the best in the world, turned their fellow citizens into cripples. Today our own "best and brightest," with the best of intentions, achieve the same end through childhood vaccination programmes yielding the modern scourges of hyperactivity, learning disabilities, autism, appetite disorders, and impulsive violence. ~ Harris L Coulter,

242:It is easier to say that AS best describes my differences. It makes people more comfortable to have a scientific-sounding term. But actually, I feel dishonest when I say I have AS because the negative effects of my differences on my life are so slight compared to other kids who have AS or other forms of autism and truly suffer. I always feel like I'm doing the people who have these conditions a disservice when I use the medical term, because then people say, "Oh, that doesn't seem so bad. What's all the fuss about? ~ Francisco X Stork,

243:Rain Man certainly didn't test really well. If you look at it carefully, you have a disease autism they didn't understand back then, they didn't know in the test audience whether it's okay to laugh or not laugh, because it's a film that's done in a way where, "Well, maybe I'm not supposed to laugh." At the end of the film, Dustin Hoffman gets on the train and doesn't even acknowledge his brother. Not even a glance, nothing. That's why the studio said, "Can't you just have him look at Tom Cruise at the end of the film?" ~ Barry Levinson,

244:Social (Pragmatic) Communication Disorder DSM-5 describes a new disorder that has elements of ASD but is actually conceptualized as outside the autism spectrum. The intention is to provide diagnostic coverage for children with symptoms in the social-communication domain but who have never displayed repetitive, restricted behaviours or interests. However, it is unclear how Social Communication Disorder (SCD) will be different from ASD, which support or therapy services will be available, and what the child will qualify for. ~ Tony Attwood,

245:I get goose-bumps when you talk about Diane Wilson. Who knows where she found that courage? When she was a child, she would crawl under the bed when a stranger came to the house. But in 1989, she found out that her county in south Texas was ranked worst in the country for toxic waste. She wondered if the effluent, dumped into the waters where she and her family had shrimped for generations, might be responsible for the dwindling fish populations. And she suspected that her son's autism might be related to the pollution. ~ Frances Moore Lappe,

246:Researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have determined that the brain is directly connected to the immune system by lymphatic vessels we didn’t know existed.25 That we had no idea about these vessels given the fact that the lymphatic system has been so thoroughly studied and charted throughout the body is astonishing on its own. And such a discovery will have significant effects on the study and treatment of neurological diseases, from autism and multiple sclerosis to Alzheimer’s disease and, yes, depression. It’s ~ Kelly Brogan,

247:On the left, the antiscience tends to extend worries about health and the environment into areas that are not supported by the evidence, claiming nevertheless that, as in Silent Spring, there are hidden dangers to our environment, our health, or our spirits. Examples include the ideas that cell phones cause brain cancer; that Wi-Fi and other electromagnetic fields cause cancer, birth defects, or allergies; that vaccines cause autism; that genetically modified crops are unsafe to eat; and that fluoride in water is unsafe to drink. ~ Shawn Lawrence Otto,

248:A burst of high-frequency TMS pulses applied over Broca’s area on the left side would shut down the ability to speak, Shirley told me. This wasn’t what they were doing in the autism study—what they proposed was a much subtler tweaking. But I was intrigued by her comment and didn’t let it go. “Did you actually try it yourself?” I asked her. It turned out that she had—in fact, quite a few of the researchers, as part of their training to work in the lab, had experienced the speech-suppression TMS. They offered to show me what it felt like. ~ John Elder Robison,

249:The thing is, autism is all different, you know, variables. And you start out with a certain amount of, you know, the point where the differences in the brain are going to just be a personality variant and, like, for very mild Asperger's. But you get into more severe kinds of autism where there's obvious speech delay, obvious abnormal behavior in a two and three-year-old child, you know, the initial neurology is different from case to case. But all children with autism are going to do better if they get really good educational intervention. ~ Temple Grandin,

250:In my practice I use neurofeedback primarily to help with the hyperarousal, confusion, and concentration problems of people who suffer from developmental trauma. However, it has also shown good results for numerous issues and conditions that go beyond the scope of this book, including relieving tension headaches, improving cognitive functioning following a traumatic brain injury, reducing anxiety and panic attacks, learning to deepen meditation states, treating autism, improving seizure control, self-regulation in mood disorders, and more. ~ Bessel A van der Kolk,

251:True autism, Jack had decided, was in the last analysis an apathy toward public endeavor; it was a private existence carried on as if the individual person were the creator of all value, rather than merely the repository of inherited values. And Jack Bohlen, for the life of him, could not accept the Public School with its teaching machines as the sole arbiter of what was and what wasn't of value. For the values of a society were in ceaseless flux, and the Public School was an attempt to stabilize those values, to jell them at a fixed point-to embalm them. ~ Philip K Dick,

252:I volunteered at UCLA's occupational therapy ward, where there are lots of kids with autism and emotional problems. I just wanted to prove to myself that I could not break down and cry at everything, and that I could just help somebody else. The one thing I really remember was that when we would take them out of the hospital for a walk around campus, they would freak out the most when we were waiting for the elevator. I remember the guy at the elevator said to himself, "Transitions are the hardest." And I said to myself, "Transitions are always the hardest." ~ Fiona Apple,

253:Today, however, anti-vaccine activists go out of their way to claim that they are not anti-vaccine; they’re pro-vaccine. They just want vaccines to be safer. This is a much softer, less radical, more tolerable message, allowing them greater access to the media. However, because anti-vaccine activists today define safe as free from side effects such as autism, learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, strokes, heart attacks, and blood clots—conditions that aren’t caused by vaccines—safer vaccines, using their definition, can never be made. ~ Paul A Offit,

254:In America we've spent over a billion dollars on autism research. What have we got for that? We've not seen anything that's appreciably impacted the quality of life of autistic people, regardless of their place on the spectrum. Quite frankly, we've spent $1bn figuring out how to make mice autistic and we'll spend another $1bn figuring out how to make them not autistic. And that's not what the average person wakes up in the morning aspiring to. They think: am I going to be able to find a job, to communicate, to live independently, either on my own or with support? Those are the real priorities. ~ Ari Ne eman,

255:I've met so many parents of the kids who are on the low end of the autism spectrum, kids who are diametrically opposed to Jacob, with his Asperger's. They tell me I'm lucky to have a son who's verbal, who is blisteringly intelligent, who can take apart the broken microwave and have it working again an hour later. They think there is no greater hell than having a son who is locked in his own world, unaware that there's a wider one to explore. But try having a son who is locked in his own world and still wants to make a connection. A son who tries to be like everyone else but truly doesn't know how. ~ Jodi Picoult,

