In 2000, the science writer Steve Silberman went on a “geek cruise”, an IT conference held on a ship where he met Larry Wall, a superstar among such people. Silberman asked Wall if he could interview him when he got home. Wall said yes, “but I should tell you, my wife and I have an autistic daughter”.
Soon after this, Marnin Kligfeld, another “technologically accomplished” person, told Silberman the same thing. Silberman tells us: “The next day I was telling a friend at a neighbourhood café about this curious synchronicity. Suddenly a trim, dark-haired young woman at the next table blurted out: ‘I’m a special education teacher. Do you realise what’s going on? There is an epidemic of autism in Silicon Valley’.”
Is there an epidemic of autism not just in Silicon Valley but across the Western world? And if there is, why might it be happening? There are several possibilities. It could be that more people are being born on the “autistic spectrum”. Or maybe the modern world, with its complexity and toxicity, is causing people to be autistic. Or maybe our definition of what it means to be autistic is changing. It could be that doctors are better at spotting it. It might be something to do with the data-gathering properties of the internet or simply that, in an online world created by geeks, geeks are bound to appear more prominent.
So Silberman started to research the subject and this excellent book is the result of 15 years of work. As the late Oliver Sacks put it, “I know of no one else who has spent so much time simply listening, trying to understand what it is like to be autistic.”
The term autism, coined by the psychiatrist Leo Kanner, is derived from the Greek word autos, which means “self” because Kanner noticed that his autistic patients wanted, or needed, to be alone. Silberman looks at autism in today’s world, and he also goes back in time and tells us about historical figures who might well have been “on the spectrum”.
For instance, the brilliant scientist Henry Cavendish, “the Wizard of Clapham Common”, who ate the same meal over and over and found human communication excruciating. And the physicist Paul Dirac, the pioneer of quantum theory. Dirac’s biographer, Graham Farmelo, told Silberman: “My conclusion was that he very clearly passed every criterion for autistic behaviour.”
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But was Dirac on the spectrum? The Viennese psychiatrist Hans Asperger, who believed in a broad spectrum, might have said yes. Asperger thought autistic traits were common, and not all bad — Leo Kanner, Asperger’s rival, thought they were rare and much more debilitating. Until recently Kanner’s ideas were in the ascendency. Now Asperger’s are gaining ground. We’re beginning to see that “the geek syndrome” has its compensations.
So are there more people being born on the spectrum? Possibly. Maybe it’s partly down to what Silberman calls “assortative mating”. For centuries, if you were a male geek, you wouldn’t meet many female geeks. But now male mathematicians and programmers meet female mathematicians and programmers all the time. The gene pool is denser. Geeks get together in labs and start-ups and even on cruise ships. Their children will write our software, design our robots and cure our diseases.
