Were Newton, Tesla, and Einstein Autistic?

If these famous people were indeed autistic, I would hope for my children and grandchildren to be autistic. Who wants to be just like everyone else? Better to be great than normal.

These tendencies are not worth greatness, and I wish I didn't have some of them. I would not wish my conditions on any child, especially my own.

The anxieties, obsessions, and just strange behaviour makes you a social outcast and a difficult mate. No sir, it is not worth it.

You mean to tell me you would discourage a "Mozart" or Einstein? for normalcy.

No. But I would not wish for genius at the expense of normal feelings and behaviour for them. I am certain that only a very few who posses these traits and perhaps even genius ever realize any fame and fortune. Fame, maybe, but fortune in this world comes from success socially as well as success in ones interests.

I encourage my children to find their own personal genius and work it. But they don't suffer from any social irregularities and so they have no trouble "selling" their talents.

I have one nephew who is definitely a genius and thankfully socially adept. He is already well on the road to fame and fortune and is only 16. I expect to see him on Broadway or in film in the very near future and I am sure he will do fine.

The conditions that characterise autism and aspberger's are not fun. They are not helpful. They are a ball and chain that can make simple emotional things scary and certain social things almost impossible. And when confronted by these things in public, people look at you sideways and mumble to themselves "WTF is wrong with him?"

I would not wish that on anybody, even if it meant he could change the world.

Look at it like this:

The difference between You knowing how many toothpicks just hit the floor and Rainman knowing is five minutes. But that difference is huge outside the toothpicks. Rainman is compelled to know and you don't really care. Rainman lives in isolation and you do not. Is it really worth the difference?

I like my little quirks and oddities. They are what made me who I am today!

Plus trying to fix them should keep my wife busy for the rest of one of our lives. Who's I don't know yet.

Whatever makes you different, makes you into a real character. Being comfortable within your skull is an odd necessity to that. It does not makes you into this or that labeled classification. There is no profit in that, as everyone has some of it, when we look close enough.

It is interesting, that my whole life long, I was comfortable with real characters. Not getting the impulse, to make them to conform. If, that puts me into the category of "real character", so be it. The shoe fits, and I will wear it. And be in a good company.

Sometimes I wonder if the refrigerator mother theory isn't all that far off. Just misnamed. Who's supposed to pay the shrink? The person who just got called a refrigerator mother? And what about refrigerator fathers? The theory might have been dropped for political reasons!

From my experience I'd say a refrigerator parent is someone whose first interest is something other than their child. This is a tenuous state for a parent to inhabit and if not dealt with carefully, or if there is too much pressure, such as financially or too many children, then a lack of the desire to nurture can still express itself to a child when the parent is actually very responsible and loving.

And I don't think that genetics should be blamed for personality traits. We don't need to live our lives in psychiatric categories.

On the other hand, these conditions are real, and I think this thread is very interesting. But aspergers might be learned behavior. Not everything is rocket science.

I saw a movie on Temple Grandin where she worked to improve the way cattle are slaughtered, making in more humane. Excellent example.

As far as whether Newton, Tesla or Einstein were Autistic, I really don't see the sense of trying to determine that. It would require having them here to examine. Not much chance of that. "Equally if not more controversial is the practice of posthumously diagnosing well-known historical figures based on biographical accounts of their eccentric or unusual behavior." I say leave them alone. Let there record of accomplishments speak for themselves, why try to "label them" because they were different.

"...why try to "label them" because they were different..."

I have no problem with what you are saying, just to try and answer your question. People on the spectrum do try to answer rhetorical questions by the way, can't tell the difference between them and real questions.

I think those trying to say that Tesla & Co were on the spectrum are probably mostly those who are on the spectrum themselves. Make sense? It puts us in fine company, when we have spent our whole lives on the outside looking in, feeling like we are from a different planet! What could be better than to be from Tesla's planet?!

My parents spent most of their working lives in the public school systems dealing with troubled children and by far their opinions about autism and learning disabilities its that over half is not mental or psychological it just outright crappy parenting.

Far too many parents seem to want to have their kids diagnosed with some disorder just so that they have an excuse for not putting a effort into raising their little brats the right way.

Is little Bobby autistic? Odds are no. More likely little Bobby needed both parents in one house and his and their ass's beat more between the ages of 3 and 8. Thats all.

The thing is I grew up around a number of other kids that by today standards would be getting high level special treatment for autism and or psychological disorders however back then they got raised just like everyone else. When they acted out in class like wild apes they didn't get special treatment because they have autism or whatever. We made fun of the little ape until he or she grew some skin and got their act together and joined the human race.

