OfficialDiagnosis: Asperger's Syndrome

Ambivalence vs. Balance

If someone would see me walking next to them on the street, they would not notice. I look like them, walk like them - at least I seem to walk like them even if I mostly look to the ground noticing the patterns of tiles, the color of them, their individual shape and markings, oh that one is badly chipped... even if I seem oblivious to the people around me, because I do not often look at them; but do I have to? I can tell where they are, how THEY are walking, if they are man or woman and how old from their voices, from their clothes that I take in at fast glimpses, from the sound of their high heels or squicky boots. I seem to walk normal, but I am not. I know it and they, all the others around me, do not.

I am not hiding it.

It is obvious as obvious as it can be, but it's their eyes and ears, or maybe brain that can't see me. Brain is what procesess the information coming in from our physical senses. My senses are in high alert, all the time. I hear everything, I see and notice everything, I smell everything, I feel everything -please stop touching me with that piece of paper that you are holding standing behind me on the line to the cashier's desk. Every time it touches my skin electricity shoots up to my brain. That is how much I CAN feel it, so please when I ask you to stop doing it once DO NOT give me that stupid look.

I can see you, I know you are standing behind me, and you are so absorbed by the phonecall you are making that you keep bumping on me with that piece of paper and you get annoyed when I finally grab that piece of paper and tear it to pieces and you call me names, in a loud even more annoying voice, saying that I am mental and your voice is hurting my ears and you should feel lucky that I did not punch you to make you stop all that noise you are making hurting my ears, hurting my brain, hurting my very soul.

But I have NO right to tear the paper that was causing me pain, or making you stop from hurting my ears with your loud angry ugly voice, cause you are NORMAL and I am not.

You feel anxious about this whole issue, don't you. This Autism thing. Because I am an "abnormal" that doesn't LOOK abnormal. I look normal on the outside. It makes you feel anxious cause you don't know when I might become dangerous, when I might use my abnormality against you. You wish I was normal. So that I could be predictable and thus also safe to be around. Normal is the same as being THE SAME, the same like you.

If we are both normal and both the same, you can feel like you know me, that you can just be as if you are looking in the mirror and I am your reflection and we are the same and we both know what the other is thinking and feeling.

DID I SAY THINKING AND FEELING? YES! I DID.

You see that is what the society expects of all us human beings. We must be all the same to ensure we are all safe and all know what each other is feeling and thinking. Cause not knowing is not safe. Not knowing means that someone might be thinking something that could be hurmful to someone else.

That is also why of all disabilities, illnesses, syndromes, mental issues are the most fearful. Psycho killers are the no. 1 scary stuff. Because a psycho killer looks normal but can suddenly turn into a killer.

Not knowing whta the other feels and thinks are the basic issues that an autistic has with others. That is why they see us as abnormal. Thalt is why they are so keen in stamping or better brand-marking us disabled so that we are taught from early on that we are not as good as the normal ones and that we should never, never, never, ever... take it up against them.

They make sure we will loose if we do. Cause abnormality is NOT welcomed. Unless you can be like us, THE SAME, so that we can all know what you think and what you feel and so you can know what WE think and what WE feel, we don't wnat you in our society, you can turn a killer...

It is that simple. Once I read on a wall: "If you will not learn to respect us, you will learn to fear us"

The Neurotypical Society has brandmarked us, has labelled us, has diagnosed us, taped syndromes and low functions on us, has declaired us unfit to be equal to them, and insists we are LESS! Children of a LESSER mind.

We are not as good as them normals," so better learn to behave like us, better learn to pretend at least to be like us, better know how to fit in, or you will be left out, out in the cold, out alone, out with NO MERCY, you heartless and thoughtless human," we hear all around us, twenty plus years now...

How can you even call yourself a human being NOT knowing how your fellow humans feel, what your fellow humans think. How can you be a normal human being you creep!?!?

Yes, you are right. How can I? Why do I get all these depressions? Why do I become suicidal, self-abusive, a willing mute, a rocking-horse, a overgrown baby in diapers? I do it so you can see that I am not human. Maybe then, at least then, you might feel pity for me, care for me instead of abuse me, fear me, unlove me... I can't be human so what else can I be?

I am not a monkey, nor a butterfly as much as I wish I was. So what other choices do I have? I can become an extreme. A extreme mathematician, an extreme painter, an extreme day-teller and extreme musician, an extreme linguist, an extreme idiot if needed.

So WHAT am I? Who am I?

I am the mirror image. I am the other. But not the one YOU see. Because You see what your brain tells you to see, guided by the Gestalt that connects the dots and sees something that is NOT there.

It sees stars, dots in the sky, forming star signs; a bull, the taurus appearing out of thin air, a lion the Leo and a beautiful maiden the Virgo. The human brain can create images that are not there thanks to its Gestalt ability. It is a safety mechanism. It helps us protect ourselves. When we can connect the dots, the shadows in the grass, get also connected the new image spells "tiger" so we know when to run.

But Gestalt is not like a little flash light that you can turn on and then off.

It is there all the time. It does what it does all the time. It takes dots and connects them, it takes parts and conencts them, it takes the trees and shows you the forest. The trees become only parts that are conencted to a whole. It takes sheep and makes a flock. It takes cows and makes it a herd, it takes fish and makes it a school.

Gestalt is an ability that is meant to protect because there is safety in numbers. That is how the neurotypical brain works. It sees people and makes them a society, it sees people and makes them a group where all parts are the same, and in being the same and in being a group there is safety.

Humans need safety. We humans are born in the middle of the food-chain. We can be eaten. We are vulnerable lile the sheep and we know that there are wolves and tigers in the grass and we need the Gestalt to be able to "see" them inbetween the long grass blades. If we did not have Gestalt we would be unable to see the tiger as it is fragmented by the blades of grass, we would see shadows and only know we are in danger until it was too late.

But here is also the thing. Nature is wise. If it only made one of each kind, extonction would be much easier. It made animals that like on the ground and animals that live in water. Animals that fly and animals that crowl, it made animals that prefer to live at night and animals that prefer the daylight.

It only made one kind of human beings, though... Really??? Do you really believe that? Do you really believe that Nature and God are THAT stupid to make only one of a kind???

You see human beings are not just vulnerable like sheep, they are ALSO like wolves, tigers, hunters and killers. We are as I said, in the middle of the food chain. We can kill as well as we can kill others and eat them. We are hunters, killers.

We have great abilities as hunters but these contradict the "sheep" in us. The sheep is good, religion told us so. Being a sheep is rewarded, it is the proper thing to be. Sheep are guarded and guided by God we are told, sheep are safe in numbers for as long as there are NO WOLVES that is.

So, when human beings flock like sheep using their neurotypical Gestalt ability to see themselves as a group, as a society, as a civilized animal, they deprive themselves of an important part: the wolf, the tiger, the hunter and warrior in them.

Why do they do that? Because they were told that this part was bad. It was evil, unpure, dark and feared. It was the part that made us uncivilized, brutal, animals! I was like the dark side of the Moon, we know it's there but we do not want to see it. We see the Moon as a crecent not as the circle that it actually is.

Being different and not seeing, recognizing and accepting other's thoughts and feelings is what trademarks a killer, a hunter, isn't it???

The killer would be unable to kill and eat its pray if it could see, recognize and identify emotions in that meal. The hunter's instinct and his Gestalt ability is set on different rules and priorities. Its Gestalt needs to form other kinds of groups out of other kinds of parts.

Its brain looks to the ground seeking tracks, animal tracks, and then needs to group similar tracks to make out the kind, size, weight, and direction of the animal or animals. The brain of a hunter is not set to flock but to ungroup. If a hunter attacks its pray in numbers the pray will notice them much sooner. Very few animals, species of animals, hunt in groups. Most hunt alone.

Hunters are feared, because they need to kill to survive. Sheep are loved as they are the victims. Yet, Nature in its wisdom made both, because BOTH are necessary to keep an ecosystem's balance. We all now know what happens when there are too many sheep or too many wolves. Balance and equality is the key here.

Yet, when it comes to humans, neurotypicals assume that they have all norms in own pocket. They, the sheep, are the only normals and all who evoke this norm are witchhunted as fearful and unwanted.

I am one of society's unwanted. I am autistic, I am Asperger. I am. Until you learn to respect me, you will always fear me. Fear autism, fear the future of your kids, fear your own reflection on societie's mirror. Cause the more sheep there are, the more wolves Nature will create to keep the balance.

