There are some autistic persons who would look at you as if you’re a piece of furniture just because they do not see you as a living, thinking being with thoughts and feelings of your own. Then there are others who are very in tuned to others and quite empathetic to what you feel and think.

It comes down to the simple task of reading non verbal body language. Pure and simple, you have to care in general to get that, or not!

What living with autism has taught me is to not jump to conclusions about others or judge because I don’t know their particular disability – not all are physically, readily seen.

For those who don’t get the enormity of what this young man is capable of I can say it is truly your loss. For those of us who look at this and are amazed by his work, you get that being different from “normal” people is not such a bad thing after all. As with normal people, autism is not an excuse for why you can’t accomplish something, it’s just harder to find what they’re good at to help develop them into functional members of society (if possible).

Mother nature sure does work in mysterious ways, where a path is blocked she finds a way around it. How it manifest in each person is it’s own issue to be resolved for all of us.

There are some autistic persons who would look at you as if you’re a piece of furniture just because they do not see you as a living, thinking being with thoughts and feelings of your own. Then there are others who are very in tuned to others and quite empathetic to what you feel and think.

It comes down to the simple task of reading non verbal body language. Pure and simple, you have to care in general to get that, or not!

What living with autism has taught me is to not jump to conclusions about others or judge because I don’t know their particular disability – not all are physically, readily seen.

For those who don’t get the enormity of what this young man is capable of I can say it is truly your loss. For those of us who look at this and are amazed by his work, you get that being different from “normal” people is not such a bad thing after all. As with normal people, autism is not an excuse for why you can’t accomplish something, it’s just harder to find what they’re good at to help develop them into functional members of society (if possible).

Mother nature sure does work in mysterious ways, where a path is blocked she finds a way around it. How it manifest in each person is it’s own issue to be resolved for all of us.

It is truly incredible how powerful the human mind can be. I have heard two theories about autistic savants and autism in general. The first is that autistic savants (supposedly a small percent or autistic people) are able to achieve such talents because the areas of the mind that are usually used to function in the world that we live in are not overwhelming the areas that have the talent. It is hypothesized that if we could turn off parts of our brain temporarily with, say an electrical interfering field, we would be able to be temporarily savantic (if that is a word).

The other idea is that autistic people are not so much disabled as they are an alternate mode of human existence. In effect, our attitude to autistic people is like the attitude of a hypothetical civilization of blind people who feel sorry for those who can not find their way in the dark yet feel that street lights are a waste of tax dollars. I think that much more research is needed because some profound autistics seem to be completely unable to communicate (despite the claims of facilitated communication proponents) but there have also been people who have been “written off” who later are able to engage with the world.

Just as many insights into human neurology have been gained by those with damaged brains, so to might a great deal be learned about human nature by observing and engaging with those who are divergent from the norm.