The Geek Syndrome

THE GEEK SYNDROME
At Michelle Winner’s social-skills clinic in San Jose,

Calif., business is booming. Every week dozens of
youngsters with Asperger syndrome file in and out of
therapy sessions while their anxious mothers run errands
or chat quietly in the waiting room. In one session,
a rosy-cheeked 12-year-old struggles to describe
the emotional reactions of a cartoon character in a
video clip; in another, four little boys (like most forms
of autism, Asperger’s overwhelmingly affects boys)
grapple with the elusive concept of teamwork while
playing a game of 20 Questions. Unless prompted to
do so, they seldom look at one another, directing their
eyes to the wall or ceiling or simply staring off into
space.
Yet outside the sessions the same children become
chatty and animated, displaying an astonishing grasp
of the most arcane subjects. Transformer toys, video
games, airplane schedules, star charts, dinosaurs. It
sounds charming, and indeed would be, except that
their interest is all consuming. After about five minutes,
children with Asperger’s, a.k.a. the “little professor”
or “geek” syndrome, tend to sound like CDs on
autoplay. “Did you ask her if she’s interested in astrophysics?”
a mother gently chides her son, who has
launched into an excruciatingly detailed description of
what goes on when a star explodes into a supernova.
Although Hans Asperger described the condition in
1944, it wasn’t until 1994 that the American Psychiatric
Association officially recognized Asperger syndrome
as a form of autism with its own diagnostic criteria. It
is this recognition, expanding the definition of autism
to include everything from the severely retarded to the
mildest cases, that is partly responsible for the recent
explosion in autism diagnoses.
There are differences between Asperger’s and highfunctioning
autism. Among other things, Asperger’s
appears to be even more strongly genetic than classic
autism, says Dr. Fred Volkmar, a child psychiatrist at
Yale. About a third of the fathers or brothers of children
with Asperger’s show signs of the disorder. There
appear to be maternal roots as well. The wife of one Silicon
Valley software engineer believes that her Asperger’s
son represents the fourth generation in just
such a lineage.
It was the Silicon Valley connection that led Wired
magazine to run its geek-syndrome feature last December.
The story was basically a bit of armchair theorizing
about a social phenomenon known as
assortative mating. In university towns and R.-and-D.
corridors, it is argued, smart but not particularly wellsocialized
men today are meeting and marrying
women very like themselves, leading to an overload of
genes that predispose their children to autism, Asperger’s
and related disorders.
Is there anything to this idea? Perhaps. There is no
question that many successful people—not just scientists
and engineers but writers and lawyers as well—
possess a suite of traits that seem to be, for lack of a better
word, Aspergery. The ability to focus intensely and
screen out other distractions, for example, is a geeky
trait that can be extremely useful to computer programmers.
On the other hand, concentration that is too
intense—focusing on cracks in the pavement while a
taxi is bearing down on you—is clearly, in Darwinian
terms, maladaptive.
But it may be a mistake to dwell exclusively on the
genetics of Asperger’s; there must be other factors involved.
Experts suspect that such variables as prenatal
positioning in the womb, trauma experienced at birth
or random variation in the process of brain development
may also play a role.
Even if you could identify the genes involved in Asperger’s,
it’s not clear what you would do about them.
It’s not as if they are lethal genetic defects, like the ones
that cause Huntington’s disease or cystic fibrosis.
“Let’s say that a decade from now we know all the
genes for autism,” suggests Bryna Siegel, a psychologist
at the University of California, San Francisco.
“And let’s say your unborn child has four of these
genes. We may be able to tell you that 80% of the people
with those four genes will be fully autistic but that
the other 20% will perform in the gifted mathematical
range.”
Filtering the geeky genes out of the high-tech breeding
grounds like Silicon Valley, in other words, might
remove the very DNA that made these places what
they are today.

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THE GEEK SYNDROME

At Michelle Winner’s social-skills clinic in San Jose,

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