When the sheep accept the wolf in them there will be no need for external wolves. Once society looks into her own mirror and truly sees what is there with out labeling the sheep good and the wolves bad, then and only then it will not need to flock like scared sheep because in each and every sheep, there is an equally strong wolf hidding. Able to kill if needed to defend itself.

When we finally truly see ourselves for what we really are, accept our "dark" side our YIN as we accept our good, our "light" side our YANG, accept that everything is made in wisdom, then we will realize that human species is not one, but two. There are two and there are inside every and each ONE of us human beings. We are Yin and we are Yang.

For as long as we try to split these two apart in ambivelance, because we can't chose between our two human natures, our sheep nature and our hunter nature, the more we push one to overpower the other, the more we evoke a Law of Nature that says:
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Human beings have been pushing the sheep, the "neurotypical herd" image as the one to be, forcing humans to ignore the tiger in them. Nature has for that reason now is turning them into Autistics so the balance is restored. It is the Law of Nature.
For EVERY ACTION, there is an EQUAL AND OPPOSITE REACTION!

But neurotypicals can't see further than their selves. The see in every other around them: Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, and one more like me, and one more and one more and one more...

Then they decide that Me equals Good. So, obviously and this is real NO BRAINER, everyone who is not Me, is also not Good.

Me = Good, Not Me = Not Good
Neurotypical = Good, Not Neurotypical =Not Good
Autistic = Not Neurotypical, Autistic = Not Good

Hmmm, maybe because Autistic is .... better???
Have YOU considered THAT possibility????

We all know science's need for precision. It clearly says that a correlationcan go always both ways. When one goes up the other goes down, but the opposite is also of value, that the same that goes up, has to be read as also coming down.
Nature is not linear.

All is round, the Earth is round and the sun ir round, it MUST be round. A line has no mass. The first solid form must be made of THREE lines. Not one not two but three! Yet, there is a solid shape that defies that law, human made law. A circle is ONE line that forms a solid shape. Not just a circle, that is two dimentional, but also a sphere, a ball, a planet, our Earth.

Time is also a line, humans think. Yes, it is but it is a circle, a sphere, a ball. Time is endless an endless round form.

Human brain can understand better 2 dimensions when it thinks. Gestalt connects dots, but only when they are presented in a 2-Dimensional form. When the shadow is split in pieces by the long grass blades, it makes teh shadow look 2-Dimensional, not 3-Dimensional as the original form that cast it.

The sheep see better 2-Dinesions. It helps them protect themselves better. It is something that Nature gave them so they can have a better chance at survival. Cows are the same. All herding animals see 2-Dimensions better than 3.

That is why they have eyes on the SIDES of their heads. They see with one eye at a time, they use both eyes but they take turns as they are being processed by the brain. Each eye sees 2-Dimensions, but they do NOT see the same image as we humans can. Our eyes are on the front of our heads. We can see 3-Dimensions.
We MUST see 3-Dimensions to be able to hunt!

Yet, we MUST also be able to see 2-Dimensions. That is the human advantage above all other hunting animals, all other killers. We do not have thick fair, or long claws, we don't even have long enough teeth. But we have a brain that is as sharp as a knife.

We can switch from 2-Dimensions to 3-Dimensions. We see more than the sheep, cause we see 3-D like the killers. We can see better than the killers because we can also see 2-D and notice them faster.

Seeing 2-D also gives us a hunting advantage. While other hunting animals become CONFUSED, when the herd starts moving and all they see is a blur unable to distinguish each animal because they do not have Gestalt! Animals do not have the Gestalt ability humans have.

This ability is what enabled us to speak, to create language in a verbal and written form. Speaking is connecting words as one would connect dots. We connect them and see a sentence.

Autistics (dyslexics and all other with reading problems), have these problems because their brain does not use Gestalt to connect these dots. The Autistic brain uses Gestalt to connect visual dots, making them a 3-D image. We think with pictures not words. We read and speak images.

When we talk, we translate an image we see and that is why our speech is frangmented, doesn't seem to flow, to form proper sentences and proper paragraphs. We do not use Gestalt in the same way. How DO we use it?
We use it the Autistic way.

The Autism Rights Movement

A new wave of activists wants to celebrate atypical brain function as a positive identity, not a disability. Opponents call them dangerously deluded.

By Andrew Solomon
Published May 25, 2008

Ari Ne'eman (Photo: Henry Leutwyler)

On December 1, the NYU Child Study Center came out with advertisements in the form of ransom notes. One said, “We have your son. We will make sure he will not be able to care for himself or interact socially as long as he lives. This is only the beginning.” It was signed “Autism.” Another said, “We have your son. We are destroying his ability for social interaction and driving him into a life of complete isolation. It’s up to you now,” and was signed “Asperger Syndrome.”

Harold Koplewicz, director of the center, hoped the ads would propel undiagnosed children toward competent professionals. But they repelled and upset a subset of the very population they were meant to assist: people with autism-spectrum disorders.

Autism activists spearheaded a huge protest. The chief organizer was 20-year-old Ari Ne’eman, who has an Asperger’s (autism without speech delay) diagnosis. In a memo to his Autistic Self Advocacy Network, he denounced the campaign as relying on “the oldest and most offensive disability stereotypes to frighten parents.”

While people with diagnoses of autism and Asperger’s have difficulty with social interaction, he added, “we are not incapable of it and can succeed and thrive on our own terms when supported, accepted, and included for who we are.” Stereotypes of autism were self-fulfilling, he argued. As he told me later, autistic adults were abandoned to “rot in institutions because of the perception that there is no way they can live in the community.”

Ne’eman started a letter-writing campaign and recruited support from the major American disability groups. The campaign rapidly escalated and was soon reported in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. This was startling for several reasons. Autistic people are held to be bad at social functioning—and therefore incapable of the organization such protests entail. Autism advocates are an entirely new category: The whole idea didn’t really exist five years ago.

Moreover, rather than advocating for a cure, or seeking research into the cause of the much-publicized “autism epidemic,” these activists argued that society needed to change, not autistic people. Koplewicz was stunned. “People kept misinterpreting the ads, and there was a contagion to that. And there was no way we could seem to explain ourselves,” he said. Less than three weeks after they appeared, the ads were pulled. It was a signal triumph for the neurodiversity movement, the self-chosen name for the autism-rights brigade.

The first person to articulate the autism-rights position, Jim Sinclair, has produced only a few page-long essays. In his seminal invective, “Don’t Mourn for Us,” from 1993, he wrote, “It is not possible to separate the autism from the person. Therefore, when parents say, ‘I wish my child did not have autism,’ what they’re really saying is, ‘I wish the autistic child I have did not exist and I had a different (non-autistic) child instead.’

Read that again. This is what we hear when you mourn over our existence.

This is what we hear when you pray for a cure. This is what we know, when you tell us of your fondest hopes and dreams for us: that your greatest wish is that one day we will cease to be, and strangers you can love will move in behind our faces.”

The term neurodiversity was put forward by Judy Singer, an Australian whose mother and daughter have Asperger’s and who is on the spectrum herself, and was first published by the American writer Harvey Blume. “I was interested in the liberatory, activist aspects of it—to do for neurologically different people what feminism and gay rights had done for their constituencies,” Singer said.

Singer, Blume, and Sinclair, voices in the wilderness in the nineties, are now part of a thriving culture: There are Websites and T-shirts, and slang like NT, or “neurotypical” (a playful slur for the non-autistic), Aspies, and auties. The neurodiverse present regularly at autism conferences.

Some of the first wave of activists are parents of autistic children, but more recently, autistic adults have been advocating on their own behalf. The Internet has made the climate even more hospitable to an autism-rights position, allowing activists to locate one another and communicate at their own pace. The Web, Singer said, “is a prosthetic device for people who can’t socialize without it.”

These activists argue that autism is not an illness but an alternative way of being. The preferred terminology among disability activists is to speak of a “person with deafness” rather than a “deaf person,” or a “person with dwarfism” rather than a dwarf. But Sinclair has said that “person-first” terminology denies the centrality of autism and has compared “person with autism” to describing a man as a “person with maleness.”

I’ve heard these arguments before and been swayed by them, both in the case of the deaf community and on the matter of mental illness. But to me, autism was different. Whereas deafness creates relationships, autism seems to cut people off from one another. I took the much-publicized agony of parents of autistic children to be a marker for the despair of their children.

Autism’s deficits—for the head-banging, nonverbal children and for the socially inept, obsessive ones—seemed simply too bleak to celebrate, and I did not see how any wishful rhetoric could alter that fact.

Kathleen Seidel (left) is the owner and operator of the Website neurodiversity.com. She has a child with Asperger’s, had a father with similar qualities, and exhibits spectrum characteristics herself.