256:Just as the discoveries of medication and surgery led to therapies to relieve a staggering number of conditions, so does the discovery of neuroplasticity. The reader will find cases, many very detailed, that may be relevant to someone who has, or cares for someone who has experienced, chronic pain, stroke, traumatic brain injury, brain damage, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, autism, attention deficit disorder, a learning disorder (including dyslexia), a sensory processing disorder, a developmental delay, a part of the brain missing, Down syndrome, or certain kinds of blindness, among others. ~ Norman Doidge,

257:rediscovered, a ketogenic diet is returning to mainstream acceptance and is again recognized as a highly effective therapy for seizure and neurologically related disorders. In fact, there are studies to show the strong benefits of ketogenic diets on virtually every manner of neurological disorder. Some examples of neurologic uses of a ketogenic diet other than epilepsy are migraines, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS), autism, brain tumors, depression, sleep disorders, schizophrenia, postanoxic brain injury, posthypoxic myoclonus glycogenosis type V, and narcolepsy, to name a few. ~ Nora T Gedgaudas,

258:I think that people with autism are born outside the regime of civilization. Sure, this is just my own made-up theory, but I think that, as a result of all the killings in the world and the selfish planet-wrecking that humanity has committed, a deep sense of crisis exists. Autism has somehow arisen out of this. Although people with autism look like other people physically, we are in fact very different in many ways. We are more like travelers from the distant, distant past. And if, by our being here, we could help the people of the world remember what truly matters for the Earth, that would give us a quiet pleasure. ~ Naoki Higashida,

259:In an effort to add detail to my blueprint for life, I have begun contacting a number of autism experts, including Professor Tony Attwood, author of The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome. He stressed that with autism the core features are generally the same for boys and girls, men and women. There are, however, key differences. He told me, “One is how girls react to being different. The other is the different expectations in society for girls. “In terms of how girls react, I think one of the common ways is to observe, analyze, and imitate and create a mask, which delays diagnosis for decades until the wheels fall off. ~ Laura James,

260:Six decades of study, however, have revealed conflicting, confusing, and inconclusive data.17 That’s right: there has never been a human study that successfully links low serotonin levels and depression. Imaging studies, blood and urine tests, postmortem suicide assessments, and even animal research have never validated the link between neurotransmitter levels and depression.18 In other words, the serotonin theory of depression is a total myth that has been unjustly supported by the manipulation of data. Much to the contrary, high serotonin levels have been linked to a range of problems, including schizophrenia and autism.19 ~ Kelly Brogan,

261:GAPS Diet This diet is intended to heal gut damage in children, which may result in autism, ADHD, severe food allergies, or other outward symptoms. Children who have severe physical and behavioral problems may begin this diet in order to address the underlying causes, which is a so-called “leaky gut.” This means that the good gut flora that should be present isn’t, and that there are “holes” in the gut wall where undigested proteins are leaking through and into the bloodstream, sensitizing the child. There is also an overgrowth of pathogenic bacteria and likely, candida. The GAPS diet[2] addresses this and helps to actually heal the gut. ~ Anonymous,

262:fully fifty-five diseases are known to be caused by gluten (Farrell and Kelly 2002). Among these are heart disease, cancer, nearly all autoimmune diseases, osteoporosis, irritable bowel syndrome and other gastrointestinal disorders, gallbladder disease, Hashimoto’s disease (an autoimmune thyroid disorder responsible for up to 90 percent of all low-functioning thyroid issues), migraines, epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease), neuropathies (having normal EMG readings), and most other degenerative neurological disorders as well as autism, which is technically an autoimmune brain disorder. ~ Nora T Gedgaudas,

263:As a functional Aspergian adult, one thing troubles me deeply about those kids who end up behind the second door. Many descriptions of autism and Asperger’s describe people like me as “not wanting contact with others” or “preferring to play alone.” I can’t speak for other kids, but I’d like to be very clear about my own feelings: I did not ever want to be alone. And all those child psychologists who said “John prefers to play by himself” were dead wrong. I played by myself because I was a failure at playing with others. I was alone as a result of my own limitations, and being alone was one of the bitterest disappointments of my young life. ~ John Elder Robison,

264:Thank God for the American Affordable Care Act. It was passed in a limited form right before the Rising began, despite the opposition of one hell of a lot of people who thought that providing health care to their fellow citizens was somehow, I don’t know, inappropriate. Honestly, it was a miracle the thing passed at all, considering that we’re talking about the era of vaccine denial and homeopathic cures for everything from autism to erectile dysfunction. If the Rising hadn’t come along when it did, most of the United States would probably have died of whooping cough before 2020, leaving the middle part of the continent ripe for Canadian invasion. But ~ Mira Grant,

265:The children I describe here have horizontal conditions that are alien to their parents. They are deaf or dwarfs; they have Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, or multiple severe disabilities; they are prodigies; they are people conceived in rape or who commit crimes; they are transgender. The timeworn adage says that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, meaning that a child resembles his or her parents; these children are apples that have fallen elsewhere—some a couple of orchards away, some on the other side of the world. Yet myriad families learn to tolerate, accept, and finally celebrate children who are not what they originally had in mind. ~ Andrew Solomon,

266:Some introductory books on neurofeedback: J. Robbins, A Symphony in the Brain: The Evolution of the New Brain Wave Biofeedback (New York: Grove Press, 2000); M. Thompson and L. Thompson, The Neurofeedback Book: An Introduction to Basic Concepts in Applied Psychophysiology (Wheat Ridge, CO: Association for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback, 2003); S. Larsen, The Healing Power of Neurofeedback: The Revolutionary LENS Technique for Restoring Optimal Brain Function (Rochester, VT: Healing Arts Press, 2006); S. Larsen, The Neurofeedback Solution: How to Treat Autism, ADHD, Anxiety, Brain Injury, Stroke, PTSD, and More (Toronto: Healing Arts Press, 2012). ~ Norman Doidge,

267:Dr. Sacks treats each of his subjects—the amnesic fifty-year-old man who believes himself to be a young sailor in the Navy, the “disembodied” woman whose limbs have become alien to her, and of course the famous man who mistook his wife for a hat—with a deep respect for the unique individual living beneath the disorder. These tales inspire awe and empathy, allowing the reader to enter the uncanny worlds of those with autism, Alzheimer's, Tourette's syndrome, and other unfathomable neurological conditions. “One of the great clinical writers of the 20th century” (The New York Times), Dr. Sacks brings to vivid life some of the most fundamental questions about identity and the human mind. ~ Oliver Sacks,

268:anthologies like Accessing the Future (gathering together voices of disabled people to create SF tales of disability), The Sum of Us (an anthology complicating ideas of care and caregiving), Alison Sinclair’s Darkborn series (presenting the social changes that would occur in a world where half the population is blind), Tanya Huff’s novel Gate of Darkness, Circle of Light (which features a protagonist with an intellectual disability who resists containment or control), Ada Hoffmann’s short story “You Have To Follow the Rules” (which transports the reader into a world where autism is the norm and asks us to reconsider how we codify rules of social interaction and privilege neurotypicality), ~ Lynne M Thomas,

