posted September 06, 2008 02:37 PM         

One in every three hundred people is born an Aspergian Mutant (AM). You may be one them, and you may not even know it! There are an estimated 20 million AM’s worldwide – enough to match the entire population of New York State, the state of Texas, or twice the entire population of Greece – and yet it is possible that you have never heard of them!

At school they are often viewed as normal children, if a little awkward or introverted – but childhood and adolescence are such turbulent years anyway that many AM’s are missed completely. Young AM’s are inherently different to non-AM children, and they grow to be very different adults. From an early age they tend to be very focussed on a specific subject or succession of very narrowly defined subjects. Many of them start reading non-fiction titles at a young age, and mostly continue to prefer non-fiction informational reading throughout their lives. They have little or no time for long literary descriptions (“time wasting”, “not to the point”), or the human equivalent: small talk. If you wanted to capture their imagination with a good story, a play will do a much better job than a novel. They will very much appreciate their concentrated brevity.

AM children often develop some “special powers” too. These are varied and sometime take years to discover. They may be far reaching memory skills (e.g. the ability to remember entire catalogues after one reading), extraordinary 3d simulating skills (e.g. the ability to visualise a whole building’s infrastructural composition as a 3d computer program would do) mathematical abilities (e.g. the ability to perform highly complex computational wizardry in their mind), superior language skills and many others. Not all AM’s have them, but those who do will be aware that somehow they possess a “different” trait. Often they will hide it, so as not to be the “odd one out”.

When AM individuals combine their strong personal focus with their “special power”, they have an extraordinary potential to contribute to society and develop new and striking inventions and works of art or science. Further research is required in the field of history to find out how many central innovative figures in human history did indeed have Aspergian traits.

When a person is gifted with one good trait, there is usually a trade-off in another, and this is evident in AM’s lack of social-interaction buffers. These are the buffers which many of us call “social intuition”. When you talk to group of people, you don’t normally have to think about where your eye-contact should go. For an AM individual in a social situation, this is just one of many variables she will have to calculate if she’s to get it right. There are a set of rules that govern human gazes, and whilst most people know those almost by osmosis, an AM person will have to calibrate and calculate them on an ongoing basis. This will also apply to conversation, body language and any social interaction. Think of it as an alien living among humans, and having to think about every move and every single part of their body. With so many external stimuli to process, AM’s will quite naturally become exhausted after interactions in situations involving several or many people (e.g. gathering of a group of colleagues in a bar), and will either develop sophisticated coping mechanisms to deal with these situations, or try and avoid them as much as possible. The latter is more common.

These are not all the traits characterising an AM person, but they already provide the main basis of the AM profile: a person with a very strong sense of destiny and focus, possibly a bonus special mind-function to aid her and a limited ability to socialise. This sounds almost as if nature created a brand of humans designed specifically for a task. Now why would evolution create a variation like that?

This is a strong statement and I think perhaps we need to dwell and reflect on it a little. We treat society and socialization as a defining element of our being human. Our pre-modern ancestors hunted and gathered in groups and used language to communicate amongst them. They identified their affinity and loyalty to their group through ritual, dress and language. In fact, their communal identity was essential to their existence, even before speech at this high form evolved in humans. Furthermore, even our primate relatives, apes and chimps, live in tribe-like groups, as did our extinct relative, the Neanderthal, and they do not use language, or at least not the same form of complex generative grammar. Being part of a group has always defined human behaviour. To this day, our whole social fabric is based on groupings and affiliations.

In our modern-world, family and tribal groupings are still very much a reality (instead of tribal, you can also read “national” or “ethnic”), as are continued cases of ethnic conflicts, wars and xenophobia. However, for the first time since humans started ruling the land, the possibility of a person being brought up, and living his entire life, as an individual with hardly any tribal context is a reality. Of course there will always be affinities such as language, nationality and one’s favourite football team, but they are only groupings in a very loose sense, and you may not even be aware of them, let alone see them as a defining social context.

So this mutation, which keeps recurring, and is hereditary (many AM children are found to have AM parents) does it possibly have a role to play in the evolution of humankind?

Evolution and mutations are not, as science fiction films would have us believe, a sudden transition into a human who can fly and sees through walls with laser vision. It is a slow process, where strong traits remain and weak ones get relinquished. Nature also preserves a balance between energy and functionality, so there is also a “trade off effect”: we can only have so many traits in place (or on one gene, or using one enzyme etc). When an AM baby is born, it is given a gift that is special to it, and as a trade-off it lacks some of the traits that others have. When it grows up, most of its difficulties are not because it is inferior, but because it is not suited for the society it is born into. It would develop much more fully if the world around it was tailored for it specifically (I will touch on how this environment might look like later in this article).

Could it be that this gene is telling us: focus on development, and stop grouping so tightly that you might war yourselves out to extinction? Could it be that this is the mutation that was there for a while but was discovered in our time, now that we are ready?

Wars are caused by strong emotions of affiliation. They are sparked by bravado, nationalism, religion, hatred and xenophobia – all products of group allegiances. I won’t begin to suggest here how this barbarism can be changed by AM’s. I will only say, that the potential exists, and ask whether the next step in our evolution would be that of a loose or looser affiliation to groups.

