NeuroTribes Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“Not all the features of atypical human operating systems are bugs.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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 Untold History of Austim and the Potential of Neurodiversity

“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

“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

“It seems that for success in science and art, a dash of autism is essential. For success, the necessary ingredient may be an ability to turn away from the everyday world, from the simply practical, an ability to rethink a subject with originality so as to create in new untrodden ways. This”
― Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently

“The kids formerly ridiculed as nerds and brainiacs have grown up to become the architects of our future.”
― Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

“[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

“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

“Asperger survived the war, but his concept of autism as a broad and inclusive spectrum (a “continuum,” his diagnostician Georg Frankl called it) that was “not at all rare” was buried with the ashes of his clinic and the unspeakable memories of that dark time, along with his case records. A very different conception of autism took its place.”
― Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

“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

“After discovering that he and his sons were on the spectrum, Hedin joined the Global and Regional Asperger Syndrome Partnership (GRASP), one of the largest support groups for people with autism in the United States. Looking back, he feels certain that a number of hams he knew in the course of fifty-five years of surfing the airwaves would have qualified for a diagnosis.”
― Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

“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

“They also devised an ingeniously low-tech solution to a complex problem. Even highly verbal autistic adults occasionally struggle with processing and producing speech, particularly in the chaotic and generally overwhelming atmosphere of a conference. By providing attendees with name-tag holders and pieces of paper that were red on one side and yellow on the other, they enabled Autistics to communicate their needs and desires without having to articulate them in the pressure of the moment. The red side facing out signified, "Nobody should try to interact with me," while the yellow side meant, "Only people I already know should interact with me, not strangers." (Green badges were added later to signify, "I want to interact but am having trouble initiating, so please initiate an interaction with me.") These color-coded "interaction signal badges" turned out to be so useful that they have since been widely adopted at autistic-run events all over the world, and name-tag labels similar to Autreat ("autistic retreat") green badges have recently been employed at conferences for Perl programmers to indicate that the wearer is open to spontaneous social approaches.”
― Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

“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

“Kathryn Stewart, director of the Orion Academy, a high school for autistic kids in Moraga, California, said that she called Asperger’s syndrome “the engineers’ disorder.”
― Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

“After [Paul] Schilder mentioned that he had treated a schizophrenic teenager with psychoanalysis because the “sex center” and “fear center” of the brain are adjacent, he could no longer contain himself. [Leo] Kanner pointedly asked if people call their spouses “honey” because the sex center and the sugar center of the brain are also close together.”
― Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

“Asperger was speaking out with the “force of his whole personality” for the sake of children all over Europe who had not yet been murdered by a monstrous idea of human perfectibility—an idea that his supervisors, who were fervent Nazis, had imported from America. V”
― Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

“By midweek, they persuaded the captain to give them a tour of the engine room.”
― Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

“In his classic textbook Science and Human Behavior, Skinner explained that while aversives may seem to promptly extinguish undesirable behavior, the behavior often returns with a vengeance after the punishment ceases, because the subject has not been taught more adaptive ways to behave. He also pointed out that punishment creates fear, guilt, and shame, resulting in less learning overall. (In other words, a child compelled to practice the piano with threats of spanking does not tend to become a virtuoso but instead learns to hate music.) Skinner also cautioned that the use of aversives has negative effects on the researcher, potentially turning the experimental situation into a sadistic power play. “In the long run,” he observed, “punishment, unlike reinforcement, works to the disadvantage of both the punished organism and the punishing agency.” But”
― Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently

“Autistic children have the ability to see things and events around them from a new point of view, which often shows surprising maturity. This ability, which remains throughout life, can in favorable cases lead to exceptional achievements which others may never attain. Abstraction ability, for instance, is a prerequisite for scientific endeavor. Indeed, we find numerous autistic individuals among distinguished scientists. He”
― Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently