On my father's side of the family, there was the infamous Grandin temper. Dad would blow up in restaurants if the food took too long to arrive. He also had a tendency to fixate on a single subject. One time he got obsessed with shutting down the riding stable next door to his house. He spent days and days writing letters to the city officials and measuring the amount of manure that was thrown in the dumpster. My father had a lonely boyhood, and it is very likely that he had a mild form of autism.
Fortunately, none of my siblings are autistic. I have two sisters and a brother. One of my sisters is a visual thinker who is very artistic and extremely good at redecorating old houses. She can look at a dumpy old house and see in her mind the cute place she can turn it into. She had learning problems in school, possibly owing to mild auditory processing problems that made it difficult for her to understand speech in a noisy classroom. Mathematics was difficult for her. My other two siblings are both normal, although my youngest sister has a slight tendency to suffer from sensory overload when too many different noisy activities occur at once. Her eight-year-old son has no signs of autism, but he has had difficulty learning to read and problems understanding some speech sounds. My other nieces and nephews are normal.
Mild autistic traits often show up in the parents and relatives of children with autism. Another study published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, by G. R. Delong and J. T. Dwyer, indicated that over two thirds of families with a high-functioning autistic child had a first- or second-degree relative who had Asperger's syndrome, the mild form of autism. Based on hundreds of discussions with families I've met at conferences, it is clear that many parents of autistic children are visual thinkers with talents in computers, art, and music. Other common traits in the family histories of autistics are anxiety disorder, depression, and panic attacks. Narayan found that the parents of autistic children, especially the fathers, had a tendency to pursue a special interest singlemindedly, and they were likely to have poor social skills. Parents who were not autistic themselves had some of the traits of their autistic children. In a study conducted by Rebecca Landa and other researchers at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where parents were asked to make up a story, 34 percent made up a rambling, plotless story without a clear beginning, middle, and end. That is the nature of associational visual thinking. It is like putting a jigsaw puzzle together. It is not done in any particular order.
There is good evidence that autism has a strong genetic basis. Folstein and Rutter reported that in identical twins, when one twin was autistic, the other twin was autistic 36 percent of the time. Nonautistic twins had a higher percentage of learning problems than normal twin pairs had. Identical twins have the same genetic makeup, whereas fraternal twins have completely different genes. When one fraternal twin was autistic, the other was almost never autistic. But the inheritance of autism is complex. There is no single autism gene. Robin Clark speculates in the journal Personal Individual Differences that the disorder may occur if a person receives too big a dose of genetic traits which are only beneficial in smaller amounts. For example, a slight tendency to fixate on a single subject can enable a person to focus and accomplish a great deal, whereas a stronger tendency to fixate prevents normal social interaction.
People with autism run a greater risk than others of having a child with autism, learning difficulties, or developmental problems. However, family history studies by Edward Ritvoe and his colleagues at UCLA have shown that the siblings of an autistic have almost no increased risk of having an autistic child, although they do run an increased risk of having children with learning disabilities or mild autistic traits.
Many researchers speculate that a cluster of interacting genes may cause a variety of disorders such as depression, dyslexia, schizophrenia, manic-depression, and learning disabilities. Dr. Robert Plomin and his colleagues at Pennsylvania State University state that autism is one of the most inheritable psychiatric diagnoses. They also maintain that many disorders such as depression represent extremes of a continuum of behavior from normal to abnormal. The same genes are responsible for both normal variations and the abnormal extremes. It is likely that this same principle applies to autism. People labeled autistic have an extreme form of traits found in normal people. Leo Kanner found that in four out of nine cases, depression or anxiety occurred in the parents of autistic children. Recent studies by Robert Delong, at Duke University in North Carolina, found there is often a history of manic-depression in the families of children with autism.
Genius Is an Abnormality
It is likely that genius is an abnormality. If the genes that cause autism and other disorders such as manic- depression were eliminated, the world might be left to boring conformists with few creative ideas. The interacting cluster of genes that cause autism, manic-depression, and schizophrenia probably has a beneficial effect in small doses. In her book Touched with Fire, Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison reviewed studies that showed a link between manic-depression and creativity. Manic-depressives experience a continuum of emotions, from moody to full-blown mania and deep, dark depression. When writers experience a mild form of the condition, they often produce some of their best work. When the disorder becomes full-blown, they are no longer able to function. There is a tendency for the mood swings to worsen with age, and this may explain why famous writers such as Ernest Hemingway committed suicide relatively late in life. Studies have shown that artists, poets, and creative writers have higher rates of manic-depression or depressive disorder than the general population.
A study done at the University of Iowa by N. C. Andreason showed that 80 percent of creative writers have had mood disorders at some time during their life. A high percentage of artists, poets, and writers have to be medicated to control their condition. Thirty-eight percent of writers and artists have had to take medication, and 50 percent of poets have had to receive treatment. The University of Iowa study also showed that parents and siblings of writers have a high rate of mood disorders.
Dean Simonton, at the University of California at Davis, has studied the factors that make a person a great politician, such as leadership, charisma, and boundless energy or drive. People with these qualities often have had problems with depression and alcohol abuse. Simonton concludes that «in order to be creative, it seems you have to be slightly crazy.»
A study of mathematical giftedness further reinforces the idea of abnormality and genius. A paper by Camilla Persson Benbour, at Iowa State University, provides strong evidence that mathematical genius and giftedness are highly correlated with physical abnormalities. Three things that occur more frequently in people with high mathematical ability than in the population at large are lefthandedness, allergies, and nearsightedness. Both learning disability in mathematics and math talent are associated with lefthandedness. Young children who show very high ability in verbal reasoning and mathematics are twice as likely to have allergies as the rest of the population. Students with extremely high ability are also more likely to be nearsighted. The old stereotype of a little genius with thick glasses may be true.
Obviously, not all geniuses are abnormal, but the genes that produce normal people with certain talents are likely to be the same genes that produce the abnormalities found at the extreme end of the same continuum. Back in the 1940s researchers recognized that elimination of the genes that cause manic-depression would have a terrible cost. Researchers at McLean Hospital near Boston concluded,
If we could extinguish the sufferers from manic-depressive psychosis from the world, we would at the same time deprive ourselves of an immeasurable amount of the accomplished and good, of color and warmth, of spirit and freshness. Finally, only dried-up bureaucrats and schizophrenics would be left. Here I must say that I would rather accept into the bargain the diseased manic-depressives than give up the healthy individuals of the same heredity cycle.
Twenty years earlier, John W Robertson wrote in his book Edgar A. Poe, A Psychopathic Study,
Eradicate the nervous diathesis, suppress the hot blood that results from the over-close mating of neurotics, or from that unstable nervous organization due to alcoholic inheritance, or even from insanity and the various forms of parental degeneracy, and we would have a race of stoics — men without imagination, individuals incapable of enthusiasms, brains without personality, souls without genius.
As I have said, it has only been recently that I realized the magnitude of the difference between me and most other people. During the past three years I have become fully aware that my visualization skills exceed those
