"The Structure of Flame" by autistic artist Jessica Park. Courtesy of Pure Vision Arts: http://purevisionarts.org

In 2007, the United Nations passed a resolution declaring April 2 World Autism Awareness Day — an annual opportunity for fundraising organizations to bring public attention to a condition considered rare just a decade ago.

Now society is coming to understand that the broad spectrum of autism — as it’s currently defined, which will change next year with the publication of the DSM-5 – isn’t rare after all. In fact, “autism is common,” said Thomas Frieden, Director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, last week in a press conference. The subject of the conference was a new CDC report, based on 2008 data, that raised the official estimate of autism prevalence among children in the United States from 1 in 110 to 1 in 88.

The CDC’s announcement brought out the usual range of conflicting responses and disputes about causes and cures. Mark Roithmayr, president of the fundraising organization Autism Speaks, immediately branded the report proof of an “epidemic,” though Frieden and other experts were careful to point out that the apparent increase was likely “the result of better detection,” rather than a true spike in the population of autistic kids.

That theory is bolstered by two recent studies in South Korea and the United Kingdom, which suggest that autism prevalence has always been much higher than the estimated 1-in-10,000 when the diagnostic criteria were much more narrow and exclusionary. What’s changed now is that — in addition to the radical broadening of the spectrum following the introduction of diagnostic subcategories like Asperger’s syndrome and PDD-NOS – clinicians, teachers, and parents have gotten much better at recognizing autism, particularly in very young children. That’s actually good news, because by identifying a child early, parents can engage the supports, therapies, modes of learning, and assistive technology that can help a kid express the fullest potential of their unique atypical mind.

No matter where you stand on the rising numbers, there is one undeniably shocking thing about them. Once that 1-in-88 kid grows to adulthood, our society offers little to enable him or her to live a healthy, secure, independent, and productive life in their own community. When kids on the spectrum graduate from high school, they and their families are often cut adrift — left to fend for themselves in the face of dwindling social services and even less than the meager level of accommodations available to those with other disabilities.

Meanwhile, the lion’s share of the money raised by star-studded “awareness” campaigns goes into researching potential genetic and environmental risk factors — not to improving the quality of life for the millions of autistic adults who are already here, struggling to get by. At the extreme end of the risks they face daily is bullying, abuse, and violence, even in their own homes.

On March 6, a handsome, friendly, 22-year-old athlete in Sunnyvale, California named George Hodgins was shot by his mother Elizabeth, who then turned the gun on herself. The bodies were found by George’s father Lester, a Bay Area park ranger. The horrific crime became a cause célèbre in the media and the special-needs blogosphere — one that focused primarily on speculation about the kind of suffering that could have driven a mother to such a desperate act. George was posthumously diagnosed in the news as “low functioning and high maintenance,” and sometimes his name wasn’t even mentioned in the ensuing discussion, as if the young man was a bystander at his own murder.

Vigil for George Hodgins, Sunnyvale CA

In response, an autistic self-advocate in California named Zoe Gross organized a vigil on March 16 for disabled victims of family violence like George. Holding candles aloft under a tent pitched at Sunnyvale City Hall, autistic men and women of all ages — along with parents and allies from the disability-rights community — read the names of those who had been killed, with a poignant eulogy for the disabled victims of the Nazi eugenics campaigns that paved the way for the Holocaust. As drizzling rain fell around the warmly-lit tent, George’s former teachers at the Morgan Autism Center shared vivid memories of an energetic boy who loved listening to music and getting in the pool to swim. Instead of painting him as little more than a source of anguish and grief for his mother, who was struggling with her own psychological issues, they recalled him as a sweet, cheerful, engaged, and enthusiastic student who used assistive technology to communicate.

For autistic activists like Gross and Paula C. Durbin-Westby, a professional book indexer and choirmaster at her Episcopal church in Virginia, Autism Awareness Day is not a cause for celebration. In their eyes, the dire messaging designed to frighten wealthy donors into opening their wallets every April 2 — such as the infamous 2009 ”I Am Autism” video, which framed the condition as a terminator of marriages that works “faster than pediatric AIDS, cancer, and diabetes combined” – reinforces dangerous negative stereotypes and increases the stigma faced by autistic adults, most of whom don’t wake up in the morning yearning for a cure or wishing that their peers on the spectrum had never been born. Instead, members of groups like the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network look forward to an era when their community no longer faces violence at home or discrimination in the workplace, in housing, in education, in the legal system, in health care, and in society at large.

Two years ago, Durbin-Westby proposed that autistic people and their families and friends recast April 2 as an occasion for promoting acceptance and understanding rather than vague “awareness,” and reclaim the day as an annual opportunity to celebrate their community’s diversity and vitality. ”I started Autism Acceptance Day as a corrective to the ubiquitous negative images we see every April,” she recalls. “The first World Autism Awareness Day referred to autism as an ‘equal destroyer.’ From videos that talk about autism as some sort of soul-sucking demonic persona, to 150 empty strollers signifying that autism has robbed parents of their toddlers, navigating April for many Autistics has been like walking through a field of (stroller-shaped) land mines. No more! Autism Acceptance Day takes back April and puts it where it belongs — into the hands of Autistic people, supportive family members, friends, and communities.”

Durbin-Westby’s notion of rebranding April 2 in a more positive and proactive light is catching on with local autism advocacy groups worldwide. The Autism Society of Northern Virginia recently declared April to be Autism Acceptance Month, and other groups are getting onboard via social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Obviously, even a month of acceptance will not be enough to dramatically improve the lives of people on the spectrum. What could be done to make the world a more comfortable, respectful, and nurturing place for millions of autistic kids and adults  – now, starting today?

That’s the question I posed to a group of self-advocates, parents, and teachers that included Nick Walker, an autistic aikido master who founded his own dojo in Berkeley; the first openly autistic White House appointee, Ari Ne’eman; Emily Willingham, one of the sharpest science writers in the blogosphere; Lydia Brown, a prolifically articulate and thoughtful 18-year-old self-advocate at Georgetown University; Todd Drezner, director of Loving Lampposts, a groundbreaking documentary on autism and neurodiversity from a father’s perspective; and the editors of Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism, which is my personal recommendation for parents to read after their son or daughter’s diagnosis.

The ideas generously offered here — from outlines for education and public-policy reform, to calls for more 24-hour businesses and innovative assistive technology, to persuasive arguments from the trenches for transformations of attitude — are a road map to a more equitable neurodiverse society that will help all 88 out of 88 kids to maximize their creative potential.

Lydia Brown

Lydia Brown is an Autistic student at Georgetown University who interns for the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. She blogs at Autistic Hoya.

1. Accept us. Autism is a part of who we are. As sure as skin color or sexual orientation, we cannot change being Autistic. Acceptance starts by understanding that we are not broken, defective, or diseased. We do not need to be fixed or cured. There is nothing wrong with us. Yes, autism is a disability, and yes, some Autistic people are very severely disabled. Accepting our autism does not mean ignoring or denying disability; it means accepting us for who we are, as we are.

2. Respect us. We are people, fellow human beings. We deserve to be treated with the same respect afforded to our non-Autistic peers. Respect starts by understanding that we are full and complete human beings, with individual personalities, life experiences, goals, and preferences. We deserve an education, access to communication, and a place in society as we become adults. We deserve to live without fear of being abused, manipulated, or hurt. We are not less than.

3. Support us. Because we are disabled in varying degrees and in multiple ways, we need support, services, and accommodations to successfully navigate a world not made for us. Supporting us starts by understanding that we are usually the people who can best define what types of support and services we need, especially once we become adults. Some of us may need services throughout school and or higher education. Some of us need help with seeking and keeping employment. Some of us need help with living independently or semi-independently, or with activities of daily life. Without appropriate supports, we will not have equal access and opportunity.

4. Include us. We deserve equal access and opportunity throughout the community and throughout our lifespans. Inclusion starts by understanding that we are part of the community and deserve to be included in it. As children, we may not be ready immediately for full inclusion, but full inclusion should be the ultimate goal for every Autistic child. Full integration into the community means living outside institutional or segregated settings and working outside a segregated setting. If we need accommodations or support to fully participate in the community, then provide those accommodations. We need to belong.

5. Listen to us. Too many conversations about us and issues that affect our lives take place without any of us present. Listening starts by recognizing that we have valid, legitimate, and important things to say about our lives and about the issues that affect us collectively. Like any group of people, we are not homogeneous in opinion or ideology, and this diversity is part of the Autistic community. Yet we must be included in any conversation about us, because decisions made by policymakers, school administrators, and grant reviewers often impact our daily lives and our future outlook. We can speak (or write or sign or type) for ourselves, and it’s time to listen.

Shannon and Leo Rosa

Shannon Des Roches Rosa is the mother of an autistic son and an editor of Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism. She blogs at Squidalicious.

1. Watch movies about real autistic people. We need to uproot and replace the Rain Man as a cultural stereotype. Most autistics are not savants — and most autistics are not like most other autistics. I recommend Todd Drezner’s Loving Lampposts as the autism movie that everyone should see; it showcases the wide-ranging and complex abilities of people on the autism spectrum.

2. Be a role model of autism understanding in everyday life. Autistic behaviors like flapping and humming may not make sense to strangers, but they almost always have a function for an autistic person. If you see a person like my son behaving quirkily in a public place, it’s OK to smile and nod — especially to model that understanding and acceptance for kids. (We will move on if our behaviors become disruptive!)

3. Welcome us. Many autistics and autism families feel isolated, even within their extended families and immediate communities. If you aren’t sure what we need or how to include us, ask! We would so much rather be asked — even if we need special arrangements, even if we might have to leave early, even if we have to say no — than never get included at all.

4. Seek autism-friendly autism education resources. When looking for autism education resources, ask yourself: does this agency, book, or website support and respect autistic people and their families? If the answer is “no,” then go elsewhere — no matter how well-established, funded, reviewed, or popular the resource is. I direct people to The Autistic Self-Advocacy Network, Rethinking Autism, Wrong Planet, and Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism as starting points.

5. Demand support for autistic adults transitioning out of school. Autistic people, like anyone else, deserve the best possible quality of life — yet there is no comprehensive infrastructure to support their transition out of school and into the real world; not at my home state of California’s level, not at the federal level. The transition can be especially harrowing for autistics who need significant day-to-day support. My son and his peers deserve better.

Carol and Arren Greenburg

Carol Greenburg is an autistic self-advocate, a consultant for families of kids with special needs, and mother of an autistic son.

1. Respectful autism awareness cards widely available commercially so I don’t have to keep reinventing this wheel for the material I hand people introducing my son or myself. Nothing long-winded or rude, but a teaching moment should not have to start with an apology for autistic behavior.

2. Whatever your own neurostatus, put yourself on a 30-second pause before you react to somebody whose public behavior you find off-putting.

3. Require autism awareness training with the input of autistic self-advocates for every single educator in the US, not just special Ed teachers. I’ve heard this is done in Japan, why can’t other countries follow suit?

4. More retailer sensitivity toward customers with sensory issues. It would be nice if the staff in restaurants and stores would show greater willingness to dim lights and turn down music. Sensory seekers like my son can find loud environments and control their personal music volume. Sensory avoiders like me can’t go inside many public venues.

Paula C. Durbin-Westby, founder of Autism Acceptance Day

Paula C. Durbin-Westby is an autistic self-advocate who blogs at paulacdurbinwestbyautisticblog.blogspot.com.

1. Think of autism as a disability and a difference, not a depersonalized “disorder.” When a person has a disability, that person is still a human being. That person with a disability has a body, a mind, interests, dreams, and goals, even if you can’t discern them. Only people have rights under the Developmental Disabilities Act and other protective legislation.  A disorder can be “combatted,” “cured,” “prevented,” and “eradicated” in any manner (including questionable goals, treatments, or interventions) that researchers and others see fit.  A person with a disability has the right to be who they are and to be accepted for who they are, without the need for a “fix” or “cure.”

2. Realize that not all behavior is intentional communication. What we call “behavior” is what can be observed. Many behaviors cannot be observed; they are internal, and are as important as any outward activity. Do not assume you know the reason for or function of a behavior, especially if you are making the assumption based on why you think a non-autistic person would be doing that same behavior. Behaviors are tied to ways of navigating the world. Where behaviors are simply “odd” or different, there is no need to expend energy on doing anything other than supporting the person and working to end discrimination based on harmless behavioral characteristics. Education should focus on the strengths of Autistic people, not on making us “indistinguishable from our peers.” By the way, our peers are other Autistic people.

3. Augmentative and alternative communication for all! Communication takes more than one person. A communication device is not communication. Research priorities and dollars should refocus on communication needs. A variety of communication systems may be needed, even for a single individual, depending on circumstances. AAC can benefit Autistics who do have speaking capability as well as those who do not use speech to communicate.

4. Eliminate the use of restraints and aversives.  Not every “challenging behavior” needs a take-down response. Consult Autistic adults, who have insights into strategies that can be used to replace the dangerous and trauma-inducing use of these aggressive techniques. Do not automatically restrain people who are self-injuring — use pillows or other soft objects to deflect self-injurious movements. Learn de-escalation techniques. Do not automatically restrain someone who is kicking a piece of furniture. Let them calm down. Help them calm down. Find something for them to kick that is cheaper or less concerning. Restraint is meeting aggression with aggression. What does it teach? Think about that.

5. Teach children to respect and accept differences, including disability. This suggestion has ramifications far beyond the disability world. A general acceptance of others who are different from us is a necessity in a world that is becoming more globalized. Disabilities are no exception. Pretending to have a disability for a day is not enough. Children without disabilities need to meet and engage with those who have disabilities, with someone acting as a facilitator of those encounters where necessary. Children (and all people) need to learn that people with disabilities are both very different from and very similar to them. Find common ground as well as nurturing and appreciating differences, even differences that are considered “difficult.”

Emily Willingham

Emily Willingham is a writer, scientist, partner, and parent. She manages the Double X Science site and blogs at The Biology Files.

“Life is easy to chronicle but bewildering to practice.” — E.M. Forster, novelist

1. Practice perspective taking. It’s ironic that autistic people are expected to have trouble with insight into others when so many people have trouble with insight into autistics. Everyone should try on the other person’s shoes and walk around in them for a while.

2. Practice not judging. It’s hard not to judge. We make countless judgments big and small, every day. But before you judge another person, remind yourself that behavior is communication. Rather than judging, ask yourself, “What is that person’s behavior saying that will help me understand better?”

3. Practice compassion. It’s a corollary to the first two, and it’s not easy. That’s why it takes practice.

4. Practice being yourself. The best possible way to understand how hard anyone’s personal battles can be is to understand how much you fight yours every day. What are your obstacles to just being You? Everyone has them. Behind every social facade is the deeper reality of who we are as individuals. If you find yourself in there and accept that person, you may find it more natural to accept the deeper reality of others, as well.

5. Practice courage. It takes courage to do any of these things. Being the one who takes perspective, works not to judge, practices compassion, and embraces personal individuality is a courageous act that can separate you from social norms and make you stand out, sometimes uncomfortably. Autistic people do it every day, purposely or otherwise. You can, too. Bring your courage, and acceptance easily follows.

Kassiane Sibley

Kassiane Sibley is an autistic activist and gymnastics coach. She blogs at Time to Listen.

1. Stop killing us, and stop glorifying our killers. Every time an autistic person is murdered, people fall over themselves to feel sorry for the killer. That’s pretty terrifying if, like me, you are actually autistic right this minute. Stop. You are not supposed to side with killers, empathy does not work that way.

2. 24-hour EVERYTHING. A lot of us hate crowds. A lot of us are stuck with mass transit. A lot of us are just not daytime people. If things were open 24 hours, not only would we create jobs, but those of us who are at our worst during normal business hours would have the energy to get way more done for ourselves.

3. Turn the volume and the lights down. Just in general. Nothing needs to be as loud or as bright as it is. Save some energy — and save everyone’s processing energy, not just mine.

4. Listen and look more for substance than style. Sometimes it’s hard enough to make what we mean clear, especially if we struggle with language. Please take what I say as what I meant, rather than deciding that I am mean or rude or inconsiderate or whatever for not wrapping it in bubble wrap first. What I said is far more important to comprehension than how I said it — I promise.

5. Tolerance and awareness are nowhere near enough. Teach acceptance, early and often. Little kids take their cues from the adults around them, mostly. Teach them, from a very young age, that some people are not like them and this is AWESOME. Tolerance says, “Well, I have to put up with you.” Awareness says, “I know you have a problem and are working earnestly to fix it.” Acceptance says, “You are amazing because you are you, and not despite your differences, but because of them.” That rocks. Make that the norm.

Jennifer Myers and her son Jack

Jennifer Byde Myers is co-founder of Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism and director of the Myers-Rosa Foundation.

1. Change the word “talk” to “communicate.” When my son was younger, therapists just wanted him to talk. They still call it speech therapy. Talking is overrated. We don’t care if he “talks” we want him to be able to communicate his needs effectively so he can lead the life he wants to live, not the one we think he wants to live.

2. Invest in education. Train the aides that work with people with autism. Fund the supports that are federally mandated in the schools yet remain unfunded by the feds. And invest in the education of every American so we can have a future with people who are knowledgeable and able to teach, provide professional services and lead our country in a way that encourages inclusion and equality.

3. Stop electing bigots. If a political entity is willing to say that gays, or single mothers, or people of color are less valuable to society, or are less worthy to receive respect and fair treatment under the law, how likely is it that a minority that is as diverse as the autism community will receive respect and needed services. Vote for the changes you want to see.

4. Put fences around parks, or at least part of the park. It’s not that I am too lazy to keep an eye on my son, but really, if I mess up for even a minute, he could end up as a hood ornament. I do not take him to parks that don’t have at least three sides blocked from traffic, and consequently he has missed out on a lot of parks. Recreation should be enjoyable for everyone on the outing, and safety is paramount.

5. Create an Autism Corps, like the Peace Corps. Train a generation of young men and women to work with autistics who need support with daily living skills like grocery shopping, or getting to work. Give parents and caretakers respite by providing free or very reduced rate childcare. A trained support network could provide an infrastructure for autistics to lead more independent and fulfilling lives.

Stephen Shore and Leo Rosa

Stephen Shore is an autistic self advocate, author of Beyond the Wall and Understanding Autism for Dummies, and professor at Adelphi University.

1. Move the conversation from tolerance and acceptance of individuals on the autism spectrum to understanding and appreciation. (“Tolerance and acceptance” give a sense of putting up with something, whereas “understanding and appreciation” suggests valuing the contributions that individuals with autism bring to humanity.)

2. Know that if everyone were the same, the world would be a very boring place.

3. Understand that often the most important thing to a person on the autism spectrum about employment is making sure the job is done right. (Suggests that quality of workmanship is often the primary motivator of completing a task.)

4. Recognize that autism is. (Autism is neither good nor bad. It just exists, and it’s up to us to make as much good from the condition as possible).

5. Empower others to lead fulfilling and productive lives. That’s the greatest gift we can give to an individual on the autism spectrum, and to the rest of humanity (That way, the individual on the autism spectrum will be fulfilled and productive, and society will receive the great benefits of that person reaching their highest potential.)

Garret Westlake

Garret Westlake is the Director of the Disability Resource Center at Arizona State University’s Polytechnic campus.  He is also the CEO and Founder of STEM Force Technology, a company that provides coaching and employment services for individuals on the autism spectrum.

1.  Hire someone with autism.  You don’t need to look very far to find exceptional people with exceptional talents.

2.  Learn from someone with autism. You might learn a new skill, a joke, or a fact, but you will definitely gain perspective, understanding, and appreciation for how someone else sees the world.

3.  Abolish average education.  Why do we strive for broad mediocrity in education? Encourage outliers. Create access and accountability in education for student strengths — not weaknesses.

4. Understand autism as diversity. If we still struggle with issues of race, gender, and sexual identity, where are we with accepting disability?  Disability is diversity too.

5.  Laugh.  Everyone needs more of it. We can all do it together.

Ari Ne'eman

Ari Ne’eman is the President and co-founder of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. He currently serves as Policy & Program Evaluation Committee Chair for the National Council on Disability.

It has often been said that the United States lacks a national disability policy — instead, we have dozens of different disability policies, each developed for a different part and level of government and often conflicting with each other. The story of US disability policy is one of the slow development of different laws, programs and infrastructures, many of which still operate based on outdated and obsolete assumptions regarding the degree to which disabled Americans could be included in society. This reality significantly hinders the full realization of the civil and human rights of Autistic people and other people with disabilities. What would a national disability policy look like if it was aligned with the goals of the Americans with Disabilities Act?

