Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's

by John Elder Robison

23 I Get a Bear Cub In the spring of 1990, in the midst of starting my company and losing all my money, I acquired a son.

Sometimes I’d watch him make the same mistakes I did, and I would cringe. I tried explaining what was happening to him, and it seemed to work. Cubby began making friends, and he grew up without the worst of my Aspergian traits.

people with Asperger’s display inappropriate facial expressions. Well, I certainly knew about that. When I was a child, I was told my aunt had died, and I grinned even though I was sad. And I got smacked.

Recent articles suggest that a touch of Asperger’s is an essential part of much creative genius.

I had observed that people—when meeting someone for the first time—will invariably ask two questions within a few minutes of engaging in conversation: “Where do you live?” and “What do you do?” My statement addressed both questions with a fine economy of words, and no waiting or delay. Why were they offended?

Was she really the best choice for me? There are millions of girls in the world,

I have no idea why I ask the same thing over and over, but I do. If I am made to stop, I often become very anxious.

“Can you pet me?” I say when I sit next to her. I also say, while tilting my head, “Scratch my fur.”

The sentence is built in pieces throughout the brain, and then assembled into finished form. For some reason, Aspergians like me experience “delays” in the transmission of those sentence fragments within the brain. That gives a slightly ragged cadence to our speech

our lack of social expression is actually audible.

Collectively, those traits are called prosody.