When I started my career in advertising it was sort of on the heels of one of
most iconic campaigns in the ad game which was the Think Different
campaign that Apple put together. It talked about there's certain people that
bucked convention that did things different from the way that things were
done. And because of their approach in the way that they thought differently
they were able to make some profound and fundamental changes.
We found out or we began to suspect that our older boy who's now five has autism around when he
was two years old and I didn't really understand what it was. You've seen probably
Rain Man or something and you have some understanding of some exceptional skills
or or or the word that sometimes has been used is a 'savant' but you don't
really understand what it is. So autism is a gap in communication and people
or individuals on the spectrum they just they don't connect they don't
communicate they don't necessarily see or hear what is being transmitted at
them. The spectrum is kind of wide berth of understanding—it's a bit of
a catch-all. Autism, it's not binary it's not like you have a cold
or you don't have a cold. It's a whole range of symptoms.
And the spectrum is comprised of ADHD, autism, speech apraxia—a number of things.
Bbut that's sort of at its core what autism is. You can look at various
behavior of some notable people in history: Albert Einstein for example, even
some historical figures like Mozart, recent figures like Amelia Earhart, even
Steve Jobs, and they displayed some very classic behavior of people on the
spectrum. I was reading a report that was published in the Journal of Autism and
Developmental Disorders. It talks about how people on the spectrum are programmed to
think differently. They did a series of tests they asked a number of people—I
think there was a sampling of about 350 people—and they asked them to look at
common things like paper clips and identify alternative uses for
for these common items. A neurotypical responds to that question would have
been things like a pin or a fishhook or a piece of jewelry. People on the
spectrum gave answers like a ballast for a paper airplane or chips for gambling.
And they found that their responses were less than 5% of the common responses of
the whole sample size, so they were actually you know quantitatively
different. So people on the spectrum, the right side of the brain—the one that
answers, they say, for the creativity, for the common experiences—the more sort of
social behavior—its impaired. It's one of the reasons that they're that they are
the way that they are. There isn't really a social common behavior that they have.
There aren't the same references that they share with people. So people on the
spectrum, their left side—the more logic side—not only is it not impaired
because it's what they use more often, in some cases it tends to be more developed.
And the theory that came out of this this piece was people on the spectrum they
approach problem-solving differently because that's the way that they're
wired. I think many people remember the Think Different campaign that talked about
there's certain people that did things differently from the way that things were
done. And there was a one-minute film basically celebrating that..."Here's to the
crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels the troublemakers, the round pegs in the
square holes, the ones who see things differently..." They kind of went through
and selected some iconic figures who, just through the sheer willpower or
because they thought differently changed humanity for the better. And it just
so happens that many of these people that changed the face of humanity, that
thought differently, were on the spectrum they said—including Steve Jobs who
is suspected to have had Asperger's. If you include 18 the 18 people highlighted
13 of the 18 people were either diagnosed as being on the spectrum, or
suspected to have been on the spectrum, which is pretty amazing. And there was
never a brief, at least I never read about a brief, that they were looking for
people on the spectrum. They were looking for people that thought differently. It
kind of occurred to me that the creative field has been a place for people on the
spectrum for many many years and I think in many ways without even really knowing
it celebrated it—or at least certain things about it—unknowingly.
My name is Alex Shifrin and I think the creative industry is an environment
where autism, or people who are on the spectrum, become part of the community.
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