1. Values-Based Policymaking: Research and science have always played a large role in disability policymaking, in large part due to a history of disability being viewed mainly as a public health issue. But while science can tell us much about how the world is, it falls to values to tell us how the world should be. When assessing the quality of different forms of service-provision, we should think about both efficacy and ethics.

2. De-Medicalization: Over the course of the last forty years, the de-institutionalization movement has made tremendous progress in closing large residential facilities which segregated disabled people from society, shifting funds into more individualized supports in  local communities. Although this is an important first step, ensuring that people with disabilities have access to choice and self-determination requires more than just moving from larger to smaller housing. It also requires a real sea change in how we approach disability services. We require a shift from the expectations of institutional life — which presumes a hospital environment, in which medical experts make decisions about patients — to the expectations of home life — where staff providing support to a person with a disability are working for the person and the pursuit of their goals and judgement.

3. Equal Protection of Law: Many of the worst injustices faced by people with disabilities would be considered illegal and the source of considerable public outrage were they to occur to a non-disabled person. Federal law allows for people with disabilities to be paid less than minimum wage. States with bans on corporal punishment nonetheless allow the use of “aversive interventions” — the inflicting of pain as a means of behavior modification for children and adults with disabilities — despite the fact that the two are indistinguishable from each other. When disabled people are killed by family members and caregivers, public sympathy is often with the killer, who will frequently receive a more lenient sentence than if they had murdered a non-disabled person. Only when labor laws, protections from abuse and torture, and other relevant legal rights are applied equally for people with and without disabilities will we move forward as a society.

4. High Expectations: Much of our disability policy is predicated on low expectations that can often become self-fulfilling prophecies. Students with disabilities who take the alternative assessment rather than the standard means of assessing student achievement are more likely to be segregated from the general education classroom, less likely to have received any literacy instruction, and frequently lack access to Augmentative and Alternative Communication supports that could help them better perform at their full potential. People on Social Security’s two disability income support programs (Supplemental Security Income and Social Security Disability Insurance) face a maze of bureaucratic regulations that often discourage or prevent attempts to return to the workforce or to save in order to develop assets. Changing the expectations our society has for people with disabilities was one of the main goals of the ADA. Now it is past time for the rest of our country’s disability policy infrastructure to catch up.

5. Disability as Diversity: There is a long history of both the public and private sector working to try to encourage diversity in education, the workforce and elsewhere in society. Unfortunately, people with disabilities are often excluded from these efforts. For example, much of the recent push on the part of the federal government to close disparities in health care outcomes on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation excluded people with disabilities as yet another important under-served population. Many private sector affirmative action programs forget to or deliberately do not include disability, a failure that exists in higher education as well. Fortunately, some progress has been made in this sector, with the Obama Administration making the employment of people with disabilities within the federal workforce and among federal contractors a major priority. More work needs to be done to ensure that whenever we talk about addressing the needs of underserved populations or creating more diverse classrooms and workplaces, people with disabilities are not left out.

Liz Ditz and her grandson

Liz Ditz blogs at I Speak of Dreams.

1. Universal acceptance of the idea that “human abilities are a constellation, not a linear spectrum.” Universal acceptance of the big idea that different brains come with different strengths and weaknesses, and societies need all kinds of minds to be robustly healthy.  This is big-picture neurodiversity, embracing not only autism, but ADHD and other neurodivergencies now called dyslexia, dyscalculia, and so on.

2. Radical restructuring of the American pre-K-12 model along these lines: Make early childhood education a highly-valued, trained, and compensated profession (right now, early-childhood teachers make poverty wages and have little training in elements of recognizing neurodiversity and providing appropriate supports to kids who struggle.)

3. Make high-quality universal early education available to all, including specialized services and remediation, without having to qualify by testing. We know that there are areas in which autistic people (and other neurodiverse people) struggle, and these areas are often evident in very early childhood.  But getting help now requires going through testing, evaluation, and qualifying and continuing to qualify for “services.”  If we had a highly trained cadre of early childhood educators, some if not all of the helpful services would be available as a matter of course to students who needed them.

4. Make pre-K-8 teaching a highly valued, highly trained, and highly compensated profession, adopting some proven elements of the Finnish model:

All teachers have undergraduate degrees in a field of study other than education.

All teachers have graduate degrees in education.

Entry into teacher-training graduate programs is highly selective.

Teachers have several years of post-graduate mentoring with gradually increasing responsibility (as do physicians, with the progression of medical school > internship > residency before independent practice model.) As a result, teaching is a high-status and high-prestige profession, with a great deal of expertise gathered over years, and with continued professional development over time.

5. Eliminate the “wait to fail” and medical model for children experiencing school difficulties. Step in when pupils start to lag behind.

“A factor contributing to the success of the Finnish system is the use of early and powerful intervention when a student begins to fall behind. Frequent diagnostic testing (‘formative testing’) at early stages reveals students who need extra help, and the Finns provide it intensively, with one special-needs teacher for every seven special-needs students in some schools. The McKinsey report points out that, in Finland, about a third of students receive remediation.” — Patrick Basset, “The Finnish Model”

6. Replace the “medical model” with the “diversity model.” It turns out that all kids can learn, given good teachers, early and intensive intervention, and a supportive school and peer culture. U.S. schools need to move from a medical model (learning disabilities) to a diversity model (learning differences), and re-orient themselves to identify, value, and use a student’s strengths as “workarounds” and palliatives to weaknesses.

7. Focus on equity rather than competition.

“Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality. In the Finnish view, as Sahlberg describes it, this means that schools should be healthy, safe environments for children. This starts with the basics. Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.” — Anu Partanenen, What Americans Keep Ignoring about Finland’s School Success, The Atlantic.

Todd and Sam Drezner

Todd Drezner is the father of an autistic son and director of Loving Lampposts: Living Autistic.

1. Anyone who asks “Where are all of the autistic adults?” must make a donation to the Autistic Self Advocacy Network.

2. We should no longer describe autistic people as “high functioning” or “low functioning.” Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously defined pornography by saying “I know it when I see it,” and many of us feel the same way about defining “low functioning” and “high functioning.”  But our instant definitions don’t hold up under scrutiny.

3. Every major autism organization in the country (and every minor one for that matter) should have at least three autistic people on its board.

4. Parents who receive a new autism diagnosis for their child should immediately be issued a copy of Jim Sinclair’s “Don’t Mourn For Us“ and a list of resources to help them.  These should include websites like The Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism, blogs by autistic adults such as Autistic Hoya, and blogs by parents of autistic children like We Go With Him and Mom-NOS.  Should there be additional room on the list, it might also include a few resources to avoid.

5. Fox should immediately cancel “Touch.”

Nick Walker Sensei

Nick Walker is an autistic educator, author, psychologist, activist, parent, and martial arts master. He holds an M.A. in Somatic Psychology from California Institute of Integral Studies, where he currently teaches in the Interdisciplinary Studies program. He is founder and senior instructor of Aikido Shusekai, an aikido dojo in Berkeley, California.

1. De-pathologize autism and autistic people. Autism is a natural form of human neurodiversity. Labeling it as a “mental disorder” or a “disease” has no scientific basis, has no benefit for autistic people or their families, and leads inevitably to stigmatization, shame, and marginalization. Blind people, Deaf people, and many other disabled people get the services and accommodations they need without being labeled as having mental disorders. We don’t have to call autism a disorder or a disease to acknowledge that it’s a disability that can require accommodations. Stop worrying about the latest changes to the DSM criteria, and just remove autism from the DSM entirely, like homosexuality was rightly removed years ago.

2. Use the language of diversity, not the language of pathology. Language matters. The language that is used in talking about autism and autistic people affects how autistic people are perceived — by themselves, by others, by society – and thus how they are treated. In an autistic-friendly world, anyone speaking of autistics would observe the same linguistic conventions that civilized, non-bigoted people observe when speaking of any other social minority group (e.g., African-Americans or gays). You wouldn’t say that an African-American “has negroism” or “suffers from blackness,” so don’t speak of an autistic person as “having” or “suffering from” autism.

3. Forget “normal.” Recognize that when it comes to human diversity — including the diversity of minds — “normal” is a highly subjective, culturally-constructed fiction. Recognize that there is no “normal” mind, and that conformity to the local conception of “normal” is in no way synonymous with health, well-being, or personal fulfillment – and is, in fact, often in direct conflict with those things. A healthy, thriving autistic person looks very different from a healthy, thriving non-autistic person. In nurturing the development of autistic individuals, the goal of parents, educators, therapists, etc. should be to produce healthy, thriving, autistic people, rather than autistic people trained to stifle their true selves in order to pass as “normal.”

4. Equal protection under the law, broadly interpreted and strongly enforced. Recognize autistic people as a social minority group, grant them the same legal protections that are (or should be) extended to ethnic minorities, interpret those protections as broadly as possible, and rigorously enforce them. When an autistic person is abused for acting autistic, prosecute it as a hate crime. Anytime an ABA “therapist” grabs an autistic child’s hands to stop her from stimming, prosecute it as criminal assault and as a hate crime. Individuals and organizations that speak of autism as a “disease” or “tragedy,” and talk of “curing” it, should be prosecuted for hate speech and incitement to violence, just as if they were advocating a “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem.” Anyone involved in seeking or implementing prenatal tests for autism or any other sort of prenatal prevention of autism should be prosecuted in international court under the Genocide Convention, which classifies as genocide any attempt to prevent births within a targeted group.

5. Work for global peace and economic justice. Many non-autistic parents worry that if they don’t subject their autistic kids to extensive (and expensive) “treatments” to bring them closer to “normal,” the kids will never be able to take care of their own basic survival needs, and will end up in awful institutions or on the streets. This is an entirely legitimate concern. But the reason it’s a concern is that we live in a world in which the forces of global capitalism have replaced the true spirit of community with an artificial sense of competition, isolation, and “every man for himself,” and in which all but the most wealthy are kept in a constant condition of anxiety and fear of scarcity. This is not the natural state of humanity, and not the way the world has to be. Every disabled person in the U.S. could be supported for life on a fraction of the money that our government spends killing people in the Middle East each year – to say nothing of the funds that would be available if we made giant corporations and the wealthiest 1% of Americans pay their fair share of taxes. Instead of working so hard to change autistic people in the name of helping them survive in a cruel world, why not work to make the world less cruel?

Julia Bascom

Julia Bascom is an autistic self-advocate who blogs at Just Stimming.

Obviously a lot more than these five things needs to be changed — but without these five, the rest won’t matter.

1. Stop killing us.

2. Stop abusing us.

3. Start recognizing our communication.

4. Slow down. Value us.

5. Stop killing us.

Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg

Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg is a wife, mother, writer, and artist on the autism spectrum. She blogs at Journeys with Autism and edits and publishes the site Autism and Empathy.

1. Understand that there are many ways to communicate, and that one is not better than another. I can’t read nonverbal signals. I have auditory delays. I need a little extra time to find the words. Sometimes, my words go up over mountains and down through valleys before I know that I’ve made myself clear. It’s not going to change, and my inability to change should not mean social exclusion. Please remember that I have the same need for connection and inclusion as you do.

2. Slow down when you speak. I need time to process what I hear and to come up with a proper response. Just as an able-bodied person should give space to someone attempting to board a bus in a wheelchair, or a hearing person should take a moment to write back and forth with a Deaf person ordering food in a restaurant, so a non-autistic person should take a moment to listen to and to communicate with an autistic person.

3. Remember that talking with a disabled person is not an heroic act. There is absolutely nothing required in the way of superhuman patience to communicate with a person with a disability, and stopping to listen to someone with atypical communication, far from being a charitable act, is an act of bringing a fellow human being into human community. Social inclusion and interaction, when someone desires them, are basic human rights that no disabled person should have to request, and that no able-bodied person with an ounce of ethical understanding should refuse.

4. Go outside your comfort zone. However uncomfortable, awkward, or annoying it may feel to deal with someone who puts out unexpected nonverbal signals (or none at all), or who speaks in an atypical manner (or not at all), it doesn’t hold a candle to how excruciating it is to go through the world isolated because people just feel too uncomfortable, awkward, or annoyed to deal with you. The discomfort, awkwardness, and annoyance of able-bodied people may only last a minute, or a half hour, or an hour, and then they go back to their regularly scheduled lives. Please imagine how it feels to keep meeting up with a world full of people who turn away, every day, because their discomfort trumps our longing.

5. Put yourself in our shoes. It is vital that able-bodied people consider how soul-wearying it is to keep trying until one finds those people who simply accept the awkwardness — my awkwardness, their awkwardness, our awkwardness — and make a connection. It hurts the heart to keep going out and trying. Ask yourself: What is keeping you from extending a word, a listen, a desire for connection to us? And how does your failure to use your social skills to bring other human beings into community translate into a social disability located in autistic people, rather than in the able-bodied world?

Charles Duhigg, New York Times reporter and author of "The Power of Habit"

For a species obsessed with free will, choices, and options, we spend a surprising amount of time acting like zombies. We’re already sipping our morning coffee before we notice we’ve navigated to the kitchen on automatic pilot. We pull our smart phones from our pockets while the friend beside us says something that deserves our full attention. We can be halfway to the bar before we ask ourselves if we truly need another drink.

Indeed, we spend more than 40 percent of our precious waking hours engaged in habitual actions [PDF], according to a 2006 study at Duke University. Welcome to the machine.

That’s one reason noxious habits like smoking, overeating, and meth addiction are so hard to break. Once the behavior that perpetuates them is set in motion, the voice of willpower utters its dissent too faintly and too late. It’s as if our brains store habitual behavior in a locked box to prevent tampering by the more mindful angels of our nature — even at the cost of our health, our self-respect, our reputations and jobs, our marriages, and our personal survival.

In his provocative and brilliantly written new book, The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg — a reporter for the New York Times — pries open the box with the help of recent research and finds surprising good news: Even the most thoughtless and self-destructive cycles of behavior can be changed, if you understand how habits are formed and stored in memory.

Duhigg breaks down the sequence of ritualized behavior (which he calls the habit loop) into three component parts: the cue, the routine, and the reward. The cue is the trigger that sets the sequence in motion. Perhaps it’s a certain time of day when you tell yourself it’s time for your daily chocolate-chip cookie (that was Duhigg’s particular jones). Perhaps it’s email from your boss that makes you want to dash out for another smoke. Perhaps it’s the chiming bells and flashing lights of a crowded casino, designed to make a room full of incremental losers look like winners who are hitting jackpots all the time. The routine is the behavior itself, which can be positive (like a daily running habit) or harmful (like gambling away the family savings). And the third part is the reward — the goal of the behavioral loop, which your brain’s pleasure centers gauge to determine if a sequence of behavior is worth repeating and storing in a lockbox of habit.

A pint of butterfat and sugar with a Ben and Jerry’s label, a spurt of oxytocin when you see that @jayrosen_nyu or @ebertchicago has retweeted you, that tingling in your legs after a strenuous workout, the numbing rush of a fix, the first puffs of an American Spirit… it’s all the same to the basal ganglia, four lumps of gray matter in the forebrain that encode highly rewarding behavior for easy repetition.

Though routinized behavior is often framed in terms of the problems it can cause, Duhigg points out that habit formation is an evolutionarily keen strategy for managing the limited throughput of our conscious awareness. If we couldn’t even brush our teeth or drive without having to ponder the nuances of every action, our brains would require more real estate in decision-making areas like the prefrontal cortex. One advantage of “chunking” behavior into automatic sequences stored in memory — Duhigg tells us in a typically enlightening aside — is that our skulls can be smaller, ensuring that more mothers survive giving birth. Darwin FTW.

But when you become a slave of your most destructive habit loops — blowing through the last of the family credit at Harrah’s, or watching yourself down another half-dozen martinis like a hipster robot, though you know it’s wrecking your marriage — it’s time to make a change. Duhigg explains why our usual way of tackling the problem — telling ourselves “I’ve got to quit doing this, now!” and berating ourselves when we don’t — is often doomed to failure. Then he maps out a more effective path toward enduring habit change that focuses not on trying to scrap the routine all at once, but on becoming aware of the cues and manipulating the rewards. The encouraging news is that success in making modest alterations in behavior (which Duhigg calls “small wins”) creates a ripple effect into other areas of your life. Sometimes the most effective way to quit smoking might be to start walking the ten blocks to the office every other day instead of taking the subway. Small wins beget larger ones.

The Power of Habit transcends the self-help genre by examining ways to prompt behavior change not only in individuals, but also in organizations, multinational corporations, and society at large. One of the most fascinating sections of the book analyzes the way that Rosa Parks’ respected role in the social networks of Montgomery, Alabama provided a foundation for the triumphant 1955 boycott of segregated buses that kickstarted the modern civil rights movement. It’s a great example of how one woman’s refusal to go along with the oppressive habits of society — in a community that was ripe for change — helped transform the world.

In the wide-ranging conversation with Duhigg that follows, we talk about what inspired him to write the book, the way habits can distort your perceptions of the environment, how public-health campaigns go wrong, the factors contributing to the success of the movement for marriage equality — and how a busy New York Times reporter finally conquered his chocolate-chip cookie addiction.

Steve Silberman:  How did you become interested in habits?

Charles Duhigg:  About a decade ago, I was in Iraq. I went there because I thought it would be fun to be in a war zone. It turned out to be — not fun. I quickly discovered that one of the best ways to be in a war zone is to get to a place where people aren’t shooting at you. So I went down to a city called Kufa, about an hour south of Baghdad by helicopter. There was a major there. I found out that he had effectively stopped riots from happening in the city by influencing the habits of the crowds there. Instead of trying to tackle the job of stopping the riots in an abstract way, he banned kebab stands from the public square, and eventually the crowds just dispersed on their own. No more riots.

Silberman: That’s fascinating.

Duhigg: I thought so too. I basically had two goals when I came back from Iraq. Number one was that I wanted to learn more about the science of habits. Number two was that I wanted to lose weight. I felt powerless over my eating habits, so I figured learning about habits would be a way to do two things at once.

Silberman:  What were your most surprising discoveries about what drives habitual behavior?

Duhigg:  The first surprising thing was how malleable habits are. We’ve only really learned this in the last decade by learning about the neurology of habit formation. We’ve discovered how much habits can be changed by focusing on the three parts of what I call the habit loop: the cue, the routine, and the reward. You’re much more effective if you focus on understanding the cue and the reward. Then the problematic behavior — the routine — can be shifted much more easily.

Silberman: That’s a very different mindset from saying, as I do hourly, “Oh my God — I’ve got to lose weight! I’ve got to get in shape!” Why is it better to focus on the cue and the reward, rather than the routine itself?

Duhigg:  I think when most people think about changing their habits, they focus on the problematic behavior, on changing the habit itself. But there’s only so much willpower we can expend in a day. When someone says to themselves, “OK, I’ve got to get in shape,” that’s an almost insurmountable mountain. But if you focus on the cues and rewards, making a change is more manageable. We know from studies that almost all cues — the stimuli that elicit the habitual behavior — fall into one of five categories. It’s time of day, or a certain place, or a certain emotion, or the presence of certain people, or a preceding action that’s become habitual or ritualized. This gives us a way to create an exercise habit that doesn’t require saying “I’ve got to change my whole life” and beating up on yourself. Instead, what if you just say, “Every morning, or when I come home from work, I’m going to put on my running shoes.  I’m not even necessarily going for a run. I’m just putting on my running shoes. That’s going to be my new habit.” If you do that a couple of days a week, eventually you’re going to go running.

Charles Duhigg's "The Power of Habit." Photo courtesy of Random House.

It’s little shifts. Once you start running, you’re going to get into a running habit, right? But it starts with this small win. If as soon as you get home from work, you put on your running shoes — even if you feel stupid about it! — you’re creating a cue. The benefits of that small win will start cascading through your life.

Then you focus on the rewards. The first couple of times you go running, you’re not going to enjoy it. No one enjoys it the first time they run. So you have to give yourself a piece of chocolate when you get back from the run. You have to have some immediate reward.  And we know from studies that within two weeks, the intrinsic reward of running — the endocannabinoids unleashed by exercising — are going to become enough of a reward to create that habit. But you have to trick your brain into it by giving yourself a piece of chocolate the first couple times. And it has to be a reward you really enjoy. You can’t say, “I’m going to start running, and my reward is going to be a salad and kale chips.” No one really enjoys that.

Silberman: I love that concept of small wins. Particularly your notion that the benefits of making a modest change cascade through other areas of your life — like if you start exercising regularly or eating a healthier lunch, it may become easier to quit smoking. That’s inspiring.

