Synopses & Reviews
The realm of sensing is the place we have all come from: that world
before mind was thought of as 'me, before body became 'mine', that time
when we 'knew' because we FELT the nature of things, the feel of them-
when we sensed. This was before we had learned to interpret and see the
world not as it was but through our concepts and ideas of what it was.
Autism is seen as a disability in a world where interpretation is highly
valued, where the realm of mind, of imposed meaning, of words, becomes
the place of trust, of proof, a world in which the System of Sensing
becomes progressively redundant, devalued, discredited, even
discouraged. This book is a journey into a unique way of experiencing
the world, suggesting how this unlost instinct has much to teach us
about the assumption of so called 'normality'.
Synopsis
Expanding on themes of her previous book, Autism: An Inside-Out Approach, Donna Williams explains how the senses of a person with autism work, suggesting that they are 'stuck' at an early development stage common to everyone. She calls this the system of sensing, claiming that most people move on to the system of interpretation which enables them to make sense of the world. In doing so, as well as gaining the means of coping with the world, they lose various abilities which people with autism retain. She goes so far as to suggest that the constraints of space and time do not exist in the same way for autistic people, and that the emotional as well as the physical world is seen and therefore approached in a different way.
The book provides a fascinating insight into the way that people with autism perceive the world, going into far more depth than Williams' previous books.
About the Author
When Donna Williams was nine they found out that she actually couldn't understand sentences. Hard to imagine that from there she has become an author with 9 published books including two international bestsellers.
Her writing career began when a typewriter was left in her room at the age of nine. She typed a whole line of letter patterns. Over the next four years the letter patterns would become word lists and the word lists would eventually become poetry hidden in a roof void for nobody to see. Donna Williams' career as a writer had begun.
She went on to write songs, re-entered education and developed an ability to write essays, then exploded into the literary world with her first two autobiographical works, the international bestsellers, Nobody Nowhere and then Somebody Somewhere. She followed these with two more autobiographical works, Like Color To The Blind and Everyday Heaven, which also sold internationally and then wrote a series of text books, Autism; An Inside Out Approach, Autism and Sensing; The Unlost Instinct, Exposure Anxiety; The Invisible Cage of Involuntary Self Protection Responses and The Jumbled Jigsaw and the poetry work, Not Just Anything.
Today she continues to write in a range of genres, including moving into fiction and film. Outside of her writing, she is an accomplished artist, sculptor and songwriter and regularly gives international lectures. She lives in the hills in semi-rural Melbourne with her husband Chris.