Excerpt from Lost Boys: Autism and My Son

I found this article to be interesting... especially the part of Albert Einstein and Sir Isaac Newton. I also found it interesting that Dr. Temple Grandin ( in an interview that recently aired on ABC's "The View" this month on the topic of Autism); described these types of people as " the techno-geeks that work in Silicon Valley". It's nice to know that this disorder does have a positive side!

http://health.msn.com/pregnancykids/kidshealth/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100160052&page=1


''There's no law in America that says a 7-year-old white male can't keep a dime he finds at the pool.'' -- Harrison, arguing with his sister about a coin he found.
When Harrison was born, he had abs. I don't mean a six-pack, but a defined ridge separating his obliques from the rest of his abdomen. He also had perfectly round deltoids and a visible trapezius muscle in his upper back. His quadriceps bulged on his hairless little thighs. If you didn't know better, you'd swear someone had spiked his umbilical cord with testosterone.

Which brings me to one of the newest and most intriguing theories about why autistic kids are that way. It's called the "extreme male brain" theory of autism, and it starts with an unusually high amount of testosterone before they're born.
Simon Baron-Cohen, Ph.D., is a Cambridge University psychology professor and the driving force behind the theory. He has found that children exposed to high levels of testosterone in their mother's amniotic fluid have the most trouble making eye contact and forming friendships by age 4.

When they reach manhood, men tend to be systematizers: Our brains have a tendency to organize things unemotionally, to understand events and people by creating categories for them. Women tend to be empathizers, taking other people's feelings into account when trying to analyze situations and events.
All this falls on a spectrum, with some men and women in the middle, equally capable of empathizing and systematizing.

Autistic people, on the other hand, fall way, way out on the male side, leading to the "extreme" aspect of the male-brain theory. Part of the condition leaves them unable to empathize in normal ways. The other component is a tendency toward systematizing. The highest-functioning autistic people—a group that may have included Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton, according to Baron-Cohen—can focus on narrow topics of interest. Newton, for example, got so absorbed in his work that he forgot to eat, and young Albert Einstein was known to repeat the same sentences over and over. Who better to attempt a unified theory of the universe than an obsessive systematizer?