I just finished reading a book called ‘something about autism and intelligence’ and it only took a few hours. I keep expecting to find a book about autism that is more than 100 pages long. I don’t even understand how those texts are called books. Maybe they print them on thick porous paper that’s smaller than an A5 and with large, spaced out letters and they get the thickness of what you would consider a book on a bookshelf, but I read them all on my kindle and they are thin.

The author mentioned she’d had over 2000 pages of transcripts from interviews with her 17 volunteers, but she managed to only put a tiny sliver of those interviews in the book itself, with a little bit of comments in between.

I agree that there needs to be a paradigm change (not shift, a true change) in regards to the treatment of autistic people — in the sense of them being treated by people as if they had an illness or disability, not medical treatment.

The new theory of sensory-cognitive difference is only a little step. It feels incomplete because it only takes into account a few aspects of the autistic life and way of being.

In the beginning of the book there was a list of all the aspects that are different for autistics or that derive from the interactions of autistic people with a neurotypical world. I wish that the author had gone through that list and explored all of those aspects, not just the ones she cherry picked for convenience (and I assume time).

Hopefully, in the future there will be a new and revised version of this book, at a book length and one that takes into account the whole spectrum of experience of autistic people, hopefully even more than the 17 “high functioning” volunteers that were involved in the original study. It is time the autistics to write their own stories and some have started already.

This is my review from Goodreads:

Read this in a few hours while traveling — it’s that short.

Please don’t take the title of this book at face value, it’s not what it says in the title. There’s nothing about evolution — no studies related to the evolution of intelligence or the evolution of autism as an alternative to what is nowadays considered “neurotypical”. There is, however, a discussion about the emergence (finally) of a new theory about autism and how it arises and manifests itself.

It’s about the new theory proposed by the author in her thesis, the Theory of Sensory Cognitive Difference (proposing that we have different ways of interacting with the world and different kinds of intelligence, some more developed than others).

The theory itself is nice as an idea, but I feel like it’s incomplete and the fact that the book is so short and only includes interviews from 17 “high-functioning” autistic people is not enough, at least for me. How does one go about disproving a theory of difference? I could propose a theory that apples are produced by a different species than pears, but that’s not something you can disprove without quantitative and qualitative properties that can be described and measured over the whole population.

The author mentions she has over 2000 pages of transcripts from her interviews with only this small, relatively homogeneous group of autistics (mostly American), but the book only covers very little of that. Also, from the huge list of topics that she mentions she had filtered as main concerns from these interviews, she only covers a handful.

It would have been much more helpful (and interesting to read) if we had at least a bit of insight into all of these topics, not just some. Plus the author said she mixed up the responses to various topics in order to protect the volunteers, but they share so many personal details during each quote that it’s very easy to just point them out — I’m pretty sure that’s not just my knack for finding patterns everywhere, it’s very obvious. What’s the point of mixing up and “anonymizing” the responses if you can pick them out easily anyway?

I definitely would have liked to see what others had to say about anxiety and depression, bullying, imagination and imaginary worlds, coping mechanisms (as in camouflaging) and friendship, if not intimate relationships (I know it’s a difficult topic to discuss with anyone, so I would’t insist on that). Of course I am reading about these topics in other books that I’ve found from fellow autistics, but this is a book coming from an academic and (I hope) aimed at not only people trying to learn how to cope with their “differences” from the neurotypical world and their families, but also at people who work in fields related to mental health and social integration.

Most of all, I would like to see an expanded version of this book, one containing experiences from more than 17 people and topics broader than just intelligence and sensory overwhelm.

That being said, I wholeheartedly recommend this book as a good resource to begin to understand autistic people and as a starting point for all of us who would like to tell our stories, not just for those who want to tell our stories for us.

I think we have enough scientists (many of which may not even be aware that they are autistic) who can shed light on how our minds and bodies work. I have begun to write down my experiences (before reading this, as you may have noticed my previous review) and will be touching upon all of these topics that I keep mentioning (and maybe even more).

I will put these here, just so I can find them easily in the future and just in case anyone else needs them (I don’t believe this is a breach of copyright, as it’s just a list of terms, but nevertheless, please let me know if I shouldn’t share it here). Be aware that I added my own comments (sometimes in parentheses), so this is not only the original content of the list.

• anxiety and stress and burnout;
• attention, concentration and focus;
• special interests;
• auditory processing and communication (verbal vs. written vs. other means);
• behavioral control;
• bullying;
• cognition, cognitive strengths, challenges and energy;
• alignment with cognitive theories;
• compensation and coping (and camouflaging);
• consistency and change (and resistance to change);
• coordination;
• diagnosis;
• discrimination;
• difference and information processing;
• environment;
• executive functioning and multi-tasking;
• giftedness (and the power of imagination);
• higher education;
• injury (I didn’t really understand this one);
• information processing;
• intelligence and measurements of intelligence;
• interventions and support;
• languages and learning foreign languages;
• learning (academic subjects and learning in general);
• lighting (re. sources of light, intensity and rapid changes);
• memory;
• non-verbal communication (this should be moved to the beginning, next to communication);
• object permanence (and short-term memory issues vs. long-term memory);
• processing speed (and processing mechanisms);
• performance (including internal or external performance indicators);
• safety;
• social interactions;
• social compliance and group dynamics (fitting in, understanding and reacting to social cues, criticizing social norms);
• school experiences (should be together with higher education);
• sensory processing difference and effects on performance (again, against internal and external standards);
• sexuality (and gender identity and relationships and intimacy);
• sound sensitivity;
• awareness of sounds and pitch;
• standardized tests;
• synesthesia;
• teachers;
• time;
• taste and smell;
• touch and texture;
• us and them;
• visual differences;
• strengths and challenges;
• vocations and employment;
• whole person;
• wisdom and discernment.