Do you think Bobby Fischer may have had Asperger's Sydrome?

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I'm new to this site, so I will feel a bit (more than usual) out of it if this is common knowledge already, but I was wondering if anyone wanted to discuss whether Bobby Fischer, the chess champion who just passed away, had Asperger's. I thought the way he acted since he was young sounded as though he may have had Asperger's, but maybe not.

It was said by a colleague/friend of his in a documentary about Bobby Fischer I saw on the Biography Channel, that he had Asperger's - though it did seem it was speculation by an unqualified person and not an official diagnosis (the guy who said it also looked AS).

I watched the documentary a few times, to carefully hear again what was said, and he definitely said he thought Bobby had Asperger's and that this explained his difficult and reclusive personality.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cry_skzgMps[/youtube]

May well have done. A super genius, literally the God of Chess.

Sounds like it. His obsession with chess sounds like how Aspies tend to get obsessed with things, plus the man was a genius.

I do think he was autistic, but he was also highly paranoid and delusional, which I guess sometimes comes with the territory. Whether he had crossed over the line to real mental illness, I don't know.

It makes perfect sense that he had Asperger's Syndrome. In fact, it's odd that not many people are talking about it. You can almost see how his brain is structured, with intensely hyper-connectivity in the areas that pertain to chess, with severely low-connectivity in the areas of socializing. His chess skill is a savant skill, which comes from the hyper-local-connectivity. You cannot get this without sacrificing some inter-departmental connectivity. In other words, his brain was like a special-purpose computer processor (like math and graphics processors), as opposed to a general purpose processor that most people have. It just happened to be wired perfectly for chess. This is what Asperger's Syndrome is.

I second that.

Yeah, it all fits. Watch this recently posted 1971 video interview of Fischer, accompanied by a compassionate article about him by Dick Cavett:

http://cavett.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02 ... cher&scp=4

Yeah, it all fits. Watch this recently posted 1971 video interview of Fischer, accompanied by a compassionate article about him by Dick Cavett:

http://cavett.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02 ... cher&scp=4

I've followed chess for a long time. Watched and listened to Fischer carefully in both early and latter years of his life. I strongly believe he did NOT have AS or was on the spectrum. He had something else.

he was.....also an ant-semitic bastard........ant- US as well

Yeah, but he was also an American Jew, so he obviously had some sort of problem that led him in that direction.

He was brilliant, but maybe not so mentally well, ya know.

im a Jew myself, so i dont appreciate his charracter. I dont care about his accomplishments if so strongly shouted anti-semitic notions. The danger in doing so is that people start to actually beleive it.

I totally agree with you, but I meant that his rejection of his heritage as well as his country, plus other odd behaviors, point to some bigger problems - mental or chemical.

We all have the right to criticize our country and our religion/cultural heritage, but his perceptions and rants seemed more in the irrational range.

So, yeah, he was an anti-semitic, anti-American bastard, but he also seemed, at the end, especially, REALLY unbalanced.

Good day to you all

Whilst I hate to “rock the boat” with my very first post I was amazed and a little disappointed to see my hero Bobby Fischer so fiercely criticized and even insulted on a forum where it’s members should know better. To someone like me who has charted Bobby’s rise and fall, it is obvious that he had A.S.
For his personality traits and rants to be laid bare on an A.S. site by A.S. sufferers is staggering. If poor Bobby can’t get a little sympathy here where can he? May one suggest a little less casting of the first stone.

Rant over.

Regards to all

piroflip

The Bobby Fischer thread still lives.