A Savant Explains His Abilities 930
numLocked writes "Of the few hundred autistic savants in the world, none have been able to explain their incredible mental abilities. Until now, that is. It seems that Daniel Tammet, a mathematical savant who holds the record for the most digits of pi recited from memory, is able to explain exactly how he intuits answers to mathematical problems. Tammet is quite articulate and speaks seven languages, including one he invented. The Guardian is running an article about his amazing abilities."
It makes one wonder.... (Score:5, Insightful)
What is mathematical genius (Score:5, Insightful)
If he solved Fermat's theorem over breakfast, that would be mathematical genius!!
Re:It makes one wonder.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Huh? (Score:1, Insightful)
Intuitive... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Does not Compute! (Score:2, Insightful)
Theories...
Re:Resume Puzzle (Score:4, Insightful)
I think this is the saddest
Re:homosexuality (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Did anyone else read this bit and double take? (Score:5, Insightful)
A gay, churchgoing autistic savant in fact. That's a tough call for someone trying not to stand out.
As a gay, formerly-churchgoing, neurotic genius (i.e. a bit like like him but not as "out there"), I'm jealous that he has a boyfriend.
Re:homosexuality (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:homosexuality (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Resume Puzzle (Score:2, Insightful)
You know, I can put up with almost almost all the insults in this thread. That's what I would expect when a bunch of NTs get together and start talking about autism while totally ignorant on the subject. (The ones with autistic relatives may be slightly more clueful.)
But I'm not going to sit by while you toss around the term "idiot-savant".
Who died and made you Grand Lord Definer of Intelligence? To call an autistic person with savant abilities an "idiot-savant" is to call every autistic person without savant abilities just an "idiot".
Just to make it explicit:
1. Not every autistic person has savant abilities.
2. Not every autistic person is nonverbal.
3. Even the ones who *are* nonverbal are not the sort of basket-case you seem to think they are.
4. There are a lot of autistic adults out here who are quite capable of making ourselves understood, and we are sick of being spoken of in this slighting fashion.
That's all. We now return you to your regularly scheduled program of ignorance, flamewars, and cheat-beating contests (otherwise known as "Slashdot.org").
(Oh, and one brief note to those posters with young autistic relatives: I'm sorry it's been tough for you. Believe me, it's no picnic for them, either. Try getting them a computer; keyboards are wonderful things. Don't despair; a significant portion of us *do* learn to communicate your way as we become adults. And don't go for the "dog-training" programs; trust me, they're bad juju...you'd be better off with acceptance, patience, and a degree of flexability.)
Re:It makes one wonder.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I should kick your ass, AC.
Although I don't think my sister will be going into porn. In fact I can't imagine a career more laughably unsuited for an autistic person. One of the main problems in people with autism is that they don't find it very motivating to look at other individuals. And even when they do, they can't seem to assess information about that individual's importance, intentions or expressions. [dukemednews.org] That pretty much rules out a career in the porn industry- in front of or behind the camera.
This past Thanksgiving, my mother was excited and took pictures of all of us and our spouses, since we were all there at the same time (we live all over the country). My autistic sister erased them all so she could take pictures of the floor and the ceiling. Can you imagine paying for a porno tape and the camera quickly moves from the bed to the ceiling? I don't know what industry she might work in but it certainly isn't going to be porn.
Although my little sister is quite attractive- that's one thing she's definitely got going for her in life. She looks like me.
Re:homosexuality (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Resume Puzzle (Score:5, Insightful)
But there is some hope to be gained from others' examples. I have a friend with cerebral palsy whose pediatrician said he'd never be able to care for himself but is now a successful business owner and head of household, another friend with learning disabilities who's doing well handling repetitive tech-support calls, and a great aunt who was born cyanotic with multiple disabilities but has lived a rather full and rich life. My boyfriend, whose brain hemorrhage several years ago left him unable to care for himself (let alone hold down a job) has ended up as "a burden on the family", but they - and I - still value him for (to put it crudely) what's left of him. A step mother I expected nothing from turned out to be his greatest caregiver. (And I sure as hell didn't turn out like my family expected.)
