Just read this amazing article in Wired about the study of autism and the lives of people who have autism. For me it was fascinating. I’ll admit that my knowledge of autism and Asperger’s is very limited, coming from packaged news products and Time magazine or whatever you may find while waiting at the doctors office. Which unfortunately has informed me more about the common (mis)conceptions about it rather than going to any depths. This one article in Wired destroyed all of that.
One researcher in Canada, Laurent Mottron, is looking at autism from a completely different angle: not as a disease, but a variance of biology…
“I wanted to go as far as I could to show that their perception — their brains — are totally different.” Not damaged. Not dysfunctional. Just different.
By far the most intriguing part of the article was about 27-year-old Amanda Baggs, who lives in public housing in Burlington, Vermont. I’ve embedded one of her videos, which she produces herself and has received 400,000 hits so far. It is just mind-blowing and really humbled me. But I’ll let her speak for herself, she communicates much better than I can…
