Program Particulars
*Times indicated refer to web version of audio

(01:02) Statistics on Autism
In 2002, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) conducted studies to determine the prevalence of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) within 14 states in the United States. They found that one in 150 children in theses states were somewhere on the spectrum of autism. This sample applied to the nation at large, according to The Washington Post, would equate to 560,000 children affected by ASD. Of the 14 states, Alabama had the lowest prevalence (3.3 incidents per 1,000 children) while New Jersey had the highest (10.6 per 1,000).

(01:56–03:00) Music Element
"The Multiples of One"
from Awakening,
performed by Joseph Curiale

(02:01) Origins of the Term "Autism"
The term "autism" comes from the Greek word for self, autos, a condition in which a person lives in his or her own world. In the mid-1940s, two Austrian physicians who had never met — Leo Kanner and Hans Aspberger — gave it the same name although they were conducting research in separate areas of the world. Aspberger's syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism, is named after the Austrian scientist. In 1943, Kanner first published his research in English in the landmark paper "Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact" (PDF) while working at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. In Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism, Roy Richard Grinker chronicles Kanner and Aspberger's early pioneering work and writes: "Kanner and Aspberger's got autism into the scientific literature, and they did so at a time when psychoanalysis was still the dominant mode of psychological thought."

(02:48) Peter the Wild Boy
Peter the Wild Boy was a child found living alone in a forest and studied by philosophers and scientists of the 18th century who reflected on what it meant to be human. In Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism, Paul Collins pursued the story of the probable autistic figure. Collins writes about a turning point he had with regard to his son's condition while reading a book by the anthropologist Werner Stark:

But long before going to the doctor, before the battery of tests on Morgan, before the diagnosis, before we ever imagined anything — I had been chasing a silent boy through the even greater silence of centuries, when my own boy was in front of me all along. How? How could I not have seen it? Something drew me to Peter, something so obvious now that Stark barely mentions it in passing in his book: An early case of autism.

(03:05) Quote from Paul Collins
Krista paraphrases a passage from Paul Collins book Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism:

Autists are described by others—and by themselves—as aliens among humans. But there's an irony to this, for precisely the opposite is true. They are us, and to understand them is to begin to understand what it means to be human. Think of it: a disability is usually defined in terms of what is missing. A child tugs at his or her parents and whispers, "Where's that man's arm?" But autism is an ability and a disability: it is as much about what is abundant as what is missing, an overexpression of the very traits that make our species unique. Other animals are social, but only humans are capable of abstract logic. The autistic outhuman the humans, and we can scarcely recognize the result.

(07:30) Research of Simon Baron-Cohen
Simon Baron-Cohen is director of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge in England. Baron-Cohen is known for his theory that autism involves levels of "mindblindness" — an inability to develop an awareness of what is in the mind of another person. This "theory of mind" is a specific cognitive ability to understand others by interpreting their minds in terms of theoretical concepts. In his book Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind, Baron-Cohen opens with a thought experiment:

Imagine what your world would be like if you were aware of physical things but were blind to the existence of mental things. I mean, of course, blind to things like thoughts, beliefs, knowledge, desires, and intentions, which for most of us self-evidently underlie behavior. Stretch your imagination to consider what sense you could make of human action (or, for that matter, any animate action whatsoever) if, as for a behaviorist, a mentalistic explanation was forever beyond your limits. This is a hard thought experiment. See if it helps to make it more concrete by considering how we understand even a simple human act:

"John walked into the bedroom, walked around, and walked out."

To make sense of this, we ask ourselves why John behaved in this way. A mindreader might answer this question by saying something like this:

"Maybe John was looking for something he wanted to find, and he thought it was in the bedroom."

Or the mindreader might think:

"Maybe John heard something in the bedroom, and wanted to know what had made the noise."

Or:

"Maybe John forgot where he was going: maybe he really intended to go downstairs."

A mindreader can generate a longish list of such "maybes" to explain John's behavior—and it is a safe bet that most of them will be based on John's mental states. (In the examples above, the mental-state words are printed in boldface to make it easy to pick them out.)

Now, you and I are mindreaders. I don't mean that we have any special telepathy; I just mean that we have the capacity to imagine or represent states of mind that we or others might hold. Mindreading is nothing mysterious; however, as I hope to show in this book, it is impressive.

notice that in the above examples our way of thinking about mental states is prefixed by "maybe." We are never 100 percent sure what we or others are thinking (since mental states are to some extent hidden from view), but we nevertheless find it easy to imagine what others may be thinking.