“Honestly, I always feel kind of like an oddball whenever I’m in any kind of group situation, so the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” she says, laughing. “There’s a kind of polish that I’ll never have, and that’s just built into the wiring.”

Her personal obsession is disentangling conflicts of interest in lawsuits brought by parents who believe that vaccines caused their children’s autism. (From the neurodiversity perspective, the escalating vogue for arguing that vaccines cause autism is not just incorrect but offensive, implying as it does that their condition is a side effect of poisoning.)

But this is just a piece of Seidel’s larger project of exalting autistic people. For many parents, an autism diagnosis is a crossing into hell. Seidel sees it otherwise. “I think of diagnosis as an aid to pattern recognition in our lives,” she says. “We could make sense out of things that had been inexplicable to us; we felt validated. I encountered the word neurodiversity, and it just sang to me. I thought, What a beautiful word, that encompasses the reality that God has many different ways to build a brain.”

I invited Seidel to stay with me in New York for a weekend so that she could introduce me to the debates around neurodiversity, and she attacked the task with the elegant force of a great lawyer defending her favorite client before the Supreme Court. She has the activist’s urgency, the scholar’s rigor, a broad-ranging sensibility, and a great laugh. She trained as a librarian, wrote a Sufi cookbook, and celebrated her marriage, in 1982, at the Mudd Club.

Tall, angular, a little geeky, attractive, with a penchant for big hats and sunglasses, she has at first that air, common to people on the spectrum, of finding social interaction pointlessly exhausting. Once on her topic, though, she lights up like a neon sign. We sat up late every night, cross-legged on the floor, reviewing case after case, and she told them with the punch of Dickens describing Jarndyce v. Jarndyce.

She is staunchly unabashed by her many formidable opponents; she describes herself as a “1,000 percenter.” A recent profile of her in the Concord, New Hampshire, Monitor, her local paper, quoted a professor who works on autism calling her “the Erin Brockovich of autism-spectrum disorders.” She told me, “Juries and judges hear sad stories, and it’s totally logical that people’s hearts will lead the way. But hearts leading the way don’t always lead to justice.”

Seidel has had occasion recently to live this insight. She was served an incredibly far-reaching subpoena on March 26, demanding all her Website’s records and an extraordinary range of other documents including canceled checks, tax returns, Lexis/Nexis records, e-mails, information pertaining to contact with “religious groups (Muslim or otherwise),” and on and on. The subpoena was issued by the lawyer in a vaccine case within hours of her posting an article critical of his integrity.

It appeared to be a craven attempt to intimidate Seidel, who responded with Aspie meticulousness, moving that the subpoena be quashed on grounds of sanctionable abuse. Seidel became a cause célèbre, and on April 21, a judge ruled in her favor. The subpoena intended to silence her views instead served to broadcast them—testament to both her wit and her tormentors’ foolishness.

“So I have another question to ask you,” I said cautiously.
“Ask me a question. Kick me in the ass,” she said, with typical feistiness.
“When you realized that your child had Asperger’s, did you want to do anything about it?” I asked. “Did you want to ameliorate it? Did you want to celebrate it?”
It had been a challenge, she acknowledged, to accept that her child did not want to be touched, would avoid eye contact. But by the time she heard the diagnosis, she’d moved past that stage. “I wanted to figure out what my child needed,” Seidel said. “I wanted to figure out what my child needed to thrive, for fulfillment.”

Under Seidel’s tutelage, I began to understand that there were two basic principles that I did not yet grasp. The first is the variety of experience that gets lumped under the words autism spectrum, which is not a simple range from milder to more severe symptoms but rather a three-dimensional universe of behaviors as challenging to define as the notion of human personality itself.

The other is that some people who lack what consensus deems essential to happiness are happy nonetheless. Much as the Grinch cannot believe that Christmas can come without packages, boxes, or bags, so I thought happiness could not come without what looks to the rest of us like intimacy. I was wrong.

The neurodiversity activists include both people on the spectrum and their parents; their opponents likewise include both groups, with a heavy concentration of parents. There are in reality three sides in this debate: those who believe autism is caused by environmental toxins (especially vaccines) and should be cured by addressing those pollutants; those who believe it is genetic and should be addressed through the genome; and the neurodiverse, who believe that it is genetic and should be left alone.

These camps are blatantly hostile to one another. Gerald Fischbach, the scientific director of the Simons Foundation, one of the largest private funders of autism research, says, “I’ve never seen an advocacy community as intense and demanding. The mercuries get livid when people talk about genetics. The geneticists get furious when people talk about environmental toxins. And these activists get angry at both.”

To complicate things further, it may be deceptive to talk about autism as a single illness at all. According to Steven Hyman, former head of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and now provost of Harvard, the illness is likely to “turn out to be a family of related brain problems that won’t respond to the same treatments.” In the seventies, the rate of autism was said to be about one in 10,000; it is now one in 150. But what do these numbers mean?

If an autism epidemic is sweeping the country, then huge resources to address it are appropriate—to treat it, to find a cause, to figure out how to acknowledge this new population. If we are now describing as autism both what was once misdiagnosed as mental retardation and what was once accepted as eccentricity, there is no public-health crisis.

There are contradictions even within the different camps. While vaccine activists tend to dismiss the articulate neurodiversity people as “not really autistic,” merely “quirky” individuals hijacking the fates of those more seriously affected, they fight for research by pointing to swelling autism rates that include just such people.

I had dinner with Ari Ne’eman at Blue Hill in New York. He is not without social graces, but you can feel the effort in them, traces of being “the only kid in third grade who brought the newspaper to school in the morning.” He said, “I like to say that neurotypical social interaction is a second language. It’s not as if we can’t learn it. It’s just that it doesn’t necessarily come easily to us.”

When Ne’eman was in high school, his extraordinary intellectual skills and his striking social deficits meant that he was considered both gifted and disabled. “People think of those as opposites, but that’s not the case. As a public-relations point, it’s nice to point to people like Vernon Smith, a guy with Asperger’s who won the Nobel Prize in economics, or [music critic] Tim Page, who has Asperger’s and won a Pulitzer.

But it would be a mistake to say that people carry worth and should have their differences respected only if they can deliver some sort of special talent.” Ne’eman started speaking out about autism rights when he was 16 and in school in New Jersey; before long, he was appointed by the governor to the New Jersey Special Education Review Commission, and became chair for the Public Policy Committee for the New Jersey Coalition for Inclusive Education.

He is attending the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; he jokes, “In my spare time, I’m a full-time student.” His parents, he says, “were some of my strongest, strongest allies. They told me I could grow up to be whatever I wanted to be. Early on it was a paleontologist, then it was a physicist. I briefly had an obsession with the New York Yankees, and I still don’t understand what the attraction was there. And then it became politics and the general social sciences, and that sort of stuck.”

I asked Ne’eman about the initiative from some in the neurodiversity movement to have Asperger’s, like homosexuality, removed from the illness list in the DSM. Did he agree with that approach?

“There is a wide diversity on the autism spectrum,” he said, with measured sobriety. He nodded and then added, a touch autobiographically, a phrase that many in the autism community use: “When you know a person on the spectrum, you know one person on the spectrum.”

One of the clichés of autism is emotional deadness.

Spending time with Seidel and Ne’eman, I felt the opposite. They both use the tonalities of logic, but the logic of the heart. They are a little weird, but then most intelligent people are weird deep down, and there was something about the frankness with which Seidel and Ne’eman and other activists I met displayed their fascinations that was refreshing, even relaxing; in fact, I felt with them that my proud knack for observing social niceties was also a tissue of pointless lies.

Please don’t write about them,” Lenny Schafer, editor of the prominent Schafer Autism Report, adoptive father of a severely autistic child, and a vaccine activist, said. “It’s a handful of noisy people who get a lot of media attention but do not represent a broad swath of the autism community. Best for them to be ignored. They want to redefine autism as something nice that Einstein and Bill Gates had. They’re trivializing what autism really is. It’s like stealing money from the tin cup of a blind man when you say that it’s not an illness.”

Mark Blaxill, a leading vaccine parent, called them “a nuisance” and expressed the common concern that they were not in fact autistic. “There’s a militancy associated with celebration, pride, and sense of identity—all that’s fine and wonderful,” he said. “They’re also just a little sad. What kind of person would need to attack parents trying to help their kids?”

John Best, parent of a child with autism and author of the Hating Autism blog, puts it most harshly: “It’s time to put an end to celebrating having brain damage.”

