Gilles Trehin is an autistic 28-year-old. Since the age of 12, he has been designing an imaginary city called Urville, named after the "Dumont d'Urville," a French scientific base in Antarctica. He has created detailed historical, geographical, cultural, and economic descriptions of the city, as well as an absolutely extraordinary set of drawings. His Guidebook to Urville will be published later this year.
(Via Chapel Perilous.)
I consider feats like this circumstantial evidence that certain forms of autism, far from crippling disorders, are anomalies to be embraced. It's arguable that the "problem" is less neurological than social.
2 comments:
I've long held the theory that autism is nature's attempt at creating Focused Intelligences (since by definition it can't create AI).
I foresee a future where there are two kinds of human: the Focused -people really good at doing one thing at a time and the Mayflies - really good at multi-tasking, incapable of sitting still).
Without going too far down the RD Laing route (he pretty much argued that it was society that was insane, and saw little wrong with homicidal sociopaths roaming the streets), I think lots of mental and/or emotional disorders are very much a question of diagnosis.
For example, lots of kids do badly at school. If their parents are rich, they might be diagnosed as dyslexic, and get specialised teaching. If they're not so rich, it's attention deficit disorder, and get drugs. And if they're poor, it's because they're dumb, and tough shit.
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