Steve Silberman

NeuroTribes

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Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction
Shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize
Shortlisted for the MJA Health Book of the Year Award
Shortlisted for the BMA Medical Book Awards
A Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller
Foreword by Oliver Sacks
What is autism: a devastating developmental condition, a lifelong disability, or a naturally occurring form of cognitive difference akin to certain forms of genius? In truth, it is all of these things and more — and the future of our society depends on our understanding it.
Following on from his groundbreaking article 'The Geek Syndrome', Wired reporter Steve Silberman unearths the secret history of autism, long suppressed by the same clinicians who became famous for discovering it, and finds surprising answers to the crucial question of why the number of diagnoses has soared in recent years.
Going back to the earliest autism research and chronicling the brave and lonely journey of autistic people and their families through the decades, Silberman provides long-sought solutions to the autism puzzle while casting light on the growing movement of 'neurodiversity' and mapping out a path towards a more humane world for people with learning differences.
This book is currently unavailable
720 printed pages
Copyright owner
Bookwire
Original publication
2017
Publication year
2016
Publisher
Allen & Unwin
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Impressions

  • Nast Huertashared an impression6 years ago
    👍Worth reading
    💀Spooky
    🔮Hidden Depths
    💡Learnt A Lot
    🎯Worthwhile
    🚀Unputdownable
    💧Soppy

Quotes

  • fluffyragehas quoted2 years ago
    When I was five years old, I was taking my electronic toys apart to see how they worked. (I also attempted to put them back together, with mixed results.) I have always been a voracious reader. I was reading college-level physics books bought at garage sales in the second grade. I used to annoy my father to no end wanting to build scale models of nuclear reactors, submarines, trains, anything you could think of. I have only had very small groups of close friends. I always considered that odd but never knew how to go about correcting it. Quite frankly, I find most people quite annoying and illogical—probably another common Asperger trait. :)
  • Yarahas quoted3 years ago
    As they were clearly not psychotic, Asperger coined the term Autistischen Psychopathen (“autistic psychopathy”) to describe their condition, employing a nineteenth-century term for the hazy borderland between mental health and illness. He also employed the simpler term Autismus and referred to it as a “natural entity,” like a field biologist describing a life-form he’d discovered flourishing in plain sight.

    He pointed out that the distinctive characteristics of this natural entity were already familiar in stock characters from pop culture like the “absentminded professor” and Count Bobby, a fictitious aristocrat who was the butt of many Austrian jokes. Crucially, Asperger also described Autismus as remaining “unmistakable and constant throughout the whole life-span,” and said that it encompassed an astonishingly broad cross section of people, from the most gifted to the most disabled. There seemed to be nearly as many varieties of Autismus as there were autistic people.

    The range [of this type] encompasses all levels of ability from the highly original genius, through the weird eccentric who lives in a world of his own and achieves very little, down to the most severe, contact-disturbed, automaton-like mentally retarded individual . . . Autistic individuals are distinguished from each other not only by the degree of contact disturbance and the degree of intellectual ability, but also by their personality and their special interests, which are often outstandingly varied and original.
  • Yarahas quoted3 years ago
    applied behavior analysis (ABA), a form of behavior modification based on the animal-learning theories of B. F. Skinner and pioneered as an early intervention for autism in the 1960s by psychologist Ivar Lovaas at the University of California in Los Angeles.

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