To me, it seemed clear that everyone in this debate expends a lot of energy defeating straw men. While those seeking a cure for autism do not (as their opponents in the neurodiversity movement claim) want to obliterate a vibrant subculture of atypical thinkers, the neurodiversity activists also do not oppose helping kids—though they do take exception to some treatments used on children.

Researching this article, I spent a lot of time being talked at by people on both sides, one more doctrinaire than the next. Not since my early days reporting from the Soviet Union had I found myself so bullied about what I should and shouldn’t be mentioning.

Roy Richard Grinker, author of a pellucid book called Unstrange Minds that deals with his daughter’s autism, pointed out that the vaccine activists and their neurodiversity opponents do share one thing, a deep suspicion of the motives of scientists: While the neurodiversity people are furious that scientists want to cure autism, anti-vaccine parents rage that they are studying the wrong things. “I’ve compared it to the standoff between intelligent design and evolutionary biology, that both use the language of science but with premises so different that dialogue is impossible,” Grinker said.

Some activists oppose autism research, fearing it will lead to eugenics. Their fear is legitimate: how would parents react if they could identify an autistic fetus?
The idea that vaccines cause autism got a boost in March, when the Centers for Disease Control settled with the parents of 9-year-old Hannah Poling on the grounds that her autismlike symptoms were caused by vaccines that aggravated an underlying mitochondrial disorder.

This was widely misinterpreted to mean that the vaccine side had won, a false conclusion that drives neurodiversity activists crazy. “I protest the wholesale characterization of people on the autism spectrum as toxic. It’s scientifically incorrect and symbolically offensive,” Seidel says.

The most important research from the other side is being done by Michael Wigler at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, who considers autism “entirely genetic,” although he emphasizes that these genetics are hugely complex, involving as many as 200 genes, and that how they translate into behaviors is not yet understood. Even research like Wigler’s is sometimes opposed by those touting neurodiversity, who fear that it will lead to eugenics.

This fear is legitimate: Ninety percent of pregnancies that test positive for Down syndrome are terminated. How would parents react if they could identify an autistic fetus? “There are serious problems with taxpayer and well-meaning charitable funds going toward that kind of research,” Ne’eman says. “We need an awareness that not every dollar given toward autism causes is helpful to autistic people.”

I was uncomfortable with this anti-scientific position but was nonetheless moved by the activists’ glorious vision of a world that would err on the side of acceptance rather than pathologize difference. When I spoke to parents of children with extreme autism, however, the neurodiversity perspective could feel entirely beside the point.

Jennifer Franklin Nash was living happily in New York when her 2-year-old daughter, Anna Livia, was diagnosed. She decided the best treatment would be a rigorous ABA (applied behavior analysis) program that could deal with Anna Livia’s violent tantrums. Since there were no such programs in New York, she applied out of the city.
When Anna Livia was accepted at a school in New Jersey, Nash and her daughter moved there; Jenny’s husband, a surgical resident at Sloan-Kettering, could not leave. Jenny now lives in a community where she knows no one. ABA has to be practiced not only one-on-one throughout a long school day but also all the time at home, and so every day, Jenny waits for Anna Livia to come home at 4 P.M. and then works with her nonstop until 9 p.m., reinforcing appropriate speech and actions, tallying rewards for everything done right and demerits for everything done wrong.

When Anna Livia goes to bed, Jenny soothes herself watching movies. She wakes at 7 a.m. to make breakfast for her daughter and does more ABA until the school bus comes. Exhausted, she climbs back into bed so that she will be bright enough to cope when 4 p.m. rolls around.

A Brown graduate with an M.F.A. from Columbia, a gifted poet published in The Paris Review, she has the accusations of the neurodiversity people ringing in her ears. ABA has, however, had significant positive effects. Anna Livia no longer engages in self-injurious behavior and has few tantrums. Her vocabulary, though tiny for her age, has increased.

“I’d like nothing more than for her to develop the kind of consciousness that would allow her to join the neurodiversity movement,” Nash said. “If she decides to communicate without speech, that will be her choice, and I would love for her to be capable of such choices. It’s my fantasy that someday my daughter will go to her therapist to say what a terrible mother I was forcing her to do all this ABA. When that happens, I’ll know I succeeded.”

Parents like Nash are willing to try anything that will work—and potential therapies abound, from dietary treatments to remedial vaccine therapies, most prominently chelation, a process for removing metals from the body that is risky and unproved. Even the most enthusiastic advocates for pharmacological treatments (including a Lupron protocol that is basically chemical castration) admit that they are highly experimental. The neurodiversity community sees them as hazardous medical experiments on disabled children.

Many neurodiversity people also take exception to ABA. Camille Clark, who blogs as the Autism Diva, told me that she objected to the treatment’s goal, to render the autistic child “indistinguishable from his peers.” ABA, she says, “may make a very neurotic simulacrum of a normal kid who can pull off a normal act in some narrow situations, but there is no way to train a kid to be ‘normal’ inside using dog/dolphin/pigeon training methods.”

Clark argues that her opponents misrepresent this perspective as an insistence that autistic children be left to “rot.” (Schafer, for one, has called them “pro-fester.”) But Clark protests that to lobby against harmful therapies is the opposite of advocating the abandonment of vulnerable children. “A loving parent wouldn’t expect a kid with no hands to practically kill himself trying to master the piano, and parents of autistic kids shouldn’t expect that their kid is ever going to be ‘normal.’ Period.”

In many ways, the question is whether it’s the autistic people or their parents who are unhappy and need fixing. Often enough, the neurodiversity activists argue correctly, the parents of autistic children conflate their unhappiness with their children’s.

Parents are in a tough place figuring out how to respond. What should be treated, and what left alone? Much of the debate hinges on divergent ideas of love. The vaccine people believe families who don’t accept their hypothesis are neglecting their children; the neurodiverse people believe parents who describe their autistic children as diseased are insulting them.

Thomas Insel, director of the NIMH, told me, “I’m at a point where I think that the parents probably know more than the scientists about autism, and I’ve heard families say, ‘I wouldn’t trade my child’s autism for anything; it’s been the best experience of my life.’ I admire that, but even so, if you could get rid of autism, I would say, go for it. There are plenty of other challenges in life that will make people miserable; let’s at least have people face them without having to wear diapers.”

I was interested by how much everyone talked to me about the cure. There are thousands of Web pages devoted to advocating for a cure, arguing against a cure, discussing when and how a cure should be administered. The fact that all of this is mired in the hypothetical does not dissuade either side.


Alex Plank, who founded the Wrong Planet Website, which has over 19,000 members, says, “Since no cure exists, I don’t have to be opposed or for it. The thing now is to deal with the autistic people who are already on this planet. The organizations with the best connections were founded by parents of people with autism, who aren’t going to have the same priorities as autistic people, especially if those parents’ idea of success is to make their kid the same as themselves.”

Seidel concurs. “I am not opposed to seeking a treatment that might be useful to people in the future who want it, but I am concerned about how to make life positive for the people on the autistic spectrum who are here now, a group that happens to include my own child.”

But of course some autistic people do want to be cured, now. Jonathan Mitchell, an autistic who blogs against neurodiversity, says, “Most persons with an autism-spectrum disorder have never expressed their opinions on someone’s blog and never will. The neurodiverse often reach a vulnerable audience, as many persons on the spectrum have low self-esteem. Neurodiversity provides a tempting escape valve.”

Cattle-handling-equipment designer Temple Grandin, author of the autism classic Thinking in Pictures, has long been the public voice of autism. Neurodiversity has dawned since she began grappling with autistic pride, and though she has enabled it, she is too late to be its beneficiary.

Grandin argues that both the autistic person and society have to make accommodations. “I won’t do all the neurotypicals want, but you have to go halfway,” she says. “We had manners pounded into us. We had fancy dinners at my grandmother’s, and I was expected to sit at Granny’s table for twenty minutes and I couldn’t monopolize the conversation.

You can’t degeekify the geeks, but you can be a polite geek. Autism is a continuum from genius to extremely handicapped. If you got rid of all the autism genetics, you’d get rid of scientists, musicians, mathematicians. Some guy with high-functioning Asperger’s developed the first stone spear; it wasn’t developed by the social ones yakking around the campfire. The problem is, you talk to parents with a low-functioning kid, who’ve got a teenager who still goes to the bathroom in his pants and who’s biting himself all the time.

This guy destroys the house, and he’s not typing, no matter what keyboards you make available. His life is miserable. It would be nice if you could prevent the most severe forms of nonverbal autism.”