269:In the first sixteen years of my life, my parents took me to at least a dozen so called professionals. Not one of them ever came close to figuring out wheat was wrong with me. In their defense, I will concede that Asperger's did not yet exist as a diagnosis, but autism did, and no one ever mentioned I might have any kind of autistic spectrum disorder. Autism was viewed by many as a much more extreme condition - one where kids never talked and could not take care of themselves. Rather than take a close sympathetic look at me, it proved easier and less controversial for the professionals to say I was just lazy, or angry, or defiant. But none of those words led to a solution to my problem. ~ John Elder Robison,

270:Danforth and Grob have reason to believe that MDMA could be crucial in breaking down the barriers autistic people face, especially their extreme difficulty in connecting to the “neurotypical” world. There are ample accounts from those with autism who have taken MDMA independently, without medical guidance, stating that the drug makes it possible for them to function—not only while they’re on the drug, but for weeks and sometimes months afterward. In Danforth’s own study of how autistic adults experience the subjective effects of MDMA, she found that 91 percent of respondents reported an increase in feelings of connectedness on MDMA, while 86 percent of them said that communication became easier. ~ Lauren Slater,

271:Many autism experts believe daily living skills, such as managing finances, need to be explicitly taught to people on the autism spectrum. Everything most nonautistic people pick up as they go along—how to shop, catch a bus, cook, clean, or manage money—are skills that are difficult for me to acquire simply by assimilation. I need a book, a video, or someone to explain and show me how to do it. There’s a perception that anyone with average or above-average intelligence will naturally pick up these skills. Strangely, intelligence seems to have little to do with it, and one study even found that problems of this kind are especially prominent in those autistic people with greater cognitive abilities. ~ Laura James,

272:Key survey results, which showed that Democrats were roughly twice as likely to have been diagnosed with a mental disorder as Republicans, included: post-traumatic stress disorder (Democrats 7.95 percent, Republicans 3.97 percent), ADD/ADHD (Democrats 9.13 percent, Republicans 3.97 percent), anxiety (Democrats 20.84 percent, Republicans 10.26 percent), depression (Democrats 34.43 percent, Republicans 23.51 percent). In fact, in every category polled – dyslexia, ADD/ADHD, Asperger’s/autism, depression, anxiety, OCD, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, PTSD, narcissistic personality disorder, anorexia, and bulimia – Democrats reported higher incidences than Republicans, except for dyslexia.37 Nevertheless, ~ David Kupelian,

273:The teacher picks a science issue that has political traction at the time, such as climate disruption, vaccines and autism, GM food or the like, and phrases it as an antiscience proposition that students will argue for, using rhetorical arguments, or argue against, using scientific arguments. The trick is that the teacher does not determine who will argue for or against the motion until the day of the debate, by a coin toss. This way, all students have to research both sides of the debate. In so doing, they quickly learn the difference between the knowledge-based scientific arguments against the antiscience proposition, and the non-scientific, emotionally persuasive rhetorical arguments in favor. ~ Shawn Lawrence Otto,

274:science and reason, which has found itself in recent decades under attack on many fronts: right-wing ideologues who do not understand science; religious-right conservatives who fear science; left-wing postmodernists who do not trust science when it doesn’t support progressive tenets about human nature; extreme environmentalists who want to return to a prescientific and preindustrial agrarian society; antivaxxers who wrongly imagine that vaccinations cause autism and other maladies; anti-GMO (genetically modified food) activists who worry about Frankenfoods; and educators of all stripes who cannot articulate why Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) are so vital to a modern democratic nation. ~ Michael Shermer,

275:So how do people with autism see the world, exactly? We, only we, can ever know the answer to that one! Sometimes I actually pity you for not being able to see the beauty of the world in the same way we do. Really, our vision of the world can be incredible, just incredible ...

When you see an object, it seems that you see it as an entire thing first, and only afterwards do its details follow on.... But for people with autism, the details jump straight out at us first of all, and then only gradually, detail by detail, does the whole image sort of float up into focus.

Every single thing has its own unique beauty. People with autism get to cherish this beauty, as if it's a kind of blessing given to us. ~ Naoki Higashida,

276:The number of diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder almost certainly went up dramatically for another reason, one that hasn’t gotten as much attention as it should: a typographical error. Shocking but true. In the DSM-IV, the description of pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified that was supposed to appear in print was “a severe and pervasive impairment in social interaction and in verbal or nonverbal communication skills” (emphasis added). What actually appeared, however, was “a severe and pervasive impairment of reciprocal social interaction or verbal and nonverbal communication skills” (emphasis added). Instead of needing to meet both criteria to merit the diagnosis of PDD-NOS, a patient needed to meet either. ~ Temple Grandin,

277:On the one hand, I was happy to have a proper diagnosis. Aside from a trust fund and a royal title, that was really the only thing I'd ever wanted in life. On the other hand, I was offended to learn that my brain was defective. Or, I suppose I should say, "differently abled."
One thing I was not was surprised. Four generations of manic depression on my mother's side of the family. Three of autism on my father's side. Drug addict uncles, a pyromaniac cousin, a couple of schizophrenics and suicides, several flesh-and-blood geniuses, and a pecan farmer. You just cannot mix those raw ingredients together and then stick them inside my mother for nine months and expect something normal to come out. It's a wonder I wasn't born with a set of horns. ~ Augusten Burroughs,

278:... for me the number one reason is that us people with autism love the greenness of nature.

... Our fondness for nature is, I think, a little bit different to everyone else's. I'm guessing that what touches you in nature is the beauty of the trees and the flowers and things. But to us people with special needs, nature is as important as our own lives. The reason is that when we look at nature, we receive a sort of permission to be alive in this world, and our entire bodies get recharged. However often, we're ignored and pushed away by other people, nature will always give us a good big hug, here inside our hearts.

