Gilles Trehin is an autistic 28-year-old. Since the age of 12, he has been designing an imaginary city called Urville, named after the "Dumont d'Urville," a French scientific base in Antarctica. He has created detailed historical, geographical, cultural, and economic descriptions of the city, as well as an absolutely extraordinary set of drawings. His Guidebook to Urville will be published later this year.
(Via Chapel Perilous.)
I consider feats like this circumstantial evidence that certain forms of autism, far from crippling disorders, are anomalies to be embraced. It's arguable that the "problem" is less neurological than social.
4 comments:
I've long held the theory that autism is nature's attempt at creating Focused Intelligences (since by definition it can't create AI).
I foresee a future where there are two kinds of human: the Focused -people really good at doing one thing at a time and the Mayflies - really good at multi-tasking, incapable of sitting still).
Without going too far down the RD Laing route (he pretty much argued that it was society that was insane, and saw little wrong with homicidal sociopaths roaming the streets), I think lots of mental and/or emotional disorders are very much a question of diagnosis.
For example, lots of kids do badly at school. If their parents are rich, they might be diagnosed as dyslexic, and get specialised teaching. If they're not so rich, it's attention deficit disorder, and get drugs. And if they're poor, it's because they're dumb, and tough shit.
As a "saner" alternative to Laing but along similar lines, I highly recommend Thomas S. Szasz's book, The Myth of Mental Illness, which exposes exactly to what degree the pandemic diagnosis of "mental disorders" is a tool of social control.
Although I am not really convinced about Homo aspergensis being the future there is an interesting arguement for it and I am more convinced that something like this may have had evolutionary advantages when we were hunter gatherers:
http://www.wunderkabinett.co.uk/damndata/index.php?/archives/181-Homo-aspergensis.html"
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Along the lines of "do drugs/mental illness show us some external truth" Clifford Pickover has argued it for a range of medical and psychological disorders/syndromes:
http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/Pickover/pc/bonnet.html
http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/Pickover/pc/capgras.html
I am even less convinced of that line of reasoning but I am intrigued enough that I'll be tracking down his book.