My point I suppose is that things don't always turn out as badly as you fear they will, and you have to let every situation sort itself out as best as you can. There's no guarantee that everything will all work out, but then there's no guarantee that it won't. Work with that.
Re:It makes one wonder.... (Score:1, Insightful)
You've got to be the first person I've ever been able to recognise as someone who's not seen much porn. Believe me, that wouldn't make a whit of difference. It'd keep someone out of the top tier, but that's the worst of it. A room, a camera, and a vibrator are about all it takes.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:homosexuality (Score:5, Insightful)
Now go look that up in a few other translations. It is quite a bit different.
I've never understood how people can believe that the Bible is true, yet at the same time not find it important enough to read in the original languages.
Re:homosexuality (Score:3, Insightful)
2) Homosexuality is not a vector for disease spread. The vector is massive ammounts of sexual activity without proper precautions (such as condoms, limiting partners [to a perferred one], and plain ignorance). I will not say that there are not a large number of sexually over active individuals and I will not condone actions which are well known to be stupid and dangerous, but just because a large portion of a population engages in a dangerous activity is no reason to attack this population en masse. There are no laws preventing smokers from adopting children or raising children they alreayd have, but there are similar rules against gays. While it is known that being around smoke and smoking is dangerous to your health and to the child's health, being around gays is not dangerous to the child or to the homosexual.
Re:homosexuality (Score:1, Insightful)
Just because it's OLD doesn't make it RIGHT.
Re:homosexuality (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:homosexuality (Score:1, Insightful)
Interestingly, many Jews find this a confusing aspect of Christianity. "What do you mean there's 197 different versions? Which one is, you know, the *real* one?"
A relative of mine... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's sort of impressive, but it's also a horrible condition. I'd rather lack that ability and at least be more able to function normally in the world. He's still a great person but obviously life is much more difficult for him.
Sketchy science (Score:4, Insightful)
On the other hand it appears that he at least exists, and that his story is not fabricated from whole cloth: http://www.usyd.edu/news/newsevents/articles/2004
Finally, in reference to the Guardian article, I find the parroting of autistic savant folklore such as the tale of the savant able to play Tchaik 1 without having taken a piano lesson (or touched a piano depending on the retelling) extremely galling. Playing a piano concerto depends on technique, muscle memory, and many other things besides pure mental contortion. To think that someone who has never played scales would be able to wrap their untrained fingers around a concerto of non-negligible complexity is positively ridiculous in my mind. I suspect that the story arose as a vast but innocent exaggeration initially and has taken up a life of its own through repeated retellings by reporters too lazy to check the source material of their stories.
Can this explain the nature of math? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Interesting tidbits about Asperger's and Autism (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd say it's natural to be depressed every so often, but we still have such a thing as "clinical depression". I'd wager that lots of people falsely decide they need treatment/medication for their depression too, when they don't really have a mental problem.
Even defining an "alcoholic" seems to be rather difficult. I remember reading the list of "signs" back in school, and the running joke was that "Hey, we're almost ALL alcoholics and we didn't even know it!"
It seems to me, Aspergers is just a definition of extremely mild autism -- and the diagnostic criteria have to be broad, because it's nearly impossible to draw an absolute "line" as when this transcends "slightly geeky" and crosses over into the territory of an actual disease/illness.
Truth is, these things only become "problems" for an individual when they interfere with their daily lives to the point where they're unable to overcome them on their own.
So yeah - if you're simply not making an effort to overcome some problem you're having, then you're correct. It's time to stop with the excuses and time to take a little responsibility to change.
