Thinking In Pictures: and Other Reports from My Life with Autism

In an ideal world the scientist should find a method to prevent the most severe forms of autism but allow the milder forms to survive. After all, the really social people did not invent the first stone spear. It was probably invented by an Aspie who chipped away at rocks while the other people socialized around the campfire. Without autism traits we might still be living in caves.

But my favorite of Einstein's words on religion is "Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind." I like this because both science and religion are needed to answer life's great questions.

I believe there is a reason such as autism, severe manic-depression, and schizophrenia remain in our gene pool even though there is much suffering as a result.

[T]he only place on earth where immortality is provided is in libraries. This is the collective memory of humanity.

Unfortunately, most people never observe the natural cycle of birth and death. They do not realize that for one living thing to survive, another living thing must die.

I believe that the place where an animal dies is a sacred one. There is a need to bring ritual into the conventional slaughter plants and use as a means to shape people's behavior. It would help prevent people from becoming numbed, callous, or cruel. The ritual could be something very simple, such as a moment of silence. In addition to developing better designs and making equipment to insure the humane treatments of all animals, that would be my contribution.

My mind can always separate the two. Even when I am very upset, I keep reviewing the facts over and over until I can come to a logical conclusion.

The word “autism” still conveys a fixed and dreadful meaning to most people—they visualize a child mute, rocking, screaming, inaccessible, cut off from human contact. And we almost always speak of autistic children, never of autistic adults, as if such children never grew up, or were somehow mysteriously spirited off the planet, out of society.

In a noisy place I can’t understand speech, because I cannot screen out the background noise.

Children who are visual thinkers will often be good at drawing, other arts, and building things with building toys such as Legos.

The Internet may be the best thing yet for improving an autistic person’s social life.

I replaced emotional complexity with visual and intellectual complexity. I questioned everything and looked to logic, science, and intellect for answers.

My thinking pattern always starts with specifics and works toward generalization in an associational and nonsequential way.

I get great satisfaction out of doing clever things with my mind, but I don’t know what it is like to feel rapturous joy.

Teachers who work with autistic children need to understand associative thought patterns.

To destroy other people's culture is to rob them of immortality.

The easiest words for an autistic child to learn are nouns, because they directly relate to pictures. Highly verbal autistic children like I was can sometimes learn how to read with phonics. Written words were too abstract for me to remember, but I could laboriously remember the approximately fifty phonetic sounds and a few rules.

Many autistic children like to smell things, and smell may provide more reliable information about their surroundings than either vision or hearing.

I was also struck, when we walked together, by her seeming inability to feel some of the simplest emotions. “The mountains are pretty,” she said, “but they don’t give me a special feeling, the feeling you seem to enjoy … You look at the brook, the flowers, I see what great pleasure you get out of it. I’m denied that.

One of the most profound mysteries of autism has been the remarkable ability of most autistic people to excel at visual spatial skills while performing so poorly at verbal skills.

The Mind of a Mnemonist

Since brains on the autistic spectrum are specialized

There was no single breakthrough. It was a series of incremental improvements.

Sacks O 1994 Edgar A. Poe: a psychopathic study. Sacks O. 1995 Prodigies. The New Yorker, pp. 44–65. January 9,

Texas., Future Horizons U. Frith 1989 A Thorn in My Pocket. Arlington, Texas., Future Horizons

Musk told Vance, “I think there are probably too many smart people pursuing internet stuff, finance, and law. That is part of the reason why we haven’t seen as much innovation.” I totally agree with this.

I went online recently and looked at Common Core arithmetic problems for elementary school. The procedure that replaced borrowing in subtraction was so complicated I would have been lost. Common Core promoted no arithmetic that I could use in the real world.

Rules of Living” from Roy Rogers,