What sense does a person with mindblindness make of John's behavior in the example above? In trying to answer this, we must of course refrain from using any mental-state terms in the explanation. Here is an attempt:

"Maybe John just does this every day, at this time: he just walks into the bedroom, walks around, and walks out again."

Notice that this is not an explanation in terms of any causal motive or reason. Rather, it is simply a statement about possible temporal regularities. It is also very likely to be wrong. When our mindblind person discovers that John does not do this every day at this particular time, he or she will need to come up with another non-mentalistic attempt to explain John's action.

The problem is that there just aren't many simple, readily available, plausible, non-mentalistic explanations for John's behavior. (Try generating some yourself if you don't believe me.) To a person with mindblindness, even this very basic sequence of acts—waling into the bedroom, walking around, and then walking out again—is a real mystery. Now imagine what sense a mindblind person would make of an infinitely more complex situation.

(09:52) Speaking at Microsoft
Collins spoke at Microsoft while working on his first book, Banvard's Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn't Change the World — a book about failed inventors and artists.

Bill Gates is staring at me and smiling in a rather unnerving way. I shift uneasily in my chair.

WHERE DO YOU WANT TO GO TODAY?

I don't know.

I finally break away from the gaze of the clumsily taped-up poster on the lobby wall of Microsoft HQ. Somehow I'd expected a hologram of the guy to greet me by name, or at least an animatronic Bill in the style of the Country Bear Jamboree. But no, it's just a torn poster. Where do you want to go today? I drum my fingers against the plastic of the chair. Where did I go today, exactly? They asked me up here to do a meet-the-author thing with their employees, but what I really want to do is meet their autism researchers. Outside I can see men and women strolling through the Microsoft plaza, talking into cell phones, lugging gym bags, tapping at pocket assistants. Buzz buzz buzz. I wonder how many wireless signals are passing through my body right now. …

I give my author lecture in another meeting room down the hall. This time the lights are staying on. But from the moment I begin talking, I see guys in the audience looking down. And then I hear it:

click. click. click-click.

They are staring deeply into laptops, tapping away.

At the end of the lecture, I drain out from the meeting room along with the crowd, reminding myself to talk to one of the participants when we meet for dinner downtown. On the cab ride over, I watch the Redmond campus recede behind me and think about the man behind it all: Alan Turing. …

"Okay ..." I lean toward the employee as we're waiting for our food. "Here's what I can't figure out about Microsoft."

"This should be good."

"No, it's just a little thing. It was when I was talking to the audience. There were guys typing into laptops right from the beginning, when I was just saying hi. Before I even opened my mouth. I mean, what could they possibly be taking notes on?"

"They weren't taking notes," she says.

"What do you mean?"

"They were watching the company's internal webcast of your talk."

I puzzle over this as the plates arrive.

"They were sitting twenty feet away from me."

"Doesn't matter. That's how they prefer to watch people."

She sets her fork down.

"Listen, they're different. They actually have someone there full-time, and all she does is try to take these programmers on field trips. Those guys live at Microsoft. That's all they do. They go to the campus to work, they sleep in their apartment on the edge of campus, they wake up and go back into campus again. They won't do anything else. They don't know what else to do. So that's this woman's whole job. She books places just so that the programmers and math theorists get a night out."

"That would be interesting to see."

"Hmph. I think one time they booked the symphony, just for Microsoft, so the musicians were playing to all these programmers. Only these guys in the audience had all their phones and their gadgets with them, and they wouldn't stop using them during the performance ... and, well, they were sort of not asked back."

"Understandably."

"But see, the programmers didn't know. Seriously. They really didn't know that they weren't supposed to do that ..." She searches for the words. "It's ... it's as if they have to be taught how to act around actual human beings. Because they just don't know."

Really, how does anyone know? Imagine if you tried to pretend to understand people, but didn't really. So you rehearse it all in your head: taking notes, analyzing every social action, trying to connect it all together. And if you just hit upon the right formulas, the right set of actions, the right buzzwords, you would have it down—you could fit in.