Now years later as adults I still know and am friends with some of those kids and I can tell you that as adults they may not all be the brightest people but they sure have their acts together and are all around good decent people who contribute to society far more than they take from it.

BTW I was one of the disorderly kids growing up and I can tell you for a fact 80% of my issues came from what I still see as weak/cold parenting with unrealistic goals at the time. The other 20% was high IQ, boredom, crappy schooling, and a bit of childhood dyslexia. I still can't spell worth a crap but I do know how to run a spell check to overcome that problem!

When I first heard about autism, in an ed. psych.course about 60 years ago, it was something rare and mysterious, easily diagnosed, because autistic children didn't learn to speak or function and were institutionalized at an early age, long before school age. How things have changed, espcially since we now have a "spectrum" of autism.

A while ago, I was telling some psychiatrists about medicine during WW-1, and I mentioned that my father had been in the British Army 1915-1919. They asked me about his career. He had been a corporal in a poison gas unit, and he volunteered to be busted to private to get out of it and become a medic; the experience had made him a pacifist. The army obliged him, and he finished the war with a red cross on his sleeve. He later became a very successful pharmaceutical chemist, PhD from Liverpool, DSc from Oxford. One of the psychiatrists announced that he was obviously suffering from aspbergers (ie. mild autism). How's that for a snap diagnosis, patient unseen?

My wife, who deals with medical residents, had a run-in with a particularly intelligent, viscious, vindictive resident, whose excuse for not doing his job was that he has aspbergers, with a letter from a psychiatirst to prove it. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act the residenccy program was supposed to excuse his shit. The last I heard, after being charged with a few felonies, he is unemployed, living in his mother's basement.

Now, sort of affectionately, my wife excuses my procrastination, etc. by saying she married someone with aspbergers.

I have become very sceptical of the psychiatric profession and their imperfectly defined diseases.

Perhaps the outright crappy parenting can be blamed on Dr Spock. Many parents are unsure if they can actually parent their children when they are afraid to spank them when they get out of line. Based on the stories about social workers claiming the children were "abused" when they were simply parented... with the outcome being the child being removed from the home based on one man's thesis (right or wrong).

Parents are unsure how to parent with the concern of unnecessary governmental intervention when social workers make the mistake of claiming children were abused based on what the children tell them. To a child who was corrected with a swat on the rear, they can easily claim to have been abused. I have seen it happen. To me, the problem is one of wrongfully indicting the parents based on false testimony of the children. To a parent, a swat on the rump is corrective action, but the child may embellish their testimony and unfortunately some social workers take the childrens' word over the parents when the childrens' understanding is flawed and/or the social worker's understanding is flawed.

The ambiguity of the situation has more than likely caused a multitude of parents to err on the side of caution leaving us with the result that society wants to blame the problem on the parent when in fact, society caused the problem in the first place.

I hope you're not calling Mozart, Einstein or Tesla retarded. They were certainly characters and lived in their own little world, but where would the world be without the likes of them? Of course there are various degrees of autism and we would not wish some forms on anyone. It would probably be wiser to refer to the great ones as geniuses. I can understand the pain the parents of an autistic child must endure. We were put on this earth for better or worse, so we have to just thank our lucky stars and live with it. Next time you have something to complain about, give a moment of thought to the thousands of children who die every day for whatever reason. That should put autism into perspective.

Not at all - the theories mentioned aren't my own personal ones. I'd probably err on the side of calling these guys "eccentric" at worst. Another interesting facet in this discussion - and I'm not suggesting Mozart, Tesla, or Einstein were mentally ill - is the supposed correlation between high levels of creativity and mental illness such as depression and anxiety. Researchers still aren't sure whether the mentally ill are unusually creative or the creative are unusually depressed.

My mother was a teacher of 10+ years old ones the longest time. Every year the new class came in, some 15-20% were troublemakers. Then in a month the first parents / teachers conference came up. My mother discussed some very basic stuff, like sugary foods and drinks, good breakfast instead, not having TV in the bedroom, and a little bit of more care (when the kid is not bouncing off the walls from sugar overload), and such simple things.

By the time the second conference came about, 90% of the parents earned praise and encouragement with their children. The remaining 10% (of the troublemakers) really had some issues, to be taken care of. The statistics held thruout her career.

At 10-12 my mother essentially lost control over me, even with her considerable teacher skills. Oh, I did schoolwork ok. But I was one of the worst mischief makers. Then the school had enough. 4 classes were overloaded. They made a5th from selected troublemakers, and gave us the toughest male teachers. It was an experiment for them, an adventure for us, that's for sure. They were teaching us uptempo, and loaded us with quality homework. Guess what? We were bored out of our skulls at the old system, and did thrive in the new, demanding one. When higher education came about, some 5times of us made it, and plenty of the class made into good professions.

WE WERE BORED OUT OF OUR SKULLS, AND NEEDED SOME FIRM MANLY TREATMENT TOO, TO SHAPE UP.

Now, there was a 5'4" doll teaching us biology, smart as a whip. No respect from boys. Today, now that I am civilised for quite a while, my approach would be different. Bless her hearth, and memory.

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No, I do not support theories, which are not anchored in experience.

Troublemakers are not necessarily autistic. Some come from homes where the parents don't care. It's the inner city schools that have the problems with troublemakers. Autistic kids get shuffled into schools for kids with "learning disorders".

Some of the above contain descriptions of behaviour not of Autism or Aspergers but more of what is now diagnosed as ADHD.

I have lacked social skills my whole life although I now have a veneer of social normality which will break down if tested. The lack of ability to read social cues weighs heavily especially when young and under the hormonal pressures of puberty and post puberty, Is that an invitation to ask her out or just friendly? Guess wrong one way and you miss a promising date, guess wrong the other way and you lose a friend.

I heard a radio program in which a shrink was describing me! when I checked the program was about the Autism Spectrum. Shocked, I checked the description and realized that i am at the high functioning end of the spectrum. Temple Grandin, who is herself autistic, and a PhD, often speaks on the subject. She described NASA as a playground for people with Aspergers, so she includes then high functioning ones.

For what it is worth, when I went into the Royal Engineers, my IQ was over 140 but I don't know how much higher. I don't claim any credit for this, I did nothing to gain it, it simply was there.

Later, I discovered the Myers-Briggs personality types and found myself in the same group as Newton, Hawking and Ayn Rand (Ayn Rand being there surprised me no end)

I don't think of us as trouble makers, I like rules, I like truth, these are good traits for engineers, fudging numbers or cutting corners around the rule book end, many times, in disaster.

I don't think of the condition as anything but the way the brain was wired at birth; after all, most Autistics are found early in life when they exhibit the typical behaviors and before any "cold mother" effect has a chance to manifest itself.

Yep same here except I caught the social cues well enough I just always found them terribly tedious and largely pointless. Still drives my wife nuts now.

They did a bunch of testing on me in school in 7th grade and instead of coming out retarded I tested genius. 138 on one test 146 on another. Wow what a bunch of disappointed teachers I had with that one!

Instead of giving me challenges and praise I got held back for a year just to prove they could do whatever they wanted to me and caught hell for the high test scores for the rest of my educational days. Part of that crappy school and bad parenting I mentioned earlier.

Now years later my wife keeps telling me I could do this and and I could do that but I just tell her there is a lot of things that I could have do but I didn't do them then so why I would want start doing them now!

(I think it's related to those tedious social skills things or something. I don't really care either way.)

I think the jury is still out on what causes autism and aspergers. Because of this, logically speaking, it is not possible to say that they are actually related to each other. So a deeply autistic infant with perfect parents could be a genetic thing, while an asperger person could be learned behavior. I don't think these categories should be used too rigidly, and a diagnosis can become an excuse as some have suggested above.

I'm sure that some of those posting here would agree with me that aspergers should not be described as a "mild" form of anything! There is nothing mild about being bully bait, not knowing how to meet girls, not knowing when to look your boss in the eye, not knowing when someone doesn't expect you to take them literally, etc etc.

Psychiatry and its' little brother, Psychology, have made a Industry out of "Labeling Behavior", and have held the Uppermost rooms in the Ivory Towers for decades. The number of "abnormal Behaviours" written into the Official Psychiatric Behaviour books has increased by hundreds, if not thousands. You have all seen the ridiculous names for many of these. They, the "Doctors", then become expert witness for the Pharmaceutical Industry, who are creating and making obscene profits off of damaging Drugs, that are supposed to "Control" such behavior. They used Lobotomies earlier, and then Electroshock, and called them successes, until those Barbaric practices were outlawed. (The equivalent of taking the hard drive out of a computer, and saying that no more "Bad" data could be accessed, or switching off the Mains , in an Electrical system))---CURED!! One of the little known facts of the rash of School and public shootings , is that at least 12 of the shooters were under Psychiatric care, and had been subjected to Anti-Depressant or Anti -Psychotic drugs. There is a Freedom of Information case going on right now on the release of the Medical toxicology report related to the Newtown Shooter. They refuse to release it. The Batman killer in Colorado was under Psych. care, and had these drugs in his room. My wife has been a Public School teacher , for 35 years, and has seen it all, including the forced drugging of kids, with Ritalin, by the School Nurses--The kids are labeled ADHD, the Parents are brought in , brainwashed with a bunch of mumbo -jumbo, and then agree to medication. Poor kids often behave like little wusses, losing their "Edgy Behaviour" You know what that means... I can only imagine what the world would be like, if the 3 Geniuses mentioned at the beginning, as well as many Geniuses and the many of you as contributors, describing similar "symptoms", were drugged, electro-shocked, or Lobotomized. Off my horse--Thanks for in the stage-- Off topic if you wish..