I’d like to talk about cues for a moment. A few years ago, I interviewed a couple of brilliant neuroscientists named Kent Berridge and Terry Robison, who study the role of dopamine in generating anticipations of pleasure. We were talking about a phenomenon they dubbed “incentive salience,” which is the way that subconscious expectations of pleasure can highlight certain stimuli in the environment — cues, as you call them in the book. A cigarette smoker can pick up the odor of an ashtray two rooms away, and it starts their nicotine craving going. An alcoholic can walk through a neighborhood, and without even being aware of it, start generating an internal map of where all the bars and liquor stores are, in case he needs to slip away for a drink later.

Duhigg: Yeah. I looked up Kent Berridge after you mentioned him to me last year. It’s really interesting stuff. In the last chapter of my book, I talk about Reza Habib, who does a lot of gambling studies. In particular, he does fMRI studies of people watching slot machines. The brains of pathological gamblers tend to react as if near-wins are wins, while the brains of non-pathological gamblers react as if near-wins are what they really are — losses. It’s a similar phenomenon to incentive salience, I think. Basically people are seeing the same thing, but they’re seeing it two totally different ways, because of what’s jumping out in their mind. It makes sense to me that if you have a cue around a certain habit, when you see an environment that has that cue in it, you’re hypersensitive to that cue. It’s going to color everything you see.

Slot machines. Photo by Flickr user ragingwire.

I have a couple of friends who are long-time recovered alcoholics. Sometimes I’ll be talking about taking certain paths through the city and I’ll ask one of them, “Can you tell me every bar that’s on this route?” And he’ll be like, “Yup, I can tell you where every single bar is in that area. In fact, I can tell you the route I’ll take so I have to pass as few of them as possible.”

Silberman: That’s interesting. You talk in your book about how you weaned yourself from your daily chocolate-chip cookie habit. I know how hard that can be, but is that really the most intense addiction you’ve ever struggled with? Did you ever smoke?

Duhigg:  No, I’ve never had a smoking habit. But on the other hand, I do feel like I’ve pretty much struggled with my weight my entire life. It drove me crazy because I felt like I was a very successful person, so I should be able to… I should be able to master this. And it wasn’t until I started doing this research that I was able to basically change how I eat and how I exercise.

And what’s crazy is, within a year it totally shifted. I’ve lost 21 pounds in the last year, I’m running all the time, and I’m actually going be in a marathon later this year. I should have been able to do this ten years ago, right? If anything, I had more energy ten years ago. But understanding the structure of the habit loop has made a huge difference in my life.

Silberman:  That’s great. When I was reading the sections of your book about the importance of belief in behavior change, I was reminded of the placebo effect, which I wrote a long article about in Wired. As you probably know, the placebo effect is a physiological response — not just a psychological response — brought about by the belief that you’re getting medical treatment, even if all the man in the white coat is giving you is sugar pills. Why is something as abstract as “belief” so important when you’re trying to change behavior?

Duhigg:  That’s a fascinating parallel. I wonder if the placebo effect is stronger in groups of people who talk about how they’re taking a pill versus people who are just taking a pill on their own?

Silberman:  Absolutely. In his book Placebo Effects, researcher Fabrizio Benedetti talks about how hearing about the alleged effects of a drug from other people is one of the most placebogenic stimuli around.

Duhigg:  Right — it’s like in high school, when everybody’s doing drugs together, and the drug really turns out to be flour, but they keep talking about how much they feel it coming on.

Silberman:  ”I’m soooo high!” Hearing that from friends is enough to make some of the kids feel the effects of a faux drug.

Duhigg: There’s a woman named Lea Ann Kaskutas who is an alcoholism researcher in California. She’s one of the old-school AA researchers — and there aren’t that many of those, because people are so dismissive of AA. She said something to me that I think is really powerful. She was talking about why it’s important that AA takes place in a group. Obviously, part of it is the social support, right? There’s someone telling you “Good job!” and giving you positive feedback. But she also said that even if someone knows intellectually that they can quit alcohol, they’re going to forget that at some point. Emotionally, they’re not going to believe that they can do it. But then they’re gonna be sitting in an AA meeting, and they’re going to look across the room, and they’re going to say to themselves, “You know that guy Joe? Joe is a moron. If even Joe can quit, then I can definitely quit.” I don’t even know what you would call that kind of motivation. It’s the other side of the social support coin.

Silberman:  I loved how you analyzed the role of Rosa Parks‘ social networks in the Montgomery bus boycott, and how those networks played such an important part in the early success of the Civil Rights Movement. I wonder if you see any parallels in the gay-marriage movement, which has been amazingly successful in moving the mainstream toward favoring equality for all, despite the efforts of well-paid professional bigots like Maggie Gallagher of the National Organization for Marriage in spreading a lot of nonsense about how long-term, devoted gay couples are a “threat” to marriage or kids.

Rosa Parks at ground zero of the civil rights movement, Montgomery, Alabama, 1955.

Duhigg:  It’s happening amazingly quickly too, right? I was just talking to Michael Barbaro, one of our reporters who covers this issue, and I was saying  there needs to be a book about the gay-marriage movement. It must be working in the same ways that the early civil-rights movement did. We know that for a movement to take hold, for it to get widespread support, there are certain things that need to happen. It feels like most people who favor equality, when they talk to pollsters, tend to say things like, “I know someone who’s gay.”

Silberman:  That’s exactly what occurred to me when I read your book. I think the most powerful, transformative thing that gay-rights pioneers like Harvey Milk did was to urge every gay person to come out of the closet. The result of that push for public candor is that now everybody either knows a gay person or a gay couple themselves, or knows someone who knows a gay couple. That makes the marriage issue personal. Who wouldn’t want their Aunt Rose to be able to finally wed her friend Marian, and have all the rights and responsibilities of legal matrimony, when they’ve been devoted to one another for 30 years?

Look at Dick Cheney. He’s pro-gay marriage because his daughter is gay and he naturally wants her to have her best shot at happiness. I think you’re so right about how social ties and networks accelerate social change.

I don’t think it’s possible to deny gay couples marriage rights unless you turn them into something less than human in your mind, as Gallagher and GOP candidates like Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney do. Groups like NOM openly admit that they depend on the depersonalizing phrase “redefining marriage” to turn voters off to the idea of equality. They fight to get that precise language into these hateful amendments they’re bankrolling everywhere, because if it becomes obvious that you’re rewriting the state constitution to perpetuate the notion that gays are second-class citizens, most voters instinctively know it’s wrong. It’s as if NOM was waging a campaign against integration by claiming that letting black kids go to the same schools as whites is “redefining education.” My husband Keith and I didn’t redefine the traditional concept of marriage. We embraced it eagerly and enthusiastically the first chance we could.

Mormon mom breaks the homophobia habit. Photo by Steve Silberman.

Duhigg:  Did you find that people reacted to you guys differently once you were married?

Silberman:  Not that much. We’ve been together for 17 years, so everyone knows us as a couple. But what’s amazed me is how marriage transformed my own experience of our relationship.

Duhigg:  That’s interesting.

Silberman:  Yeah. One reason why I’m such an advocate for equality is that marriage has strengthened our relationship in ways that I could not have predicted. It put an end to a certain kind of equivocation: “Well, I hope this relationship works out.” Marriage gives you a solid rock to stand on. Of course, it turns out not to be so solid after all for about half the straight couples that get married these days, but for us anyway, it has enabled us to feel more secure and more deeply woven into the fabric of our extended families in many different ways. That’s one reason I think equality is so important.

Duhigg:  I completely agree. I started dating my wife in college, so I feel like getting married was always an inevitable possibility, because it’s always been legal for us. But what’s astounding to me is exactly what you said — how much it changes the relationship to say, OK, there are certain questions that are off the table now.

Silberman: Totally. So back to your book. We’re a society that struggles with the fact that so many people have damaging addictions like smoking and alcoholism. Knowing what we do about habit formation, is there anything that the government could do to discourage smoking, beyond printing pictures of bloody lungs on cigarette packs? Is there any way that social networks or interventions could be employed to make it easier for people to change their lives in healthy ways?

Duhigg:  Absolutely. There’s a little part in the book when I talk about the only time that the government successfully changed people’s eating patterns — when they got people to eat organ meats during World War 2. Granted, that was a weird time, but they did it by basically leveraging existing habits — by saying, “Let us teach you how to put kidney into your meatloaf.”

Rationing poster from World War Two.

So many campaigns that the government does right now essentially say, “Change your entire behavior” — without paying any attention to the cues and rewards, and without saying, “Let me explain to you why your family eats at McDonalds three times a week. I know that you don’t want to do that, and I know that just telling you not to do it isn’t going to work, so let me explain. Here’s where things are breaking down and you’re losing the time.”

Or telling people that if they set up the ingredients on their counter before they leave for work, it’s gonna be a lot easier to start making dinner when they get home. This is practical advice that no PSA ever includes, right? Why not? Why not have Michael Pollan talking about how to shop at the grocery store? Why isn’t that on ads in the subway?

They say “Read to your kids,” which is great, because we know if you read to your kids, they’ll do better in school. But that’s not how you create a habit. It’s just ordering people around. You have to say, “Before your kid goes to sleep, have a book on their pillow. Put it there in the morning so it’s a cue for you to pick up. And you know what? You don’t have to read the whole book, just read three pages. The reward is to let yourself watch TV for a half an hour afterwards, because you did a good job. That’s how to create a habit.

Silberman: One of the revelations of reading The Power of Habit was realizing how many hours of the day I spend running in zombie mode, just carrying out these behavioral loops. Did you experience a subjective difference in awareness of your own behavior after writing this book?

Duhigg's nemesis (New York Times recipe). Photo courtesy of Flickr user Jamison_Judd.

Duhigg:  Yeah, I did. I became much more aware of why I was doing things habitually. I became more aware of how to experiment in a finding a way to change my cookie habit. I also I got to a place where I could edit the book anywhere. I would start editing and get drawn into the text immediately. A lot of that was creating these work habits, or really, thinking habits to help me focus. I was much more conscious and deliberate about choosing cues and rewards. When I focused, I rewarded myself.

I think a lot of our instinct is to think that doing good work means just powering through it, then getting home and powering through the work some more. Instead, I spent some time really thinking about, “What do I enjoy during the day? What rewards are genuinely rewarding?” Making sure I gave rewards to myself for habits I wanted to encourage. Those behaviors definitely became easier. So writing the book changed my subjective experience of my life a lot.

Workout time. Photo courtesy of Flickr user maHidoodi.

The Figure 5 in Gold, Charles Demuth, 1928

“I have this rather freakish gift of seeing letters in color,” novelist Vladimir Nabokov told a BBC interviewer in 1962. “It’s called color hearing. Perhaps one in a thousand has that.”

The Russian-born author of Lolita, Pale Fire, and other exuberantly witty books claimed that when he was a child, he saw the number 5 as red, and that he had continued to perceive numbers and letters as having their own distinctive hues.  The interviewer asked Nabokov how the initials of his own name appeared to him. He replied:

V is a kind of pale, transparent pink: I think it’s called, technically, quartz pink: this is one of the closest colors that I can connect with the V. And the N, on the other hand, is  a greyish-yellowish oatmeal color. But a funny thing happens: my wife has this gift of seeing letters in color, too, but her colors are completely different.  There are, perhaps, two or three letters where we coincide, but otherwise the colors are quite different.

It turned out, we discovered one day, that my son, who was a little boy at the time — I think he was 10 or 11 — sees letters in colors, too.  Quite naturally he would say, “Oh, this isn’t that color,  this is this color,” and so on. Then we asked him to list his colors and we discovered that in one case, one letter which he sees as purple, or perhaps mauve, is pink to me and blue to my wife. This is the letter M. So the combination of pink and blue makes lilac in his case. Which is as if genes were painting in aquarelle.

Nabokov’s “color hearing” — a curious neurological phenomenon known as grapheme-color synesthesia — also found its way into his books. In Bend Sinister, the protagonist, Adam Krug, says that the word “loyalty” reminds him of “a golden fork lying in the sun on a smooth spread of pale yellow silk.”

In his autobiography, Speak, Memory, Nabokov launches into a virtuoso synaesthetic reverie: ”The long a of the English alphabet… has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French a evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes hard g (vulcanized rubber) and r (a sooty rag being ripped). Oatmeal n, noodle-limp l, and the ivory-backed hand-mirror of o take care of the white… Passing on to the blue group, there is steely x, thundercloud z and huckleberry h. Since a subtle interaction exists between sound and shape, I see q as browner than k, while s is not the light blue of c, but a curious mixture of azure and mother-of-pearl.”

One of the ravishing pleasures of reading Nabokov is sensing a deep rightness in his word choices (even in English, which was his second language) that goes beyond having a knack for finding le mot juste to make his prose cohere at every level: phonetic, orthographic, and semiotic. Surely the atypical wiring of his brain gave Nabokov an advantage in his quest for this comprehensive unity.

Synaesthetic alphabet

Few writers have mapped this uncanny phenomenon with such obsessive precision, but the gift of multiplex senses turns out to be not as freakish and rare as Nabokov believed. Researchers have learned that even chimpanzees associate low notes with darker colors with high notes with brighter ones. In a recent paper in Psychological Science, David Eagelman of the Baylor College of Medicine argues [PDF link] that synaesthetic ability falls along a spectrum, the end product of multiple processes of neuronal excitation, inhibition, and pruning in the brain gone awry, “all of which happen to converge on the similar result of unusual perceptual or cognitive pairings.”

Another recent study raises the possibility that we are all born with a capacity for sensory crosstalk that diminishes as we get older and our neural networks are streamlined for greater efficiency. Nabokov also believed that we are all born synaesthetes, but because science hadn’t yet elaborated the concept of neuroplasticity, he blamed the loss of the gift on “stupid parents” telling their kids, “It’s all nonsense. An A isn’t black, a B isn’t brown. Don’t be absurd.”

In fact, however, hacking the firewalls between senses may turn out to be a useful skill that parents could teach kids who were not born that way. In an ingeniously designed blog post, Macquarie University autism researcher Jon Brock discussed a recent report by V.S. Ramachandran in Neurocase [PDF link] of a young man with Asperger’s syndrome who was instructed to associate emotions with colors to improve his social perspicacity. As he got older, the young man learned to gauge how he felt about a person by the color of the “halo” around the face.

Nabokov was not alone in his conscious employment of his gift to serve his art. Master painter and digital artist David Hockney relies on his synaesthesic abilities to generate hyper-vivid images that glow with an almost child-like visual innocence. He told author David Burton that when he was designing a set featuring the image of a tree for a production at the Metropolitan Opera of a piece by Maurice Ravel, he listened to the relevant section of the score and “the tree painted itself.”

Felled Trees by David Hockney

Likewise, the genre-stretching jazz, folk-rock, and avant-garde music of Duke Ellington, Syd Barrett, Alexander Scriabin, and Oliver Messaien [PDF link] was allegedly energized by each composers’ bimodal perceptions. In his epic multi-volume manifesto Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d’ornithologie (“Treatise on rhythm, color and bird song”), Messiaen described chords as “blue-violet rocks, speckled with little grey cubes, cobalt blue, deep Prussian blue, highlighted by a bit of violet-purple, gold, red, ruby, and stars of mauve, black and white.”

For a drearily mono-sensory person like me, it’s tough to read these accounts without feeling a (sour-apple green?) twinge of envy. What would it be like to live in a world in which each prime number generated its own harmonics, every letter of the alphabet was associated with a characteristic odor (the freshly laundered scent of L, the fulsome perfume of Q), and Miles Davis’ “Flamenco Sketches” (on Kind of Blue, natch) shimmered like an iridescent watercolor over the heads of the bored baristas at the local coffee shop?

Color music notation

Now a prolific multimedia artist and writer named Perry Hall [Flash required], who was born with his own version of Nabokov’s quirky gift, has developed an iPhone/iPad app called Sonified that enables even those low on the synaesthetic spectrum to experience light, colors, and movement morphing into sounds.

I first became interested in Hall’s work seeing a series of haunting HD videos made in 2006 that he called Material Study, featuring light dancing on the surfaces of ferrofluids that surge and swell like some kind of protean lava. While convalescing from a bout of Lyme disease, Hall decided that he needed to set his synaesthesia loose in the wild, as he puts it. He and his digital collaborators developed software that siphons the luminance and color values from the video cameras in iPhones and iPads (only later-generation devices like the iPhone 4, 4S and iPad 2 will work correctly) and uses them to trigger stereo samples from a library of CD-quality audio composed for the purpose.

Perry Hall, artist, synaesthete, and designer of Sonified

When Hall — who helped create the lush “painted world” sequence in What Dreams May Come, the 1998 film starring Robin Williams – told me about Sonified in email, I knew I had to try it myself. After downloading it from the App Store, I boarded a streetcar here in San Francisco, slipped on a pair of headphones, and aimed my phone out the window just as the train streaked past a row of brightly painted Victorian houses, accelerating through shafts of sunlight and shade on its way into a tunnel.

The effect of the audio-visual-kinesthetic link-up was unexpectedly profound. Instead of feeling like Sonified was imposing its digital soundtrack on the world, I felt I was accessing a layer of reality that is normally hidden from us. It was like a little dose of Morpheus’ red pill in The Matrix.

Sonified screen shot

To give potential users a foretaste of the experience, Hall has uploaded videos to YouTube here, here, here, and here. But experiencing Sonified second-hand rather misses the point. The thrill of using the app is having it respond to optical nuances in real time as you move through spaces that come alive in new and surprising ways. Hall’s ethereal sonic palette may be a bit New Agey for some tastes, but the software offers a teasing glimpse of how much more we could be doing with these powerful multimedia platforms in our pockets. Sonified takes the often mundanely-applied concept of augmented reality (we were promised Terminator vision and got Plaxo QR codes instead) a step closer to the radical departure from sensory business-as-usual that 18th century multimedia pioneer William Blake described in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?

Glad Day or the Dance of Albion, William Blake, circa 1794

I asked Hall, who lives in western Massachusetts, what it’s like to walk around every day with naturally augmented senses.

Steve Silberman: When did you figure out that you experience the world differently from most people?

Perry Hall: I’ve been experiencing two different kinds of synaesthesia since I was about 10 years old. The first is “colored hearing,” where sounds become very visual; and the other is a milder type of synaesthesia that is more directly connected to Sonified, in which images, color, and spaces like landscapes inspire tones and sounds. Both types are very emotional for me, and define a profound beauty that compels me to write music or create visual works of art that are reflections of it.

When walking through certain kinds of terrain — usually those involving vast spaces or interactions of light and color — these tones will become present. It’s usually in a natural environment, such as a beach, landscape, or other place where deep space and light can play, stretch, and unfold with a kind of purity. But it’s always there, at least in the background.  I was just in Wales taking a train along the Irish Sea, the landscapes that Turner captured in his paintings. I was filled with a lot of sounds as I moved through this environment.

Wreckers Coast of Northumberland, Joseph Mallord William Turner, circa 1836

I feel an intense identification with these spaces, as if the distance and distinction between myself and the environment is collapsing, and I identify with the sky or landscape and lose myself. The sounds that come from this environment blur the distinction between seeing and hearing into a single point. Visual dynamics create sonic dynamics — the two are joined, like a mirror, with visual qualities on one side and sonic qualities on the other. When the light slowly fades, the sounds fade; as the light shifts, increases, or decreases, the sounds shift equally. A circuit is made between seeing and hearing, but it’s not seeing and hearing, it’s see-hearing, seering, hearseeing — something distinct from merely a combination of the two senses that we think of as separate.

Silberman: What inspired you to try to make these experiences available to others?

Hall: Eighteen months ago, I was diagnosed with Stage 2 Lyme disease. I had it for over a year, including a fever that lasted for four months. Finding myself in bed, wondering what was going to happen, I had time to think. I realized it was important for me to make this strange and wonderful experience accessible to other people. I came up with a means of creating a “synaesthetic engine” that could translate light and color into sound. I wanted to put this engine into a camera anyone could use anywhere, rather than putting it in a gallery or museum. I wanted people to be able to walk through a desert or a city, to lay in bed or sit on a train, and have the same kind of experiences I can have anywhere. Knowing I was stuck in bed, a friend gave me an iPhone to play around with, and I saw it had all the pieces that I needed to set synaesthesia loose in the wild.

Silberman: How did you go about designing the software?

Hall: First I created the design documents — a set of charts showing one-to-one relationships between light and an audio mixer. You can look at a lot of artists and thinkers — going back to Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Cardano, and Newton — who made similar charts, conceiving of various schemes to show relationships between color and sound. It’s a huge subject in science and history. For me, it was a little more simple — I was just trying to grasp the working parts of an experience I’d been having my whole life. In designing Sonified, I could always ask myself, “Is that what this color sounds like to me? Does that audio-visual behavior make sense? Is it the truth?” That kept me on course.