Stephen Silberman posits, in his article for Wired magazine, "The Geek Syndrome" that Microsoft was the first major U.S. corporation to offer employees insurance benefits to cover the cost of behavior training for their autistic children:

It's a familiar joke in the industry that many of the hardcore programmers in IT strongholds like Intel, Adobe, and Silicon Graphics — coming to work early, leaving late, sucking down Big Gulps in their cubicles while they code for hours — are residing somewhere in Aspberger's domain. …

Though no one has tried to convince the Valley's best and brightest to sign up for batteries of tests, the culture of the area has subtly evolved to meet the social needs of adults in high-functioning regions of the spectrum. In the geek warrens of engineering and R&D, social graces are beside the point. You can be as off-the-wall as you want to be, but if your code is bulletproof, no one's going to point out that you've been wearing the same shirt for two weeks. Autistic people have a hard time multitasking — particularly when one of the channels is face-to-face communication. Replacing the hubbub of the traditional office with a screen and an email address inserts a controllable interface between a programmer and the chaos of everyday life. Flattened workplace hierarchies are more comfortable for those who find it hard to read social cues. A WYSIWYG world, where respect and rewards are based strictly on merit, is an Aspberger's dream. …

One provocative hypothesis that might account for the rise of spectrum disorders in technically adept communities like Silicon Valley, some geneticists speculate, is an increase in assortative mating. Superficially, assortative mating is the blond gentleman who prefers blondes; the hyperverbal intellectual who meets her soul mate in the therapist's waiting room. There are additional pressures and incentives for autistic people to find companionship — if they wish to do so — with someone who is also on the spectrum. Grandin writes, "Marriages work out best when two people with autism marry or when a person marries a handicapped or eccentric spouse.… They are attracted because their intellects work on a similar wavelength."

(12:43—14:09) Music Element
"Perpetual Motion"
from After Hours,
performed by James Campbell

(14:56) Echolalia
The National Institutes of Health reports that a majority of autistic individuals have little or no problem with pronunciation but have difficulty effectively using language, particularly with word and sentence meaning, intonation, and rhythm. Echolalia is the involuntary parrot-like repetition (echoing) of a word or phrase spoken by another person. There are two types of echolalia: immediate and delayed. Immediate echolalia occurs soon after the original words are heard. Instead of replying "yes" or "no" to a question such as "Do you want something to drink?" the individual with autism will repeat the question.

Delayed echolalia is repetition of words or phrases hours, days, or weeks after they are heard. When asked, "Do you want something to drink?" whenever he or she is asking for a drink. According to autism experts, echolalia occurs in approximately 85 percent of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders who eventually develop speech.

(17:58) Passage from Collins' Book
Krista paraphrases a scene from Collins' book, Not Even Wrong, in which he recounts a specialist named Mindy visiting their home to observe their son Morgan:

Morgan is lying on his bedroom rug, his body in a right angle with legs stuck straight up in the air, and he is staring at a sheet of stickers with pictures of musical instruments. We sit watching form his bed.

"Do you like music, Morgan?"

"Music."

He pulls a sticker off the sheet.

"Tuba," he adds dreamily.

"That's right!" Mindy gushes. "That's a tuba. Do you like the tuba? A tuba goes boom boom Boom."

Jennifer and I look at each other as Morgan darts out of the room and Mindy follows. Boom? I mouth wordlessly. Jennifer shrugs and rolls her eyes. It takes a few minutes until it dawns on me: oh, right. Mindy's testing him. When we emerge into the living room, Morgan is bouncing around impatiently, waiting for his computer to boot up.

"Isosceles triangle!" Morgan streaks past us. "Rhombus!"

He's been going through a geometric phase. He leaps effortlessly onto a couch, scrambles onto its arm, and jumps down onto the cushion, rebounds off onto the floor, and ricochets onto a rocking chair. This he stands on while expertly balancing himself and wobbling the chair under his feet.

"We've thought of covering the house in gym mats," I admit.

"Does he often do this, climbing onto furniture? Like that?"

"Um, well, not like ... I mean, not specifically. He'll climb anything. He just likes climbing and jumping."

"Whoa!" Morgan whoops. He hauls out the bench from under the piano and climbs it, too. The velvet upholstery has long been torn off by his gymnastics; it's now down to the original faded pink Edwardian fabric. Morgan vaults gracefully off the bench: whump.

"And so there's been no physical problems? No awkwardness? Clumsiness? Epilepsy?"

Oh no, no. He's been perfect."

