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Autistic Genius: Real or Imaginary?
I’ve run across a couple of other writers recently who’ve made efforts to debunk the notion of autistic genius, and since I’ve been one to lean heavily on the idea that “autistic intelligence,...
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Mark Stairwalt on 11/20/09 | No Comments | Read More
Neurodiversity’s Neighboring Conditions
I’ve sometimes wondered what a theory of human personality and psychotherapeutic intervention would look like if contemporary psychodynamic theory was based on a theory of human evolution that embra...
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Andrew Lehman on 11/18/09 | 2 Comments | Read More
Rush to the Beginning
It has been observed that a human baby displays many of the characteristics of an embryo in the womb. The infant is unable to slumber longer in the dark or he or she would not be able to depart. Their...
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Andrew Lehman on 11/17/09 | 3 Comments | Read More
Neurodiversity Deep Sea Diving
We live in a society that believes that it is pragmatic to presuppose that consciousness is contingent upon evolutionary conditions that led to its emergence. Self awareness occurred by chance. Acad...
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Andrew Lehman on 11/16/09 | No Comments | Read More
Time for this Elephant to Leave this Circus
Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and Limbo. Those were the four big places to go. The weirdest of all was Limbo. Limbo was where they sent unbaptized babies. The reasoning was, “It wasn’t their faul...
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Mark Stairwalt on 11/13/09 | 6 Comments | Read More
Abortion, Female Infanticide and Autism
Male control of the female body is a hallmark of a patrifocal society, the Right Wing and hierarchical societies. It is no mistake that the contemporary Republican Party has its roots in the anti-abor...
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Andrew Lehman on 11/11/09 | 2 Comments | Read More
Neurodiversity and Speech
A conundrum frequently reveals itself during my observations of left-handed people. An answer to this riddle seems to be connected to an understanding of how bridges, brain bridges, are made. Lefties ...
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Andrew Lehman on 11/9/09 | 4 Comments | Read More
Self-Starters
There is a short story I read years ago that I’ve always remembered as a tiny masterpiece of irony. It was set among what are sometimes called First Nations people, but viewed with a slightly diff...
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Mark Stairwalt on 11/6/09 | 2 Comments | Read More
Autism’s Female
Autism researchers such as Simon Baron-Cohen have noted a pattern. The mother’s testosterone levels influence the likelihood of a child having autism. The higher the mother’s testosterone level, t...
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Andrew Lehman on 11/4/09 | 1 Comment | Read More
Neurodiversity, Neuropsychology and Evolution
In ancient cultures across the world, there are myths describing a time when women controlled society with a magic more powerful than men’s. These stories go on to describe that there is a loss of t...
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Andrew Lehman on 11/2/09 | No Comments | Read More
Autism Is As Autism Does
While the notion of Everyday Autism Everywhere is still in the air around here (welcome, William Stillman readers), I’d like to further expand some of the ideas Mr. Stillman and I have been floating...
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Mark Stairwalt on 10/30/09 | No Comments | Read More
Minnesota Somali Autism
When I was a kid, my sisters and I would place a marble in the middle of the dining room linoleum floor and watch it begin rolling toward the hallway. Quickly, it would pick up speed, pass through the...
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Andrew Lehman on 10/29/09 | 51 Comments | Read More
Dancing Theory
A couple entries ago, I proposed a predictable display of variation of the physical features in the children of a family over time as a mother’s testosterone level slowly rose with age. This predict...
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Andrew Lehman on 10/28/09 | No Comments | Read More
Idea Drawing
Georges Cuvier was an early French biologist, a contemporary of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Lamarck, unfortunately, died before Cuvier and ended up vilified in a famous eulogy by his younger, very influent...
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Andrew Lehman on 10/27/09 | No Comments | Read More
Legitimacy
There was a cascade of insights and epiphanies that was set off for me from coming to the knowledge, at the age of 36, that both myself and a 7-year-old girl who later became my stepdaughter occupied ...
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Mark Stairwalt on 10/23/09 | No Comments | Read More
Autism Family History
It could be said that it all begins in the womb. It is even deeper and more subtle than that. Autism researchers such as Simon Baron-Cohen are coming to the conclusion that a mother’s testosterone l...
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Andrew Lehman on 10/22/09 | No Comments | Read More
Road Map
Autism expert Simon Baron-Cohen has a theory that the autistic male shows evidence of a brain that is too male for his own good, the autistic personality being male to the extreme, evidencing exaggera...
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Andrew Lehman on 10/20/09 | No Comments | Read More
Legends in Our Own Minds
There is a tribe of males more than a little infatuated with themselves and their own ideas. We’re often described as narcissists. Upon discovering I fit into this group, I was appalled, and predict...
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Andrew Lehman on 10/19/09 | 6 Comments | Read More
Grandma, They’re Not Santa Claus!
There’s a comic on XM Radio’s Canadian Comedy Channel who’s gotten good mileage out of his grandmother having told him that she does not believe in gay people. He recounts going around and aro...
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Mark Stairwalt on 10/16/09 | No Comments | Read More
Brains and Testicles
When I was exploring the possibility of a human genetic precursor that was random-handed with a larger brain encouraged by a song-and-dance-based matrifocal culture, I hypothesized that if representat...
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Andrew Lehman on 10/14/09 | 2 Comments | Read More
How to Speak Drakk
NightStorm is a 23-year-old Asperger-diagnosed autist, a watercolor artist and writer of original and fan fiction, a blogger and a lover of storytelling and role play. Like so very many others then, s...
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Mark Stairwalt on 10/13/09 | No Comments | Read More
Notes on Three Dursleys
I THINK IN PICTURES. Words are like a second language to me. I translate both spoken and written words into full-color movies, complete with sound, which run like a VCR tape in my head. When someb...
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Mark Stairwalt on 10/9/09 | No Comments | Read More
Lefties
Four out of five of our last presidents were left-handers. Researcher Marian Annett hypothesizes that there is a gene for being right-handed and a gene for being nonhanded or random-handed. One could ...
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Andrew Lehman on 10/8/09 | 1 Comment | Read More
Politics and the Environment: Cause of Autism #3
A child exhibits characteristics from both parents. The parents’ features in their children can complement each other in ways that reinforce and even encourage specific maturational trajectories. Fo...
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Andrew Lehman on 10/7/09 | No Comments | Read More
Time Machine: Cause of Autism #2
Though little discussed, the ability to send our children back in time is an ability all of us have. This ability has to do with how we choose a mate. It has been estimated that our lineage of homo de...
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Andrew Lehman on 10/5/09 | 1 Comment | Read More
Still a Crowded Room
“Stick to the image” is perhaps the most concise advice one can come away with from James Hillman’s archetypal psychology. When trying to see through to what is happening in a dream, or in an ...
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Mark Stairwalt on 10/2/09 | 1 Comment | Read More
Revenge of the Nerd: Cause of Autism #1
There are many ways to kill a dragon. I counted several hundred strong-man dragon interventions in the almost one hundred books I read when I was snake-charmed by the subject. Courage, strength and cl...
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Andrew Lehman on 10/1/09 | 1 Comment | Read More
Everyone Has Autism
By William Stillman Reprinted with permission of the author for one-time usage only. Ever awaken in the middle of the night and realize your arm is “asleep” from the elbow down? It is a common s...
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William Stillman on 09/29/09 | 1 Comment | Read More
Superstition and Obsession
It crossed my mind awhile back that individuals with autism are less likely to be superstitious. This conclusion would also suggest that autistics are not magical thinkers. If this generalization has ...
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Andrew Lehman on 09/28/09 | 1 Comment | Read More
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