http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aspergers.html
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The Geek Syndrome Autism - and its
milder cousin Asperger's syndrome - is surging among the children of Silicon
Valley. Are math-and-tech genes to blame? By Steve Silberman
Nick is building a
universe on his computer. He's already mapped out his first planet: an
anvil-shaped world called Denthaim that is home to gnomes and gods, along
with a three-gendered race known as kiman. As he tells me about his universe,
Nick looks up at the ceiling, humming fragments of a melody over and over.
"I'm thinking of making magic a form of quantum physics, but I haven't
decided yet, actually," he explains. The music of his speech is pitched
high, alternately poetic and pedantic - as if the soul of an Oxford don has
been awkwardly reincarnated in the body of a chubby, rosy-cheeked boy from
Silicon Valley. Nick is 11 years old. Nick's father is a
software engineer, and his mother is a computer programmer. They've known that
Nick was an unusual child for a long time. He's infatuated with fantasy
novels, but he has a hard time reading people. Clearly bright and
imaginative, he has no friends his own age. His inability to pick up on
hidden agendas makes him easy prey to certain cruelties, as when some kids
paid him a few dollars to wear a ridiculous outfit to school. One therapist suggested
that Nick was suffering from an anxiety disorder. Another said he had a
speech impediment. Then his mother read a book called Asperger's Syndrome:
A Guide for Parents and Professionals. In it, psychologist Tony Attwood
describes children who lack basic social and motor skills, seem unable to
decode body language and sense the feelings of others, avoid eye contact, and
frequently launch into monologues about narrowly defined - and often highly
technical - interests. Even when very young, these children become obsessed
with order, arranging their toys in a regimented fashion on the floor and
flying into tantrums when their routines are disturbed. As teenagers, they're
prone to getting into trouble with teachers and other figures of authority,
partly because the subtle cues that define societal hierarchies are invisible
to them. "I thought,
'That's Nick,'" his mother recalls. Asperger's syndrome is
one of the disorders on the autistic spectrum - a milder form of the
condition that afflicted Raymond Babbitt, the character played by Dustin
Hoffman in Rain Man. In the taxonomy of autism, those with Asperger's
syndrome have average - or even very high - IQs, while 70 percent of those
with other autistic disorders suffer from mild to severe mental retardation.
One of the estimated 450,000 people in the US living with autism, Nick is
more fortunate than most. He can read, write, and speak. He'll be able to
live and work on his own. Once he gets out of junior high hell, it's not hard
to imagine Nick creating a niche for himself in all his exuberant
strangeness. At the less fortunate end of the spectrum are what
diagnosticians call "profoundly affected" children. If not forcibly
engaged, these children spend their waking hours in trancelike states,
staring at lights, rocking, making high-pitched squeaks, and flapping their
hands, repetitively stimulating ("stimming") their miswired nervous
systems. In one of the uncanny
synchronicities of science, autism was first recognized on two continents
nearly simultaneously. In 1943, a child psychiatrist named Leo Kanner
published a monograph outlining a curious set of behaviors he noticed in 11
children at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. A year later, a
pediatrician in Vienna named Hans Asperger, who had never seen Kanner's work,
published a paper describing four children who shared many of the same
traits. Both Kanner and Asperger gave the condition the same name: autism -
from the Greek word for self, autòs - because the children in their
care seemed to withdraw into iron-walled universes of their own. Kanner went on to
launch the field of child psychiatry in the US, while Asperger's clinic was
destroyed by a shower of Allied bombs. Over the next 40 years, Kanner became
widely known as the author of the canonical textbook in his field, in which
he classified autism as a subset of childhood schizophrenia. Asperger was
virtually ignored outside of Europe and died in 1980. The term Asperger
syndrome wasn't coined until a year later, by UK psychologist Lorna Wing,
and Asperger's original paper wasn't even translated into English until 1991.
Wing built upon Asperger's intuition that even certain gifted children might
also be autistic. She described the disorder as a continuum that "ranges
from the most profoundly physically and mentally retarded person ... to the
most able, highly intelligent person with social impairment in its subtlest
form as his only disability. It overlaps with learning disabilities and
shades into eccentric normality." Asperger's notion of a
continuum that embraces both smart, geeky kids like Nick and those with
so-called classic or profound autism has been accepted by the medical establishment
only in the last decade. Like most distinctions in the world of childhood
developmental disorders, the line between classic autism and Asperger's
syndrome is hazy, shifting with the state of diagnostic opinion. Autism was
added to the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980, but Asperger's syndrome wasn't
included as a separate disorder until the fourth edition in 1994. The
taxonomy is further complicated by the fact that few if any people who have
Asperger's syndrome will exhibit all of the behaviors listed in the DSM-IV.
(The syn in syndrome derives from the same root as the syn
in synchronicity - the word means that certain symptoms tend to
cluster together, but all need not be present to make the diagnosis.) Though
Asperger's syndrome is less disabling than "low-functioning" forms
of autism, kids who have it suffer difficulties in the same areas as
classically autistic children do: social interactions, motor skills, sensory
processing, and a tendency toward repetitive behavior. Contributing editor
Steve Silberman (digaman@wiredmag.com) wrote about Judy Estrin and
Bill Carrico in Wired 9.11. Page
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