The Times: Sometimes I wish I was more autistic

I found this extremely interesting. I know a few adults and children with high functioning autism.

The scientist Dr Camilla Pang considers autism to be her superpower. What sets her apart from ‘neuro-typical’ people also helps her to explain their emotions

Dr Camilla Pang has written a book called Explaining Humans

Dr Camilla Pang tells an instructive story about how her brain works. One day, when she was a child, she answered the phone at home. The conversation went as follows: “Hi Millie, is your mum there?”

“Yes,” she replied, and hung up.

Her brain didn’t register the unspoken question “. . . and if so, can I speak to her?” Instead, she confirmed what she had been asked to confirm and concluded that the discussion was now over. Pang was eight when she was diagnosed as autistic. Now 27, she’s at the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum, and also has Asperger’s syndrome, generalised anxiety disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). She does not, however, consider any of the above to be either a deficit or a disorder. She thinks they’re a bonus.

“My autism is a superpower,” she says. “It’s relentless, it’s all consuming, a sensory overload. My mind is always curious, unapologetically looking for something all the time. Books on neurodiversity treat it as some kind of problem to be solved, but I love mine. I have no filter. It’s a force to be reckoned with, and I’m up for the challenge.”

Pang has spent her life observing how the people she refers to as “neurotypical” behave, and devising strategies to manage her own “neurodiverse” brain. She has a PhD in biochemistry from University College London and a job as a post-doctoral scientist of translational bioinformatics, not in spite of her neurodiversity, she argues, but because of it. (If you’re baffled by bioinformatics, she describes it as biochemistry on a computer, spotting the underlying patterns in masses of clinical data and analysing them.) Having felt like an outsider from the human race all her life, she realised that treating her need for connection as a scientific venture — gathering and analysing data about what other humans did and said, when and how — helped her to integrate.

The full online article can be found here.