When I felt better,  I rolled up my sleeves and recorded 500 short pieces of music. I selected which ones were the most visual, and which worked together to create a true sense of what synesthesia is like. That process proved really interesting. What does red sound like? Blue? Green? Pitch black? Pure white light? I felt like I could write music for each color for the rest of my life.

Still from Perry Hall's video series Material Study, paint and ferrofluid, 2006

In general, the darker something is, the lower it sounds; the brighter, the more high-pitched. Blue and violet are the lowest colors to me; orange and yellow are the highest. Each visual element also has a temperature — orange, reds and yellows are hotter, while greens and blues are cooler.  Each visual quality or color is a timbre, a sonic texture, a pulse, a wave, an ambience, building off of the harmonic series, like stacking harmonics off of a string in a variety of timbres over many registers. But the most important thing is that the visuals and sounds are synched, locked, translated — in a one-to-one relationship in their behavior, proportion and dynamics.

I came to think about synaesthesia more poetically than scientifically. Instead of trying to create an app that was like a Geiger counter, I realized it was better to try and create something more like a guitar — a musical instrument rather than a scientific one. When something felt very subjectively right and truthful to my own experience of synaesthesia, I went with that, regardless of whether it fit into a pre-existing template of how “light relates to sound.”

Silberman: What kinds of feedback have you gotten from Sonified users?

Hall: Just about every person smiles when they put the headphones on and start moving the camera around.  How could they not get it? It’s what they do all the time anyway, seeing and hearing. They’re just doing it in a different way. I get the sense that they’re feeling something I’ve felt. That’s the greatest thing I can hope for, as an artist and a person — that we are all connected, sharing something we were a part of all along, but never knew about until that moment.

Nabokov's synaesthetic engine

Leo Rosa visits the Magic Kingdom, 2011. Photo by Mike Des Roches.

A sea-change is happening in the world of autism. Just a few years ago, the loudest voices in media coverage of the issue were those of Jenny McCarthy’s “warrior moms,” defending Andrew Wakefield’s now-discredited claim that the combined measles-mumps-rubella vaccine causes autism, while spending hard-earned income on the latest cure for their “vaccine-injured” kids — which could allegedly be found in megadoses of vitamins, chelation therapy to remove heavy metals like mercury from the body, elaborate elimination diets, home hyperbaric chambers and saunas, and untested gray-market drugs.

It’s not hard to understand what motivated these parents: Intense love and concern for their children, along with healthy skepticism of corrupt multinational corporations and government agencies that have proven themselves fully capable of covering up crimes against humanity that resulted in the injury and death of thousands. The mothers and fathers of kids on the spectrum have excellent reasons to distrust the medical establishment — notably its unquestioning acceptance of Bruno Bettelheim’s “refrigerator mother” theory in the 1950s, which cruelly blamed parents for their kids’ developmental disorders, adding shame and stigma to the challenges of raising an autistic child.

Psychiatrist/author Bruno Bettelheim, whose bestselling books blamed a generation of mothers for their children's autism.

Bettelheim’s Freudian claptrap was consigned to the dustbin of pseudoscience long ago – fittingly, by the father of an autistic boy, a Navy psychologist named Bernard Rimland, who surgically dismantled Bettelheim’s imperious nonsense in his own book in 1964, establishing autism as primarily a genetic and organic, rather than psychogenic, condition. A tireless networker, Rimland also founded the National Society for Autistic Children to speed parents’ access to treatments that he felt showed promise. By doing so, he anticipated the self-empowerment of citizen scientists in the digital age.

Unfortunately, Rimland — who undertook Herculean efforts to make his own son, Mark, “normal,” as he put it — was also one of the first parent-advocates to promote Wakefield’s 1998 case series in The Lancet linking autism to vaccines. That study has since been found to have been an elaborate fraud by the British Medical Journal, disowned by its co-authors, and retracted by The Lancet. But the seeds of panic it sowed among a generation of parents are now sprouting all over the world in resurgent epidemics of childhood diseases like the measles and whooping cough, after being kept in check for decades by vaccines. Meanwhile, many of the biomedical treatments championed by Rimland have turned out to be no more effective than placebo or outright dangerous, as well as punishingly expensive for families financially stressed to the limit.

With greater understanding and another decade of research, talk of “curing” autism is fading away, though no one should dispute the need to find more effective treatments for seizures and other physical co-morbidities that some autistic people experience. Instead of obsessing about causes and cures, however, a new generation of parents is proposing something radical: loving their kids just as they are, in all their flamboyant eccentricity, the product of a distinctive kind of human wiring that likely lasts a lifetime. (Even Rimland’s loyal successor at the Autism Research Institute in San Diego, Stephen Edelson, said in a recent interview, “If a practitioner claims to ‘cure’ autism, run in the other direction.”) Instead of inspiring hopelessness, this shift has liberated many parents to embrace and even celebrate their kids’ differences, while focusing on the real challenge of helping them build healthy, happy, and independent lives in a society that provides shamefully few supports, resources, and accommodations for autistic adults.

That’s the message of several groundbreaking books and films in recent years, including Roy Richard Grinker’s Unstrange Minds, Paul Collins’ Not Even Wrong, Thomas Anderson’s Neurodiversity, Priscilla Gilman’s The Anti-Romantic Child, Tom Fields-Meyer’s Following Ezra, and Todd Drezner’s inspiring documentary Loving Lampposts.

At the same time, technological advances like the Internet and social media, text-to-speech software, visual computing, and mobile devices are opening up ways for people on the spectrum — including many who would have been written off as non-verbal or “low-functioning” in previous eras — to boldly speak out on behalf of themselves and their community. It turns out that autistic self-advocates have a lot to say about how they’ve been stereotyped, marginalized, overlooked, and demeaned by so-called neurotypical culture — even by organizations that claim to speak for them. Two of the most powerful pieces of online writing I read this year were by self-advocates whose view of their own lives is informed by the social model of disability: Julia Bascom’s “Quiet Hands” and Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg’s “The Path That Chose Me.” Self-advocates like Bascom and Cohen-Rottenberg proudly own their autistic behavior and atypical cognitive styles, casting light on the ways that monolithic concepts of normalcy oppress everyone who doesn’t fit the mold.

With this sea-change in mind, my favorite book of the year on autism was curated and self-published by a group of parent-warriors with the express purpose of sparing other parents the grief, isolation, and confusion that followed their own kids’ diagnoses. Called the Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism, it offers helpful, positive, pragmatic, evidence-based advice for making the life of your kid and your family more rewarding and more joyful, starting today. I can’t think of a better holiday gift for someone with a loved one on the spectrum. With current estimates of autism prevalence running at 1 in 110 people in the US, the book deserves a wide readership.

Thinking Person's Guide to Autism

Covering a wide range of nuts-and-bolts subjects — from strategizing toilet training and and planning fun family outings, to helping your kid cope with bullying, to identifying the issues that a skilled speech-language therapist can work on with your child, to spotting and avoiding “autism cults,” to navigating byzantine special-needs bureaucracies and providing your child with appropriate assistive technology, to fighting for your kid’s right to an individualized education — the Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism is bracingly free of dogma, heavy-handed agendas, and pseudoscientific woo. What distinguishes it from, say, the fine guide for parents recently made freely downloadable by the National Autism Center, is the heart, soul, fierce intelligence, and subversive wit of the authors and editors, which shines on every page. Offering observations from parents, professionals, and autistics themselves, the book is a welcome dose of optimism and uncommonly good sense.

Many guidebooks for the parents of autistic kids are dry, clinical, and relentlessly grim; by contrast, this book is about real families facing ordinary situations with grace, grit, and humor. Editors Shannon Des Roches Rosa, Jennifer Byde Myers, Liz Ditz, Emily Willingham, and Carol Greenburg are prolific bloggers and tweeters on the war-torn autism frontier every day: battling misinformation and quackery, standing up for science and evidence-based medicine, and crucially, building mutually beneficial alliances between parents and self-advocates. Their message is: We’ve been there. We know. And we want to help you become your kid’s most powerful ally while respecting and celebrating his or her unique identity.

There’s also a cheeky irreverence to the tone of the essays — many of which originated in the blogosphere — that is utterly refreshing. I can’t think of another book on the subject that would include the statement, “Children with autism are well known for masturbating in public. (And who can blame them?)”

TPGA editors Shannon Des Roches Rosa and Jennifer Byde Myers.

“My son Leo is 11 and has high-octane autism,” says Des Roches Rosa when I ask her about the genesis of the project. “I’d been blogging about parenting and autism since 2003 and writing columns as BlogHer’s contributing editor for parenting kids with special needs for a year. The reactions to my posts had been great, but I remained frustrated by the amount of negativity and flat-out misinformation pervading the Internet and traditional publishing, and worried about a constant stream of people entering the autism communities and getting misdirected or outright hoodwinked. I’d been ranting about it for a while, and so had Jennifer and Liz, so one day we just said, ‘Fuck it, someone has create a one-stop, comprehensive, evidence-based autism handbook, with perspectives from autistics, parents, and professionals.’ So we took the plunge.”

The book doesn’t make light of the diligent work required to make the world a more comfortable, supportive, and joyful place for atypically developing kids, while helping them cope with the stresses and sensory challenges that are an inevitable part of life on the spectrum. But it also makes clear that one of the toughest things to deal with as a parent is the pervasive view of autism as a tragedy. The deeply networked science-and-tech-literate parents who put the book together have happy children who are respected and treasured for being who they are, rather than pitied as unwitting victims of a Big Pharma conspiracy. (That was cherubic Leo Rosa rocking the iPad in a clip played at Steve Jobs’ last keynote).

Leo Rosa loves his iPad.

“You will think you can’t handle it. You will be wrong,” writes Jess, one of the book’s contributors. “This is not an easy road, but its rewards are tremendous. Its joys are the very sweetest of life’s nectar. You will drink them in and taste and smell and feel every last drop of them.”

There are valuable lessons in this book even for those who have no direct personal experience of autism. Here’s Willingham, the TPGA team’s science editor, speaking frankly about what happens on the rare occasions she tells people her son is on the spectrum:

What response do you get from people when you mention your child’s difference or try to explain it to them? I can categorize our responses into three distinct groups.

From total strangers—and my mentions of autism in this context are rare—the response is pity. Clearly pity, and with it a lack of understanding of what I’m even talking about. And then, of course, I find myself struggling to clarify why pity simply isn’t necessary, to get across with pith what a great person my son is, what a total joy it is to have a wonderful person like him in my life. It’s rare that I bring up autism to strangers, although if I were savvier, I could use it as a way to enhance awareness and downgrade the pity response.

From casual acquaintances, such as parents of other children and periodically from others closer to me: “I don’t like labels.” “He seems like a pretty normal kid to me.”

These responses set my teeth on edge. They speak to so many things: Diminishing my son’s struggles. An accusation that we’re magnifying his struggles, or worse, have sought and gotten the “diagnosis du jour” of autism for a child who’s merely quirky. An implication that if we just left him alone without labels, he’d be just fine.

Of course, I have to forgive these responses. Sometimes, they’re just well meaning, an effort to say, “Well, even with that difference, he’s just a kid like other kids.” Sometimes, it’s exactly the implied criticism I think it is. But I must forgive. They know not of what they speak. How could they?

Invariably, these responses come from parents of neurotypical children. The fact is, they just don’t get it. They never will. Sorry, but unless you’ve spent hours wondering why your child’s anxiety leads to nonlinear, bizarre suicidal ideation at age three, you’re not gonna get it. Unless you look at your nine-year-old child and marvel at how far he’s come that he can say, “I’m going to go interact with that child over there,” and wonder if it’s the intensive therapies or your own efforts or his efforts or all of the above, you’re not gonna get it. Unless you’ve spent days fending off perseveration over strawberry plants because you unwittingly drove by a plant nursery, you’re not gonna get it.

TPGA science editor Emily Willingham and her youngest son at Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco.

One of the most progressive aspects of the Thinking Person’s Guide is that it includes a section of essays written by autistic people themselves, which gives it an intimate, insiders’ view of a way of being that is all too often depicted as an impenetrable enigma (represented by the ubiquitous puzzle-piece iconography employed by many fundraising organizations, which many self-advocates have come to detest). Their accounts indicate the pressing need to debunk stereotypes of autistics as either amazing savants or automatons who lack empathy, and to create neurodiversity-friendly workplaces — needs that are not addressed by the usual star-studded “autism awareness” campaigns that raise millions of dollars a year to scan genomes and hunt for new drug targets.

Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg, who has a new e-book out called Blazing My Trail, contributes a poignant reflection after being diagnosed in mid-life:

I have no inclination to ask who I might have been without being autistic. Being autistic is intrinsic to my life experience, to my insight, and to the gifts I bring. The One Above made me just as I am, and I respect that… The world is often not a safe and welcoming place for autistics. I have been bullied, and ignored, and left behind, in many different ways, all my life. And yet, I don’t wish I were different. I wish the world were different. I wish that more people defended the bullied rather than the bullies; I wish that more people took the time to get to know me and find out what a great good friend I am; I wish that more people were sensitive to all the things that autistic people need in order to live our lives with more joy and less fear, more inclusion and less loneliness.

Author/self-advocate Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg and her husband Bob Rottenberg.

For self-advocate Corina Lynn Becker, getting a diagnosis at 17 was not shattering, but empowering:

I want you to understand, that from my point of view, I did not suffer from autism. That is, autism does not cause me pain. It creates struggles and challenges, yes, that can be disabling, but the pain and suffering that I went through happened because of two things: being undiagnosed and not having the knowledge for supports and accommodations.

In other words, I struggled because nobody knew exactly what I was struggling with, and because I did not have the words to describe my difficulties. For me, the rising autism rate represents a rising rate in awareness and knowledge and a hope that fewer and fewer children will be mis-, under- and un-diagnosed, until not one child slips through the cracks. With that hope, there is a chance to make a difference, to ensure that each child gets exactly what he or she needs and requires in order to succeed.

Self-advocate Corina Becker.

For parents who are rapidly reorienting in the wake of a child’s diagnosis, this book can play the role of a seasoned mentor who relieves the burden of unnecessary worry and grief while providing a detailed map of the road ahead.  Here’s Susan Walton on the importance of building a network of other parents who understand:

I have friends whom I met sitting in waiting rooms during the first weeks following my son’s diagnosis. When we looked at each other back then, our eyes told our whole story. We were all sick at heart and desperately trying to make sense of the news and figure out what to do. And it is amazing how strong we look to each other now. When we run into each other or find time for a coffee date, we see entirely different people looking back. Even as we are sharing news about the latest round of problems in our lives, the difference is amazing. We are in control and things are moving forward every day. We see battle-scarred but victorious soldiers in each other. These are valuable friends indeed.

The takeaway from the Thinking Person’s Guide is: You can do this, and you will become a wiser and stronger person for helping your son or daughter grow into the most creative, aware, loving, self-confident, and independent person that he or she can be. I’m grateful for this uplifting book, which has the potential to transform lives and society for the better — in this generation and the next.

Leo's music lesson with self-advocate Stephen Shore.

Graphical interface pioneer Susan Kare, photo by R.J. Muna

Point, click.

The gestures and metaphors of icon-driven computing feel so natural and effortless to us now, it seems strange to recall navigating in the digital world any other way. Until Apple’s debut of the Macintosh in 1984, however, most of our interactions with computers looked more like this:

How did we get from there to here?

iPad photo by Ben Atkin, under Creative Commons license

The Mac wasn’t the first computer to present the user with a virtual desktop of files and folders instead of a command line and a blinking cursor. As every amateur geek historian knows, the core concepts behind the graphical user interface or GUI (including the icons, mouse, and bitmapped graphics) made their debut in 1968 in a presentation by Stanford Research Institute’s Doug Engelbart celebrated as the “mother of all demos.”

The revolutionary ideas in Engelbart’s demo were further developed at Xerox PARC, where a 24-year-old Steve Jobs took a legendary tour in 1979 that convinced him that the GUI represented the democratic future of computing. (“I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen in my life,” he said later. “Within ten minutes, it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this someday.”) He promptly licensed the GUI technology he saw at work in a non-commercial product called the Xerox Alto for a modest amount of Apple stock, and the rest is Silicon Valley history.

Steve Jobs, 1983, by Susan Kare

Shortly thereafter, Xerox doomed its chances to own the icon-driven future by pouring its resources into the Xerox Star, a product aimed strictly at the corporate market. Each Star purchase required an initial $75,000 installation and a network of external file servers, plus another $16,000 for each additional workstation (twice the price of a new car at the time). A digital revolution for the masses, it wasn’t.

The genius of Steve Jobs, Jef Raskin, and the rest of the Mac team was recognizing a huge untapped market for home computing among artists, musicians, writers, and other creative weirdos who might never have cared enough to master the arcane complexities of a command-line UI or blow a fortune on hulking digital workstations.

The challenge of designing a personal computer that “the rest of us” would not only buy, but fall crazy in love with, however, required input from the kind of people who might some day be convinced to try using a Mac. Fittingly, one of the team’s most auspicious early hires was a young artist herself: Susan Kare.

Susan Kare joins the Mac team

After taking painting lessons as a young girl and graduating from New York University with a Ph.D. in fine arts, Kare moved to the Bay Area, where she took a curatorial job at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. But she quickly felt like she was on the wrong side of the creative equation. “I’d go talk to artists in their studios for exhibitions,” she recalls, “but I really wanted to be working in my studio.”

Eventually Kare earned a commission from an Arkansas museum to sculpt a razorback hog out of steel. That was the project she was tackling in her garage in Palo Alto when she got a call from a high-school friend named Andy Hertzfeld, who was the lead software architect for the Macintosh operating system, offering her a job.

Kare’s first assignment was developing fonts for the Mac OS. At the time, digital typefaces were monospaced, meaning that both a narrow I and a broad M were wedged into the same bitmapped real estate — a vestigial legacy of the way that a typewriter platen advances, one space at a time. Jobs was determined to come up with something better for his sleek new machine, having been impressed by the grace of finely wrought letterforms in calligraphy classes he audited at Reed College, taught by the Trappist monk Robert Palladino, a disciple of master calligrapher Lloyd Reynolds. (The lasting impact of Reynolds’ instruction can also be seen in the playful cursive of the seminal West Coast Beat poets Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen, making Reynolds and Palladino the human hyperlinks between desktop publishing and Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums.)

For the Mac, Kare designed the first proportionally spaced digital font family that allowed text to breathe as naturally on the Mac’s white screen as it does in the pages of a book. The distinctive Jobs touch was upgrading the original monikers of these elegant typefaces from the names of train stations near Philadelphia — like Rosemont and Ardmore — to those of world-class cities like Geneva, Chicago, and New York.

Inspired by the collaborative intelligence of her fellow software designers, Kare stayed on at Apple to craft the navigational elements for Mac’s GUI. Because an application for designing icons on screen hadn’t been coded yet, she went to the University Art supply store in Palo Alto and picked up a $2.50 sketchbook so she could begin playing around with forms and ideas. In the pages of this sketchbook, which hardly anyone but Kare has seen before now*, she created the casual prototypes of a new, radically user-friendly face of computing — each square of graph paper representing a pixel on the screen.

First Kare sketched a pointing finger for the “paste” command, using a pink magic marker.

Then she sketched a paintbrush with some paint on it.

She drew a pair of scissors for the “cut” command.

And she drew a bitmapped hand — the primitive progenitor of all the “pan hands” sliding invisible sheets of paper in programs like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.

She sketched an icon for “stop.”

And a symbol for “danger.” (The skull-and-crossbones design would come in handy when Jobs issued one of his infamous motivational koans to the Mac team: “It’s better to be a pirate than join the Navy.” Painted on a flag, Kare’s Jolly Roger was hoisted outside of the Mac skunkworks in Bandley 3.)

And she sketched a pair of complementary bitmaps for Apple itself.

Kare also drew some frankly goofy stuff, like an icon for “auto indent” that was a bit too literal.

And two equally whimsical icons for a programming instruction called “jump.”

She also came up with ideas for a term she heard the programmers using as they raced to meet Jobs’ punishing deadlines: “debug.”

And for “boot,” she drew an icon worthy of Nancy Sinatra.

Once software was developed that enabled Kare to start brainstorming digitally, she mined ideas from everywhere: Asian art history, the geeky gadgets and toys that festooned her teammates’ cubicles, and the glyphs that Depression-era hobos chalked on walls to point the way to a sympathetic household. The symbol on every Apple command key to this day — a stylized castle seen from above — was commonly used in Swedish campgrounds to denote an interesting sightseeing destination. [Note: See comment by Lennart Regebro below for an even older citation of the design.]

Kare’s work gave the Mac a visual lexicon that was universally inviting and intuitive. Instead of thinking of each image as a tiny illustration of a real object, she aimed to design icons that were as instantly comprehensible as traffic signs.

