Home > Work > NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity QUOTES

NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity QUOTES

1 " Write me a creature that thinks as well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man. —JOHN W. CAMPBELL "

― Steve Silberman , NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

2 " In his popular novel Microserfs, Douglas Coupland quipped, “I think all tech people are slightly autistic. "

― Steve Silberman , NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

3 " Oliver Sacks’s An Anthropologist on Mars, "

― Steve Silberman , NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

4 " [Temple Grandin] told him that the one thing she wanted more than anything else in life was for someone to hug her - but the moment that anyone did, she couldn't bear it. "

― Steve Silberman , NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

5 " By autistic standards, the “normal” brain is easily distractible, is obsessively social, and suffers from a deficit of attention to detail and routine. Thus people on the spectrum experience the neurotypical world as relentlessly unpredictable and chaotic, perpetually turned up too loud, and full of people who have little respect for personal space. "

― Steve Silberman , NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

6 " Our therapeutic goal must be to teach the person how to bear their difficulties. Not to eliminate them for him, but to train the person to cope with special challenges with special strategies; to make the person aware not that they are ill, but that they are responsible for their lives. "

― Steve Silberman , NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

7 " Researchers would eventually discover that autistic people stim to reduce anxiety—and also simply because it feels good. In fact, harmless forms of self-stimulation (like flapping and fidgeting) may facilitate learning by freeing up executive-functioning resources in the brain that would otherwise be devoted to suppressing them. "

― Steve Silberman , NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

8 " Not all the features of atypical human operating systems are bugs. "

― Steve Silberman , NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

9 " Aware adults with autism and their parents are often angry about autism. They may ask why nature or God created such horrible conditions as autism, manic depression, and schizophrenia. However, if the genes that caused these conditions were eliminated there might be a terrible price to pay. It is possible that persons with bits of these traits are more creative, or possibly even geniuses. If science eliminated these genes, maybe the whole world would be taken over by accountants. "

― Steve Silberman , NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

10 " One of the most promising developments since the publication of “The Geek Syndrome” has been the emergence of the concept of neurodiversity: the notion that conditions like autism, dyslexia, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) should be regarded as naturally occurring cognitive variations with distinctive strengths that have contributed to the evolution of technology and culture rather than mere checklists of deficits and dysfunctions. "

― Steve Silberman , NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

11 " When I think back upon the kids that I tried to treat back in the 1960s, who were so extremely self-injurious, I think, “Boy, they were tough!” What they were really saying is, “You haven’t taught me right, you haven’t given me the tools whereby I can communicate and control my environment.” So the aggression that these kids show, whether it is directed toward themselves or others, is an expression of society’s ignorance, and in that sense I think of them as noble demonstrators. I have a great deal of respect for them. "

― Steve Silberman , NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

12 " A speech-language pathologist named Michelle Garcia Winner told me that many parents in her practice became aware of their own autistic traits only in the wake of their child’s diagnosis. "

― Steve Silberman , NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

13 " Instead of seeing the children in his care as flawed, broken, or sick, he believed they were suffering from neglect by a culture that had failed to provide them with teaching methods suited to their individual styles of learning. "

― Steve Silberman , NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

14 " During World War II, the British spy agency MI8 secretly recruited a crew of teenage wireless operators (prohibited from discussing their activities even with their families) to intercept coded messages from the Nazis. By forwarding these transmissions to the crack team of code breakers at Bletchley Park led by the computer pioneer Alan Turing, these young hams enabled the Allies to accurately predict the movements of the German and Italian forces. Asperger’s prediction that the little professors in his clinic could one day aid in the war effort had been prescient, but it was the Allies who reaped the benefits. "

― Steve Silberman , NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

15 " By sharing the stories of their lives, they discovered that many of the challenges they face daily are not “symptoms” of their autism, but hardships imposed by a society that refuses to make basic accommodations for people with cognitive disabilities as it does for people with physical disabilities such as blindness and deafness. "

― Steve Silberman , NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

16 " neurodiversity: the notion that conditions like autism, dyslexia, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) should be regarded as naturally occurring cognitive variations with distinctive strengths that have contributed to the evolution of technology and culture rather than mere checklists of deficits and dysfunctions. "

― Steve Silberman , NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

17 " Finally, at age seventy, Goodman was able to get the diagnosis and access to services he needed. Joining a support group for adults run by the Asperger’s Association of New England, he says, was “like coming ashore after a life of bobbing up and down in a sea that seemed to stretch to infinity in all directions. "

― Steve Silberman , NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

18 " Many autistic adults are not exercising the strengths of their atypical minds at companies like Apple and Google—instead, a disproportionate number are unemployed and struggling to get by on disability payments. "

― Steve Silberman , NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

19 " In 1997, cognitive psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen found that the fathers and grandfathers of children with autism were more likely to be engineers. "

― Steve Silberman , NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

20 " people on the spectrum were fully capable of irony and sarcasm at a time when it was widely assumed that they didn’t “get” humor. "

― Steve Silberman , NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity