::scr The Geek Syndrome

[Simon Wistow]

Most people are on London.pm anyway but still ...

The whole Asperger's/Dyspraxia/Dyslexia-with-respect-to-hackers thing is
something I've been mulling about for a few years - I wnated to go to
university and do Cognitive Psychology with the view to doing a PhD on
this. Hence the name check at the end of this mail.

It does seem to me that geeks/nerds/techies [DELETE as appropriate] do
tend to exhibit some or all of the symptons of these syndromes. There
are also other trends such as almost universally bad handwriting (even
before extended contact with computers precluded writing stuff by hand.

There has been some study ont his before and there is evidence to back
up the correlation

"Identifying dyslexia is vital, not only because literacy and numeracy
are increasingly important, but also from an educational/training
perspective ­ illiterate dyslexic people and illiterate non-dyslexic
people often respond better to different remedial regimes. In addition
there is a growing recognition that dyslexic people, while disadvantaged
in tasks that require reading, writing and sequential skills, often
excel in jobs that demand more creative and intuitive thought processes,
often including visuospatial awareness (eg computer programmers,
architects, etc)."
http://www.abilitynet.co.uk/content/abilitymag/issue34/dyslexia_screen.htm 

Is this something other people have noticed? I'm mildly dyslexic - I
have problems 'seeing' word endings especially if I wrote them and will
often write "th end" and such. Are other people dyslexic?



----- Forwarded message from Leon Brocard <acme@astray.com> -----

Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 13:56:15 +0000
To: london.pm@london.pm.org
From: Leon Brocard <acme@astray.com>
Subject: The Geek Syndrome

There's an article in December's Wired magazine entitled The Geek
Syndrome. Finally an interesting article in Wired, you say, well, here
are a couple of choice quotes as I can't find it online:

Autism - and its milder cousin Asperger's syndrome - is surging among
the children of Silicon Valley. Are math-and-tech genes to blame?

Clumsy and easily overwhelmed in the physical world, autistic minds
soap in the virtual realms of mathematics, symbols, and codes.

The Valley is a self-selecting community where passionately bright
people migrate from all over the world ti make smart machines work
smarter. The nuts-and-bolts practicality of hard labor among the bits
appeals to the predilections of the high-functioning autistic mind.

(The Valley) is a fraternal association of loners... As more women
enter the IT workplace, guys who might never have had a prayer of
finding a kindred spirit suddenly discover that she's hacking Perl
scripts in the next cubicle.

Last Jan, Microsoft became the first major US corporation to offer its
employess insurance benefits to cover the cost of behavioral
trainginfor their autistic children.

The flip side of dyslexia is enhanced abilities in math and
architecture.

The healthiest state for a gene pool is maximum diversity of things
that might be good.

Oh, go and buy the magazine, I'm not typing the rest in. Simon's
talked about this in the past, but what do the rest of you think?

Leon
-- 
Leon Brocard.............................http://www.astray.com/
Nanoware...............................http://www.nanoware.org/

... An unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys



----- End forwarded message -----