He is perfect ... well, perfect to us. But we felt as though our inevitable parental pride had the outside world's stamp of approval; as a baby in San Francisco, he was cute enough to get scouted out of a crowd by a photographer working for the Gap. Would we come in for a Baby Gap test shoot? We felt simultaneously wary and not a little flattered. There was something unsettling about the idea of modeling our child, even if just for a pajama suit with bunnies all over it—but we needn't have worried. Jennifer took him to their studio, but the shoot just couldn't begin. Morgan would smile when he felt like it and not smile when he was asked to. He wanted to examine the photographer's gear; he couldn't care less about the photographer. He didn't say "cheese"; didn't watch the birdie; didn't notice the toys and rattles the assistants were shaking. The photographer and crew were stumped.

"Sorry," Jennifer had offered to the crew, while being politely shown the door. "He's not a people person."

(20:10) YouTube Videos of Logos
We were curious about the YouTube community that their son Morgan finds interesting. So we asked him for links to some of his favorite videos. Besides watching Sesame Street segments and Nora the Piano Playing Cat, Morgan especially likes logo history compilations of PBS, WGBH, and Paramount. We've compiled them on our site for you to watch.

(21:05—21:47) Music Element
"Tight Muscle Part at Love Beach"
from The League of Crafty Guitarists Live,
performed by Robert Fripp

(22:05) Audio Clip of Temple Grandin
Temple Grandin is a well-known author who's won won wide acclaim for her work to create humane slaughterhouses. Her struggles and coping procedures for her autism has been well-documented, particularly by the neurologist Oliver Sacks who drew the title of his 1995 book, An Anthropologist on Mars, from his profile of her. As part of NPR's This I Believe series, Grandin reflected on her approach to ethics and meaning in "Seeing in Beautiful Precise Pictures".

(23:15—26:57) Music Element
"River of Orchids"
from Apple Venus Volume 1,
performed by XTC

(27:38—29:27) Music Element
"Goldberg Variations, Aria (1955)"
from A State of Wonder,
performed by Glenn Gould

The Washington Post music critic Tim Page had conducted extensive interviews with late classical pianist Glenn Gould. In an interview with Weekend Edition with Scott Simon, Page said that he believed Gould probably had Aspberger's syndrome. Page discusses Gould's eccentric behavior and talks at length about the difference between his 1955 and 1981 versions of Bach's Goldberg Variations — both of which are used in our program.

In a recent New Yorker article titled "Parallel Play", Page writes about his own experiences growing up with Aspberger's syndrome, and not being diagnosed with the condition until much later in life.

"In the fall of 2000, in the course of what had become a protracted effort to identify—and, if possible, alleviate—my lifelong unease, I was told that I had Aspberger's syndrome. I had never heard of the condition, which had been recognized by the American Psychiatric Association only six years earlier. Nevertheless, the diagnosis was one of those rare clinical confirmations which are met mostly with relief. Here, finally, was an objective explanation for some of my strengths and weaknesses, the simultaneous capacity for unbroken work and all-encompassing recall, linked inextricably to a driven, uncomfortable personality. And I learned that there were others like me—people who yearned for steady routines, repeated patterns, and a few cherished subjects, the driftwood that keeps us afloat."

(29:52) Fascination with Thomas the Tank Engine
Collins says that there is a tremendous fascination with Thomas the Tank Engine among many autistic children. In 2001, the National Autistic Society in the United Kingdom surveyed parents of children with autism and Aspberger's syndrome to try to understand why they connect so strongly with the characters in these children's programs more than with others. The report confirmed what many parents have known anecdotally for years, that Thomas is comforting and reassuring. And, for some, Thomas the Tank Engine is a way for them to connect with others and serves as "an initial point of entry into realms as vital as speech, emotion and imagination."

(34:01) Conversations about Children as Little Philosophers
For an in-depth exploration of children and questions of spirituality and ethics, listen to Krista's conversation with Sandy Eisenberg Sasso in the SOF program "The Spirituality of Parenting."

(38:45—41:13) Music Element
"Zero Gravity"
from The Great Thaw,
performed by Neptune Quartet

(45:45) Quote about Newton
Isaac Newton was another person mentioned in Jennifer’s book, and she goes on to read a partial quote from Paul Collin’s book:

There is no way to know what an immense concentration and radically altered perspective will alight upon. To someone with great focus, the fascination is the point. It was blind, brilliant, dumb luck that we had an Isaac Newton who focused on something that other people found important. There are Newtons of refrigerator parts, Newtons of painted light bulbs, Newtons of train schedules, Newtons of bits of string. Isaac Newton happened to be the Newton of Newtonian physics, and you cannot have him without having the others, too.

(49:15—52:41) Music Element
"Goldberg Variations, Aria (1981)"
from A State Of Wonder,
performed by Glenn Gould