There was an ineffably disarming and safe quality about her designs. Like their self-effacing creator — who still makes a point of surfing in the ocean several mornings a week — they radiated good vibes. To creative innovators in the ’80s who didn’t see themselves as computer geeks, Kare’s icons said: Stop stressing out about technology. Go ahead, dive in!

And dive in we did, en masse. In the Wall Street Journal recently, Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From and other smart books, recalled the thrill of seeing the first computer he ever considered buying: “One look at the Mac and you could tell something was different. The white screen alone seemed revolutionary, after years of reading green text on a black background. And there were typefaces! I had been obsessed with typography since my grade-school years; here was a computer that treated fonts as an art, not just a clump of pixels. The graphic interface made the screen feel like a space you wanted to inhabit, to make your own… The Mac was a machine you wanted to live in.”

Many of us are living there still; and you can find the myriad visual descendants of Kare’s sketches in desktops, laptops, tablets, and phones today.

At the same time, as hardware has become faster, cheaper, and more powerful, interface designers have moved away from spare, economical road-sign style icons, and now favor the lush, elaborately rendered, 3D virtual objects that fill up the screens of our mobile phones and tablets, complete with faux shadows and glistening highlights.

For Kare herself, the Apple years were just an initial milestone in a distinguished career that has included designing icons for the Windows and IBM OS/2 operating systems, bitmapping the virtual deck in the Windows version of Solitaire, crafting logos for startups, creating products for New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and making fine-art prints of memorable icons like the Bomb, the Watch, the Paint Can, and the taxonomically ambiguous Dogcow.

For years, thousands of Facebook users a day swapped Kare-designed birthday cakes, engagement rings, roses, and disco balls, never knowing they were made by the same artist whose smiling image of the Happy Mac greeted a generation at the threshold of a new world.

In time for the holiday season, Kare has self-published her first book, Susan Kare Icons, with copies signed by the artist available on her website. A modified version of this essay serves as the introduction, though the hand-drawn icons seen here are not included in the book.

I asked Kare if she had any feeling at the time that the work she was doing at Apple 30 years ago would be so pervasively influential. ”You can set out to make a painting, but you can’t set out to make a great painting,” she told me. “If you look at that blank canvas and say, ‘Now I’m going to create a masterpiece’ — that’s just foolhardy. You just have to make the best painting you can, and if you’re lucky, people will get the message.”

"Susan Kare Icons," available at kareprints.com

[*Some of these icons were included in my presentation for Pop-Up Magazine #5 at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco on November 9, 2011. Thanks to the Pop-Up editors and contributors for a marvelous evening. All icons used with the permission of Susan Kare.]

Ari Ne'eman of ASAN. Photo by Aristide Economopoulos, used with permission.

Editor’s note: I’ve never been a fan of campaigns that propose to get people talking about important issues by telling them to shut up. (No “Day Without A Gay” in my name, thanks.) That’s why, when I saw a press release [PDF] a year ago from an organization promoting a social-media blackout for autism awareness called “Communication Shutdown,” it seemed like an awful idea. The goal of the event — touted by a roster of “celebs” including actor Steven Segal — was to give non-autistic people a taste of the frustration some people on the spectrum face in trying to communicate by convincing them to log off of all social networks for 24 hours (while downloading a $5 “charity app” that funneled money to the organization.) It seemed almost perverse to honor autistic people by shunning the very medium that has empowered many of them to find their own voices at last, after decades of being silenced behind the walls of institutions and well-meaning organizations that claim to speak for them.

Then I read an inspiring post from a young woman named Corina Becker calling for a counter-protest on November 1 that she called Autistics Speaking Day. She wrote: “What’s the tragedy? That people can’t speak? Or that too few are listening? Whether we’re verbal or nonverbal, does telling people to stay off social communication networks really create empathy for us? The Internet is how we find one another. It’s where many of us feel heard. It’s where many of us feel most comfortable.” I offered Becker this forum for a day, and I’m glad I did. Her essay “25 Things I Know as an Autistic Person” was honest and provocative. Yielding this space to someone on the spectrum each November 1 feels like a tradition worth maintaining.

This year, I’m honored to feature Ari Ne’eman, co-founder of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network, and the first openly autistic White House appointee, nominated by President Obama in 2009 to sit on the National Council on Disability. Ne’eman — who is also one of the youngest presidential appointees in history at 23 — is one of the most passionate and articulate leaders of the neurodiversity movement, an emerging force for social justice that brings the empowering message of the disability-rights movement to those who think differently. From his seat on the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, which oversees policy initiatives within the Department of Health and Human Services, Ne’eman has been a powerful advocate for autistic people and their families, fighting for services and support, inclusive education, and public policy that will enable people on the spectrum to live and work in their own communities, while battling unethical research agendas and entrenched stereotypes of what autistic people can and can’t do.

I did the first major interview with Ne’eman on Wired.com after he took his seat on the NCD, and have followed his career as I write my book on autism and the neurodiversity movement. Ne’eman and I don’t always agree on everything, but I’ve often found myself mulling over things he says long after he says them. I’ve also watched him talk to autistic people and their families, to folks with other disabilities, and to student organizers and self-advocates across the country, and I’ve been consistently impressed with the depth of his knowledge, his compassion and empathy, and the earnestness of his commitment to civil rights for all. I’m grateful to him for speaking out today on the Public Library of Science.

– Steve Silberman

Ari Ne'eman of ASAN. Photo by Aristide Economopoulos, used with permission.

Community Matters

by Ari Ne’eman

Community matters. One of the things I always appreciated about my first few weeks in college was the existence of the local Hillel — the Jewish student center active on my campus, and many hundreds of other campuses across the country. I was an out-of-state student going to a university where most of my classmates had grown up within no more than an hour’s drive of the campus. Having an immediate sense of community as a Jew was incredibly meaningful for me — and yet, I always felt a profound sense of regret that I didn’t have the same opportunities as an Autistic as I did as a Jew. Walking into the university disability services office was a far cry from the warmth of Shabbat dinner or outreach by campus Jewish organizations. Instead of being connected to others who could relate to my experiences as someone on the autism spectrum, I and other disabled students were usually greeted by a bored work-study student handing us a card upon which we could check one of a few “standard” accommodations — extended time, alternative print/braille, note-taking and a few others, crafted without thought to the needs of students like me. Anything else required a long wait and an uphill battle.

There are a lot of issues worth unpacking here — the low quality of support offered to disabled students in post-secondary education, the vast gap between programs focused around compliance and those focused around quality of life — but the one that I want to focus on today is the value of community. Being part of any minority group is always a challenging experience. Living in a world built for people who are not like you is alienating, whether it’s because of the way your brain works or because you don’t celebrate Christmas. In the disability world, we use concepts like the social model of disability to explain this experience. Service-provision and reasonable accommodations and any number of other things we fight to receive are intended to bridge the gap between the world as it is and the world as we’d like it to be. Yet, we still have so very far to go to create a more just society. The last few months have seen some heated discussions about privilege in both the autism community (that is, the community of non-Autistic parents and professionals with an interest in autism) and the Autistic community. I think one of the things that makes privilege such a hard topic to discuss with those who are, or would wish to be, our allies is that it continues to exist, even when we get the things we’re advocating for. In the best of all possible worlds we can create, we will still be expected to explain ourselves to others in ways that no neurotypical person would have to do. We will still frequently face assumptions and stereotypes that require us to work twice as hard for the same results.

So, what can we do when our best efforts to change the world we live in are simply not enough? What salvation exists for us, when our lives are still more difficult, even when we do get the supports and accommodations we want? These are vexing questions. Some people try and find the answer in the search for a “cure.” They believe that the best way to solve the problems facing Autistic people is make us appear as non-autistic as possible, or to prevent future generations of Autistic people from existing.

The first option bothers me deeply. When a child or adult is called “recovered,” they don’t change into a different person. All the things — good and bad — that we call autism don’t go away because you lose a word. Instead, that person no longer has language for what they experience. That person goes through the same struggles, the same difficulties, but lacks the context and the community to know how that it is okay for them to be who they are. Sometimes that prevents them from accessing needed help. Other times it just traps them in a place where they have to constantly look over their shoulder, worrying about who might notice them being just a little bit “off.” Either way, it isn’t an outcome we should wish upon anyone.

Not too long ago, a colleague commented that I should be proud for being so nearly “indistinguishable from my peers.” Only in the autism community would anyone consider that a compliment. Despite the good intentions behind the remark, I felt a profound sense of hate and disgust motivating it — not of me as an individual, but of the person I was growing up, and of the person I still am, hidden underneath layers of mannerisms and coping strategies and other social sleights of hand. Those kinds of statements define our worth as human beings by how well we do looking like people whom we’re not. No one should have to spend their life hiding who they are.

As for the path of prevention, I’ve never seen that as particularly realistic. Not only because I like my brain the way it is and am worried about the ethical consequences of breeding “better” human beings, but also because I know that if people like me didn’t exist, the stigma and prejudice that sometimes makes our lives difficult wouldn’t go away – it would just move along to another group. Disability has always been a fluid concept, and I don’t imagine for a moment that preventing the existence of the next generation of disabled people would or could eliminate the place we’re put in within the social hierarchy. Besides, I think we have better solutions available to us.

To me, the better option has always been filling the gap between what we need and what we can get from society with each other. As we work to make the world better, we can provide ourselves with a place where we feel safe and understood, even if we don’t yet feel that way in the broader society. Every time we speak up about what being Autistic means to us as opposed to those who speak on our behalf, we can empower other Autistic people to do the same thing. Every time one of us comes out of the closet in a place where people don’t expect people with our kind of brain to be, we carve out a little bit more cultural space that we can claim for our community. What if the next generation of Autistic people grew up with the idea of Autistic community and culture an ever-present factor in their lives? What if we took our individual experiences and turned them into a collective narrative, as so many other minority groups have done across history? What if we knew, that even when life was hard and the world at large didn’t understand, that we would always have the chance to connect with those of us who have gone through the same struggles? Whether it’s through creating resources by and for our community – like ASAN’s new Navigating College handbook – or just connecting with other autistic adults informally in social groups or online, I feel that Autistic community is and can be a revolutionary concept.

That is what Autistics Speaking Day means to me. For those of us who have spent our lives being discounted as voiceless or being told that our experiences don’t count, the act of speaking up matters. And while we should do it every day, this holiday gives us the chance to do it not only as individuals but as a community, to braid our individual narratives into a collective one. Most importantly, it sends a powerful message to any Autistic person who hears in the voices speaking up today an echo of their own lives: no matter where you are or what you’re going through, you aren’t alone.  Community matters.

Kobun Chino Otogawa, Steve Jobs' Zen teacher.

One reason I was looking forward to reading Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Steve Jobs was my hope that, as a sharp-eyed reporter, Isaacson would probe to the heart of what one of the few entrepreneurs who really deserved the term “visionary” learned from Buddhism.

By now, everyone knows the stories of how the future founder of Apple dropped acid, went to India on a quest for spiritual insight, met a laughing Hindu holy man who took a straight razor to his unkempt hair, and was married in a Zen ceremony to Laurene Powell in 1991. I was curious how Jobs’ 20-year friendship with the monk who performed his wedding — a wiry, swarthily handsome Japanese priest named Kobun Chino Otogawa — informed his ambitious vision for Apple, beyond his acquiring a lifetime supply of black, Zen-ish Issey Miyake turtlenecks.

Isaacson does a fine job of showing how Jobs’ engagement with Buddhism was more than just a lotus-scented footnote to a brilliant Silicon Valley career. As a young seeker in the ’70s, Jobs didn’t just dabble in Zen, appropriating its elliptical aesthetic as a kind of exotic cologne. He turns out to have been a serious, diligent practitioner who undertook lengthy meditation retreats at Tassajara — the first Zen monastery in America, located at the end of a twisting dirt road in the mountains above Carmel — spending weeks on end “facing the wall,” as Zen students say, to observe the activity of his own mind.

Why would a former phone phreak who perseverated over the design of motherboards be interested in doing that? Using the mind to watch the mind, and ultimately to change how the mind works, is known in cognitive psychology as metacognition. Beneath the poetic cultural trappings of Buddhism, what intensive meditation offers to long-term practitioners is a kind of metacognitive hack of the human operating system (a metaphor that probably crossed Jobs’ mind at some point.) Sitting zazen offered Jobs a practical technique for upgrading the motherboard in his head.

The classic Buddhist image of this hack is that thoughts are like clouds passing through a spacious blue sky. All your life, you’ve been convinced that this succession of clouds comprises a stable, enduring identity — a “self.” But Buddhists believe this self this is an illusion that causes unnecessary suffering as you inevitably face change, loss, disease, old age, and death. One aim of practice is to reveal the gaps or discontinuities — the glimpses of blue sky — between the thoughts, so you’re not so taken in by the illusion, but instead learn to identify with the panoramic awareness in which the clouds arise and disappear.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche in the early '70s.

One of the books that inspired Jobs to become interested in this process was Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Tibetan lama who led a group of monks over the Himalayas in the 1950s to escape the invading Chinese army. Isaacson doesn’t do much more with Trungpa than name-check the title of his book, but he was a fascinating and controversial figure in his own right. After being recognized as the reincarnation of a great lama as a boy, Trungpa fled his home country and went to the British Isles, eventually graduating from Oxford. He began teaching in the traditional style at a meditation center in Scotland, complete with maroon robes, a shaved head, and vows of celibacy and sobriety; one of his early students went on to become the chameleonic pop star David Bowie.

After a nearly fatal car crash — driving into a joke shop after being distracted by a billboard, no less — Trungpa scrapped his old approach to teaching. He realized that the trappings of being a Tibetan lama were an unnecessary barrier to reaching the widest possible audience for Buddha’s revolutionary message. He jettisoned the robes, grew out his hair, eloped with the brilliant teenage daughter of a high-born British family, and emigrated to America, where he soon found legions of hippies who had reached the limits of psychedelic insight and were eager for teachings on the nature of mind from a deep-rooted contemplative tradition.

Trungpa became a hugely popular and influential teacher, praised (rightly) for his brilliant exposition of esoteric concepts in fresh, unsentimental, idiomatic English; and fiercely criticized (also rightly) for his heavy drinking and flamboyant womanizing. From his home base in Boulder, where he established a contemplative university called Naropa, Trungpa became the spiritual advisor to many counterculture luminaries, including poet Allen Ginsberg, author Ken Wilber, and singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell, who portrayed him (accurately) in a song on her haunting Hejira album called “Refuge of the Roads.”

I suspect that one of the things that Jobs found inspiring about Trungpa’s writing — beyond its bracingly direct tone and surgical deconstruction of the lies that prevent us from seeing things as they are — was his profound respect for artists, poets, and musicians, whom he saw as fellow warriors against delusion (which he called “neurosis,” adopting the lexicon of Western psychology.) This passage of Trungpa’s, from an essay on “dharma art,” could have been a blueprint for Jobs’ uncompromising vision for Apple:

Our attitude and integrity as artists are very important. We need to encourage and nourish the notion that we are not going to yield to the neurotic world. Inch by inch, step-by-step, our effort should wake people up through the world of art rather than please everyone and go along with the current. It might be painful for your clients or your audience to take the splinter out of their system, so to speak. It probably will be quite painful for them to accommodate such pressure coming from the artist’s vision. However, that should be done, and it is necessary. Otherwise, the world will go downhill, and the artist will go downhill also.

Flowers at Tassajara. Photo by Perfecto Insecto.

Another influence on Apple’s young founder was the book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki-roshi, the founding teacher of San Francisco Zen Center. Assembled from Suzuki’s lectures by a young student named Trudy Dixon who died of cancer while the book was in production, it’s a graceful, welcoming, insightful guide to the spirit of Zen practice. Suzuki’s playful language — like the voice of a wise child — communicates profound and subtle insights about what Zen teachers call the Great Matter of life and death, dancing gracefully on the edge of the unsayable. It’s one of those rare books that can be read at many points in your life, and it always seems uncannily relevant.

At the same time, it was a subversive piece of work. Swimming against the tide of Zen writings of its era, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind downplayed the enticing concept of enlightenment in favor of slow, steady mindfulness practice “with no gaining idea” — that is, with no hope that your next session on the cushion would bring about a shattering, life-changing flash of satori. Suzuki-roshi didn’t even claim to be enlightened himself, which was a shocking thing for a renowned Zen teacher to admit at the time (laughingly confirmed by his mischievous wife, Mitsu). You didn’t sit zazen to become a Buddha, Suzuki-roshi used to say: “You’re perfect just as you are — and you could use a little improvement.”

Jobs’ celebrated motto for the original Mac team — “the journey is the reward” — could have been lifted from the pages of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. For Suzuki-roshi, the path was the goal.

Shunryu Suzuki-roshi, founder of San Francisco Zen Center.

The only regrettable aspect of Isaacson’s account is his clownish portrayal of Jobs’ teacher and friend for two decades, Kobun Chino Otogawa, as a hapless bore who spoke in needlessly cryptic “haiku.”

Isaacson quotes former Apple employee Daniel Kottke, the friend who accompanied Jobs on the India trip, as saying that he found Kobun “amusing” and little more: “Half the time we had no idea what he was going on about. I took the whole thing as a lighthearted interlude.” Describing the Jobs’ wedding ceremony at the Ahwahnee Lodge in Yosemite, Isaacson says the Zen priest “shook a stick, struck a gong, lit incense, and chanted in a mumbling manner that most guests found incomprehensible.”

I’m tempted to blurt out, Yes, Mr. Isaacson — particularly the guests who didn’t understand Japanese, the language of much of the Buddhist liturgy that Jobs had been chanting at Zen centers for two decades. Imagine a description of Yom Kippur in a biography of a major Jewish historical figure that dispenses with the Kol Nidre as “incomprehensible wailing.” Adding to Isaacson’s awkward handling of Jobs’ teacher is his insertion of a comment from an Apple software engineer who “thought [Kobun] was drunk” at the wedding ceremony. Isaacson quickly interjects “he wasn’t” — which makes you wonder why the author felt compelled to include the remark at all.

Issacson loses interest in Kobun after that, leaving out one of the most poignant aspects of his life, which surely also had a profound impact on Jobs. In 2002, Kobun drowned in a shallow, icy pool at his student’s home in Switzerland, trying to save the life of his 5-year-old daughter Maya, who perished anyway. I imagine the loss of his longtime spiritual friend was particularly rough on Apple’s founder when he came face-to-face with his own mortality the following year after his diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.

Farmer's shed, Green Gulch Farm. Photo by Flickr user danasmith.

If it sounds like I have a personal stake in this, I do. In the late ’70s and early ’80s, I was a student at San Francisco Zen Center, where Kobun frequently gave dharma talks. Like Jobs, I meditated at Tassajara, though not as often as he did. I spent most of my own time on the cushion at Zen Center’s headquarters in San Francisco, known informally as City Center, in a former home for single Jewish women designed by the Bay Area architect Julia Morgan.

In fact, when I decided to leave Zen Center because I felt I was too young (20) and unworldly (I’d had only one relationship) to become a monk, it was Kobun who encouraged me to plunge wholeheartedly into secular existence, advising me sensibly, “Your challenge will be to find a way of life that is as meaningful to you as Zen practice.” I eventually found it in writing.

Kobun was similarly encouraging to young Jobs, telling him, in Isaacson’s words, that he “could keep in touch with his spiritual side while running a business.”  It’s intriguing, if depressing, to imagine what the digital world would have been like if Kobun had given Jobs the opposite advice, along the lines of Jobs’ own now-infamous challenge to Pepsi CEO John Sculley: “Do you want to sell stylish electronic gadgets for the rest of your life, or come with me and vow to save all sentient beings from suffering?”

The Han at Tassajara.

Another thing that becomes clear in Issacson’s book is the crucial role of what Buddhists call mindfulness played in securing Apple’s success. When a 15th century poet named Ikkyu was asked, “What is the meaning of Zen?” he replied, “Attention.” Asked to explain further, he replied, “Attention means attention” — one of those cryptic, haiku-like utterances that can make people think you’re drunk. But attention, in Zen practice, means more than just being mindful of your breath in the zendo. It means investing moment-to-moment awareness in everything you do in the course of an ordinary day — whether running for the bus, cooking a pot of rice, talking to your in-laws, taking your blood-pressure pills, or making love.

Or, say, crafting a totally new kind of computer “for the rest of us.” The physical environments Jobs practiced in at Tassajara and other Zen centers offered breathtaking juxtapositions of highly cultivated traditional craftsmanship and wild, rugged California landscapes. I doubt that the Japanese joinery (no nails!) that held up the walls of the zendo was lost on the aspiring design geek, or that he was unmoved by the vibrant, airy layout of Greens Restaurant in San Francisco, punctuated by an enormous, twisting redwood burl (rescued from a beach in Marin) that had been sculpted to sprout tables and chairs. Zen Center’s aesthetic was a harmonious fusion of East and West — as Apple’s would be.