The greenness of nature is the lives of plants and trees. Green is life. And that's the reason we love to go for walks. ~ Naoki Higashida,

279:[I]t seems to me that a lot of the stranger ideas people have about medicine derive from an emotional struggle with the very notion of a pharmaceutical industry. Whatever our political leanings, we all feel nervous about profit taking any role in the caring professions, but that feeling has nowhere to go. Big pharma is evil; I would agree with that premise. But because people don’t understand exactly how big pharma is evil, their anger gets diverted away from valid criticisms—its role in distorting data, for example, or withholding lifesaving AIDS drugs from the developing world—and channeled into infantile fantasies. “Big pharma is evil,” goes the line of reasoning; “therefore homeopathy works and the MMR vaccine causes autism.” This is probably not helpful. ~ Ben Goldacre,

280:He was a man of very few words, and as it was impossible to talk, one had to keep silent. It’s hard work talking to some people, most often males. I have a Theory about it. With age, many men come down with testosterone autism, the symptoms of which are a gradual decline in social intelligence and capacity for interpersonal communication, as well as a reduced ability to formulate thoughts. The Person beset by this Ailment becomes taciturn and appears to be lost in contemplation. He develops an interest in various Tools and machinery, and he’s drawn to the Second World War and the biographies of famous people, mainly politicians and villains. His capacity to read novels almost entirely vanishes; testosterone autism disturbs the character’s psychological understanding. ~ Olga Tokarczuk,

281:This law will not let undesirables be born that will suck up money throughout their lives because they have one health issue or another, like children with Down syndrome or even Autism. This law will require that everyone pay the government for their healthcare, no one will have the freedom to use whatever healthcare provider they want. We will control what will be used and for how long. Companies who do not comply with the rules, like giving their employees full access to abortions, will be sued or forced out of business. Universal healthcare will also be used to tell people what they can or cannot eat, and we will declare that Americans are full of obese people who need the government to control what they eat. No more eating whatever junk food you want to eat just because you can. ~ Cliff Ball,

282:Neurotypical - Is the Word Useful? And/or Meaningful

The word itself doesn't make sense - being used to describe "others" (people who aren’t on the spectrum) society is a mixture of different sorts of people and rather than lumping people into one "group" (neurotypical society, neurotypicals, NTS) wouldn't it be best to say people who don't have autism? People who aren't on spectrum? It has also been used as word to "attack” people who don't have autism which surely is reverse prejudice? Two wrongs certainly don’t make a right in this case.

I like people on the basis of being people it doesn't matter who they are or were they come from I like them for their personalities not because of anything other – human beings are all unique and that means we are all equal in the world. ~ Paul Isaacs,

283:Every genetic “illness” is a mismatch between an organism’s genome and its environment. In some cases, the appropriate medical intervention to mitigate a disease might be to alter the environment to make it “fit” an organismal form (building alternative architectural realms for those with dwarfism; imagining alternative educational landscapes for children with autism). In other cases, conversely, it might mean changing genes to fit environments. In yet other cases, the match may be impossible to achieve: the severest forms of genetic illnesses, such as those caused by nonfunction of essential genes, are incompatible with all environments. It is a peculiar modern fallacy to imagine that the definitive solution to illness is to change nature—i.e., genes—when the environment is often more malleable. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee,

284:Every genetic “illness” is a mismatch between an organism’s genome and its environment. In some cases, the appropriate medical intervention to mitigate a disease might be to alter the environment to make it “fit” an organismal form (building alternative architectural realms for those with dwarfism; imagining alternative educational landscapes for children with autism). In other cases, conversely, it might mean changing genes to fit environments. In yet other cases, the match may be impossible to achieve: the severest forms of genetic illnesses, such as those caused by nonfunction of essential genes, are incompatible with all environments. It is a peculiar modern fallacy to imagine that the definitive solution to illness is to change nature—i.e., genes—when the environment is often more malleable. 10. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee,

285:Congress will also look into the possible link that certain medical problems, such as Down syndrome, Autism, and others have that causes such violence to occur from these kinds of people. The Health Administration will research the possible reasons for this violence, what can be done about it, and how it might be prevented in the future. If it starts in the womb, we will take care of such problems. If it occurs due to nurture, the parents and their mental health will be examined. It might be best if children were raised by the community, so that’s something we’ll examine. We will leave no stone unturned to get to the bottom of gun violence. We’ll take a couple of questions,” “Speaker Rooney, what’s being done to curb the speculation online that this whole thing was a set-up to take away guns from the American people? ~ Cliff Ball,

286:You and I might have smidgens of autism and not realize it, especially if you happen to be a man. Scientists have sometimes described autism as an extreme version of the male brain. And in truth, of all the world’s autistics, only one fifth are female.3 This may be because women have more axons and dendrites, which are the pathways in the brain that enable it to work as a unit. Men’s brains have more neurons. In effect, this makes male brains less networked than women’s, but outfitted with more processing power, largely focused, it seems, on spatial and temporal capabilities. This doesn’t make one sex smarter or more talented than the other, simply different. It also helps explain, at least according to some scientists, why men are sometimes less socially tuned in than females, and why women are superior, generally, at reading social cues. ~ Chip Walter,

287:I mean, there’s a lot of other things I could do for money. I could sell autographed ECT machines or rhinestoned mood stabilizers or even Star Wars scented laxatives. But do I do that? Do I do a commercial on television to (attempt to) sell a medication while running around some random backyard with some rented golden retriever laughing and looking cured and totally amazed to be so worry-free while a voice comes on and says, “Reginol is not recommended for wayward fish or Libras with dementia. If you notice swelling in your femur or notice a subtle beam of backlight glowing northward from your anus or the anus of someone you went to school with, call your doctor immediately as this could be a symptom of hydrocephalus that could lead to roughhousing and misguided bloat. Reginol is not recommended for pregnant Nazis or yodelers over seventy. Reginol does not protect you from unpopularity or autism . . . ” All ~ Carrie Fisher,

288:After the antivaxxers’ claims that the MMR vaccine caused autism were debunked, they argued that the thimerosal in vaccines caused autism. After this was debunked, new claims surfaced that the cause was the vaccines being given too close together and too early, somehow shocking a child’s immune system and resulting in autism. This, too, was debunked. Science shows that even though the number of shots has risen over time, the actual load on the immune system has decreased because today’s vaccines are better engineered. Before 1991, the whooping-cough vaccine had three thousand different antigens. Today’s whooping-cough vaccine has no more than five particles—just as effective, but much easier on the immune system. After the “too many, too soon” myth was debunked, antivaxxers began claiming that the MMR vaccine was “triggering” autism in children who were somehow genetically predisposed to it. That, too, was debunked. ~ Shawn Lawrence Otto,

289:We do take pleasure in one thing that you probably won't be able to guess. Namely, making friends with nature. ... nature is always there at hand to wrap us up, gently: glowing, swaying, bubbling, rustling.

Just by looking at nature, I feel as if I'm being swallowed up into it, and in that moment I get the sensation that my body's now a speck, a speck from long before I was born, a speck that is melting into nature herself. This sensation is so amazing that I forget that I'm a human being, and one with special needs to boot.