Creativity and innovation – many teenagers who finish their secondary education define their future outlook as “lost”. They have some idea as to what to do, but not a very strong sense of destiny. A large percentage of people will end up in a profession almost by mistake, or to fulfil someone else’s expectations. An AM person would grow up quite differently. He will usually feel an almost endless need to “do things”, not to sit still, not to waste time… His focus will be his main drive and he will dedicate a great deal of time to it, thus having a much higher potential of personal achievement on his specialised subject. The only thing holding an AM child back would be her inability to integrate into the non-AM social structures. So what sort of social structures will she fit into?

The Aspergia.com initiative is trying to address these sort of questions, by speculating how an AM only society would look like. An AM child, for example could be educated in an AM society in the following way:

- During her formative years she would be exposed to an exponential range of subjects to allow her to fixate on the narrow subject that really interests her, and to prevent her from growing up without the chance to find the right focus (AM’s who cannot find a subject focus may become very frustrated).

- She will be helped to find any special skills she has and encouraged to develop those.

- She will be encouraged to combine her main interest subject with her special skill.

- She will be provided with a regular, predictable social context, to provide her social needs, without the strains of complying with non-AM conventions.

This last point may sound comical, but is actually at the heart of any AM society, if one were to attempt and set one up. An AM society would probably base itself on a set of pre-arranged social meetings, which would have very clear “rules of behaviour”, and will probably be set up in a structured way. This may sound strange and foreign to a non-AM, but not more foreign than a cocktail party would seem like to an AM person.

As you can see, this is a very challenging perspective. It also challenges AM’s to part with the establishment that defined, “diagnosed”, and used various labels to categorise them. The help they usually require relates to the society that they live in, and the way their lives developed as a result. Perhaps it is time we started valuing ourselves as something completely different.?Perhaps it is time we treated ourselves better?

Perhaps you would like to think about how an AM society would look like, what sort of institutions it will have, how would the educational system work etc. Perhaps you would like to contribute to the debate?

The website that hosts this article deliberately avoids the old definitions of Asperger's. They are acknowledged as part of a natural process of seeking classifications and explanations, but if we are to move the debate forward and create something new, we must create a new language. A new terminology that moves away from the dictionary of the health care profession.

posted September 06, 2008 03:07 PM         

If they gathered us all in one place, all 20 million of us, our number would be similar to that of the entire population of Australia. We could have been a continent of our own!

Now suppose you then take 66 thousand people who do not "have" Asperger's and disperse them evenly among this theoretical continent, shake well, and observe: what would the symptomology be for those 66 thousand "others"?

Their two main defining symptoms would be:

1. Lack of a strong focus or drive in their lives. Their interests tend to get dispersed, and are often counter-productive.

2. Desperate need for social coherence and grouping, and an inability to define themselves without this. Inability to spend time alone (The systems that our culture would have created would cater for our social needs in a way that is balanced with our advancement, and caters to our individualistic needs, but these would be insufficient for these "special needs" people).

As a group, they would also be more prone to fight and start wars. Wars rely on a certain social affinity that we do not have. We would not feel the same sense of belonging, at least not in a way that is beyond a theoretical concept.

The full list of symptoms would be much longer and a large number of those would relate to the difficulty of those "different individuals" in integrating into our social structures and our individual-based social environment.

Obviously this sounds strange, and you may even question the symptoms or the logic behind them, but this is precisely the point: it is impossible to assess how we would be like in an environment where 'the way we are' would be the norm, and it would be impossible to imagine how we "Aspergians" (a term we use on this site) would be like if we did not grow in an environment where we are a minority surrounded by a foreign social context.

I think it is time we thanked the researchers, theoreticians and professionals who helped identify the phenomena and make it public. The work of Dr Asperger and the follow up by the likes of Wing and Atwood has been pivotal in identifying that there is indeed a group of people who are born with a neurology which is inherently different to that of the general population. This group processes information differently, has a different set of social interactions and a wide variety of uncommon traits such as a high sensitivity to external stimuli.

We must be grateful to them for "classifying" us, but now that our existence is officially recognised by the majority, is it not time that we start classifying ourselves? Is it not time that we take responsibility for our own self determination, rather than letting others tell us who we are, what our behaviour should be like, and how we should be treated?

Asperger's isn't a disease or an illness. It is a unique set of traits, which is very likely to be the driver behind some of the greatest human achievements to date. It is speculated that Einstein himself had Asperger's as did many other prominent historical personalities. Asperger's is the single minded determination behind invention and innovation, and the ability to create something different to standard thinking. Human minds are locked within their barriers of social acceptability. Asperger's allows the expansion beyond this.

Note: you are born with Asperger's, you do not acquire it like an illness. Put plainly it is a genetic mutation - your genes jumped a little and you got some extra traits, and, to keep the balance, had to give up some others. You are only different because your environment is not ready for you, but you are not a one off fluke. Nature manufactures us repeatedly. perhaps there is an evolutionary reason for this? Perhaps these extra traits have a special role to play in the progression of humankind? Explore this site further and you will understand more how much this makes sense, and read our lead article about rebranding Asperger's.

The words "symptoms", "condition", "difficulties" etc are one element in a cycle that causes us to define our lives in other people's conceptual terms. We need to break free from this. We need to take ownership of our own future. We need to understand that we are possibly one of the best things that happened to human development.

Our focus and single mindedness, coupled with a range of special skills allow us to excel in places where others never could. There are of course social trade-offs, but as we grow more aware, we can start looking after our community, creating solutions for our needs in a way never thought of before: social meetings with our own special structures, organisations with our focus to drive them, and, of course, support to those young Aspergians. children who need to learn that they are different only from those around them. In the land of Aspergia they share the traits and background of others.