Indeed, the senior teacher at Zen Center who oversaw all this construction — a charismatic Harvard graduate named Richard Baker-roshi — was known as both a supremely articulate exponent of Zen philosophy and a relentless, abrasive micromanager who would putter around the dining room at Greens in his robes, straightening napkins and fussing with flower arrangements on every table. Sound familiar?

Greens restaurant. Tapestry by Donald and Era Farnsworth of Magnolia Editions.

Like a Zen fussbudget, Jobs paid precise, meticulous, uncompromising attention to every aspect of the user experience of Apple’s products — from the design of the fonts and icons in the operating system, to the metals used to cast the cases, to the colors on the boxes and in the magazine ads, to the rhyming proportions in the layout of Apple stores. He encouraged mindfulness in his customers too, by designing his computers so superbly that they faded into the background as creative imagination took over. Jobs thought of computers as “bicycles for the mind,” and Isaacson reports that, for one ill-considered month in 1981, Jobs even tried to rechristen the Mac “the Bicycle.” (For once, his team ignored him.) The point was to get where you wanted to go, and eventually the terrain available for exploration included the entire global network. By contrast, Windows machines are like heavy, clunky, training-wheel affairs that are always calling attention to themselves with hectoring dialog boxes and protocols that require hundreds of pages of tedious documentation to explain.

The Mac launched a democratizing revolution — for those who could afford it. And Jobs’ insistence that Apple create products that its customers would already know, intuitively, how to use is what transformed computing from a geeky oligarchy of Usenet wizards into a digital sandbox for the masses.

"Happy Mac" icon by Susan Kare, Kare.com

In his pursuit of intuitive computing, Jobs found a kindred spirit in Jonathan Ive, the sweet, self-effacing young British designer who helped him create the iMac, the iPod, the iPad, the MacBook Air, and the iPhone — all the gadgets that made your jaw drop when you first saw them, because they seemed so elemental, unfussy, and inevitable; as if they were platonic fusions of form and function that were already waiting somewhere in the universe when Ive and Jobs “discovered” them together.

To indulge in a little Buddhist jargon, the best Apple products seem like they suddenly appeared in emptiness (Śūnyatā), unencumbered by previous notions of what a “computer” or “phone” or “MP3 player” or “tablet device” should be. They were cosmically clean; avatars of the new.

One of the most memorable lines in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind is Suzuki-roshi’s statement, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.” Suzuki didn’t want his senior students to take a seat on the cushion each morning feeling like Zen adepts who had been there and done that. He wanted them to approach meditation with the open-minded curiosity of an amateur trying it for the first time. Apple devices, you might say, are sophisticated tools for evoking, supporting, and sustaining shoshin, beginner’s mind.

Indeed, Jobs’ commitment to mindfully-crafted excellence extended even to aspects of his products that were invisible.  In Jony Ive’s smart and pointed eulogy for his best friend last week, the design chief reminisced about spending “months and months” with Jobs perfecting parts of Apple’s machines that most users would never see (“…with their eyes,” Ive then tellingly added.) “Steve believed that there was a gravity, almost a civic responsibility, to care way beyond any sense of functional imperative.” When Apple introduced one of the first products they designed together — the iMac with its transparent Bondi blue case, a design trope eventually echoed everywhere from kitchen appliances to running shoes — Jobs bragged that the back of the iMac looked better than the front of his competitors’ computers.

That was a lesson Jobs first learned from his adopted father, Paul, a skilled mechanic who told him, “‘You’ve got to make the back of the fence that nobody will see just as good-looking as the front of the fence. Even though nobody will see it, you will know, and that will show that you’re dedicated to making something perfect.”

In monasteries in Japan, the young monks (unsui, or “cloud-water” people) are encouraged to do good deeds for others, but anonymously. The back of your practice is as important as the front.

Bodhidharma.

I suspect that Jobs’ chutzpah as the Valley’s most dramatic and effective showman was inspired, at least in part, by the mythical Zen rogues who drank sake, caroused with whores, shunned temples, mocked hollow rituals, sat zazen in caves, and turn out to be the only ones worthy of inheriting the old master’s robe and bowl by the end of the story. Zen flourishes in irreverence, subversion, inscrutability, and self-mockery — all words that describe Jobs’ style but the last.

Undertaking study of the Great Matter is serious business to Zen students, but it must be done with humor and a light touch. In addition to being a meditation teacher, Kobun Chino was a renowned master of kyūdō, Zen archery. He was once invited to give a demonstration of his skills at Esalen, the famed retreat center near Big Sur. Kobun placed his feet in the traditional, grounded ashibumi stance, straighted his spine, drew the bow, and let loose his arrow — which not only missed the target completely, but soared over the fence behind it, plummeting into the Pacific below. The spectators were aghast until they looked up at Kobun, who gleefully shouted, “Bullseye!”

Skeleton performing zazen on waves by Maruyama Okyo, 1787, Daijoji Temple, Hyogo, Japan.

Isaacson is admirably frank about the core tenet of Buddhism that Jobs seems to have bypassed: the importance of treating everyone around you, even perceived enemies, with basic respect and lovingkindness. It’s tempting now to cast Jobs’ tantrums, casual brutality, and constant berating of “shitheads” as the brave refusal to compromise his ideal of perfection — even as a kind of tough love that inspired his employees to transcend their own limitations. But a more skillful practitioner would have tried to find ways to bring out the genius in his employees without humiliating them — and certainly would have found ways of manufacturing products that didn’t cause so much suffering for impoverished workers in other countries. The moment in Isaacson’s book when Jobs tells the Mobile Me team after the project’s disastrous début, “You should hate each other for having let each other down,” shows that even near the end of his life, Jobs had more to learn from his teachers.

I suspect that the most powerful lesson Jobs took from his years with Kobun was to accept death as an inevitable part of life, which served him well when he learned that his own death was imminent. Jobs’ moving commencement speech at Stanford in 2005 was a classic dharma talk, made better by not mentioning Buddha:

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart…

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

I would have loved to have asked Jobs himself what he learned from his years of Zen practice — but the one time I tried to do that, during an interview in Cupertino, an anxious PR handler cut me off by saying, “I thought you agreed not to ask Steve any personal questions!”

I’ve never forgotten something else Jobs told me that day: “If you want to know what I think, just look at our products.” At the time, it seemed like a crabby, dismissive, “bad Steve” response. But it was the most Zen thing he could have said.

Enso - the traditional Zen circle.

Keith with a model of a DNA molecule. Photo by Steve Silberman.

Five mornings a week, Keith gets up before dawn, puts on one of his geekiest bow ties (think Space Invaders, DNA helices, and daVinci’s Vitruvian Man), and drives half an hour down the freeway to teach teenagers about the wonders of science and the rigors of the scientific method at a local high school.

It’s a demanding life with little downtime. Keith’s evenings and weekends are often consumed by lesson planning and other school-related activities, but he’s perpetually stressed out about whether he’s doing enough for his kids. With his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Berkeley — one of the top five such programs in the country — he could triple his schoolteacher’s salary by taking a job as a bench scientist at DuPont or Exxon-Mobil, as many of his fellow Berkeley grads have done.

But Keith has a passion for teaching. He lives for those moments when he can help a student make sense of the world through science. (He’s also my husband.)

People who make the career choices that Keith did don’t get a lot of respect these days. In endless discussions of “the crisis in education,” teachers are routinely described as burned out, bumbling, underqualified, and unfit — particularly if they belong to a union. In his new book Class Warfare, aspiring education reformer Steven Brill calls school districts “the most lavishly funded and entrenched bureaucracies in America… supported by an interest group — the teachers’ unions — which [have] money and playbooks every bit as effective in thwarting the public interest as Big Oil, the NRA, or Big Tobacco.”

It’s as if we’ve collectively decided that anyone who devotes his life to standing at the head of a classroom, when salaries are so low and school budgets are being slashed, can’t be that smart after all — an insidious legacy of the era when teaching was one of the few acceptable occupations for women.

Conversely, teachers who are clearly effective are portrayed as exceptional: self-sacrificing superheroes who single-handedly boost their students’ scores on standardized tests with little regard for such mundane concerns as a living wage, job security, health benefits, and adequate class resources. Meanwhile, billionaire venture capitalists like PayPal founder Peter Thiel advise young entrepreneurs to drop out of college altogether as a “bad investment” and get down to the serious business of raising capital in their teens — as if a wide-ranging education was just another expendable item on a spreadsheet.

While reading this moving NPR story about a neurosurgeon who phoned his high-school science teacher to express his gratitude after performing a tricky operation, it struck me how rarely we hear from accomplished people about the debt they owe to their teachers. The words of a true teacher stay with us a long time, offering wise counsel in a confusing world and a potent inoculation against foolishness. Yet we rarely get to thank them explicitly. Perhaps only in mid-life, we realize that the career path we chose was set, at least in part, by the recognition, praise, or clarifying criticism of a respected teacher when we were young.

Classroom photo by Black Vanilla.

In that spirit, I’ve asked some of the brightest folks I know in science and media to answer this simple question: What’s the most important lesson you learned from a teacher?

I’m delighted to report that a wide range of writers and thinkers were eager to share their stories. Among those who pay tribute to their most influential teachers here are two bestselling authors, Rebecca Skloot and Deborah Blum; the brilliant culture critic Mark Dery; award-winning science journalists David Dobbs, Amy Harmon, and Hillary Rosner; cognitive psychologist Uta Frith, the pioneer of autism research who translated Hans Asperger’s original paper; and several of the most perceptive and prolific bloggers around, including Maggie Koerth-Baker of BoingBoing, Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG, and Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science. It turns out that by asking people that simple question, you open floodgates of memory and understanding.

If you feel inspired after reading these marvelous, charming, and occasionally terrifying tales from the classroom, please consider Googling up a memorable teacher and sending them an email to tell them what you’re up to now and express your appreciation. I guarantee that doing so will improve your day and profoundly touch the heart of someone who helped guide you into the world. Life is brief.

One of my favorite stories about a teacher’s enduring impact comes from Pulitzer prize-winning poet Gary Snyder, the real-life model for the hero of Jack Kerouac’s novel The Dharma Bums, and one of the first American students to study Zen in Japan. Snyder’s teacher there was a tough old monk who delivered his lengthy discourses on Buddhadharma in such a soft voice that his students strained to hear them, struggling to stay awake on their meditation cushions.

Years later, Snyder ran into one of his fellow students from his days in Kyoto, who was by then a senior monk himself. The monk told the poet, “Remember those talks rōshi gave that no one could hear? I’m beginning to hear them now.”

Rebecca Skloot

Rebecca Skloot is the author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and a writer for Popular Science magazine.

As people who’ve read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks know, I first learned about Henrietta and her amazing HeLa cells in a basic biology class when I was 16 years old. My teacher, Mr. Defler, wrote Henrietta’s name on the chalk board and told us she was a black woman. That was it, and class was over. I followed him to his office saying, “Who was she?  Did she have any kids? What do they think about those cells?”  He told me no one knew anything else about her.  ”But if you’re curious,” he told me, “go do some research, write up a little paper about what you find and I’ll give you some extra credit.”  At that point I was planning to be a veterinarian — something I’d been determined to do since I was a small child.  I had no intention of becoming a writer. I looked for information about Henrietta but didn’t find anything, so I didn’t write that extra credit paper. But I never forgot about her — in fact, I was a bit obsessed by her.

More than a decade later, while working my way through an undergraduate degree in biology so I could apply for vet school, I took my first creative writing class as an elective. (Amazingly, the school I went to counted creative writing toward its required foreign language requirement, so I signed up for creative writing thinking it would be less work than the alternative… but that’s another story).  At the start of that class, the teacher gave us this writing prompt:  ”Write for 15 minutes about something someone forgot.”  I scribbled, “Henrietta Lacks” at the top of my page and began writing an essay about how the whole world seemed to have forgotten about Henrietta, but I was weirdly obsessed with her. I fell in love with writing in that class but still had no intention of becoming a professional writer.  I had what I now refer to as Veterinary Tunnel Vision.

Then one day, when I was getting ready to submit my applications for vet school, my writing teacher, the amazing John Calderazzo at Colorado State University, pulled me aside and said, Do you realize you’re a writer? And do you know there’s such a thing as a science writer? I didn’t.  He told me he thought the world needed more people who understood science and could convey it to the public.  You know, he said, you don’thave to go to vet school just because that’s what you always planned to do – you could get an MFA in writing instead. I told him I’d never even heard of an MFA and had never for a moment thought of giving up on my dream of becoming a vet.  Then he said these essential words: Letting go of a goal doesn’t mean you’ve failed, as long as you have a new goal in its place.  That’s not giving up, it’s changing directions, which can be one of the best things you ever do in life. The next day I started researching MFA programs in creative nonfiction writing. The rest, as they say, is history.

In 1988 when my biology teacher told me to see if I could find any information about Henrietta, neither one of us could have imagined that more than twenty years later, I’d publish a book about her having spent most of my adult life looking to answer a question he inspired in that classroom. Before my book came out, I tracked down that biology teacher, now long retired, and sent him a note: “Dear Mr. Defler, here’s my extra credit project. It’s 22 years late, but I have a good excuse:  No one knew anything about her.” He was shocked.  I was just one of thousands of students he’d taught in countless huge auditoriums, most of us (myself included) looking disaffected and half asleep. He didn’t remember that moment in class when he first told me about Henrietta, but I did. Which is an amazing thing about classrooms: You never know what random sentence from a teacher will change a student’s life.

Ferris Jabr

Ferris Jabr is a reporter for New Scientist.

Sometimes you can feel a hidden cog in your brain lurch into motion—and sometimes you know exactly who got it going. I was sitting in Carol Gontang’s biology class at Mountain View High School in California. We were discussing Archaeopteryx. My teenage brain got the gist of it: birds evolved from dinosaurs. But I couldn’t visualize the process. I spouted my question as I raised my hand: “So dinosaurs just, like, randomly started growing feathers?”

Mrs. Gontang’s eyes settled on me, then drifted toward the ceiling as she touched her crown of poufy hair, all honey and lemon meringue. “A feather is not so different from a scale,” she explained. “Remember, they’re both made of keratin. It’s not hard to imagine a mutation that would produce feathery scales.”

The eggshell cracked. A claw emerged, a beaky snout, a hint of plumage. I could see it: something like a baby velociraptor, slick with yolk, covered here and there in patches of fuzzy down. I had begun to understand.

A classroom in India. Photo from the World Bank photo collection.

Amy Harmon

Amy Harmon is a correspondent for the New York Times.

The point of high school, so far as I could tell, was to prove how much you knew. That was why you crammed for tests, tried to come up with clever comments in class, stayed up late writing papers. You were graded on it, of course. You were rewarded for it. Maybe you even enjoyed it for its own sake, this accumulation of knowledge. I did. I liked the sense of authority that came with being able to reel off the real (economic!) causes of the Civil War, the workings of the digestive system, Wordsworth’s recurring themes. And I liked the pats on the back I got for being a Good Student from the teachers at my New York City private school.

So it came as something of a shock, in the second semester of my senior year, to encounter a pair of teachers who told us that recognizing how little you knew was what really mattered in life. Their names were Frank Moretti and Jack Salzman, and they co-taught a strange blend of history and philosophy and literature. They backed up the claim with Socrates and Salinger, and over the course of the term, with some reluctance, my classmates and I began to grasp what they meant. It’s a lesson I have had to re-learn again and again, in the dark moments of writing, when I inevitably realize that what I really need to do is more reporting. But I can’t imagine a better one for a journalist, especially one like me, trying to write about science with no background in the field. It’s humbling, after weeks or months of research, to say, “I still don’t understand.” But it’s also liberating. And often at those moments, I flash back to the glass-enclosed classroom, up the stairs off the library, where I first considered not acting like such a know-it-all.

Geoff Manaugh

Geoff Manaugh is the writer and editor of BLDGBLOG.

In the break between 7th and 8th grade, my mom hired my middle school Latin teacher — an amateur poet in his free time — to give me writing lessons during the summer months. The basic idea was that I would learn to read and write poetry, something I was already trying my hand at, but also that I would thus also stay out of trouble over the summer, as my family had just fallen apart in a divorce and I was feeling more and more betrayed and alienated by everyday life.

The resulting experience was both life-changing and extraordinary, and I still think about it two decades later: my Latin teacher assigned me both The Odyssey and Huckleberry Finn to read as key texts over the summer, and we would meet up in the local state park, walking around amidst deer, train tracks, and untended Pennsylvania forests, discussing how to travel, how to document the allure of new destinations, and how to turn notes, impressions, loose thoughts, sketches, and other mental ephemera into poetry. We’d challenge each other with new themes to turn into poems each week, sometimes even right there on the spot, writing down lines in a rush within mere minutes, and we’d always return to walking around that park, which, to this day, makes me think of The Odyssey.

The next few years were often extraordinarily dark for me, and it was poetry — the great valve of energy and release that poetry offered — that got me through it all in one piece, a gift that can be traced directly back to a Latin teacher, Dwight Peterson, in suburban Pennsylvania, something I’ve never really thanked him for but will never forget.

Maggie Koerth-Baker

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She’s also the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about how our electric system works today, why it got that way, and how it will have to change to meet the needs of the 21st century. It will be published in April 2012 by Wiley and Sons.

I had the same teacher for 4th and 5th grades, Shirley Johannsen. She started teaching at State Street Elementary in Topeka, Kansas in 1963, so by the time I got there in the late 1980s, this woman was already educating the children of her first students. She taught both grades, simultaneously, in the same classroom. And there were more than 20 of us in each grade. Forty-plus students, one room, one well-loved Apple IIE, and Ms. Johannsen.

That sounds like a recipe for a failing school, but Shirley Johannsen was one of the best teachers I have ever had. There are two things this woman did that completely changed my life.

First, Ms. Johannsen made me a writer. It was in her classroom that I first made the connection between my obsessive love of reading, and the fact that I could write books, too. And she encouraged me to write, not just for school assignments, but for fun and for practice. She was the first person who told me that writing was something I was good at. She was my first editor.

Second, Ms. Johannsen made me love science. In my memories, it’s like I woke up one day, in her classroom, with a 9-volt battery and an electric switch in my hand. Before her, science was dinosaurs and trips to the museum with my parents. After, it was something to look forward to every school year—new discoveries, surprising knowledge, a better understanding of how the world around me worked.

Today, I’m a science journalist. I love my job. And I owe that to the teacher who saw my gifts and inspired my curiosity.

Classroom photo by IITA image library.

Maia Szalavitz

Maia Szalavitz is a neuroscience journalist for TIME.com and a co-author of Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential—And Endangered with Dr. Bruce Perry, and the author of Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids.

“Those who do not articulate their rights have none,” was the statement that Mr. MacTamaney wrote on the blackboard on the first day of school at Monroe-Woodbury High in New York state. That thought — and the way he engaged my high school English class with humor and humanity — had a profound influence on me.

My most important journalism can be summed up in that sentence. It has involved attempting to help the voices of vulnerable people — teenagers, drug users — be heard and to have their rights respected.

While that may not sound like traditional science journalism, it has only been by understanding and presenting research data that I have been able to uncover and fight specific injustices.

For example, if research showed that humiliation, abuse and attack therapy cured addiction and helped troubled teens, my exposés of those programs would not have made sense; if the science didn’t support the idea that overdose prevention and needle exchange programs save lives, I would not have continued to write op-eds explaining the data and the need for such interventions.

I come from a family of teachers: my mother taught high school social studies and my grandfather was a professor of business at Baruch College.  The power of a good teacher is to me, therefore, so obvious that it’s actually hard to articulate.  But I do think we need to speak up for teachers and make sure their contributions to the careers and success of every one of us are known — and they deserve to be respected and better compensated.

The source of the spark that awakens a child’s mind is hard to pinpoint, but the research is clear that early learning experiences have great impact, for both good and ill.  One kind word, a small bit of encouragement can start a virtuous cycle that leads ultimately to the expression of talent and success. We need to support our teachers so they can illuminate all of us.

Deborah Blum

Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and the author of The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York.

In the year that I started 8th grade, we moved from Louisiana to Georgia. Terrible timing for any child in middle school and for me — a shy girl whose major hobby was reading books, a full-fledged geek wearing horn-rimmed glasses (yes, even then!) — completely traumatic. I went to school, did my work, kept my head down. But here’s what changed things. My 8th grade English teacher, Lois Player, liked the way I wrote.  And she was too smart to praise me in front of the class, too savvy to further brand me as a full-fledged geek. She called me aside and told me she thought I had talent and she bullied a rather reluctant school administration into putting me into a brand new class, one in which students created a newspaper for the school.