Grandin’s desire to find a middle ground resonated with me. If there is one thing that everyone in the autism world seems to recognize, it is the pervasive confusion about what qualifies as “sick,” and what qualifies as “odd.” Some of the geeks, in Grandin’s parlance, are autistic; some are just geeky.

Some people with no language make social connections; others are highly verbal but unable to understand social rules; others are paralyzed by anxiety, or have hyperacute sensory responses that cause them to withdraw. Some kids have full use of language, and others have echolalia (meaningless repetition of overheard phrases), and yet others have language for basic communication but no more; Alison Singer, an executive vice-president of Autism Speaks, told me that her daughter had language at last—“which means that she says, ‘I want juice,’ not that she says, ‘I feel that you’re not understanding how my mind works.’”

“Some guy with high-functioning Asperger’s developed the first stone spear; it wasn’t developed by those social ones yakking around the campfire.”
It’s also possible that what have been understood as emotional deficits are in fact something slightly different: communication deficits or sensory overload. “The perception of people like us as lacking emotion is wholly inaccurate,” Ne’eman says. “It’s the failure of society to understand the communication styles of autistics.”

For many Asperger’s-syndrome and autistic people, Autism Diva Clark points out, “just being in the presence of others is as much work as it is for a normally social person to host a big party.” She told me that parents needed to learn not to take it personally if their child didn’t show affection in typical ways: While deaf children may never say ‘I love you,’ she argued, that doesn’t mean they don’t feel love.

Seidel agreed with this, in terms of her own relationship with her kid, who Seidel said did indeed have an affectionate side, and when it began to blossom, her child would make tea for her—that was a form of love. “Why should I force eye contact or hugs on someone for whom that’s just noise?” she asks.

The irony, of course, is that empathy—the very quality at issue in defining autism—can be hard to come by among these warring factions. There is intolerance of neurodiversity activists, but there is also intolerance from them, and doing these interviews sometimes felt to me like watching Wimbledon; it made my neck hurt.

In the film Autism Every Day, Alison Singer describes going to New York to look at schools for autistic children, being overwhelmed by the hopeless dreariness of the classrooms, and fantasizing, as she drove back over the George Washington Bridge, about driving off it with her daughter.

The neurodiversity people have had a picnic with this; Ne’eman drew a connection between these comments and the killing of autistic children, saying that Autism Speaks was “morally complicit in these murders.” It’s disrespectful toward Singer and Jenny Nash and other mothers like them to suggest that their struggles are anything less than passionately loving.

Autistic children seem frequently, by virtue of the extra care they require, to inspire a desperate, enormous welter of adoration, fantastically powerful even when it is striated with frustration and sorrow. The love predicated on hope is as profound as that predicated on acceptance. The balance is infinitely difficult. “When your child is 12 years old and not toilet-trained, or is head-banging at age 15, how much of your acceptance is wise and how much is preventing recovery?” NIMH director Insel asks.

The complicating factor here is that personality and illness are not so easy to disentangle, making absolute measures of disability almost impossible. Hyman, the former head of NIMH, says, “Some people with Asperger’s can’t figure out why they’re having so much trouble. Others wonder why anyone considers it a clinical condition.”

Some autistic people are shattered by their social deficits, while others are largely uninterested in friendship. Those who are told throughout their lives that they are bizarre and aberrant are less likely to feel good about who they are than those who receive supportive messages. It is not possible to separate the person and the autism and to say that certain things are the “real” person while others are the “disease,” but it is possible to see that there are buoyant and depressed autistic people—the full personality range of the neurotypical population.

Regardless of personality, regardless of social handicaps, some autistics have abilities that elude their non-autistic counterparts—spatial thinking, for example—which challenge the disability model, as with Ne’eman’s conundrum of being both gifted and disabled. “My kid has an ability to focus intently,” Seidel said.

“Things can be difficult if the teacher wants you to shift every fifteen minutes. But that’s not stupidity. A Cray supercomputer is used for intense computing that involves the manipulation of massive data. One of the most powerful computers made, it runs so hot it has to be kept in a liquid cooling bath. Is the Cray defective because it requires this kind of nurturing environment for its functioning? No! It kicks ass! That’s what my kid is like. Needs support, needs attention, and is amazing.”
Is this wanting to eat and have your cake? It strikes me that in post-ADA America, it is taboo to say that having disabilities is frequently unpleasant not because of a tyrannical social structure that constructs disability as a negative but because the broad spectrum of normative abilities are in fact useful, while their absence is, for want of a better word, disabling.

As Koplewicz, the head of the organization that put out the anti-autism ads, puts it, “If you’re short, you stand on your toes; if you’re a little person, you qualify for accommodation. They can’t have it both ways.” The question is how to afford people the maximum dignity and also give them the maximum ability to function in this majority-defined world.

Can neurodiversity bring about change efficiently enough to supersede the tyranny of typical neurology? Kathleen Seidel says, “The word incurable is quite devastating-sounding, but you can also look at it as being that autism is durable. Looking at this jewel through different facets, I do not trivialize the challenges of people who face tremendous obstacles; I’m trying to look at the whole picture, including the beautiful part of it. Autism is as much a part of our humanity as the capacity to dream. This is one of the possibilities in our world. It’s a part of the human condition—or conditions, as the case may be.”

I came to this assignment with my own smattering of neurodiversities. I was severely dyslexic as a child and suffered acute depression as an adult. My mother devoted a great chunk of her life to eviscerating the dyslexia, but I am almost incapable of writing by hand and wonder whether I could have been a writer in a time before keyboards. I take seven medications to keep my depression at bay; I have been an outspoken critic of people who glamorize the condition.

And yet, while I would never have chosen to have dyslexia and would love to be rid of it, I cannot help wondering whether my passion for written expression came in part from the unending praise heaped on me every time I sounded out a word. In my book The Noonday Demon, I wrote about how grappling with depression had given me strength and depth of character and said that while major depression is a horrifying illness that should be erased from human experience, the mood spectrum that includes extreme sadness is essential to our capacity for love. I would not be myself without those diversities.

I started off highly skeptical of the neurodiversity movement, but it turns out that autism is to cognition as depression is to mood and that the same layers of nuance apply to it. Severe autism is a ghastly affliction that should be cured; milder autism may be part of a precious spectrum we wouldn’t want to compromise.

As with depression, there can be a tyranny of people focused on a cure who are insensitive to the meaning some people find in their struggles, and there can, likewise, be insensitivity on the part of meaning-finders to the acute suffering experienced by others. The one crucial difference is that depression is now largely treatable (though some illness is intractable) and autism is largely untreatable (despite the partial success of behavioral programs).

It is unproductive to rail against the incurable; if you can learn to love it, that’s your best chance of happiness. For some people, the love is self-evident; for others, it is acquired through struggle; others cannot do more than pretend to it. Though neurodiversity activists can get in the way of science and sometimes wrap themselves up in self-important, specious arguments, they also light the way to such love—a model of social acceptance and self-acceptance that has the capacity to redeem whole lives.

This is what Autism is...

The problem is that the answer and solution that solves the AUTISM puzzle is not 2-dimentional but 3-D, it is a sphere and not a flat circle. If you are able to understand that extra dimension then I will be able to explain the whole puzzle to you.

Because it is a circle, there is also no beginning and no end, something like the "who came first the chicken or the egg". as language is 2 dimensional so I will have to 'limit' my reply to fit into that need.... while my normal mode of thinking in pictures is 3-D... yes, the pictures we auties think with are 3-D NOT 2-D as most NT scientists think, they are not flat pictures, they are images like we see in dreams they are 3-D... here is thus a new misconception about the autistic brain...

Let's say that the chicken came first.

Lets look at the female body and chemistry. We have two hormones the male and female hormones. For the female body NORMAL is a high level of estrogens and a low level of testosterone. NORMAL meaning a balanced state, a safe and survival enhancing state of being.

ABNORMAL is when the testosterone level raises. Adrenaline (and its by-product testosterone) is produced by fear, stress, anger, etc and creates an UNBALLANCED and thus also ABNORMAL state in the female body. the body knows (as well as the brain) that changes are necessary to preserve the state of being, and to survive. This state is 'toxic' to the body as it is to the brain, because it disturbes the perfectly balanced ecosysyem of the brain's chemistry!

The more the female body encounters situations of stress the more toxic traumas her body encounters. As I mentioned, her body keeps score of these toxic traumas inside the core of each cell - the mitochondria, by keeping an accurate account of each encounter and also of the level of adrenaline and testosterone it has produced, which allowed the organism to survive- the body then by knowing what amount of adrealine it needed to ensure survival, it can provide a better chance for its offsprings in the race that is called the survival of the fittest.

