Quotes About Neurodiversity

Autism typically means a person may not be fully aware of the consequences of their actions, or understand the consequences of their behaviour on others.

If I woke up and didn't have Tourette's syndrome, it would feel weird - not better or worse, just different.

Asperger's is not a disease. It's a way of being. There is no cure, nor is there a need for one. There is, however, a need for knowledge and adaptation on the part of Aspergian kids and their families and friends.

Saying you "have" something implies that it's temporary and undesirable. Asperger's isn't like that. You've been Aspergian as long as you can remember, and you'll be that way all your life. It's a way of being, not a disease.

When today's brain scientists talk Asperger's, there's no mention of damage—just difference. Neurologists have not identified anything that's missing or ruined in the Asperger brain. That's a very important fact. We are not like the unfortunate people who've lost millions of neurons through strokes, drinking, lead poisoning, or accidental injury. Our brains are complete; it's just the interconnections that are different.

Bill Gates is said to be Aspergian. Musician Glenn Gould is said to have been Aspergian, along with scientist Albert Einstein, actor Dan Aykroyd, writer Isaac Asimov, and movie director Alfred Hitchcock. As adults, none of those people would be described as disabled, but they were certainly eccentric and different.

So is there a cure?' I asked. 'It's not a disease,' he explained. 'It doesn't need curing. It's just how you are

for all the lip service that the social justice warriors give to 'diversity,' they don't actually care about one of the most fundamental forms of diversity – neurodiversity.

With the right support and reasonable adjustments, autistic people make wonderful employees.

And I'm autistic, which means I can be hyperfocused but also all over the place at the same time. I think I'm very lucky to have found cooking because it's the one area where a brain like mine really thrives.

You will learn that living with ASD can have many challenges, but also great rewards that are uniquely yours to cherish.

I get extra time to take the test because of my ADD. Everybody's brains works differently and I just need longer for things to register.

Asperger syndrome.

I'm dyslexic, I have attention-deficit disorder, and I've got something like a hereditary tremor.

What we want is that one day every workplace will be diverse - we already encourage that with gender and ethnicity, but the next frontier is neurodiversity and it will become ordinary. People won't think twice about it.

Most persons with an autism-spectrum disorder have never expressed their opinions on someone's blog and never will. The neurodiverse often reach a vulnerable audience, as many persons on the spectrum have low self-esteem. Neurodiversity provides a tempting escape valve.

Bottom line: people with ADD have higher levels of creative thinking than those without.

As documented in two important books, Neurodiversity by Thomas Armstrong and The Power of Different by

I think that autistic brains tend to be specialized brains. Autistic people tend to be less social. It takes a ton of processor space in the brain to have all the social circuits.

Normal people have an incredible lack of empathy. They have good emotional empathy, but they don't have much empathy for the autistic kid who is screaming at the baseball game because he can't stand the sensory overload. Or the autistic kid having a meltdown in the school cafeteria because there's too much stimulation.

Autism, dyslexia, language delay, language impairment, learning disability, left-handedness, major depressions, bipolar illness, obsessive-compulsive disorder, sexual orientation, and many other conditions run in families, are more concordant in identical than in fraternal twins, are better predicted by people's biological relatives than by their adoptive relatives, and are poorly predicted by any measurable feature of the environment.

People aren't broken. They're just interestingly wired.

I've got Asperger's. I come at things from sideways.

She explained to him her theory that people we now consider "on the spectrum" were, in the past, the geniuses in art, science, and literature, but now, with medications and diagnoses, we flatten them out, make them more uniform, dull their senses.