Good Article About a Girl With Asperger's Syndrome

I just read a great article about a girl with Asperger's Syndrome titled, "The Girl With a Boy's Brain". Why was it great? well I love articles or people who express ideas which i think myself, they may say something and I will light up inside, Oh my god! that's exactly how I feel. Also this article gives me lots to think about.

Here is the start of the article:

Kiriana Cowansage can run complex neuroscience experiments and sketch beautiful portraits. She melts at the sight of an animal, but she balks at the concept of love. Such paradoxes define women with Asperger's syndrome. (full article here)

Here are my favourite parts from the article:

Kiriana's similar strategy amounts to remembering and rehearsing scripts. When she walks into a clothing shop, for example, she pulls up a mental dialogue box: "No thanks, I'm just looking," is what one should say if a saleswoman offers help.

Around that same time, she developed a feverish curiosity about the medical experimentation the Nazis conducted during the Holocaust. "All my obsessions related to something profoundly catastrophic," she says. "I have a really hard time feeling emotionally aroused. Brutal, violent, scary things were interesting to me because that was the best way to feel something."

When a psychiatrist finally pulled the pieces together and diagnosed her with Asperger's, the label alone resolved a lifelong identity crisis. The diagnosis was the only one that reconciled, as she puts it, her special talent for being smart and stupid at the same time. "In this very small world of Asperger's," she says, "that's normal."

She tries to remind herself that as neuroscientists, her colleagues are particularly likely to understand that her brain is wired differently. Besides, she says, "It's a profession where everyone is a bit odd."

At the moment, Kiriana is combining her current fascinations for science, writing, and drawing as she translates a textbook on neurodevelopment into metaphorical scenes. One page of her sketchbook shows two rivers, labeled the "dorsal" and "ventral" streams, along which undifferentiated cells migrate to their destinations. Sharks in the water represent inhibitors to cell development. The project is time consuming, but it's the best way she's found for mastering complex ideas.

Kiriana's never taken an art class, though her drawings are sophisticated and beautiful. Her spatial orientation problems don't extend to her ability to imagine objects and render them on the page. "To me, art is a part of science, of observation—it's finding the details that define an object."

When a friend is upset, she can give advice if she can relate to the dilemma.

"While there are many people who certainly matter to me, I'm not sure I can qualitatively summarize whether or not that constitutes love," she says. She doubts she could ever fall in love.

For as long as she can remember, she's had a need for rational understanding, to take things apart to know how they're put together. That kind of thinking has helped her become an ace science student, a precise artist, a forceful writer

I really really really like this bit, "To me, art is a part of science, of observation—it's finding the details that define an object"

I have thought this many times.

Posted by Nathan Kowald @ 11:54 PM