It was the first time I realized that writing could be community — not a bad lesson at the age of 13.  And the bigger lesson — that kindness literally can shape a life — I learned that too. How can you not admire a teacher who, besieged by hordes of adolescents, takes the time to help a lost child? There are so many teachers today who do the same and I know that from stories my sons tell me.  But one more point about Mrs. Player. She still lives in Athens, Georgia and last year I went there to give a book talk. She was in the audience and she came up after to tell me how proud she was. I felt lucky all over again.

Ed Yong

Ed Yong is an award-winning British science writer. His work has appeared in New Scientist, the Times, Wired, the Guardian, and Nature. He is the author of Not Exactly Rocket Science.

My science teacher, Keith Davies, used to teach me extra stuff in the interstitial moments of class practicals. Though I was still in primary school, I was learning secondary-level science because he never blanched at the prospect of a precocious student asking lots of questions. Mr. Davies taught me that curiosity would be rewarded with knowledge. What better preparation for a scientific life could there be?

Math class. Photo by Stuart Pilbrow.

David Kroll

David Kroll is a pharmacology professor, aspiring writer, and science blogger at Take As Directed and Terra Sigillata.

As a gangly Polish kid in an Irish Catholic high school, I was a perennial target for physical humiliation. Being good in school didn’t help matters. But I had two science teachers whose kindness and support stay with me 30 years later.

Thomas Hannan was a tall, handsome baseball coach who was also our 10th grade biology teacher. I good-naturedly taunted him by scoring a 100 on any test he could throw at us. After class one day, he offered to formalize the challenge: every time I got a 100 thereafter, he would buy a Pepsi and award it to me in class. If I didn’t, I owed him a Pepsi. I thought this was madness. I didn’t need another reason to be pushed around by the jocks. But as the baseball coach, Hannan’s endorsement became an inoculation against the thrashings that typically befell a smart kid. Good biology grades became an “in” thing.

My chemistry and physics teacher, Neil Bender, was the opposite of Hannan in physical appearance — disheveled, mismatched clothes — and had a penchant for diverging into his other passion during class: movie reviews. After our first submission of chemistry lab reports, he commended us on our work but announced that one student’s work stood head and shoulders above the rest. He refused to say who until all of the cool kids badgered him for the student’s identity. As I sat in the back at the lab bench for the other outcasts, I was shocked when he revealed that I was the one with the propensity for chemistry.

I was not the only one singled out by either of these teachers. They often did the same for others in their own thoughtful, personalized ways. Mr. Hannan and Mr. Bender demonstrated that public recognition of student performance and quiet understanding of high school challenges can reach across the decades to inspire you as a teacher — to pay forward the power of encouragement.

Mark Dery

Mark Dery is a cultural critic, freelance journalist, and the author of I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams (University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

In my mental pantheon of Professors Who Changed My Life, one looms largest: an English teacher I encountered in my senior year in high school, Mrs. C. (We’ll pseudonymize her for reasons of privacy.)

Loftily titled “Humanities,” her course for the few, the proud, the college bound was thrillingly elite: anyone with the right GPA and an interest in literature was welcome to submit an essay for consideration, but few were chosen. The few who were chosen, me happily among them, learned on Day One that our careers as self-satisfied bullshit artists were over. Peering imperiously over her no-nonsense glasses, smartly turned out in a gray twinset and skirt color-coordinated with her salt-and-pepper hair, Mrs. C. regarded us with a flinty stare and the mocking ghost of a smile. In that instant, we knew that she was well familiar with our apple-polishing sycophancy, half-assed ”classroom participation,” and slapdash, semicoherent papers, and knew them for the laughable fraud they were.

From the moment we crossed the threshold of her classroom, she informed, we would be treated as if we were in college. We would read serious novels such as The Scarlet Letterand Moby Dick and, because Mrs. C. was a devout Jungian, philosophical investigations such as Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections. We would participate in class — frequently, vigorously, and intelligently, arguing our interpretations of the week’s readings with specific evidence mined from the text. Those who wanted to excel were advised to buy Cirlot’s Dictionary of Symbols, a skeleton key to the collective unconscious. (I promptly rushed out and bought a copy; it sits on my shelf to this day, a beloved artifact of that pre-Derridean world when a symbol had a fixed, finite number of meanings.)

San Diego, in the 1970s, was a dreamy limbo of Navy retirees and Goldwater Republicans and bible-belt troglodytes and stoners and surfers and Malibu Barbies, reflexively hostile to intellectualism. In Mrs. C’s mirrorworld, intellectuals were celebrated and sharp-elbowed debate was the only sport that mattered. She threw wide the doors of adolescent minds whose previous idea of deep thought had been M.C. Escher posters and Yes lyrics, exposing us to the mysteries of symbolism and subtext.

Of course, only one reading of the text was permissible — hers — and my later encounters with Barthes and his postmodern progeny would make Mrs. C.’s by-the-numbers Jungianism look autocratic and antiquated. Even so, the endorphin buzz of hitting the interpretive bull’s-eye, making Mrs. C.’s eyes light up with that you-got-it! glow of approval, struck sparks in my teenage mind. My year with Mrs. C. inspired a major in English, a career in cultural criticism, and a lifetime habit of overthinking everything, a gift that keeps on giving.

Sarah Fallon

Sarah Fallon is a story editor at Wired magazine.

I took AP Chemistry my senior year in high school. It was a small class, just me and three other women, and it was taught by a guy named Garcia Stone. We suspected that Garcia was not his real name, and the rumor around school was that he had been a chemist for the Hells Angels before he started teaching high school. On the weekends, he ran a motorcycle repair shop.

On the first day of class, Garcia asked us if we wanted him to teach to the AP test so we all got 4s and 5s — or if we just wanted to learn fun stuff and do cool experiments. We said screw the test, let’s just do a fun year. And that’s what we did. I did a project on esters (take an acid and an alcohol, mix them up, and the result is usually something smelly) that left my car reeking of old bananas for months. We made thermite (used in WWI bombs) and nitrogen triiodide (a contact explosive). We asked him to let us make fireworks. (He said no.) We asked about making LSD too. (He said that the ingredients required to make it safely were too closely monitored by the government.) It was wonderful. And we all got 4s and 5s on the test.

Class photo, Aomori, Japan, 1950s. Photo by Richard Masoner.

Tim DeChant

Tim DeChant is the author of Per Square Mile.

Within weeks of beginning my freshman year in high school, Mrs. Wondergem, my English teacher, assigned a five paragraph essay on Lord of the Flies. I worked diligently on the paper. I turned it in on time. And I received a C-. I was devastated. I was a good student, and the low grade felt like a slap of cold water in the face. But all hope wasn’t lost — since the entire class had done so poorly, Mrs. Wondergem said she would give us the chance to revise the paper. Relieved, I worked hard, running edits past my mother. My grade improved, but more importantly, my writing improved — however incrementally — because I had revised.

In retrospect, the bad-grade-followed-by-chance-for-redemption bit feels a tad canned. From the start, Mrs. Wondergem had probably planned the whole thing as a sort of lesson. “You’re in the big leagues now,” she seemed to be implying, and, “Your first draft may not be good enough, but you can always revise.” That bad grade wasn’t just an introduction to the hard knocks of high school, it was an early lesson in persistence.

I can’t say that at that moment I decided to be a writer — I was too annoyed with having received the initial bad grade — but it was a pivotal moment in my academic career. I didn’t love writing that year, or necessarily the next. It took years to learn to embrace the process, and years more before I decided to become a writer. But I got there eventually. Mrs. Wondergem was the first editor of many, but she was pitch perfect in that role — demanding and vexing yet ultimately forgiving and encouraging.

A few weeks ago, I received a letter in the mail from Mrs. Wondergem. She had recently spoken to my parents, who told her I was now a writer. She was thrilled.

Nicola Twilley

Nicola Twilley is the writer and editor of Edible Geography.

My favorite teacher story involves my Phys. Ed. instructor telling me, aged 14, that, if I only believed in myself, I could do a somersault. It ends with four of my front teeth hanging out of my mouth by their roots. But perhaps that’s not what you’re looking for.

My school teachers were extremely competent and not particularly inspiring, and my poor undergraduate professors had to deal with the fact that I wasn’t really interested in doing any more academic work after the treadmill intensity of my A-levels. The real eye-opening happened late in the day, during my post-graduate studies at the University of Chicago, in a course called “Art and Medicine” taught by Barbara Maria Stafford.

Call me slow, but it was the first time that I’d been introduced to the incredibly fertile, idea-rich, and under-explored territory created by crossing disciplines. I ended up writing about wedding dresses adorned with sequins of foil-wrapped contraceptive pills, silver-coated Valium charms on bracelets, the placebo effect, the boundaries between surface and interior, and all sorts of other things that, although expressed in somewhat pretentious art-history academese, were incredibly exciting, at least to me. I’ve since made the space where food meets everything else my intellectual home, and I don’t know how much longer it would have taken me to find it (if ever) without Barbara Stafford’s inspiring introduction to the delights of cross-disciplinary exploration.

Hillary Rosner

Hillary Rosner has written about science and the environment for The New York Times, Popular Science, High Country News, Mother Jones, Audubon, and many other publications.

My senior year of high school, a young teacher named Mr. Willey offered a postmodern literature seminar. I’d always loved reading, but to be freed from the stuffy confines of the canon was incredible. We read Thomas Pynchon, Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Gloria Naylor, Walker Percy — and in writing assignments we mimicked each author’s style. The books we read felt so relevant, in a way that nothing before had, that it really solidified my desire to become a writer. To be 17 in the late 1980s and reading White Noise… It was so powerful, like listening to a transformative record. Mr. Willey made me aware, in a way I hadn’t been before, how many different ways there were to use language to tell a story or convey a message.

Later, when he read a draft of my college admissions essay, I was crushed when he said it was trite and needed work. Writing had always come easily to me, and I’d learned to get by with minimal effort. Mr. Willey taught me that having a natural aptitude for something means you have to work even harder at it — because otherwise what’s the point?

Bonnie Bassler

Bonnie Bassler is an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Princeton Professor of Molecular Biology.

From my postdoctoral advisor, Michael Silverman, I learned that science is an adventure and the only limitation is one’s imagination.

Classroom, Gambia. Photo by H2O Alchemist.

Joe Kloc

Joe Kloc is a freelance writer and illustrator who lives in San Francisco.

My last semester of college, I took a class on Paradise Lost in which the professor defined Milton’s notion of grace as “the ability to change.”  Raised in Catholic school, I was surprised I had never heard this — or any — concrete definition of the word. I didn’t think much of the lesson at the time, because I had long ago taken up the habit of dismissing any word born of religion.

But then some weeks later, the professor brought up Milton’s grace again, this time to explain how he had gotten sober after decades of drinking. As I watched this old man stand before a class of 25 cynical kids and use his own alcoholism to make an appeal for grace and dignity in our lives, it occurred to me that whether it was from god or family or friends — I won’t do him the disservice of speculating which — he had indeed been given grace. I could no longer dismiss this word; there was no other to replace it.

I left that class with the understanding that words — their religious, historical or scientific baggage aside — are ultimately human inventions, created to articulate our experiences. In dismissing words too quickly, we run the risk of losing the language that affords us the ability to comprehend ourselves.  I came to see why “Amazing Grace” is still a song worth singing through a secular life.

Uta Frith

Uta Frith is a developmental psychologist at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London.

I had many excellent teachers, but today my memory spotlight landed on one distinct if distant image: Frl. Dr. Lunkenheimer, teacher of the Sexta, about 40 eleven-year-olds in their first year of high school. Picture provincial Germany in 1952; picture a suit-clad woman, prim and spinsterish, with hair that looked as if it couldn’t wait to turn grey, drawn back into a plain knot, perhaps still in her thirties. She taught us how to write essays, and how to parse sentences, and she knew her stuff. After all, she had a PhD. My parents told me it would be more respectful to address her as Frau Doktor Lunkenheimer, and not Fräulein. Interestingly, in this they anticipated modern usage, where the Fräulein has been thoroughly replaced by Frau. Frau Dr L. belonged definitely to the strict and distant type of teacher rather than the popular and chummy type. I liked her a lot and always looked forward to her lessons. Once she deeply hurt my feelings in front of the whole class and from this stemmed also perhaps her greatest gift to me.

As every pupil of a Gymnasium knows you have to learn poems. I knew many of them by heart already because my mother was a great fan of poetry. Almost every Sunday she would read poetry to me and my sister from her favourite volumes. In lessons with Frau Dr. L. we read and discussed a famous poem, by Goethe, entitled “Johanna Sebus.” The subtitle tells all: “In memory of the virtuous and beautiful seventeen-year-old girl from the village of Brienen who on 13^th January 1809, during the freezing of the Rhine and great collapse of the dam at Cleve, died while bringing help.” Thus, a real life story was the subject of this very dramatic ballad, which starts with the foreboding and onomatopoeic lines, imprinted in the brain of legions of German schoolchildren:

Der Damm zerreißt, das Feld erbraus’t,

die Fluten spülen, die Fläche saus’t.

“Ich trage dich, Mutter, durch die Flut;

noch reicht sie nicht hoch, ich wate gut.”

(You can find a translation here.)

The story of the heroic girl is told by Goethe in tightly condensed form: she saves first her mother, carrying her on her back, then goes back to save a woman and her children (who also asked her to save a goat), but she fails. The heart wrench of the poem is that all want to be saved by her but nobody is there to save the heroine.

At this point in the poem a strange anomaly occurs: Goethe refers to the heroine as “Susie,” (“schoen Sus-chen”): Susie who still stands straight and good; Susie who stands like a star; Susie whose image floats above the flood.

Why on earth does Goethe call her Susie and not by her real name, Johanna?  Somebody in the class asked this obvious question, and Frau Dr. L. said “I really don’t know.” I raised an eager hand indicating that I knew why: “Goethe didn’t like the name Johanna and he rather liked the name Susie.” Frau Dr. L. looked at me in surprise: “How do you know this?” “My mother told me,” I replied proudly. Inevitably, Frau Dr. L. dismissed this explanation with scorn, telling the whole class that this information could certainly not be trusted. I was shocked and mortified. Surely, my poetry-obsessed mother would not make up this story. Not to trust her word was simply unprecedented, and yet in this lesson I started to think.  It occurred to me that you must always have precise sources for what you believe to be true — and be able to quote them at the right moment. The word of a trusted authority, even the greatest authority, is subject to scrutiny. The reverberating memory of the shock that I felt at the time made me think that this was a crucial lesson for me. Remarkably, much later in life I found this lesson to be encapsulated in the motto of the Royal Society, Nulla in verbis, which means, roughly, “Don’t believe in the words of authority.”

I still thank Frau Dr. L. for having so subtly started my conversion from childish believer to adolescent doubter. Ironically, Goethe’s ballad praises a young girl’s love for her mother. Yet, my story is about finding out that mothers are not infallible. And there is yet another twist. I still believe that my mother had a credible source for Goethe’s reasons for the name change. Searching the web today, I found mention of two possible reasons: First, Goethe did not know the name of the girl when hearing the story which inspired him to write the ballad; his information was clearly scanty as he had the age wrong with Johanna Sebus being only 16 at the time and not 17. The second possible reason is that he disliked the real name of the heroine – my mother’s explanation! Here is at last a proper source.

The letter of a young painter, Luise Seidler (1986-1866) is cited. She wrote in June 1809, a month after Goethe wrote the poem, that he replaced the real name of Johanna because it had too much pathos because of its connection with the Maid of Orleans.

Classroom, Kenya, 2010. Photo by Nikki McLeod.

David Dobbs

David Dobbs writes on culture and science for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Neuron Culture, and other places. He’s working on his fifth book, The Orchid and the Dandelion.

I started studying the violin in my 30s, working with a warm, intense teacher named Malone. After 5 years he put Bach’s D minor partita in front of me. “We’ll start with the Allemande,” he said. He put the music on the stand and talked me through the first movement, pencilling in bowings and fingerings, occasionally demonstrating how to get through some rhythmic puzzle, and sent me home. I practiced hard all week and came in ready to play about half the first page.

He stopped me on the second note. “Please put down the violin,” he said. I did.

“You’re skipping through that first D. I know it’s just a fucking little sixteenth note, but you have to play the whole thing. I don’t even mean the time. You’re actually giving it enough time. But you’re playing over it instead of through it. You have to play right through the center of it. It’s a leading note, but it’s not just a step into the room. It is the room, and you have to put us there. Play it. Play through every single note in the piece.”

I started to reach for the violin. He held up a hand.

“Wait,” he said. “This is Bach. And Bach, more than any other music, and these pieces, more than any other Bach, is music complete. This doesn’t just mean it’s beautiful. This means you can play this music all your life, even just this Allemande, and no matter what you do, it will expose you. It will expose everything you are and everything you’re not. It will expose everything you can do and everything you can’t. It will expose everything you’ve mastered and everything you’re scared of. And I don’t mean just about the violin. I mean about everything. It’ll show all that today and it’ll show all that when you play it again in 10 years. And people who know music, who’ve seen you play it both times, they will see you play it and know who you were and who you’ve become.

“There is nothing you can do about this. Or actually there is only one thing you can do about it. And that’s to play the fucking music. To not play scared, even if you’re terrified. To not rush. To not short anything. Inhabit this thing. Play it full.”

He took a deep breath, let it out slow, and gave me the tiniest hint of a smile. “Okay,” he said, and nodded at my violin. “Play.”

The metaphor of frogs that don’t notice the water around them is getting warmer until it’s boiling (and they’re cooked) is only an urban legend, say the vigilant debunkers at Snopes.com — but it’s an apt image for today’s frequent flyers. Schlepping their carry-ons through security mazes, standing shoeless with arms outstretched in bleeping machines, shrugging off dramatic confiscations of shampoo and toothpaste, and frantically rejiggering carefully-plotted itineraries at a moment’s notice, we’ve come to accept the current state of affairs as just another way that life sucks in the post-9/11 era. Never mind that I’m old enough to recall when a cross-country trip on an airplane, even in economy class, offered an opportunity to unwind and feel coddled in the lap of luxury for a few hours with a stratospheric view. Now I look forward to flying about as much as I look forward to a trip to the dentist.

Unlike the constitutionally enraged audience of Fox News, however, it’s not TSA pat-downs that bug me. I’d be flattering myself to believe there’s anything prurient about some guy in a rented uniform having to touch my middle-aged junk. I’m sure that feeling around in the waistbands of science bloggers for plastique is not what most TSA agents had in mind when they signed on for the job.

It’s the casually contemptuous attitude of the airline industry toward its customers in the face of snowballing inconveniences that I find soul-crushing. Formerly courteous gate agents now have the wary look and defensive manner of IRS agents who are accustomed to being convenient targets of hate and ridicule. Flight canceled or hours late? Routine. Connecting flights missed? Happens all the time. Massively oversold? That’s just how we roll. Bag gone missing despite a $50 handling fee? Fill out this form over there, sir — there’s a line of passengers behind you.

Not until my most recent trip, however, did I realize that the airline industry’s reckless attitude is conspiring with developments in the technology of personal computing to breed a new kind of nightmare in the formerly friendly skies.

Yeah, well.

Arriving at SFO hours early in the hope of avoiding long lines at the ticket counter, I discovered that United’s “Easy Check-In” system was unable to locate my reservation. Thankfully, the ticket agent spotted my name on a printout, but I was informed that my aisle seat on the outgoing flight had been mysteriously converted to a middle one. Oh well, at least my plane was still scheduled to depart on time.

The smartly-dressed woman in her late 30s or early 40s who occupied the aisle seat in my row — who looked like an academic of some sort – scowled at me when I approached my seat. Looking terribly inconvenienced, she finally stood up, and I gingerly eased around her and strapped myself in for the five-hour journey.

Luckily, I had my trusty Kindle 3G with me, complete with e-books and PDF files I’d carefully chosen to guide and inform my three weeks of research. Back in the pre-digital days, the bag on my aching shoulder would have been overloaded with reading materials, because watching two-month-old romantic comedies on a jerky screen at 30,000 feet is not my idea of passing the time. My Kindle had become my constant companion on reporting trips. I slipped it into the pocket of the seat in front of me and tried to make myself comfortable.

Kindle: So portable and convenient, you may never see it again.

Suddenly, the woman beside me jumped up and convened a hushed meeting of flight attendants. Though she hadn’t said a word to me, it didn’t take long to figure out that the subject of this emergency summit was me. The attendants kept glancing at the woman’s face, and then at me, with expressions that broadcast This is the last thing we need to be dealing with right now. Finally, the woman crossed her arms in triumph, and the senior flight attendant came over with a pleading look. “Sir,” she said, “I’m afraid we have to ask you to move to another seat.”

