I finished reading the book and I highly recommend it. Roy Grinker, parlays his anthropologist perspective onto the subject of autism spectrum and writes about his daughter who is on the autism spectrum.
I'll quote a few passages from the book that had piqued my interest enough to write down while reading and am curious about you all's take on them:
Quote:
[Leo] Kanner described his father as abnormally short, socially awkward, obsessively dedicated to Talmudic studies, and eager to absorb large amounts of useless information on just about anything in the world. Had his father lived in the twenty-first century, he might well have been diagnosed with Asperger's Disorder. Kanner recalled that his mother played with his father's unusual skills as if he were a toy and enjoyed having him perform his amazing memory in public. If she had a skill, it was the art of opposition. She strayed from Jewish tradition often, and eventually she placed her son in a public, non-Jewish high school, where he excelled in science but felt isolated and unusual.
Quote:
During Kanner's medical school years, the American Psychiatric Association was still called the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane."
Quote:
...recent genetic, clinical, and epidemiological studies that strongly suggest that the social deficits characteristic of autism spectrum disorders are not only common in the general population - albeit in minimal, subtle forms that cause no alarm or major social problems - but that they are more prevalent in the relatives of people with autism. There are even MRI studies that "normal" people and their autistic relatives share similar abnormalities in specific parts of the brain responsible for motor planning, imitation (motor cortex and basal ganglia), and the processing of social information (somatosensory cortex).
I'll post a few more passages if there's interest on this thread.
06 Nov 2009, 3:44 pm