Nature calms me down when I'm furious, and laughs with me when I'm happy. You might think that it's not possible that nature could be a friend, not really. But human beings are part of the animal kingdom too, and perhaps us people with autism still have some left-over awareness of this, buried somewhere deep down. I'll always cherish that part of me that thinks of nature as a friend. ~ Naoki Higashida,

290:I didn't cry out and I didn't weep when I was told that my son Henri was a prisoner in his own world, when it was confirmed that he is one of those children who don't hear us, don't speak to us, even though they're neither deaf nor mute. He is also one of those children we must love from a distance, neither touching, nor kissing, not smiling at them because every one of their senses would be assaulted by the odour of our skin, by the intensity of our voices, the texture of our hair, the throbbing of our hearts. Probably he'll never call me maman lovingly, even if he can pronounce the world poire with all the roundness and sensuality of the oi sound. He will never understand why I cried when he smiled for the first time. He won't know that, thanks to him, every spark of joy has become a blessing and that I will keep waging war against autism, even if I know already that it's invincible. Already, I am defeated, stripped bare, beaten down. ~ Kim Th y,

291:The developmental diaschisis hypothesis has important consequences for the treatment of autism. Developmental diaschisis opens the possibility that in early life, autism treatments may end op focusing on brain regions that were previously unsuspected to contribute to cognitive or social function, such as the cerebellum. For instance, failure of the cerebellum to predict the near future could make it hard for babies at risk for autism to learn properly from the world. Consistent with this, the most effective known treatment for autism is applied behavioral analysis, in which rewards and everyday events are paired with one another slowly and deliberately - as if compensating for a defect in some prediction process within the brain. Applied behavioral analysis works only on only about half of kids with autism. It might be possible to manipulate brain activity in the cerebellum to help applied behavioral analysis work better or for more kids. ~ David J Linden,

292:petting.” This powerful finding has been rediscovered over and over, most recently in the early 1990s in Romania, where thousands of warehoused infants went without touch for sometimes years at a time. PET studies (similar to SPECT studies) of a number of these deprived infants have shown marked overall decreased activity across the whole brain. Bonding is a two-way street. A naturally unresponsive baby may inadvertently receive less love from its parents. The mother and father, misreading their baby’s naturally reserved behavior, may feel hurt and rejected and therefore less encouraged to lavish care and affection on their child. A classic example of this problem is illustrated by autistic children. Psychiatrists used to label the mothers of autistic children “cold” they believed the mother’s lack of responsiveness caused the autism. In recent times, however, it has been shown in numerous research studies that autism is biological and preceded any ~ Daniel G Amen,

293:In the context of the autism world (and my outlook in general) this is were I stand equality is for everyone, everybody in the world - I look at both sides of the the coin and take into account peoples realities (that makes me neutral/moderate/in the middle).

That means that you look in a more three dimensional perspective of peoples diverse realities you cannot speak for all but one can learn from EACH OTHER through listening and experiencing.

I also try my best to live with the good cards I was given not over-investing in my autism being the defining factor of my being (but having a healthy acknowledgement of it) that it's there but also thinking about other qualities I have such as being a writer, poet and artist.

I do have disability, I do have autism and I have a "mild" learning disability that is true but I a human being first and foremost. And for someone to be seen as person equal to everyone else is a basic human right. ~ Paul Isaacs,

294:The gut is the seat of all feeling. Polluting the gut not only cripples your immune system, but also destroys your sense of empathy, the ability to identify with other humans. Bad bacteria in the gut creates neurological issues. Autism can be cured by detoxifying the bellies of young children. People who think that feelings come from the heart are wrong. The gut is where you feel the loss of a loved one first. It's where you feel pain and a heavy bulk of your emotions. It's the central base of your entire immune system. If your gut is loaded with negative bacteria, it affects your mind. Your heart is the seat of your conscience. If your mind is corrupted, it affects your conscience. The heart is the Sun. The gut is the Moon. The pineal gland is Neptune, and your brain and nervous system (5 senses) are Mercury. What affects the moon or sun affects the entire universe within. So, if you poison the gut, it affects your entire nervous system, your sense of reasoning, and your senses. ~ Suzy Kassem,

295:Recall from Chapter 5 that six processes characterize people who suffer from anxiety, regardless of their particular disorder:74 (1) increased attention to threats; (2) failure to discriminate threat and safety; (3) increased avoidance; (4) heightened reactivity to unpredictable threats; (5) overestimation of threat significance and likelihood; and (6) maladaptive behavioral and cognitive control. Circuits involving the amygdala, nucleus accumbens, bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, lateral prefrontal cortex, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, hippocampus, insula cortex, and arousal systems contribute to these processes. Of great interest would be comparisons of the involvement of the processes and the specific circuits and molecular mechanisms underlying each of them across anxiety disorders, and also between anxiety disorders and other mental disorders in which increased anxiety is a factor (e.g., depression, schizophrenia, autism). ~ Joseph E LeDoux,

296:Intellectual Patience is the delicate kind of patience which is guided by fine-tuned observations that lead the way to the anticipated scientific results without ever reverting to any regulatory measures. Its absence as a necessary social nourishment of a good-natured tolerance in the society marks a demonic urgency that feeds into a diseased arrangement. Autism -for example- is a symptom of Socialism; the ideology that lacks any intellectual patience and hastily throttles its subjects into interactional homogeneity. This is why planning, plotting and scheming are not considered as criteria of patience, but rather, of action - because they are generated thoughts. The only single mandate that overwrites this is that of God; and even The Lord Himself makes the parents as delegates of His authority over their own children until the child starts making her/his own choices. [Judicial activism] after all takes away the right to make choices from the people - to whom it were granted in the first place by The Lord. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim,

297:Since we are talking about autistic children, let’s start there, and then we will circle back and focus on treating people with PTSD. Dr. Porges: We can cluster both PTSD and autism together, because from a Polyvagal perspective, the pivotal point is whether we can help another human feel safe. Safety is a powerful construct that involves features from several processes and domains, including context, behavior, mental processes, and physiological state. If we feel safe, we have access to the neural regulation of the facial muscles. We have access to a myelinated vagal circuit that is capable of down-regulating the commonly observed fight/flight and stress responses. And, when we down-regulate our defense, we have an opportunity to play and to enjoy our social interactions. I wanted to introduce into this discussion the concept of play. An inability to play is a characteristic of many individuals with a psychiatric diagnosis. Yet, we do not find an inability to play with others or to spontaneously and reciprocally express humor in any diagnostic criteria. ~ Stephen W Porges,

298:The 2D:4D ratio is so variable, and the sex difference so small, that you can’t determine someone’s sex by knowing it. But it does tell you something about the extent of fetal testosterone exposure. So what does the extent of exposure (as assessed by the ratio) predict about adult behavior? Men with more “masculine” 2D:4D ratios tend toward higher levels of aggression and math scores; more assertive personalities; higher rates of ADHD and autism (diseases with strong male biases); and decreased risk of depression and anxiety (disorders with a female skew). The faces and handwriting of such men are judged to be more “masculine.” Furthermore, some reports show a decreased likelihood of being gay. Women having a more “feminine” ratio have less chance of autism and more of anorexia (a female-biased disease). They’re less likely to be left-handed (a male-skewed trait). Moreover, they exhibit less athletic ability and more attraction to highly masculine faces. And they’re more likely to be straight or, if lesbian, more likely to take stereotypical female sexual roles.72 ~ Robert M Sapolsky,

