Suspected Autism Quotes

I suspect the I.Q., SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent...Smart and wise people who score low on IQ tests, or patently intellectually defective ones, like the former U.S. president George W. Bush, who score high on them (130), are testing the test and not the reverse.

If a psychosis was just some synapses misfiring why wouldnt you simply get static? But you dont. You get a carefully crafted and fairly articulate world never seen before. Who's doing this? Who is it who is running around hooking up the dangling wires in new and unusual ways. Why is he doing it? What is the algorithm he follows? Why do we suspect there is one?

Internally, I was fractured, a series of faked personalities and protective shields that kept people at a distance. I could only drop the shield when I was alone, but even in my solitude I was miserable and confused. I was all defense mechanisms, with nothing left inside worth defending. When a masked Autistic person lacks self-knowledge or any kind of broad social acceptance, they are often forced to conceive of themselves as compartmentalized, inconsistent parts. Here is the person I have to be at work, and the person I must be at home. These are the things I fantasize about doing but can’t tell anybody about. Here are the drugs that keep my energy levels up, and the lies I tell to be entertaining at parties. These are the tension-defusing distractions I’ll deploy when someone begins to suspect there’s something off about me. We don’t get the chance to come together into a unified whole that we can name or understand, or that others can see and love. Some sides of us go unacknowledged entirely, because they don’t serve our broader goal of remaining as inoffensive and safe as possible.

For masked Autistic people, knowing “too much” or thinking about something too deeply is seen as suspect. People find it calculating or creepy for us to put more effort into something they never grant a passing thought.

In a naïve attempt to put a familiar label on him, I asked if he’d considered whether he was on the autism spectrum. “Nah,” he said, “I’m not any of that.” I began to suspect his primary pathology was being from Gore.

Neuroscientists have observed that Autistic brains continue to develop in areas associated with social skills for far longer than neurotypical brains are believed to. One study, conducted by Bastiaansen and colleagues (2011), observed that though young Autistic people experienced far less activity than allistics in the inferior frontal gyrus (an area of the frontal lobe involved in interpreting facial expressions), by age thirty no differences between non-Autistics and Autistic people were evident. In other words, Autistic brains eventually “caught up” to neurotypical brains, in terms of how actively they processed and interpreted facial expressions as social data. Other studies have found that Autistic people over the age of fifty are comparable to allistic people, in terms of their ability to make sense of the motivations and emotions of others. Researchers aren’t sure why these findings occur, only that they help to justify conceiving of Autism as a developmental disability or delay. For my part, I suspect that Autistic people get better at reading faces and understanding human behavior over time because we eventually develop our own systems and tricks for making sense of the world. We might have developed at the same pace as neurotypicals if we’d been given accessible tools earlier on. The social scripts and shortcuts that work for neurotypical people do not work for us, so we have to teach ourselves to develop social instincts.

Dr. Naviaux knew that the cellular danger response took effect when cells were “told” by organic compounds in the blood, called purines, to stop performing their ordinary services and activate defensive systems to stave off attack from viruses or toxic chemicals. Moreover, he suspected that when the danger response was activated in young children, the purines sometimes just kept circulating nonstop and left neurons in permanent defensive lockdown. If this was so, then he theorized that targeting the purine activity could potentially end the lockdown, allow the neurons to make long connections again, and treat the autism. Dr. Naviaux set up an experiment with mice. He knew from past work that if female mice were infected with a virus midpregnancy, their offspring would be born with brains in defensive lockdown and exhibit autistic behaviors such as fear of novelty and difficulty interacting with other mice.