“I found a parcel on the porch,” I said, entering the kitchen. “Thanks,” said my hostess, the wife of a fellow mathematician, while washing salad in the sink. “Put it on the table.”
“Which table?” I asked, for none was evident. “How many tables are there?” she replied brusquely. At this point I felt things beginning to skid. I knew that she did not require an inventory of tables in their splendid new home, but she still had not given me any idea where she wanted the wretched parcel put and she was becoming angry.
I fell back on the truth, a fool’s strategy if there ever was one. “I don’t know how many tables there are.” She grabbed the parcel and slammed it down on a work surface. “On the table,” she shouted very loudly. I felt humiliated. But I didn’t say: “That’s not a table; that’s a work surface.” I’ve learnt to be careful.
We talked about it afterwards. She said that she could not imagine why I cared where the parcel was put, and did not think that cooking supper was a good time for philosophy. In her terms, I had been insensitive to her instruction to dump the parcel anywhere, and oversensitive to her passing irritation.
It was a combination that she found hard to deal with. I decided not to say that her original instruction had been imprecise to the point of incomprehensibility and her anger an inappropriate response to uncertainty. I’ve learnt to be careful. There are a lot of people who just don’t think like me.
I was born in 1943, the year that the Austrian psychiatrist Leo Kanner first recorded a pattern of symptoms in some children that he labelled “early infantile autism”. If I were born more recently, my condition would probably have been diagnosed as being “on the autistic spectrum”, but then I was a “problem child”. That is to say, I had noticed that few grown-ups seemed to have a clue what they were doing and I challenged them repeatedly as a consequence. I was fired in the direction of various mind doctors. At 15, my loud and repeated assertions that my teachers were stupid led to a shower of blows and my expulsion from Charterhouse School. I was, it was decided, uneducable.
I resent the assumption that autism is simply a disability. In fact, I believe that it may be an incredibly important asset for humanity. My life story doesn’t conform to the idea of the limited possibilities most people associate with autism. After school I was a member of the anti-nuclear group the Committee of 100, and spent my 17th birthday as a fellow prisoner of Bertrand Russell in Wormwood Scrubs. Ultimately I ended up sneaking down the wrong atomic bunker and spent six months hiding in a metal cutlery factory on the German North Sea coast. When I got back to England in the 1960s, I did my bit to bring the anarchist newspaper IT into existence and later became editor.
I had a position at an ecological research institute and got to run supercomputers at Nasa and Oxford, which was fun. Then I was the managing director of an industrial research company that won an international prize for technical innovation.
But it was my academic work on psychology and mathematical philosophy, which I began part-time in the early 1970s, that has played the biggest role in determining what I believe about autism and why I believe society has got it wrong. Working with the linguist Dr Dinah Murray, I became particularly interested in the relationship between language and the imagination, and we began to build a computer model of what is considered “normal”. And as we learnt more and more about the way people think, autism emerged as a “magic mirror” through which to see the various ways that the everyday human mind worked. We developed a model of the mind as an “interest system”.
Dr Murray and I believe that people with autistic traits are part of the normal variety of human beings and that variety is a good thing. What differentiates them is how completely their interest or attention tends to be focused, and that has an impact on their lives in a society.
It can be argued that human knowledge and achievement is limited by our attention. Most of us do not have enough attention to deal with the demands of everyday life. That’s why 2,000 people die on the roads each year.
However, it seems that humanity has evolved a way of dealing with this problem of scarce attention by giving some people the propensity to focus their attention in a concentrated beam, an attention tunnel. This approach is often diagnosed as autism or Asperger’s syndrome. There is a minor but socially significant side-effect to this tight beam approach: it means that little attention is left for social rules, language, and how human beings relate.
People who are good at these succeed as salesmen, politicians and chat-show hosts. People who are good at focusing their attention succeed in activities as diverse as sport, science, war or remembering railway timetables.
These thoughts have informed the internet site Autism and Computing (www. autismandcomputing.org.uk), which I set up with Dr Murray, one of a number that have made a point of carrying scientific work by autistic scientists. Mathematics is my area. In working on our computer model of the human mind, the equation that Dr Murray and I used produced so much data that it required a supercomputer to run.
Our study of autism became increasingly relevant to me. I had never had much success in forming an image of myself based on the examples around me, but my far from typical mental architecture has begun to reveal itself in the light of our understanding of autism through the computer model.
Despite displaying a number of typical autistic traits, I do not regret my condition having never attracted the diagnosis of autism. Although some aspects of my life might have been easier if I had, I do not relish the prospect of being known as something that few people understand. I would rather be included in the vaster mystery of common humanity.
There is a growing international autism civil rights movement, with many people who have been labelled as autistic combining in self-defence against discrimination and stigmatisation. It is becoming, especially in America, a civil rights issue. Sympathetic as I am to those who wish to follow this course, I do not believe that it is possible to liberate a single section of humanity.
I do think, however, that tyranny requires an environment of collusion. For people with autism, there is a complicity in society that amounts to oppression. Everywhere people choose to view the autistic mind as something wholly negative — and that applies to those who are supposedly on the side of those who have had autism diagnosed.
The other day I glanced at a National Autistic Society publication which stated that autistic people are mostly of low intelligence. I wonder how I am supposed to react to this. The society publishes my work. It would be down- right autistic to write to the newspapers and complain.
The autism spectrum
Some researchers believe that autism is badly defined, and that rather than being a disability, many types should be seen as part of a continuum of human characteristics — some of which society deems acceptable.
