From Mark Leviton in The Sun: […] In 2001 Steve Silberman, then head science writer for Wired magazine, was working on an article about two leading figures at technology companies when he learned that both had autistic children. He was talking to a friend over lunch about this seemingly unusual coincidence when a woman at the next table overheard and told him there was an “epidemic” of autism in the high-tech world of Silicon Valley. Silberman did some research and found there was indeed a high incidence of autism in the area. In his experiences interviewing tech workers at Google, Microsoft, and Apple, he had noticed that many of them exhibited autistic traits — difficulty reading body language and facial expressions, for example.
The article Silberman wrote about the phenomenon, titled “The Geek Syndrome,” inspired hundreds of responses from parents of autistic children and autistic people themselves. For Silberman it was the beginning of a long fascination that would eventually lead to his 2015 book, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity.
Silberman’s work is part of a larger change in how autism is viewed. In 2013 the diagnosis was reclassified as “autism spectrum disorder” to acknowledge that it encompasses a wide range of people with varying degrees of disability. “Autistic people know better than anyone that autism includes deficits, but it also brings gifts,” Silberman says. Though not a scientist, he has written about science for fifteen years, and every citation in NeuroTribes is thoroughly documented in forty pages of notes. […]