CONTEMPORARY PEOPLE WITH ASPERGER’S

John Nash 1928-, US mathematician (portrayed by Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind,
Oliver Sacks 1933-2015 Neurologist, author and expert on Autism
UK/US neurologist, author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings. Oliver Sacks wrote in the forward of Thinking in Pictures that her first book, Emergence: Labelled Autistic, was “unprecedented because there had never before been an inside narrative of autism.”  Dr. Oliver Sacks profiled Dr. Grandin in his best-selling book An Anthropologist on Mars.
He was a neurologist who was a precise observer of the world.
He met a pair of identical twins named George and Charles Finn who could instantly calculate six-digit prime numbers. Yet George and Charles could not perform simple multiplication, reading, or tying their shoes. Then Sacks met Jose, a 21-year-old autistic man described as an idiot and unable to comprehend language or time. But when asked to draw a watch, he pulled every feature, not just the time. Sacks made the provocative suggestion in 2001 that Henry Cavendish had Asperger’s,
Sacks realized that, instead of being incommunicative, his patients were communicating all the time – not in words, but in gestures and other nonverbal forms of utterance, particularly among themselves.
For decades, prevalence estimates had remained stable at just four or five per ten thousand. But that number started to snowball in the 1980s and 90s, raising the frightening possibility that a generation of children was in the grips of an epidemic of unknown origin.
Books like Clara Claiborne Park’s The Siege. Sacks himself had played a role in the sea change by making the distinctive traits of autism recognizable to his colleagues in his sensitive portrayals of artist Stephen Wiltshire, the calculating twins, George, and Charles Finn, and industrial designer Temple Grandin in An Anthropologist on Mars and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. He was an advisor to Dustin Hoffman for Rain Man.
Personal Life
Sacks never married and lived alone for most of his life. He declined to share personal details until late in his life. He addressed his homosexuality for the first time in his 2015 autobiography On the Move: A Life. Celibate for about 35 years since his forties, in 2008, he began a friendship with writer and New York Times contributor Bill Hayes. Their friendship slowly evolved into a committed long-term partnership that lasted until Sacks’s death.
In Lawrence Weschler’s biography And How Are You, Dr. Sacks?, he is described by a colleague as “deeply eccentric”. A friend from his days as a medical resident mentions Sacks’ need to cross taboos, like drinking blood mixed with milk, and how he was deeply into drugs like LSD and speed in the early 60s. Sacks himself shared personal information about how he got his first orgasm spontaneously while floating in a swimming pool, and later, when he was giving a man a massage. He also admits having “erotic fantasies of all sorts” in a natural history museum he visited often in his youth, many of them about animals, like hippos in the mud.
Sacks noted in a 2001 interview that severe shyness, which he described as “a disease”, had been a lifelong impediment to his interactions. He believed his shyness stemmed from his prosopagnosia, popularly known as “face-blindness”, a condition he studied in some of his patients, including the titular man from his work The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. This neurological disability of his, whose severity and life impacts Sacks did not fully grasp until he reached middle age, even prevented him from recognizing his reflection in mirrors.
Sacks swam almost daily for most of his life, beginning when his swimming-champion father started him swimming as an infant. He became publicly well known for swimming when he lived in the City Island section of the Bronx, as he routinely swam around the entire island or vast distances away from the island and back.
Oliver Sacks visited Grandin at Colorado State University. His views of autism were swiftly evolving, informed by the insights of Lorna Wing, Uta Frith, and the others in the London group. He suspected that in writing Emergence, Grandin’s co-author, Margaret Scariano, must have ghostwritten it. “The autistic mind, it was supposed at the time, was incapable of self-understanding and understanding others and therefore of introspection and retrospection. How could an autistic person write an autobiography? It seemed a contradiction.” After reading dozens of her papers, he found that Grandin’s distinctive persona – that of an irrepressibly curious observer of society from the outside, an “anthropologist on Mars,” as she put it – was consistent throughout. She was writing in her voice.
He eventually realized that autistic people were capable of “getting” humour. Autism must be seen as a whole way of being, a profoundly different mode of identity, one that needs to be conscious (and proud) of itself. In an environment designed for their comfort, they don’t feel disabled; they feel different from their neighbours.
Sachs spent several days with Grandin. Grandin was amused to discover that the eminent neurologist was nearly as eccentric as she was. “He was like a kindly absentminded professor who zoned out a lot.” In his next best-selling book, An Anthropologist on Mars, he wrote an in-depth profile of her that became the book’s centrepiece. After 50 years of describing autistic people as befitting robots or “imbeciles”, Sachs presented Grandin in the full breadth of her humanity – capable of joy, whimsy, tenderness, passion about her work, exuberance, longing, philosophical musing on her legacy, and sly subterfuge. He acknowledged the prevailing theory that autism is “foremost a disorder of affect, of empathy”, but also explored her deep sense of kinship with other disabled people and with animals, whose fates she saw as intertwined in a society that views them both as less than human.
See https://www.ronperrier.net/2021/11/01/temple-grandin-oliver-sacks/ in the History section
Bob Dylan 1941-, US singer-songwriter
Jeff Greenfield 1943-, US political analyst/speechwriter, a political wonk
John Motson, 1945-, English sports commentator
David Helfgott, 1947-, Australian pianist, subject of the film Shine
Al Gore, 1948-, former US Vice President and presidential candidate
James Taylor, 1948-, US singer/songwriter
Charles Dickinson, 1951, US Writer
Jamie Hyneman 1956-, Co-host of Mythbusters
Genie 1957- US “wild child” (see also L’Enfant Sauvage, Victor)
Paul Kostabi 1962-, writer, comedian, artist, producer, technician
Crispin Glover 1964, US actor
Joseph Erber 1985-, young English composer/musician who has Asperger’s Syndrome, subject of a BBC TV documentary
Seth Engstrom 1987-, Magician and World Champion in Sleight of Hand. The best man with a deck of cards the world has ever seen.
Bill Gross – successful investment manager (C): See his video about his diagnosis.
Adrian Lamo, an American computer hacker
Carl Soderholm, a speaker on neuropsychiatric disorders
Clay Marzo, an American professional surfer
Daniel Tammet, the British autistic savant, is believed to have Asperger’s Syndrome.
Dawn Prince-Hughes, Ph.D., primate anthropologist, ethologist, and author of Songs for the Gorilla Nation
James Durbin, a finalist on the tenth season of American Idol
Jerry Newport, American author and mathematical savant, is the basis of the film Mozart and the Whale
John Elder Robison, author of Look Me in the Eye
Judy Singer, Australian disability rights activist
Liane Holliday Willey, author of Pretending to be Normal, Asperger Syndrome in the Family; Asperger syndrome advocate; education professor; and adult diagnosed with Asperger syndrome at age 35
Lizzy Clark, actress and campaigner
Raymond Thompson, New Zealand scriptwriter and TV producer
Richard Borcherds, a mathematician specializing in group theory and Lie algebras
Tim Ellis, Australian magician and author
Tim Page, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and author
Travis Meeks, lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter for the acoustic rock band Days of the New
David Campion – champion snowboarder
Michael Burry – USA physician, investor, and hedge fund manager: The movie “The Big Short” is based on him (C)
Ulysse Delsaux & Cody Ware – Race car drivers (C)