Marco > Marco's Quotes

“While the psychiatric establishment was debating theories of toxic parenting and childhood psychosis, however, Asperger’s lost tribe was putting its autistic intelligence to work by building the foundations of a society better suited to its needs and interests. Like Henry Cavendish, they refused to accept their circumstances as given. By coming up with ways of socializing on their own terms, they sketched out a blueprint for the modern networked world.”
― Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

“As Gernsback became wealthy, he cultivated the air of a bon vivant, packaging himself as adroitly as he packaged his crystal sets by dressing in bespoke suits and silk ties. But he inevitably struck people as odd, rude, self-centered, and even callous. On train trips to Chicago to pick up parts for his company, he would stop off in Cleveland to visit his seven-year-old cousin, Hildegarde. The entrepreneur would terrify the girl by launching into windy soliloquies about a society in which domed cities in orbit, robot doctors, and retirement colonies on Mars were commonplace. (Meanwhile, horse-drawn carts were still plying the streets outside.) If a ringing telephone interrupted him in midreverie, he would raise an admonishing finger and say to his cousin in his bristling Germanic accent, “Hildegarde, fix your hair. It won’t be long before the caller can see your face over the wires.”
― Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

“Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket. We shall be able to witness and hear events—the inauguration of a President, the playing of a World Series game, the havoc of an earthquake or the terror of a battle—just as though we were present.” Gernsback, who was twenty-eight years younger, became Tesla’s most prominent advocate. The first theme issue of Modern Electrics was wholly devoted to his work.”
― Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

“cult followings based on sports teams or rock stars, science fiction fandom was rooted in an essentially solitary activity: reading. Traits typically viewed as pathological or pathetic in the mainstream (like obsessing over trivia while accumulating vast hoards of treasured ephemera) were rewarded in the community as signs of “trufan” commitment. Fandom offered what every homesick space child yearned for: membership in an elite society of loners united by their belief in the future. For those who had felt like exiles their whole lives, forced to live among strangers, becoming a fan was like finally coming home.”
― Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

“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

“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

“The text-based nature of online interaction eventually provided the foundation for something that Leo Kanner couldn’t have imagined: the birth of the autistic community. But two things had to happen first. Kanner’s notion that autism was a rare form of childhood psychosis would have to be permanently laid to rest. Then, as Asperger’s lost tribe finally emerged from the shadows, autistic people would have to overturn the notion that they were the victims of a global epidemic.”
― Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

“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

“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

“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

“The B.’s were well aware that the protocols and conventions of nonautistic society were opaque to them, and that they were required to “ape human behavior” at work, as Mr. B. put it, to avoid alarming their professional colleagues. But Sacks reported that they had come to feel that their autism, “while it may be seen as a medical condition, and pathologized as a syndrome, must also be seen as a whole mode of being, a deeply different mode or identity, one that needs to be conscious (and proud) of itself.” At home with other members of their tribe, in an environment designed for their comfort, they didn’t feel disabled; they just felt different from their neighbors.”
― Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

“In my view, as soon as you’ve told something to someone, you’ve taken the potential for a deeper meaning away from them. True knowledge is when information becomes embodied understanding: We have to act in the world to understand it.”
― Beau Lotto, Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently