The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum Read Free

her time. It would take child psychiatry decades to catch up with her.
    People often ask me, “When did you really know you were autistic?” As if there were one defining moment in my life, a before-and-after revelation. But the conception of autism in the early 1950s didn’t work that way. Like me, child psychiatry back then was still young. The words
autism
and
autistic
barely appeared in the American Psychiatric Association’s initial attempt to standardize psychiatric diagnoses, in the first edition of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)
, published in 1952, when I was five. The few times those words did appear, they were used to describe symptoms of a separate diagnosis, schizophrenia. For instance, under the heading Schizophrenic Reaction, Childhood Type, there was a reference to “psychotic reactions in children, manifesting primarily autism”—without further explanation of what autism itself was.
    Mother remembers one of the early doctors in my life making a passing reference to “autistic tendencies.” But I myself didn’t actually hear the word
autistic
applied to me until I was about twelve or thirteen; I remember thinking,
Oh, it’s me that’s different.
Even then, though, I still wouldn’t have been able to tell you exactly what autistic behaviors were. I still wouldn’t have been able to tell you why I had such trouble making friends.
    As late in life as my early thirties, when I was pursuing my doctorate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I could still overlook the role that autism played in my life. One of the requirements was a statistics course, and I was hopeless. I asked if I could take the course with a tutor instead of in a classroom, and I was told that in order to get permission to do that, I would have to undergo a “psychoeducational assessment.” On December 17 and 22, 1982, I met with a psychologist and took several standard tests.Today, when I dig that report out of a file and reread it, the scores practically scream out at me,
The person who took these tests is autistic.
    I performed at the second-grade level on a subtest that required me to identify a word that was spoken at the rate of one syllable per second. I also scored at the second-grade level on a subtest that required me to understand sentences where arbitrary symbols replaced regular nouns—for instance, a flag symbol meant “horse.”
    Well, yeah,
I thought,
of course I did poorly on these tests.
They required me to keep a series of recently learned concepts in my head. A flag means “horse,” a triangle means “boat,” a square means “church.” Wait—what does a flag mean again? Or the syllable three seconds ago was
mod,
the syllable two seconds ago was
er,
the syllable one second ago was
a,
and now the new syllable is
tion.
Hold on—what was that first syllable again? My success depended on my short-term memory, and (as is the case with many autistic people, I would later learn) my short-term memory is bad. So what else was new?
    At the other extreme, I scored well at antonyms and synonyms because I could associate the test words with pictures in my mind. If the examining psychologist said “Stop” to me, I saw a stop sign. If he said “Go,” I saw a green light. But not just any stop sign, and not just any green light. I saw a specific stop sign and a specific green light from my past. I saw a whole bunch of them. I even recalled a stop-and-go light from a Mexican customs station, a red light that turned green if the officers decided not to search your bags—and I’d seen that light more than ten years earlier.
    Again: So what? As far as I could tell, everybody thought in pictures. I just happened to be better at it than most people, something I already knew. By this point in my life, I had been making architectural drawings for several years. I’d already had the experience of completing a drawing and looking at it and thinking,
I can’t believe I did