Why is this necessary?

For the needs of evolution and survival of the species. Because the next generation this female will produce will be 'fitter' to survive the stressful environment that the mother experiences, by having the ability to create, handle and produce even more adrenaline than the previous generation(s).

This means that the score of highest adrenaline level of the mother will be inherited in her embryo and it will 'help' her embryo to be the fitter if not the fittest that will survive by being the strongest due to the increased amounts of adrenaline that this embryo's body will be able to handle, produce, work with.

A old saying mentions that "at time of war, women give birth to warriors"...

Lets think about this: time of war is a stressfull time for the body of the mother. To be able to birth warriors, her body must tell the embryo that there is war going on outside. The female body communicates this environmental information through the hormones and the mitochondria that the female body 'gives' the embryo as it grows inside her.

Due to today's society, women face constant stress, stress that the male body can handle better as it is more comfortable with high levels of adrenaline and the testosterone it produces.... yet, we see that even men who encounter stress often get more heart attacks, have high blood pressure, etc.

This is a clear indication that stress, and thus its hormones adrenaline and testosterone, are TOXIC for the human body because they are meant to function as an alarm system to warn us when something is threatening us and protect us, but when abused, instead of protecting these same hormones begin to harm and even destroy the body!!!

Because adrenaline and testosterone are so closely connected to fear, which is the primary instinct of survival, when the fetus encounters the toxic effects of high, repeated and prolongued and 'attacks' of adrenaline and testosterone through its connection to the femal body, the fetus becomes like a junkie becoming used to the high levels, addicted to the high levels of adrenaline.

Thsese high levels have the following effect: They change the chemistry of the brain and body of the fetus. The fetus becomes a warrior. The fetus brain and body are created to feel constant 'fear' so as to learn from it, and better enhance his/her warrior skills (since fear is the basis of fast learning).

Unfortunately the effect has 2 sides.

The warrior is one side of the coin and the coward is the other. The autistics are either extreme warriors or extreme cowards (or what Baron-Cohen calls the extreme male brain = warrior, and the extreme female = paranoid and shut inside itself unable/unwilling to encounter the threatening world), or the effect is that of swinging endlessly between the two extremes and becoming fearless and then in an instant becoming coward by shutting off all reality and behave autistically excluding the world around it a world that is see as a war field that fills the person with constant fear...

But the fear is NOT real! The high adrenaline level gives the brain the illusion of fear because it can work as follows:

fear ==> adrenaline ==> sensation of fear,

but it can also work as follows:

Adrenaline ==> sensation of fear (without a real source of fear!!!)

That is why autistics live in contstant fear because we were 'told' during our development period (pregnancy) through the hormones/chemistry of body of the mother that the environment we will be born in, is in a state of war (stressful, harmful, fearful, etc).

For the brain to meet the survival challenge of being born in a world of war it needs to also adapt and change. The autistic brain is fundamentaly different from the non-autistic brain we know that, but you do not know how different, while I know exactly how different.

For a warrior to survive, he/she needs to do 2 things at THE SAME TIME fight one enemy, while also protecting his/her back from another. That is why the autistic brain is like a dual hard drive. Each hemisphere works BOTH with the other AND indipendently from the other!

We can do 2 things at the same time because we think in STEREO and not MONO.

The non-autistic brain works as ONE constatntly communicating between the 2 parts becaue each part can't work independently unless it is at a constant conversation with the other.

The autistic brain can work as 2 independent bains that only communicate to decide and agree which half will do what and then they work seperately and independently from the other this ability gives autistics the ability to think in STEREO AS EACH HALF WORKS AS ONE, AND ALSO WITH THE OTHER:

LEFT brain + RIGHT brain + BOTH brains together = 3 DIMENSIONS.
That is why the autistic brain needs less connections between the 2 hemispheres, it simply needs less communication between the 2 hemispheres. It saves energy by doing that!

That is also why the NT brain will NEVER understand what autism is.

The NT brain thinks in 2 dimensions, not 3-D. The only time the NT brain thinks in 3-D is when it is asleep in the REM state of sleep. If you look at the activity of the asleep NT brain and the activity of the awake autistic brain you will see what I mean.

Living in society that has a 2 dimentional perception of world, with a 3-D brain is what creates all the misconceptions about autism. The autistic brain is not disfunctional or disabled or abnormal, but simply stressed living in a world that limits our abilities and perceptions... almost the feeling of wearing a show that is too small!

That is also why autistics can think in pictures, since images are 3-D, while words are 2-D, and if you ever wondered how can God speak to each and every person no matter what language they speak, consider that God also communicates in pictures and speaks to us through these pictures or visions like the saints always mentioned...

By seeing an image everyone and anyone will know what it means no matter what language they speak.

Yes, the autistic brain is more in tune with the language of the God and the language of the universe than you might have ever imagined.

This is the key to autism. We are the children of fear, of stress and of evolution's need to create a being (a human being) that is fit to survive the levels of fear and stress that we were born from.

We are an enhanced model that is made to save mental energy by having a brain that works more efficiently once given the chance. I can show you dear scientists how to give the autistic brain a chance and you will get the nobel prise you so much want!

I know because as I said the autistic brain has enhanced tools to survive, one of them is the sixth sense, the telepathic ability that can be used to both hunt the enemy and also protect our backs.

The autistic kids who exhibit the so misunderstood autistic behavior are just warriors/cowards that are treated and brought up as mentaly retarded (for the autistic standards of brain ability).

Please believe me that what is happenning right now with the autistics all around the world is a crime, a crime against humanity, a crime against the human race itself, a crime against autistics who are seen as a 'stigma' a curse, an epidemic, a plague.

We are not a desease, we are not broken, we are just better, enhanced ... fear made us better so that the human race can survive. I am not arrogant. I am just trying to explain to you what is autism, or better HOW much misunderstood autism is...

Women's influence on Baby's Gender...

... Is (finally) being taken into consideration, even if it is based on something that seems as unimportant as the mother's nutritional habbits around the time of conception and during pregnancy.

I have to admitt that this research is a step in the right direction, but there is still a very long way to go until science realizes HOW truly influential is the woman's contribution to the baby's gender. Something that, until now, was awarded to the male and father who -as science thought- determined the baby's gender through his sperm.

If an X sperm would fertilize the woman's egg then it would be a girl, and if it's a Y sperm, it would be a boy.

Based on this 'rusted' scientific assumption, the male and father was the sole contributor to the baby's gender leaving the woman's role to mainly be that of the womb that would carry the baby to term.

Now, it seems that this is old-fashioned idea will be changing. Finally, science is discovering HOW important a woman's and mother's contribution to humankind actually is, and it begins by also influencing her baby's gender.

Through this new information, based on something as simple as what kind of nutrition did the mother consume around the time of conception, and during her pregnancy, it seems that the mother's body has a lot more to say about the child's gender than science ever thought possible.

It is a scientific fact that what food we eat and what diet we follow, influnces our body's chemistry and the chemical reactions (communication) that take place between different organs, including our brain that influnces our emotions, as they too are chemical reactions. Food can play thus a vital role in the body's chemistry, and now it is also shown through this latest research that food can also play a role in the conception process.

What if the chemistry of the woman's body influnces which sperm (the X or the Y) gets to fertilize the woman's egg? What if the outer layer of the egg for example, based on this chemistry, plays the role of a bouncer and either permits or fences off the wanted or unwanted 'gender' of the sperm?

What if the woman's body, based on the food it eats -which food represents environmental conditions and give the body an indication of the 'outside' circumstances and conditions where the baby will be born- can decide what gender is necessary to either strengthen these outside circumstances and conditions or change them? Think about it for a minute...

The environmental changes in the water, earth, sun-light, and air - representing the four basic elements of water, air, fire and earth, are present in the food we eat as they influnce the quality and the chemicals present in what we eat that then enter our body and affect the chemical reaction within our body and now these chemical reaction can affect and also influence the gender of the child that a woman concives while living in these environmental changes.

A full circle!

This knowledge will not only change the way society perceives the females and maybe realize that it should be a female oriented society instead of the male oriented society it is today, since all of the male superiority and machoism all around the world is based on the fact that the male is the one that gives the world its two genders. Because until now we had to thank the male for other males and females being born, because ONLY the male has the two variations of X and Y in their genetic material that the new organism needs. The male sperm, thought science until now, was the sole determinant of which way the mix would go: a male child or a female child.

Surprise, surprise!!!