"...based on discredited theories and some anecdotal evidence mixed with the sort of speculation that usually happens when someone doesn't know but wants to comment anyway. My son's diagnosis is ASD. The awareness aspect is important, if you want to find out more start reading the blogs written by autistics themselves after all they would know more about it than most."

I'm the one questioning the reasons why the refrigerator mother theory was "discredited". Based on my PERSONAL experience, a distant parent, despite her great affection for her child and her own relatively high functioning, can unwittingly but literally teach the lack of social skills with a secret wish that his/her child would leave him/her alone to do something more interesting and stimulating than to nurture a child. The parents of those on the spectrum tend to be kind of touchy and superior and actually tend to condescend to those who are on the spectrum. I question the validity of their automatic denial that the whole family is not on or very near to the spectrum. I really hate to see genetics blamed for a person's personality.

The spectrum is not a disorder, or a sickness, or a mental illness, or a disease. It's not something that you have, it's something that you are. You don't wish it away, fake it away, or drug it away. Its cause is unknown, so the most accurate thing that can be said about it is that it is a set of behavior traits. I am very much on the spectrum and doubt very much that it is anything other than learned behavior. And my mother loves me very much! The whole family having some of the traits does not make it genetic; we learn from our early environment, mostly our family.

One possible conclusion is that the time spent with a child and the patience displayed in dealing with their childishness and the sacrifices willingly and happily made when the parent would rather be doing something else are way more important to the child's developing social skills than "love". What is love but affection? Or I would say, what is real love but sacrifice? After all, anyone who doesn't feel overwhelming affection for their own child is sick and/or inadequate as a parent. But out of this huge majority who feel strong affection for their child, how many are raising children who are shining examples of humanity? Not such a huge majority.

Lutherman clearly speaks from his hearth, he impressed me. On the recommendation from this thread I listened to Temple Grandin on TEDtalks. Yes, I know the type, I am comfortable with the type. I had plenty of good working relationship with the type. Because I am the type, if not nearly her extent.

Oh, no need to feel sorry for me. My ability to singularly focus, and even anticipate problems led me to a long employment at Bell Labs, as R&D engineer. Did not get rich on it, but all three kids are more than ok.

Thank god, that Temple Grandin emphasized time and again, that different talents need definitely, loudly, and sometimes aggressively different teachings.

When I was a child, teaching was mainly a man's thing. Then woman teachers were on the rise. What came with it is "female sensibilities", that comes naturally with the influx. Now it is "conflict resolution" instead two boys duking out and settling it. It was a necessity then, and I did it then. It was end of the story, and I was from then on left alone by the bullies, as it was desired by me. Conflict resolution with boys? Spare me. It is a flat lack of capacity of understanding, what matters.

The perennially stupid New York Times magazine was aghast a year or three ago, discovering that the male and female brains are wired different. Really? Is that so difficult to grasp?

Mankind is made up of many segments, with many sensiblilities, and many insensitivities. Cutting out some as not fashionable or not PC, does not cut with me, not at all.

"...different talents need definitely, loudly, and sometimes aggressively different teachings..."

I grew up in the "free to be me" 60s and 70s and attended a high school whose academic program must have been designed by pot heads. I was free to do what I wanted, in other words, there was no leadership and the attitude that "you can be whatever you want when you grow up," as you say, did not honor my abilities or how I was different from other people. I needed career guidance, needed to have goals, should have been an engineer, but graduated high school thinking that an engineer is someone who drives a train!

You might enjoy the movie made about Temple Grandin's personal struggle for her scientific abilities to be recognized, it is excellent. The title is "Temple Grandin."

In Tesla's day, and Einstein's, I'm sure that someone with a little mechanical or scientific ability would have been pushed in that direction from an early age, if there was any money for schooling. I think because of the Peter Principle, incompetence has accumulated at the administrative level and this has ruined the educational system for teachers and students alike. Only the self-motivated come out of it with usable skills.