299:Although there are no set methods to test for psychiatric disorders like psychopathy, we can determine some facets of a patient’s mental state by studying his brain with imaging techniques like PET (positron emission tomography) and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scanning, as well as genetics, behavioral and psychometric testing, and other pieces of information gathered from a full medical and psychiatric workup. Taken together, these tests can reveal symptoms that might indicate a psychiatric disorder. Since psychiatric disorders are often characterized by more than one symptom, a patient will be diagnosed based on the number and severity of various symptoms. For most disorders, a diagnosis is also classified on a sliding scale—more often called a spectrum—that indicates whether the patient’s case is mild, moderate, or severe. The most common spectrum associated with such disorders is the autism spectrum. At the low end are delayed language learning and narrow interests, and at the high end are strongly repetitive behaviors and an inability to communicate. ~ James Fallon,

300:Although there are no set methods to test for psychiatric disorders like psychopathy, we can determine some facets of a patient’s mental state by studying his brain with imaging techniques like PET (positron emission tomography) and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scanning, as well as genetics, behavioral and psychometric testing, and other pieces of information gathered from a full medical and psychiatric workup. Taken together, these tests can reveal symptoms that might indicate a psychiatric disorder. Since psychiatric disorders are often characterized by more than one symptom, a patient will be diagnosed based on the number and severity of various symptoms. For most disorders, a diagnosis is also classified on a sliding scale—more often called a spectrum—that indicates whether the patient’s case is mild, moderate, or severe. The most common spectrum associated with such disorders is the autism spectrum. At the low end are delayed language learning and narrow interests, and at the high end are strongly repetitive behaviors and an inability to communicate. ~ James Fallon,

301:I do not think God makes bad things happen just so that people can grow spiritually. Bad parents do that, my mother said. Bad parents make things hard and painful for their children and then say it was to help them grow. Growing and living are hard enough already; children do not need things to be harder. I think this is true even for normal children. I have watched little children learning to walk; they all struggle and fall down many times. Their faces show that it is not easy. It would be stupid to tie bricks on them to make it harder. If that is true for learning to walk, then I think it is true for other growing and learning as well.
God is suppose to be the good parent, the Father. So I think God would not make things harder than they are. I do not think I am autistic because God thought my parents needed a challenge or I needed a challenge. I think it is like if I were a baby and a rock fell on me and broke my leg. Whatever caused it was an accident. God did not prevent the accident, but He did not cause it, either.... I think my autism is an accident, but what I do with it is me. ~ Elizabeth Moon,

302:People often said to me what I couldn't do things when I was younger such as sports, writing, mathematics, geography, science etc - I pathway can always be tailored can change and that change itself is possible what did I excel in well art was one of those things of have gone BACK to to move FORWARD and have taken up poetry and creativity something that occupies my mind in way that creates happy thoughts, happy feelings, and happiness all round really.

To invest in your strengths and understand but not over-define yourself by your deficits is something that has worked for me over the years and this year in particular (the ethos was always there instilled that I am human being first like anyone else by my parents and family but it has been tenderly and quite rightly reaffirmed by a friend also) it has made me a more balanced person whom has healthy acknowledgment of my autism who but also wants to be known as a person first - see me first, see that I have a personality first.

I say this not in anger or bitterness but as a healthy optimistic realisation and as a message of hope for people out there. ~ Paul Isaacs,

303:if we have come here t o t alk, it is only bec aus e we have been persuaded of this: we must be done with radicalism and its meager comforts - now. The intellectual, the academic, both remain mesmerized by the contradictions that banish thought to the clouds. By never beginning from the situation, from their own situation, intellectuals distance themselves from the world so much that, finally, it is their intelligence itself that abandons them. If hipsters succeed in perceiving the world with precision and subtlety, it is only to aestheticize the sensible ever further, that is to say, to keep it at a distance, to contemplate their lives and their beautiful souls and thereby to promote their own impotence - their particular autism, which expresses itself in a valorization ofthe tiniest aspects of life.Meanwhile, the activist, in refusing to think, in adopting the ethic of middle managers, runs grinning into every single wall before him before finally collapsing into cynicism. If taking part is the only option in war, the lines that are offered to us visibly are not the ones that we should follow. We have to displace them and we have to move ourselves in between them ~ Anonymous,

304:The evidence continues to accumulate that not only are dogs sensitive to where humans’ attention is directed, but dogs are also sensitive to the social context. They know when it is appropriate to attend to their human’s attention and when it is not. This means that dogs have more than a theory of behavior. They have a theory of mind. In humans, theory of mind, or ToM, means that we can imagine what another person might be thinking. Reflecting the importance of humans’ social lives, most of our large frontal lobes seem to be concerned with this function. We spend huge amounts of mental energy navigating the complex social structure of human society. Knowing how to read people and how to behave in distinct social settings is the difference between success and failure. And at the extreme, autism may represent a failure of the ToM system in the brain. If dogs have ToM abilities, they are probably simpler than ours. The small frontal lobes in the dogs’ brains are clear evidence of that. But even if dogs have only a rudimentary ToM, that would mean dogs are not just Pavlovian stimulus-response machines. It would mean that dogs might have about the same level of consciousness as a young child. ~ Gregory Berns,

305:Campaign to destigmatize so-called "mental illness" often take a wrong turning here. They try to demonstrate how suffers of some condition have made amazing contributions to the science or the arts. Trying to destigmatize the diagnosis of autism, for example, we read how Einstein and Newton would have received that diagnosis today, and yet made fabulous discoveries in the field of physics. Even if they are acknowledged to have been "different", their worth is still reckoned in terms of how their work has impacted on the world of others. However well-intentioned, such perspectives are hardly judicious, as they make an implicit equation between value and social utility. Taking this step is dangerous, as the moment that human life is defined in terms of utility, the door to stigmatization and segregation is opened. If someone was found to be not useful, what value, then, would their life have? This was in fact exactly the argument of the early-twentieth-century eugenicists who complained for the extermination of the mentally ill. Although no one would admit such aspirations today, we cannot ignore the resurfacing in recent years of a remarkably similar discourse, with its emphasis on social utility, hereditary and genetic vulnerability. ~ Darian Leader,

306:Abhed, my father had called heredity-"indivisible." There is an old trope in popular culture of the "crazy genius," a mind split between madness and brilliance, oscillating between the two states at the throw of a single switch. But Rajesh had no switch. There was no split or oscillation, no pendulum. The magic and the mania were perfectly contiguous-bordering kingdoms with no passports. They were part of the same whole, indivisible.

