Quotes About Neurodiversity

I have autism

We have evidence that autistic people's mirror mechanism is impaired.

Neurotypical people seem to think and feel that it's okay to be rigid as long as their ideas are shared by enough people.

Every person with autism is unique, with a different profile of strengths and challenges.

different way of thinking and learning. People with autism are people first.

One of the most profound mysteries of autism has been the remarkable ability of most autistic people to excel at visual spatial skills while performing so poorly at verbal skills.

Impaired social interactions and withdrawal may not be the result of a lack of compassion, incapability to put oneself into someone else's position or lack of emotionality

By cultivating the autistic mind on a brain-by-brain, strength-by-strength basis, we can reconceive autistic teens and adults in jobs and internships not as charity cases but as valuable, even essential, contributors to society.

And just to complicate matters, autistic people seem to get visual cues mixed up with aural cues. Normally when a person is listening, the visual cortex gets turned down. But a 2012 fMRI study found that when autistics were listening to sound cues, their visual cortices remained more active than neurotypicals'. If that's the case, then even while they're straining to process aural cues, they're being distracted and confused by visual cues.

Research has also shown that when performing language tasks, the autistic subject relies on the visual and spatial areas of the brain more heavily than the neurotypical subject does, perhaps to compensate for a lack of the kind of semantic knowledge that comes with social interaction

So it's not that autistics don't respond to eye contact, it's that their response is the opposite of neurotypicals'.

author Donna Williams, who is autistic

I am also a believer in an integrated treatment approach to autism.

Another form of stress for schizophrenics is the inability to read people's emotions as expressed through facial expressions or voice. This is a critical problem for people with autism as well.

I've got Asperger's syndrome and I'm not a very good people person, so I've always been more comfortable around machinery. Not in a weird way - I don't want to marry my car or anything stupid like that!

The genetics of autism are real, but there are also environmental triggers.

One big question that's come up is: Has autism increased on the mild side of things? I don't think so - they've always been here. Some of this is increased detection.

We might want to figure out what are the positive effects of autism - mild cases.

I don't define myself as autistic first. I don't want to be a professional autistic. I think it's important to have a real job.

I'm on television, ticcing and twitching. I think that's kind of cool.

Brains come in different types and they're all normal.

Who do you think made the first stone spears? The Asperger guy. If you were to get rid of all the autism genetics, there would be no more Silicon Valley.

Mild autism can give you a genius like Einstein. If you have severe autism, you could remain nonverbal. You don't want people to be on the severe end of the spectrum. But if you got rid of all the autism genetics, you wouldn't have science or art. All you would have is a bunch of social 'yak yaks.'

What would happen if the autism gene was eliminated from the gene pool? You would have a bunch of people standing around in a cave, chatting and socializing and not getting anything done.