Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

by Joshua Foer

Daniel’s other rare condition is Asperger’s syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism. Autism was first identified in 1943 by the child psychiatrist Leo Kanner. He described it as a form of social impairment, a disorder in which, as Kanner put it, patients “treat people as if they were things.” Along with this inability to empathize, autistic individuals have a host of other problems, including language impairment, an extremely focused range of interests, and “an anxiously obsessive desire for the preservation of sameness.” A year after Kanner first wrote about autism, an Austrian pediatrician named Hans Asperger noted another disorder that seemed almost identical except that Asperger’s patients had strong linguistic abilities and fewer intellectual impairments. He called his precocious young patients, with their bottomless wells of arcane trivia, “little professors.” It wasn’t until 1981 that Asperger’s was recognized as its own separate syndrome.