The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum (38 page)

T
EMPLE
G
RANDIN
is one of the world’s most accomplished and well-known adults with autism. She is a professor at Colorado State University and the author of several best-selling books, which have sold more than a million copies. The HBO movie based on her life, starring Claire Danes, received seven Emmy Awards.

1. In the decade following Bettelheim’s death in 1990, his reputation unraveled. Evidence emerged that he had misrepresented his education, plagarized, conducted shoddy research, and lied about being a doctor, but even more damning were accusations of physical and mental abuse by former students at the Orthogenic School.

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2. . The reason for the change from Roman numerals to Arabic is that Arabic numerals will allow easier updating: 5.1, 5.2, etc.

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3.On an individual basis, the increase in risk is extremely low. Only on a population-wide basis would a change in the incidence rate become statistically significant.

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4. Personally, I don’t think people will consider the issue settled until someone runs a study that separates regressive subjects (those children who start out developing normally and then regress at around eighteen months) from nonregressive subjects.

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5. Note that Tito wasn’t using the word
astronaut
or
cow.
He had to come in the back door, so to speak. He described the object rather than named it.

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6. For more on this topic, see chapter 6, “Believer in Biochemistry,” in my book
Thinking in Pictures,
and chapter 7, “Medications and Biomedical Therapy,” in my book
The Way I See It
(second edition).

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7. It’s also sometimes called Irlen-Meares syndrome; around the same time that Irlen was doing her research, a New Zealand teacher named Olive Meares described problems involving seeing black print on white paper.

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8. It also included Rett syndrome and childhood disintegrative disorder, which don’t concern this discussion.

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9. I myself didn’t know that people have subtle eye signals until I was fifty. I have so much trouble remembering faces that in a business meeting, for instance, I’ll force myself to recognize physical details:
Okay, she’s wearing big glasses with black rims. He’s the one with the goatee.

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10. By the way, pay no attention to the Scarecrow in
The Wizard of Oz
after he receives his brain. What he apparently intends to recite is the Pythagorean theorem. What he actually recites is: “The sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side”—which is gibberish. Poor Scarecrow.

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