It seemed that the woman on the aisle had decided that she should not be compelled to sit quite so close to another human being; she may have footnoted her whispering with a piquant arch of her eyebrows about my being overweight. Fat people are never more conscious of the burden they place on others than when they fly in coach. We’re used to navigating the aisles with expressions of pained apology on our faces.

As the flight was full (are they ever not these days?), the attendant directed me to the one remaining seat in the cabin — also in the middle of a row, of course, and in fact much more constricted, wedged between two other refugees from Weight Watchers. But at least we all had the virtue of being good-humored. We made ourselves comfortable in an absurd situation by putting up our armrests and being decent and humane to one another. Meanwhile, as soon as the plane reached its cruising altitude, the woman in my old row began spreading out the contents of her voluminous purse on the vacant seat beside her, piling up stacks of paperbacks and magazines, and laying out a personal buffet of chips and candy bars. She was clearly a pro at this game.

Not science fiction. Air travel in the 1950s.

To their credit, the flight attendants took note of the fact that the whole process must have been humiliating for me. One by one, they came over to say quietly that cocktails would be on the house for the duration of the flight. There was only one problem; I hardly ever drink booze on planes, particularly when I’m planning a late dinner with friends at the other end. I thanked the attendants and stuck to club soda and lime.

All things considered, the flight was a pleasant one, due to the esprit de corps of my fellow passengers. Instead of reading or watching movies, we chatted and joked our way from coast to coast. Eventually, one of the flight attendants came over and slipped me a coupon for a $75 discount on my next United trip, which I appreciated. Upon arriving at JFK, I took down my carry-on bag and gratefully walked off the plane, breathing a sigh of relief as I strode out of the jetway.

That sense of liberation lasted only a few steps. Then I remembered that my precious Kindle and the documents on it were still in the pocket of my old seat on the plane. I turned back to the gate and asked an agent if I could quickly reboard the plane to fetch it. That would be impossible, I was told. I was instructed to call United’s lost-and-found number to retrieve my Kindle.

The automated voice on the line was defiantly pessimistic, as if it didn’t want to foster any naive hopes that merely making a call to a lost-and-found number might actually result in any lost objects being found. Please do not leave multiple messages about your lost items, the voice admonished me sternly — one message is enough. If I didn’t hear back in ten days, I could assume that the things I’d left onboard were gone forever.

Lost? Yes. Found? Not so much.

Unsurprisingly, I never heard a word. An automated message promising due diligence in retrieving my lost item would have made me feel a little better, even if it was a bald-faced lie. But instead, the whole system is designed to make passengers feel like fools for daring to bring an electronic device onto a plane. Apparently, the airlines now wish us to believe that a $189 Kindle in a $39 leather case is worth the value of a crumpled cocktail napkin, a used airsickness bag, or a tattered copy of Hemispheres magazine; that is, of no value at all.

Which is not to say that my Kindle was of no value to whoever subsequently discovered it in its seat pocket. When I contacted Amazon customer service to deregister the device, I was informed that it had already been deregistered by persons unknown.

Which leads to discomfiting questions: Are ground crews supplementing their undoubtedly meager income by deregistering and reselling lost Kindles online? (An Amazon customer-service rep I spoke to this morning confirmed this possibility, since a Kindle can be deregistered via its Wi-Fi connection without a password.) Or was the culprit the next passenger who was forced to sit in that middle seat — which means that seat pockets aren’t even cursorily checked or cleaned between cross-country flights? That doesn’t seem like a good thing.

Am I overlooking a third possibility? Given the state of security, isn’t the trajectory of objects left behind on planes a relatively closed loop — unless aspiring used-electronics vendors are sifting through trash cans outside of JFK?

While it may seem overly sentimental to mourn the loss of a relatively inexpensive e-reader, that Kindle meant a lot to me. It was a thoughtful Christmas present from my hardworking science-teacher spouse after a very lean and stressful financial year for both of us. The unspoken message of the gift was: Keep working hard on your proposal, and someday people will be enjoying your book on a device like this.

It strikes me that two contemporary developments in the culture of air travel have converged to our detriment. One of the chief selling points of Kindles, iPods, and other personal digital devices is how convenient they are for traveling, whether commuting to the office or jetting to Beijing. We entrust them with our personal libraries and other data and assume they’ll be at hand when we need them. The makers of these products have anticipated our needs by designing ever-slimmer, lighter, and more convenient devices with extended battery life — indeed, so slim and convenient that we can slip them into the seat pocket of a 757. Even people who can’t bear to sit through another Adam Sandler showcase no longer have to worry about getting bored on long flights.

At the same time, airlines like United — which once touted its corporate philosophy as “making friends and keeping them” — have propped up their bottom lines in a free-fall economy by calculating precisely how little service they can provide to their customers in coach, and how much frustration, humiliation, and disappointment those customers will endure before they stop buying tickets. I’ve been a loyal United flyer and Mileage Plus member for decades. But when I’m actually onboard a plane, I’m just another piece of oversized human freight that can be shifted around if that may make a problem passenger stop whining.

In other words, the major airlines — with rare exception — have stopped wooing customers by trying to make them happy, at least in coach. Instead, they reliably make them miserable, and then “up-sell” them ways of becoming slightly less miserable, such as Economy Plus seating, snack boxes full of mini-bar also-rans, and élite boarding passes that enable well-heeled flyers to bypass the pandemonium that is now de rigeur at the gate. Those Easy Check-In kiosks that once seemed so customer-friendly are now little more than high-priced vending machines for last-minute reprieves. And heaven help you if anything out of the ordinary happens, like accidentally leaving a device designed to fit into the seat pocket of an airplane in the seat pocket of an airplane for a few minutes.

I don’t blame flight crews, the gracious public face of corporations that have decided they can’t be bothered anymore. It can’t be easy working in a “service” industry that regularly brings its customers to tears. But if I have to watch that smarmy video of United/Continental CEO Jeff Smisek congratulating himself on the merger of the two companies one more time — against a backdrop of Gershwin’s majestic swelling chords from Rhapsody in Blue – I’ll be reaching for the little bag in the seat pocket myself.

The CEOs of United and Continental announcing the formation of the world's biggest airline.

But I will never entrust a Kindle, or any other electronic device, to my seat pocket on a plane again. Would United have been so cavalier about my losing an iPad, BlackBerry, Galaxy Tab, or MacBook Air? I will now dutifully label my digital devices, count them before I bring them onboard, and rehearse that number in my mind as the plane begins its descent, making sure I have the correct number of devices safely stowed in my bags before I walk down the aisle to disembark.

I suspect that I’m not the only passenger to have left a treasured digital device behind on a plane. A friend recently lost a pair of $349 Bose noise-cancelling headphones the same way. Like me, he realized his error while he was still at the gate. He was also turned back and told to call lost-and-found. You know how that story ends.

Have you ever left an e-reader, iPhone, tablet, PDA, MP3 player, or laptop behind on a plane while in transit? Did you get it back? Have the Kindle-deregistering elves that have apparently infiltrated airport security ever exploited the private data stored on your smart phone or laptop?  What are your tips for preventing digital devices from getting sucked into the Bermuda Triangle of modern air travel?

Update: After reading this blog, two different United/Continental reps (thank you Georganne and Christina) hunted down my phone number and email address and contacted me to make things right.  That doesn’t solve all the problems I mentioned, but I also heard about some behind-the-scenes United efforts to cope with the problem of lost electronics. And I am very glad to learn that United/Continental has empowered its customer-service reps to track these problems on Twitter and the Web and reach out to keep its customers happy.

Dr. Marx will see you now (image by Keith Karraker)

I woke up in a rented room in London in the middle of the night, feeling like my eyes had been packed with hot sand and the lids were somehow glued together. When I pried them apart, the whites of my eyes were an angry crimson.

Maybe it was nothing. I’d been told that the pollen counts in the UK this summer are sky high. A raging heat wave in a city that doesn’t really do air-conditioning (like my gloriously fogbound town of San Francisco) didn’t seem to be helping. But when I squinted in the bathroom mirror, I saw a greenish-white discharge collecting around my tear ducts. This looked like more than a bad case of hay fever.

Then I remembered that one of the cognitive psychologists I’d come to London to interview mentioned that she’d recently had a bad eye infection. I Googled “conjunctivitis.” It dawned on me that the bottle of water I drank in her office may have been a mixed blessing.

Great Portland Street Tube station

But what to do? I was far from home with lots of work to do and no idea how to see a doctor locally. Thankfully, I didn’t have any appointments for a couple of days, and have health insurance from Kaiser-Permanente through my spouse’s employer. But I knew that getting reimbursed for treatment by a doctor outside the Kaiser network can be complex; what about an out-of-country doctor?

When I dialed the 800 number on my Kaiser card to find out what to do, an automated voice from AT&T informed me that I would be billed at the standard international calling rate of $1 a minute. After navigating a maze of call-center prompts, I sat on hold for 15 minutes.

The first Kaiser rep who took my call fired off a barrage of questions. Was I experiencing “blind spots, double vision, floaters, hallucinations, or any other problems” with my vision?  Yes — the goopy discharge from my tear ducts was making it hard to see, and I said so. But that turned out to be the wrong answer. The Kaiser rep simply repeated her question in a more brittle tone of voice and added, “Just answer yes or no.”

Yes, I was having problem with my vision, but not “double vision, floaters, or hallucinations.”  Judging by the structure of the question, I suspected that it was designed to fish for a different sort of problem than the one I had, such as evidence of entopic phenomena that might indicate something awry inside the eyeball, or even in the brain. I didn’t want to end up shunted onto the wrong track in the voicemail maze. “Floaters, hallucinations, and double-vision, no,” I explained,  ”but problems with my vision yes, because the discharge from my tear ducts…”

“Sir,” she cut me off sternly. “These are yes or no questions. Answer either yes or no or I will not be able to help you.” I furiously tried to calculate which falsely binary oversimplifications were the right ones.

Then back to limbo at $1 a minute. Finally an advice nurse picked up. She ran me through a nearly identical gantlet of questions — hadn’t my previous answers been logged into the database? — but unlike the previous insurance rep, the advice nurse could handle nuance. Given the severity of my symptoms, she told me, I should certainly certainly see a doctor right away — as soon as I had secured permission for an out-of-network exam with someone at the member-services line on the other side of my Kaiser card.

It was 2 in the morning in a strange country and my eyes were oozing green goo, but at least I was getting somewhere. I called the other number, navigated another maze of prompts, and waited. Tick, tick, tick.

Thankfully, the member-services rep was both efficient and sympathetic. Of course, she said, it must be upsetting to be having eye problems far from home. I should definitely go to a local clinic. But before she could give me permission to do that, she would have to talk to her supervisor, because she’d never dealt with someone having a medical problem outside the country before. Several minutes passed.

Then, good news from the supervisor — with one caveat. Yes, I should go see a doctor at a local clinic. But because this was all happening out-of-network, I would have to pay out of pocket. As long as I made sure to obtain all the necessary receipts and forms, however, I could submit them when I got home, and Kaiser would “open a case file” on me so I could be reimbursed.

I wondered how much the visit would cost me up front — $200, $500, $1000? The unfavorable exchange rate had already vacuumed out my wallet, just picking up Chunky Hummus Salad wraps and “flat white” coffees at Pret A Manger. But it didn’t matter.  My eyes needed help now, and I was almost certainly highly contagious; I didn’t want to pass this mess on to anyone else.

The member-services rep then explained that a Kaiser doctor would be calling me within the next four hours to give me additional information. I asked her gently if the doctor could possibly call in the morning London time, because I was already sleep-deprived and had a lot of work to do the following day. Sorry, she replied, that was just not possible. The doctor would have to call within the four-hour window allotted for my case — even if that meant the phone ringing at 5 in the morning.

Still, I was grateful to finally have permission to seek the care that I desperately needed. I called a number I found on the Web for urgent care in Marylebone, the central London neighborhood where I’d found a semi-affordable place to stay for three weeks. Amazingly, a human being picked up the phone right away — an affable guy with a disarmingly chummy accent and an empathic manner. Yes, yes, of course I should see a doctor right away. Where should they send him?

What? This guy was offering to dispatch someone to examine my eyes immediately in my apartment in the middle of the night?

I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d gotten a house call from a doctor — was it when I had chicken pox in 3rd grade? I expressed my astonishment. The chap on the other end of the line just laughed: I assure you, it’s no problem.

Alas, there turned out to be a hitch after all. One of the amenities I’d traded away for affordable lodgings in Marylebone was a landline. The guy explained that the National Health Service couldn’t send out a doctor to see a patient who only had a mobile number. But he took my name and gave me the address of an urgent-care center in a hospital near the Latimer Road Tube that I could visit at 9 in the morning. I thanked him profusely and went to bed.

The physician from Kaiser who called half an hour later was brusque and reassuring as he told me everything I already knew. I almost certainly had conjunctivitis. I should go to an urgent-care center in the morning, get an examination and a prescription, collect all the receipts, and Kaiser would open a file for reimbursement.

A couple of hours later, I pried open my eyes, washed my hands, and headed out to the Great Portland Street tube. Unfortunately, because of maintenance on the Hammersmith and City line, the trip took longer than expected. Arriving in Latimer Road, I discovered that the London street app on my iPhone had been deceptively optimistic; I would need to take a bus from the station to the urgent-care center.

I started to worry. Had the nice NHS guy made a specific appointment for me at the clinic at 9am or not? Thinking back, I should have clarified that. If I missed the appointment, could I get another one promptly? Would I have to wait through an interminable queue at the hospital? Luckily I’d had the foresight to lug an afternoon’s worth of reading with me in my heavy messenger bag. I wouldn’t have to waste a whole day of work if I missed my appointment and had to start from scratch.

I didn’t expect top-drawer, American-style health care. I’ve been hearing all my life about how impersonal and inefficient the medical care in England and Canada can be — after all, it’s socialized medicine: a Kafkaesque, government-managed, bureaucratic nightmare. Surely I’d have to wait for hours in a dreary queue of ailing and indigent patients in a country with no freedom of choice between health-care providers. (Never mind that because my spouse is about to change jobs, we’ve been anxious about me losing my coverage for months, adding a sobering asterisk of reality to election-year buzzphrases like freedom of choice.)

Panting into the St. Charles Centre for Health and Wellbeing in Kensington half an hour late, I was surprised to see only one patient ahead of me. The nurse in the admitting window asked me a few basic questions; the fact that I was visiting from the U.S. didn’t seem to faze her. I don’t recall if I was even required to produce my passport. I explained to the nurse that after my examination, I would need to obtain various receipts and forms to file with my health-insurance company back home. She just nodded and waved me into the waiting room.

There were only a few people already sitting there: a pretty young girl with a sprained ankle, a middle-aged Rasta with graying dreadlocks, and a couple of prim-looking older women out of an Agatha Christie novel. The calm, tidy waiting room presented a vivid contrast to the huge Kaiser complex on Geary Street back home, where frail seniors shuffle from waiting area to waiting area, taking numbers from machines and clutching their all-important forms to deposit in seemingly unattended baskets, before they’re herded to an examination room to wait 20 minutes for their harried physician to make a brief appearance. Though most of the Kaiser staff I’ve dealt with have been pleasant and good at their jobs, they often seem beleaguered and exhausted by the sheer workload.

The subtext of nearly every interaction with a health-care provider in the U.S. is: You’re lucky to have this coverage. Don’t push it. There are thousands of patients waiting behind you who are in even worse condition than you are. Let’s get through this as quickly as possible so the whole bloody machine doesn’t come grinding to a halt.

My name was called after just a couple of minutes in the waiting room. An Asian doctor with a gentle, inquisitive face and a soothing, avuncular manner took my medical history, asked me if I was allergic to any medication, and examined my eyes. The diagnosis was indeed conjunctivitis. The doctor wrote out a prescription for antibiotic eye drops with steroids that would take care of both the infection and the discomfort, and pointed to a pharmacy directly across the street where I could fill it. Did I have any further questions?

Only one: Where could I get the forms and receipts that I would need to file with my insurance company back home? ”The eyedrops will cost you about ten pounds,” the doctor replied, “but there’s no cost for this examination.” When I gazed at him with disbelief, he added, as if patiently explaining something elemental to a child, “This is the National Health Service — it’s free.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. Surely a freeloading American had to pay up front? The admitting nurse, however, had no forms to offer me. My prescription was filled at the pharmacy within five minutes by a Muslim woman in a colorful headscarf who also directed me to a lavatory where I could put the first round of drops in my eyes. I immediately felt better as the placebogenic effects of feeling well taken care of took hold. In a couple of hours, all of my symptoms were gone for good, though of course I continued taking the drops until the bottle ran out, as directed by the doctor.

Riding the Underground back to Great Portland Street, I felt an unexpected sense of exhilaration. I had experienced not just a visit to a new clinic, but an unfamiliar paradigm of medicine — one in which health care is abundant, easily available, and affordable, rather than scarce, expensive, and a hassle for both the patient and the doctor.

I’m aware that my little adventure in socialized medicine is no more than a trivial anecdote — one tourist’s experience with a minor affliction that was easily dealt with. I expect that many Londoners could furnish horror stories about their ordeals in the NHS. One renowned health-care expert who grew up in England recently explained the difference between British and American medicine to me by saying that if he was very rich and had cancer, he would rather live in the U.S. But if he was poor and had cancer, he’d rather live in the U.K. and be guaranteed at least B-minus care.

That’s the sort of nuance that gets lost when the framing of public debate on health care is socialized medicine versus free-market capitalism, the feds vs. private insurers, or the GOP vs. “Obamacare” — and when we allow the tone of that crucial national debate to be set by ill-informed voters yelling Fox News talking points in staged riots at townhall meetings.

Shortly after arriving back home, I read that GOP presidential front-runner Michele Bachmann — who brags of being a successful small-business owner because her fey “therapist” husband, boasting a degree from a defunct diploma mill, runs a network of clinics that take government funds to indulge evangelical fantasies of homosexuality being “curable” with enough prayer and self-loathing — had declared that President Obama must have been “not in his right mind” to pass the Affordable Care Act, which she has vowed to repeal if elected president. The GOP has been sounding the alarm about “socialist medicine” since 1961, when Ronald Reagan preached against the soul-sapping dangers of Medicare as a threat to American liberty.

The Koch brothers’ astroturfed Tea Party crusade against health reform can take the lion’s share of the credit for putting the GOP in control of the House in the mid-term elections, resulting in one of the most deadlocked, fractious, showboating, anti-labor, anti-middle class, and casually bigoted Congresses in history. With help from a president who often seems more eager to demonstrate his “post-partisan” reasonableness than to defend the lives of the American people against the ravenous appetites of corporations and lobbyists, the safety and security of everyone but the very rich — in the form of modest entitlements like Social Security and Medicaid — is headed for the chopping block.

It’s my generation that will end up ill and indigent in dank emergency rooms, without even the Medicare that my widowed mother depends on in her fearful hours, because we let quacks like “Dr.” Bachmann diagnose the myriad ills in our health-care system.

GOP front-runner Bachmann describes Obama's Affordable Care Act as "Frankenstein"

The specter of Americans paying higher taxes to prop up a bureaucracy like the NHS is a dependable stockyard of red meat for the right-wing base –though Americans already pay billions of dollars every month to support a system in which they’re too often treated like interlopers and malingerers, and from which they’re liable to be exiled for the sin of quitting a bad job to try to get a better one. That doesn’t sound like a “free market” to me.

“If Democrats enact a public-option health-insurance program, America is on the way to becoming a European-style welfare state,” GOP kingmaker Karl Rove rumbled ominously from the pages of the Wall Street Journal in 2009. “The public option puts government firmly in the middle of the relationship between patients and their doctors. If you think insurance companies are bad, imagine what happens when government is the insurance carrier, with little or no competition and no concern you’ll change to another company.”

Yes, imagine. Imagine a traveler from London coming down with a mysterious infection while on holiday in the States, waking up in a hotel room with burning eyes at 2am. Who does he or she call — 911? (You can imagine the response to a polite inquiry about a house call). Where does he or she go to find care with no insurance? I’ve waited in enough dingy stateside ERs with sick and injured people to know how being acknowledged after two hours in front of a blaring TV set can be the answer to a chorus of prayers.

Or imagine a society committed to providing access to health and wellbeing for everyone, rich and poor, rather than playing childish semantic games about “death panels” and “socialism.” The cost of calls to my insurance company to get permission to see an NHS doctor who didn’t charge me a penny will be six times what I paid for the medicine that cured my infection.

But that, I suppose, is the cost of living in a free country.