The new evidence shows that it may very well be that the male gets to offer both X and Y in his sperm, but ... it is the WOMAN'S BODY that decides which one will be accepted and allowed to fertilize the egg! The woman's body, and the chemistry inside that body form the link between environmental changes and the new generations, and that link is placed through the food we eat, because the food is the part of the environment that enters our body and 'changes it' accordingly to match whatever is happening in the environment.

And we thought that as civilized creatures we had escaped Darwin's profecy of the survival of the fittest, where the environment decides who exactly the fittest will be. Wrong. All we did with our civilization was affect the environment, which is now kicking back and showing us that we are all connected more than we want to know.

All these years, by disregarding the true contribution of the woman, the female, in the course of the humankind, we created the stage for situations to happen that we are now paying for. If we had realized how the environment influnces the very gender of each generation, and if so maybe think of what more might it be influncing (could autism be one of them? Actually yes, it is... more on this later) we might have been more careful of what we do with our water, air, soil and sun-light!!!

But maybe it is not too late. Finally the truth is out. I have foretold many times throughout my blog the rise of the female, the rise of the YIN, and the slow eclipse of the YANG!

The time has come for mankind to realize that we are entering an era that I call the 'Eclipse of the Male' and the 'Dawn of the Female'. The world needs women to take over and help the world heal, by nurishing it - the female nature is the nurishing that we all need.

Ladies, it is time for humanity to see, know, and realize HOW important is a woman, and how much she deserves a place -that is not just in word equal to the male- but in full practice.

It is us WOMEN who hold mankind's future in our bodies, it is us who have been neglected and abused and ruled over by male dominance because they thought we were just a hollow body that the male could fertilize and thus procreate.

Now, our importance and contribution is slowly surfacing. This research is a small step, a small step that is just as huge for humanity as the small step mankind took on the Moon ... Yes, the Moon, the symbol of womanhood and the female. Coincidence? Maybe not. The future will show.

Keep your eyes and ears peeled! This is my prediction: The future belongs to the FEMALE!

Want to read and see more? Check:

Diet influences gender?
A woman's pre-pregnancy eating habits may impact the sex of her unborn child, a study finds. » Details

· 12 myths about pregnancy
· Search: Pregnancy food cravings

Asperger's and IT: Dark secret or open secret?

Asperger's Syndrome has been a part of IT for as long as there's been IT. So why aren't we doing better by the Aspies among us?

By Tracy Mayor
April 2, 2008 (Computerworld)

"Ryno" is a 50-something ex-sysadmin, by his own account "burned out and living on disability" in rural Australia.
He loved the tech parts of being a system administrator, and he was good at them. But the interpersonal interactions that went along with the position -- the hearty backslaps from random users, the impromptu meetings -- were literally unbearable for Ryno. "I can make your systems efficient and lower your downtime," he says. "I cannot make your users happy."

Bob, a database applications programmer who's been working in high tech for 26 years, has an aptitude for math and logic. And he has what he calls his "strange memory." If he can't recall the answer to a question, he can recall exactly, as if in a digital image, where he first saw the answer, down to the page and paragraph and sentence.
Bob has some behavior quirks as well: He can become nonverbal when he's frustrated, and he interprets things literally -- he doesn't read between the lines. "I am sure [my boss] finds it frustrating when I misinterpret his irony," he says, "but at least he knows it is not willful."

"Jeremy" excels at being able to see an engineering problem from the inside out, internalizing it almost from the point of view of the code itself. He's great at hammering out details one on one with other intensely focused people, often the CEOs of the companies he contracts for. To protect his anonymity, he doesn't want to mention his programming subspecialty, but suffice it to say he's a very well-known go-to guy in his industry.
What Jeremy is not good at is suffering fools in the workplace or dealing with the endless bureaucracy of the modern corporation. If someone is wrong -- if their idea just plain won't work -- he says so, simply states the fact. That frankness causes all manner of upset in the office, he's discovered.

These IT professionals are all autistic. Bob and Ryno have Asperger's Syndrome (AS), sometimes referred to as Asperger's Disorder; Jeremy has high-functioning autism (HFA).
Though the terms are debated and sometimes disputed in the medical community, both refer in a general way to people who display some characteristics of autism -- including unusual responses to the environment and deficits in social interaction -- but not the cognitive and communicative development impairments or language delays of classic autism.

----------------------------------------------
"The Big Interest is a great start to Aspie-spotting."
Ryno, former sysadmin with Asperger's
----------------------------------------------

People with Asperger's, widely known as "Aspies," aren't good at reading nonverbal cues, according to the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR). They can have difficulty forming friendships with peers, they form a strict adherence to routines and rituals, and they may exhibit repetitive and stereotyped motor movements like hand or finger flapping.
Dr. Tony Attwood, a world-renowned Asperger's clinician and author in Brisbane, Australia, defines Asperger's in a more human context: "The [Asperger's] person usually has a strong desire to seek knowledge, truth and perfection with a different set of priorities. ... The overriding priority may be to solve a problem rather than satisfy the social or emotional needs of others."

Problems over people? Hmm, sounds like a techie.

A paper on Asperger's from Yale University's Developmental Disabilities Clinic continues down the same path: "Idiosyncratic interests are common and may take the form of an unusual and/or highly circumscribed interest (e.g., in train schedules, snakes, the weather, deep-fry cookers or telegraph pole insulators)."
Or technology. When Ryno spoke with a receptionist to make an initial appointment for an evaluation with Attwood, she asked him, "What is your 'Big Interest'?

--------------------------------------------------
"Υes, it is a stereotype, and yes, there are a higher than average number of Aspies in high tech."
Bob, database applications programmer with Asperger's
--------------------------------------------------

"She inadvertently gave me a diagnostic question I have found invaluable," he recalls. "The Big Interest is a great start to Aspie-spotting."
Ryno's Big Interest is computers and communications. He's not the only one, not by a long shot.

The Asperger's-IT connection

Autism, though first identified and labeled in 1943, is still a poorly understood neurodevelopment disorder, and nearly every aspect of its causes, manifestations, research and cure is mired in controversy. Asperger's and HFA, being hard-to-define, often undiagnosed or underdiagnosed variants on the high end of the autism spectrum, are even less quantified or understood.

Diagnoses of autism, including Asperger's, have skyrocketed in the U.S. in recent years -- the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now estimates that 1 in 150 8-year-old children has some form of autism.
It's not clear if the increase is because of better detection, a change in the diagnosis to include a wider range of behaviors, a true increase in case numbers, or some combination of those or other factors.

It's even less clear how many adults have Asperger's. Because Aspies are usually of average or above-average intelligence, they're often able to mask or accommodate their differences socially and in the workplace, meaning many of them make it well into middle age, or live their whole lives, without being formally diagnosed.

A spokesman for the National Institute of Mental Health says that the agency is not aware of any government organization or academic research that tracks the incidence of AS in adults.

Where statistics come up short, anecdote is happy to take up the slack. Ask an Asperger's-aware techie if there is indeed a connection between AS and IT, and you're likely to get "affirmative, Captain." (Yes, Star Trek's Mr. Spock is often diagnosed online as having Asperger's; see "Playing the Asperger's guessing game.")
When the question is put to Ryno, he e-mails back a visual:

Aspies --> tech as fish --> water

Bob, the database applications programmer, says, "Yes, it is a stereotype, and yes, there are a higher than average number of Aspies in high tech."

Nobody, it seems, has more to say on the subject than Temple Grandin, a fast-talking Ph.D. Aspie professor who's the closest thing Asperger's has to an elder stateswoman. Grandin made her mark designing livestock-handling facilities from the point of view of the animal; she now has a thriving second career as an Asperger's author (Thinking in Pictures, Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships) and speaker.

"Is there a connection between Asperger's and IT? We wouldn't even have any computers if we didn't have Asperger's," she declares. "All these labels -- 'geek' and 'nerd' and 'mild Asperger's' -- are all getting at the same thing. ... The Asperger's brain is interested in things rather than people, and people who are interested in things have given us the computer you're working on right now."

Career opportunities, career limitations

Grandin has compiled a list of jobs and their suitability to Aspies and autistics according to their skills.according to their skills. No surprise, tech jobs are cited early and often. Her list of "good jobs for visual thinkers," for example, includes computer programming, drafting (including computer-aided drafting), computer troubleshooting and repair, Web page design, video game design and computer animation.
Grandin's "good jobs for nonvisual thinkers," which she further defines as "those who are good at math, music or facts," includes computer programming, engineering, inventory control and physics.

