CANDID BY MARIPAT ROBISON
Neuro Tribes
An interview with Steve Silberman
A
ward-winning science journalist Steve Silberman’s
book Neuro Tribes -The
Legacy of Autism and the Future of
Neurodiversity is a New York Times
bestseller that recently won the
2015 Samuel Johnson prize for
non-fiction. I caught up with Steve
at the college of William & Mary,
where he joined the Olitsky Family Foundation Neurodiversity
Speaker Series.
MP: Congratulations on winning the Samuel Johnson prize
for non-fiction. It’s the first science book ever to win that prize. How do you think
that “first” is important?
Silberman: It opens the door for other science books. My book
was an attempt to fuse science, literature and history because I
knew early on that it was going to be a long book, and if it didn’t
‘read well,’ people wouldn’t be able to absorb it all.
----MP: Neurotribes required exhaustive research: historic, scientific
and anecdotal. Can you describe a bit of your process for each of
these areas?
Silberman: When I was planning the project, I originally intended that it would have more hard science, neuroscience, in it. However, the state of autism science changed so rapidly. One of the
things that plagues autism science is a not just different findings,
but contradictory findings. So one neuroscientist will say: “There’s
too much white matter!” And then the next week it’s, “There’s too
little white matter!” So I wanted to delve through all this history to
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ZOOM Autism through Many Lenses
find, in a sense, the eternal truths of autism and
write about those.
As a neurotypical writer, I was aware that I
could never write about autism with the authority of someone like Temple Grandin, or the
young generation of self-advocates, because I
don’t have the experience of living inside an
autistic mind. So it was very important to listen
to as many autistic people as possible.
----MP: Before you wrote the iconic 2001 “The Geek
Syndrome” article in Wired Magazine, what did
you know about autism?
Silberman: Very little. I really had to start from
the ground up. Luckily, I lived just a couple
blocks away from one of the best medical libraries in the country: the University of California
San Francisco Medical School. I made many
trips to read papers and journals and really dig
deep into the history of autism. I read papers on
genetics, toxicology, psychiatry, and so I educated myself.
-----
----MP: What do you think are the most important
messages in Neuro Tribes, and what points
would you like readers to come away with?
Silberman: I think labels like autism, dyslexia
and ADHD actually describe, almost, different
human operating systems. Instead of thinking
of these conditions as disorders or ailments or
afflictions, epidemics or diseases, we should
think of them as ways of being human that have
been part of the human community for millennia.
The parents’ community, the self-advocate
community and the researchers don’t trust each
other, and there are good reasons for that, having to do with decades of terrible messaging
from clinicians about the causes of autism, like
theories of bad parenting.
Steve Silberman speaking at the Family Foundation
Neurodiversity Speaker Series at William and Mary College.
MP: Oliver Sacks wrote the introduction to
Neuro Tribes. Was he an important mentor
to you?
Silberman: Yes, definitely. From Oliver Sacks,
I got a very humane view of people who think
differently because of conditions like Tourette’s
syndrome, Parkinsonism and autism. I also
got a way of writing about a medical condition
where the person, not the condition, is in the
foreground. Sacks told me, “You must write
your book,” and I took that very seriously. I
would say Neuro Tribes was homage to his
work.
ZOOM Autism through Many Lenses
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