American Nerd: The Story of My People,

[Guest guest]

I found a book review in the June issue of Scientific American and looked it up on line. I followed this link http://www.salon.com/books/int/2008/05/20/American_nerd/index.html and found a question and answer interview.

I've posted just a portion that stated the author's view of what having a diagnosis may mean to Aspies. I think it is somewhat misguided because knowing is much better than wondering why everyone seems to treat you different. The book doesn't have great reviews that I've seen and I'm including a portion of one from the website, http://www.hipsterbookclub.com/features/articles/americannerd0508/page2.html.

Kim

Can you explain the connection you draw between the symptoms of Asperger's syndrome and people who might be thought of as nerds?

People with Asperger's syndrome tend to be good at what psychologists call systemic thinking. They tend to be bad at what the psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen calls empathic thinking, which is the kind you need to interpret nonverbal social cues, the kind you need to program a computer. I think a lot of people we've historically called nerds would have been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, had Asperger's been around at the time.

One of the slightly frightening things about the explosion of Asperger's diagnoses is that because Asperger's syndrome refers to a hard-wired neurological state, kids are essentially being told that they are hard-wired to be nerds. It's a really fraught diagnosis. I wonder if there are kids who would've benefited from just being able to think of themselves as nerdy, and then gone on to become something else, instead of being told when they're young, "You have Asperger's syndrome, you're always going to be a socially awkward systemic thinker."

ONE OF USReflecting on Personal Geekery with Nugent's American NerdBy MARIE MUNDACA

What Nugent describes as a nerd seems to be a person who might identify as having Asperger's Disorder. He identifies two types of nerds, and "one type, disproportionately male, is intellectual in ways that strike people as machinelike, and socially awkward in ways that strike people as machinelike." These people are not outcasts based on physical characteristics or being too smart—they deal with social and emotional issues differently from the average person, also known in the autistic community as "neurotypical." He describes the second nerd type as being "a nerd who is a nerd by sheer force of social exclusion." Both types miss the majority of nerds I know, who were nerds in the classic Square Pegs TV show way. We had different priorities that didn't involve hair and makeup, cars, or making out with the captain of the football team. Spending two hours in the morning on makeup seemed as absurd to us as spending two hours reading a non-required book seemed to "them." But we were not autistic. My nerd friends in high school had social skills, and we even wanted complex sexual relationships with people outside of our circle. We were nerds by virtue of our GPA, and our lack of interest in team sports, somewhere between nerd one and nerd two.

After high school, I found that some of my college friends (all male, by the way) had a quixotic relationship with the idea of autism. "I think I'm autistic," they would muse misty-eyed, like someone who just realized that he found the love of his life. These men seemed to use their imagined autism as an excuse for poor social skills that in most cases were caused by over-indulgent parents. Precious little snowflakes often have problems adjusting to the real world. My friends who neglected to shower or bit their nails in public or behaved like jerks were not autistic—they were assholes. Smart assholes, but assholes nonetheless. I admit that I too romanticize the notion of having Asperger's—imagine how easy art history would have been if I could just absorb all those dates with no effort! But I know people with Asperger's, and their lives are not easy, despite their abilities to retain facts and work out complex word problems. And so, I found Nugent's romanticizing to the typical autistic personality as the typical nerd personality to be predictable and incorrect.