"We of the craft are all crazy," Lord Byron, the high priest of crazies, wrote. "Some are affected by gaiety, others by melancholy, but all are more or less touched." Versions of this story have been tool, over and over, with bipolar disease, with some variants of schizophrenia, and with rare cases of autism; all are "more or less touched." It is tempting to romanticize psychotic illness, so let me emphasize that the men and women with these mental disorders experience paralyzing cognitive, social, and psychological disturbances that send gashes of devastation through their lives. But also indubitably, some patients with these syndromes possess exceptional and unusual abilities. The effervescence of bipolar disease has long been linked to extraordinary creativity; at times, the heightened creative impulse is manifest during the throes of mania. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee,

307:McCarthy’s movie career wasn’t limited to The Stupids. In 1998, she had a small role in BASEketball and the following year in Diamonds , directed by John Asher, whom she married in September 1999. A few years later, on May 18, 2002, their only child, Evan, was born in Los Angeles. But all was not well. Following a chance encounter with a stranger, McCarthy knew that something was different about her son. “One night I reached over and grabbed my Archangel Oracle tarot cards and shuffled them and pulled out a card,” she wrote. “It was the same card I had picked over and over again the past few months. It was starting to drive me crazy. It said that I was to help teach the Indigo and Crystal children. [Later,] a woman approached Evan and me on the street and said, ‘Your son is a Crystal child,’ and then walked away. I remember thinking, ‘Okay, crazy lady,’ and then I stopped in my tracks. Holy shit, she just said ‘Crystal child,’ like on the tarot card.” McCarthy realized that she was an Indigo adult and Evan a Crystal child. Although Evan would soon be diagnosed with autism, McCarthy took heart in the fact that Crystal children were often mislabeled as autistic. According to Doreen Virtue, author of The Care and Feeding of Indigo Children, “Crystal Children don’t warrant a label of autism! They aren’t autistic, they’re AWE-tistic. ~ Anonymous,

308:I think in the ever growing diversity of the distinct and person-centred presentations of autism it is important to know and acknowledge the crucial differences between Autism & Asperger's Syndrome. Both are which are forms of autism but have different "mechanics" that drive them.

I have Autism (as opposed to Asperger's Syndrome) I live in a world before the literal, words tumble in my mind into sounds

I love tone, melody and beats they brings my world alive. I live in world world where visuals hold no significance fragmented and not in my "mind's eye" and need to be touched in order to be "seen".

I like elevated gesture and tone when people speak dead words wander alive into my mind and give them meaning and circumstance.

Where a sense of "self" is not wanting to be exposed by the directness of people but at the same time I want to understand "other" even if I struggle to at times. I am empathic young man and this not through lack of care nor wanting. I care deeply.

Logic and literalism are not the name of the game for me to "decode" the word around me it's sensing, patterning and feeling to gain an "understanding". I am using a different part of my brain.

So as with AS Autism has many different presentations too this is mine. I think it is important to know differences it has helped me so much to know that. ~ Paul Isaacs,

309:She unwinds her scarf, taking so long about it that I wonder if she expects me to respond. “You were following the rules,” I offer after a minute. It makes her words no more pleasant. Resentment. Was that how she’d looked at me? Then how am I supposed to trust how she looks at me now?
My words elicit a thankful smile. “Mostly, though, I knew you could do the job. Did you ever know other autistic people?”
I shake my head. I’d heard rumors about one teacher, but never asked him. Mom had encouraged me to find a local support group, but I’d never seen the appeal—or the need. It wouldn’t change anything. I had friends, anyway. Peopleonline, my fellow volunteers at the Way Station. I even got along with Iris’s friends.
“Well, I did, and I feel like a fool for never recognizing your autism. I had autistic colleagues at the university. They were accommodated, and they thrived. One researcher came in earlier than everyone else and would stay the longest. I saw the same strengths in you once I knew to look for them. You’re punctual, you’re precise, you’re trustworthy. When you don’t know something, you either figure it out or you ask, and either way, you get it right. I wanted to give you the same chance my colleagues had, and that other Nassau passengers got. One of the doctors is autistic—did you know?” Els silences an incoming call. “Does that answer your question? ~ Corinne Duyvis,

310:the First Lady is attempting to convince the United States that it should have some kind of universal healthcare. Well, it will fail, but only because it doesn’t go far enough. My grandfather is looking into rigging future elections to go our way so that we can ram through legislation that will dramatically change America. We will eventually have a new healthcare law that will not let anyone over sixty-five have unlimited healthcare, nor will they be allowed to enjoy retirement for very long for we will have people who will determine who can live and who should die, based entirely on what these retired citizens can contribute. This law will not let undesirables be born that will suck up money throughout their lives because they have one health issue or another, like children with Down syndrome or even Autism. This law will require that everyone pay the government for their healthcare, no one will have the freedom to use whatever healthcare provider they want. We will control what will be used and for how long. Companies who do not comply with the rules, like giving their employees full access to abortions, will be sued or forced out of business. Universal healthcare will also be used to tell people what they can or cannot eat, and we will declare that Americans are full of obese people who need the government to control what they eat. No more eating whatever junk food you want to eat just because you can. ~ Cliff Ball,

311:Most people love with a guarded heart, only if certain things happen or don’t happen, only to a point. If the person we love hurts us, betrays us, abandons us, disappoints us, if the person becomes hard to love, we often stop loving. We protect our delicate hearts. We close off, retreat, withhold, disconnect, and withdraw. We might even hate. Most people love conditionally. Most people are never asked to love with a whole and open heart. They only love partway. They get by. Autism was my gift to you. My autism didn’t let me hug and kiss you, it didn’t allow me to look into your eyes, it didn’t let me say aloud the words you so desperately wanted to hear with your ears. But you loved me anyway. You’re thinking, Of course I did. Anyone would have. This isn’t true. Loving me with a full and accepting heart, loving all of me, required you to grow. Despite your heartache and disappointment, your fears and frustration and sorrow, despite all I couldn’t show you in return, you loved me. You loved me unconditionally. You haven’t experienced this kind of love with Dad or your parents or your sister or anyone else before. But now, you know what unconditional love is. I know my death has hurt you, and you’ve needed time alone to heal. You’re ready now. You’ll still miss me. I miss you, too. But you’re ready. Take what you’ve learned and love someone again. Find someone to love and love without condition. This is why we’re all here. ~ Lisa Genova,

312:That the spectrum is linear couldn’t be further from the truth. To get a more accurate perspective, I met Dr. Judith Gould at the Lorna Wing Centre for Autism. Judith is a chartered consultant clinical psychologist with more than forty years’ experience. She specializes in autism-spectrum disorders and learning disabilities. In the 1970s, with the late Dr. Lorna Wing, Judith came up with the term autism spectrum. Judith believes the key point to understand is that autism is a spectrum not because it is linear but because any factor can be present at any point. She said, “[In our study] we saw the classic autistic aloof person with repetitive rituals and elaborate routines. But we also saw children with aspects of social difficulties, communication difficulties, and imagination difficulties who didn’t fit in with [earlier] precise criteria. “These traits tended to be seen together, but you could have anything on the dimension: anything on the communication dimension, anything on the imagination dimension, and so on. At first we called it the autism continuum. Continuum implied severity from high to low, but that’s not what we meant. The spectrum would look like a rainbow because anything can happen at any point. The colors merge. “In terms of communication, people can come anywhere on the spectrum. There are those who only communicate their needs, and there are those who don’t realize the person they are with may be getting bored when they talk about special interests. Then you’ve got those with a highly intellectual, formal, little-professor communication style. ~ Laura James,