Why do Asperger's individuals gravitate to technology? "Adults with Asperger's have a social naiveté that prevents them from understanding how people relate. What draws them in is not parties and social interaction, but work that allows them to feel safe, to feel in control," explains Steve Becker, a developmental disabilities therapist at Becker & Associates, a private practice in the Seattle suburb of Des Moines, Wash., that conducts ongoing small group sessions for adults with AS, among other services.

--------------------------------------------------
We wouldn't even have any computers if we didn't have Asperger's."
Temple Grandin, Asperger's author
--------------------------------------------------

"What's better for that than a video game or a software program?" Becker asks. "When you're designing a software program, there are rules and protocols to be followed. In life, there is no manual."
While careful to protect his clients' confidentiality, Becker confirms that he sees many adults and children of adults who work for the region's tech powerhouses -- Microsoft Corp. and The Boeing Co. -- and the hundreds of smaller companies that orbit around them.

Some of the Aspies he counsels are at the very top of their tech game: software and aerospace engineers, computer scientists, Ph.Ds. But for every research fellow with Asperger's, he says, there are a legion of fellow Aspies having a much tougher time in the middle or low ranks of the industry.

"The spectrum of success is much broader than one would expect," agrees Roger Meyer, the Portland, Ore.-based author of The Asperger Syndrome Employment Workbook who runs one of the oldest peer-led adult Asperger's groups in the country. "Adults who have grown sophisticated at masking and adaptive behaviors can either bubble along at the bottom of the market or do very well at the top."
It's that "bubbling along at the bottom" that has Becker, Meyer and other Aspie specialists concerned. Employees with Asperger's might do well for years in data entry or working in a job like insurance claims, where knowledge of ephemera is a prized work skill, only to flounder when they're promoted to a position that requires a higher degree of social interaction.

"The more technical the job, the better they do. But for some, managing people in a supervisory capacity can be a problem," Becker says.
That can leave Asperger's employees stuck on the lower and less remunerative ranks of IT, sometimes in jobs that are vulnerable to outsourcing, says Meyer. For example, certain tech support situations, where sensory distractions are minimal and human interactions are reduced to a screen or a voice on the phone, are a natural fit for some Aspies.

"They're good at diagnostic work. They can get in and slosh around in the computer, use their encyclopedic knowledge of applications and work-arounds, and arrive at a solution that may be unorthodox but effective," says Meyer. As those jobs increasingly become automated and/or outsourced, Aspies' chances for employment are diminished as well.

IT's dark little secret

Becker and Meyer say they have yet to hear of a single corporation that has any kind of formal program in place to nurture and support employees with Asperger's and HFA, aside from covering the costs of therapy through standard health care plans.
Which begs the question: If Aspies are everywhere among us, why isn't the IT industry doing more to support them or even to simply acknowledge their existence?

High-tech companies, after all, have been at the forefront of supporting workers with nearly every type of social, ethnic, physical or developmental identification. Microsoft, to take just one example, sponsors at least 20 affinity groups -- for African Americans, dads, deaf and hard of hearing, visually impaired, Singaporeans, single parents, and gay/lesbian/bisexual and transgendered employees, to name a few. Just nothing for autistics.

A Microsoft spokeswoman confirmed that the company has no group or formal, separate support for Asperger's. On rare occasions, an employee with AS has requested accommodation, she says. When that happens, the employee is paired with a disability case manager to determine "reasonable accommodation" on a case-by-case basis.

Intel Corp. and Yahoo Inc. didn't respond to requests to discuss their policy toward Asperger's employees, and a Google Inc. spokesman says the company was "unable to accommodate the inquiry."
To be fair, the question of whether and how corporations should support Aspies is a thorny one to untangle.

----------------------------------------------------
If you meet someone from another country, people know they're from a different country and they cut them some slack."
Jeremy, programmer with high-functioning autism
-----------------------------------------------------

For one thing, unlike a disability that confines an employee to a wheelchair or the language barrier that a foreigner faces, autism is something others can't see or easily understand.
"A readily visible disability is easier [for co-workers] to cognitively take on board, it seems," Ryno laments. "Ah, if only Asperger's made one turn green!"
"If you meet someone from another country," Jeremy elaborates, "people know they're from a different country and they cut them some slack."

And by their very nature, Aspies are not uniters. Microsoft's clubs and support groups are all initiated and chartered by employees. That leaves Aspies out by default: It would be highly unusual for an employee with Asperger's to voluntarily organize any type of social group, with or without other autistics.
Finally, many Aspies aren't "out" in the workplace; they haven't acknowledged their condition publicly or to more than one or two individuals.
Whether they should is a matter of contention. Ryno revealed his Asperger's at only one job (his last) and lived to regret it, even though his boss happened to be a young Aspie as well.

"It's the first time I've had an AS person as a superior," he says. "It was definitely a refreshing change not to have to explain why I didn't do eye contact, hated meetings and could not suffer fools, let alone feign gladness."
In retrospect, however, Ryno regrets having told anyone he has AS. "I'd say there were many disadvantages and few gains. The gains were short-lived, too." Specifically, systems that Ryno and his boss had designed both to help users and to minimize interruptions to their own workdays were resented and little used.

Now that Ryno is gone -- he quit after being ordered by an executive to restore Internet access for an employee caught downloading pornography against company policy -- "the other AS employee is being forced into meetings, crowded social gatherings and many of the situations we had previously been allowed to keep to a minimum," he reports.

Jeremy has found that when he asks co-workers and bosses to accommodate his differences, it doesn't help, and in fact always seems to lead to the same end: termination.
"I don't blink. I stare. I don't understand boundary issues very well. I don't have a feeling of group membership, but other people have a very firm idea of membership in groups," he says, struggling to define the problem as precisely as possible.

As a result, where other employees are able to correct their mistakes and adjust their behaviors day to day in the office environment, Jeremy isn't. "People won't give me negative feedback. I don't know what I'm missing until it's already become a problem. I pick up on a lot of stuff, but I miss some cues. They're like little black holes, and the little black holes accumulate, and I end up being forced out. It keeps happening."
It isn't a question of work -- he is sought out for his programming specialty and always busy as a contractor -- but of social relationships. "I get the feeling what they'd like to do is put me in a black box, give me an assignment and get it out the other end in few weeks."

Building a better workplace?

The subtle social engineering that Jeremy and other HFA and Aspie employees struggle with may be beyond the ken of even the most proactive human resource organizations. But that doesn't mean the industry's heavy-hitters can't and shouldn't proactively fashion a more Asperger's-friendly workplace, a kind of "if you build it they will come -- and work" scenario.

These changes needn't be monumental, or limited to Aspies only, specialists say. Bob, the database applications programmer, was just one of several Aspies interviewed for this story who spoke admiringly of the work/life accommodations in place at Internet companies like Google.
"I would not demand it from anyone, but I do wish every employer were as accommodating as Google, supplying prepared meals and encouraging people to bring their dogs to work," he says.

Physical changes to the office environment can help as well, Grandin and others point out. Many Asperger's workers are debilitated by blinking or flickering lights; the mechanical noise of an air conditioner, photocopier or ringing telephones; or simple office chatter. A quiet corner, an office or cubicle with soundproofing or a white-noise machine may be all it takes to turn the situation around.

And more than one person spoke highly of the rumors that Microsoft offers a "buddy system" for Aspies, pairing an Asperger's employee with a neurotypical -- that is, nonautistic -- colleague who coaches them through the whys and wherefores of meetings and other social interactions. A Microsoft spokeswoman says that there is no official information available on any buddy programs but that there is a good chance such initiatives are conducted on a team-by-team basis within the company.
Beyond that, Asperger's individuals hope only that they be given a chance to find a niche in the modern corporate landscape. Companies have evolved to accommodate everything from workers' physical height to their hearing ability, sexual orientation or ethno-religious status, Ryno points out.

In the same way, he says, "employers of Aspies should look at the person and the tasks, environment, and communication structure and adjust for the best viable fit."

----------------------------------------------------------
"I can make your systems efficient and lower your downtime. I cannot make your users happy."
Ryno
-----------------------------------------------------------

Seattle-area psychologist Becker has seen some early signs that forward-looking high-tech companies may be doing just that. "I have seen cases where [a client] will say, 'I have Asperger's,' and receive a positive response from social workers employed by the business or the insurance companies," he reports.

On the whole, Becker is willing to cut IT some slack -- for now at least. "Most corporations have never dealt with Asperger's. It's a fairly new diagnosis, even newer for adults," he points out. His general feeling is that high tech wants to support Aspies as valuable employees, it just doesn't yet know how.
But that too shall change. "In the next five to 10 years, we'll see more businesses treating autism spectrum disorders as routine," he predicts.