✔ How brains work, in autistic people and neurotypical people ✔ Brief history of understanding autism through science ✔ Written by a scientist who is autistic herself
★★★★★ The understanding of autism is constantly changing, and with the help of technology we know more rapidly. It's our brains that are different and our differences can make a better society.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
It's 100% enlightening. Of course I'm interested in autism so I picked this book up but it's not strictly about autism, or diagnosed autistics. It's about how people's brains work, and we are all different when it comes to how brains function. And certain kind of people with autism have a certain traits that demonstrates or "proves" why the person thinks or behaves that way. It's like what Freud says, it's not psychology, it's physiology, it's how it is in the brain, as this book suggests.
The author naturally focuses on high functioning or Asperger kind of ASD, but as she says, the technology will soon allow autistic people who need more cares to express their own feeling.
And she goes on to talk about the society we live in - why doesn't the society take advantage of people who love repetitive work? They Love it and they're precise. Why not team up with different type of people to achieve a goal? Why is it so important that everyone is average at everything- when that's actually not humanly possible. So we all suffer from this belief that we should all have the same or similar capabilities, one way or another.
Interesting quotes;
P43 If you can think of five ways for the brain to do something, it does it in all ten. The five ways you've thought of, and the five ways you haven't thought of yet.
P68 Freud... always argued that his psychoanalytic concepts were place holders until science could do better. ... to replace the psychological terms by physiological or chemical ones.
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