313:A story best told at speed. After finals, more exams, then the call to the bar, pupillage, a lucky invitation to prestigious chambers, some early success defending hopeless cases—how sensible it had seemed, to delay a child until her early thirties. And when those years came, they brought complex worthwhile cases, more success. Jack was also hesitant, arguing for holding back another year or two. Mid-thirties then, when he was teaching in Pittsburgh and she worked a fourteen-hour day, drifting deeper into family law as the idea of her own family receded, despite the visits of nephews and nieces. In the following years, the first rumors that she might be elected precociously to the bench and required to be on circuit. But the call didn’t come, not yet. And in her forties, there sprang up anxieties about elderly gravids and autism. Soon after, more young visitors to Gray’s Inn Square, noisy demanding great-nephews, great-nieces, reminded her how hard it would be to squeeze an infant into her kind of life. Then rueful thoughts of adoption, some tentative inquiries—and throughout the accelerating years that followed, occasional agonies of doubt, firm late-night decisions concerning surrogate mothers undone in the early-morning rush to work. And when at last, at nine thirty one morning at the Royal Courts of Justice, she was sworn in by the Lord Chief Justice and took her oath of allegiance and her Judicial Oath before two hundred of her bewigged colleagues, and she stood proudly before them in her robes, the subject of a witty speech, she knew the game was up; she belonged to the law as some women had once been brides of Christ. ~ Ian McEwan,

314:For a while, every smart and shy eccentric from Bobby Fischer to Bill Gate was hastily fitted with this label, and many were more or less believably retrofitted, including Isaac Newton, Edgar Allen Pie, Michelangelo, and Virginia Woolf. Newton had great trouble forming friendships and probably remained celibate. In Poe's poem Alone, he wrote that "All I lov'd - I lov'd alone." Michelangelo is said to have written "I have no friends of any sort and I don't want any." Woolf killed herself.
Asperger's disorder, once considered a sub-type of autism, was named after the Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger, a pioneer, in the 1940s, in identifying and describing autism. Unlike other early researchers, according to the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, Asperger felt that autistic people could have beneficial talents, especially what he called a "particular originality of thought" that was often beautiful and pure, unfiltered by culture of discretion, unafraid to grasp at extremely unconventional ideas. Nearly every autistic person that Sacks observed appeard happiest when alone. The word "autism" is derived from autos, the Greek word for "self."
"The cure for Asperger's syndrome is very simple," wrote Tony Attwood, a psychologist and Asperger's expert who lives in Australia. The solution is to leave the person alone. "You cannot have a social deficit when you are alone. You cannot have a communication problem when you are alone. All the diagnostic criteria dissolve in solitude."
Officially, Asperger's disorder no longer exists as a diagnostic category. The diagnosis, having been inconsistently applied, was replaced, with clarified criteria, in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; Asperger's is now grouped under the umbrella term Autism Spectrum Disorder, or ASD. ~ Michael Finkel,

315:What I gleaned from all this research is that empathy is the result of numerous cognitive and affective processes, all firing away behind the scenes somewhere in our brains. Cognitive processes allow us to understand the mental state of another person—his or her emotions, desires, beliefs, intentions, et cetera—which in turn helps us to understand and even predict the person’s actions or behaviors. They allow us to step outside of our own experience in order to take on and understand other people’s perspectives—something that every wife on the planet wishes her husband would do. The affective component of empathy is more related to our emotional responses to the mental states that we observe in other people. This component allows us to feel some appropriate and non-egocentric emotional response to another person’s emotions—something else that every wife on the planet wishes her husband would do. Empathy involves both processes, and while they operate independently of one another, there is some overlap. A graphical representation of empathy might involve a Venn diagram—two circles, one for the affective component and one for the cognitive, slightly overlapping, with me standing well outside of both circles talking incessantly about the weather during a funeral. In people with Asperger syndrome and other autism spectrum conditions, these mechanisms of understanding are much less reliable and productive than in neurotypicals. Those of us living within the parameters of an autism spectrum condition simply can’t engage the empathic processes that allow for social reasoning and emotional awareness. Furthermore, we have difficulty separating ourselves from our own perspectives (the word autism comes from the Greek word autos, meaning “self”), so we can’t easily understand or even access the perspectives and feelings of others. ~ David Finch,

316:This hypothesis, referred to as the monoamine hypothesis, grew primarily out of two main observations made in the 1950s and ’60s.14 One was seen in patients being treated for tuberculosis who experienced mood-related side effects from the antitubercular drug iproniazid, which can change the levels of serotonin in the brain. Another was the claim that reserpine, a medication introduced for seizures and high blood pressure, depleted these chemicals and caused depression—that is, until there was a fifty-four person study that demonstrated that it resolved depression.15 From these preliminary and largely inconsistent observations a theory was born, crystallized by the work and writings of the late Dr. Joseph Schildkraut, who threw fairy dust into the field in 1965 with his speculative manifesto “The Catecholamine Hypothesis of Affective Disorders.”16 Dr. Schildkraut was a prominent psychiatrist at Harvard who studied catecholamines, a class of naturally occurring compounds that act as chemical messengers, or neurotransmitters, within the brain. He looked at one neurochemical in particular, norepinephrine, in people before and during treatment with antidepressants and found that depression suppressed its effectiveness as a chemical messenger. Based on his findings, he theorized broadly about the biochemical underpinnings of mental illnesses. In a field struggling to establish legitimacy (beyond the therapeutic lobotomy!), psychiatry was desperate for a rebranding, and the pharmaceutical industry was all too happy to partner in the effort. This idea that these medications correct an imbalance that has something to do with a brain chemical has been so universally accepted that no one bothers to question it or even research it using modern rigors of science. According to Dr. Joanna Moncrieff, we have been led to believe that these medications have disease-based effects—that they’re actually fixing, curing, correcting a real disease in human physiology. Six decades of study, however, have revealed conflicting, confusing, and inconclusive data.17 That’s right: there has never been a human study that successfully links low serotonin levels and depression. Imaging studies, blood and urine tests, postmortem suicide assessments, and even animal research have never validated the link between neurotransmitter levels and depression.18 In other words, the serotonin theory of depression is a total myth that has been unjustly supported by the manipulation of data. Much to the contrary, high serotonin levels have been linked to a range of problems, including schizophrenia and autism.19 Paul Andrews, an assistant professor ~ Kelly Brogan,

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