But I can certainly see value in parents being made aware that something like Asperger's exists. I'm pretty sure I have a touch of it myself, actually, but nobody ever brought it up as I was growing up. I struggled quite a bit with social skills and to some extent, with physical clumsiness. To this day, I have a habit of rocking back and forth in my chair while thinking, reading, or trying to work on a project, and I have a tendency to twiddle pens or pencils and so forth. I also tend to "hyper-focus" on specific problems or items of interest. I put up with a lot of teasing in school, until I got much of the way through high-school, and started making a real conscious effort to "fit in" and to succeed in being more "social" with other people.
To this day, I naturally want to avoid eye-contact with people when I talk to them, and I have to pretty much force myself not to do that (reminding myself each time about it).
I suspect that what I've really done over the years is teach myself how to cope with and work-around my own problems. That's fine, but I might have gotten to this point a lot more quickly if someone helped me along a little bit when I was a kid. About the only "advice" I got was that I was "shy".
Re:Resume Puzzle (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with technical definitions is that it requires someone who is technically competent to apply them. The US has only recognized Aspergers at all only very recently. (It was identified in the 1940s, I believe, but not diagnosed outside of "Old Europe" as a certain politician kindly refers to that part of the world until the 1980s.)
The most practical method of diagnosis is to hang out with autistic people. If you find you think in ways that they can relate to (and vice versa) then you have a working diagnosis. In other words, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, you must consider the possibility that it really is a duck.
Best place to find autistic people is over on Starlink [demon.nl]. The Asperger channel is only for people who have been diagnosed, not just self-diagnosed, but there are plenty of other resources there.
Re:homosexuality (Score:3, Insightful)
(Contemporary English Version)
Nm 15:15 This law will never change. I am the LORD, and I consider all people the same, whether they are Israelites or foreigners living among you.
Dt 4:2 and now he is your God. I am telling you everything he has commanded, so don't add anything or take anything away.
Seems to me that he didn't have the jurisdiction to do away with anything, at least according to the very book that gives him authority in the first place -- the one written by his father. I suppose you can totally disregard the Old Testament, but then where the heck did Jesus come from and who is he speaking for?
Ah well, Christian Logic is not something I'll ever wrap my head around. The LORD works in mysterious ways indeed.
Cheers.
Re:(Temporarily) turning people into savants (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:homosexuality (Score:0, Insightful)
Either they are really young or you are referencing a great exception.
My daughter is missing some fingers on one hand. She is now in teens and is having major issues with depression and having a very hard time accepting who she is. I could go on for hours about the details of how she feels and why. Kids make fun of kids for things and some kids would rather not be living and not have to face that on a daily basis. Try telling a teen age girl the kids are only making fun of her because most of society has a different view of homosexuality then her parents. If you think she will say, Oh, I see now and go along happily, you are sadly mistaken. If you dont think the kids are going to make fun of her, you are sadly mistaken. We as adults can see people for who they really are, teenagers do not.
How about the story? (Score:3, Insightful)
The point of this story is that modern medicine may develop a basis for understanding savantism and then maybe autism. The real goal with this guy is to get him to write a diary, so shrinks can pick his brain. This guy may be the greatest discovery made by psychology ever. And it seems to have been completely missed by everyone here on /.
Re:homosexuality (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It makes one wonder.... (Score:4, Insightful)
While that might possibly be the case for the most profoundly affected autists, most people on the autism spectrum don't see the world like that. They have a "theory of mind", as it's known, it's just that their theory is that others' minds are incomprehensible. If autists didn't believe that others had minds, the common autistic trait of averting eye contact wouldn't exist.
Re:homosexuality (Score:2, Insightful)
The Old Testament was written in Hebrew, the New in Greek. Neither of them are English, of any time period.
Re:Resume Puzzle (Score:4, Insightful)
This is what I would call a load of crap.
I mean, I realize it feels good to be able to explain away social ineptitude with some magical neurological hand-waving (oh, I'm sorry I'm a dick, it's just that I have Aspergers -- most geeks have it to some degree), but when it comes straight down to it, it just ain't so.
I have worked with autistic kids before; my first girlfriend and my college roommate both specialized in autism and working with such people was/is their profession. It seems to me that some of the self-described autistic people on Slashdot are so high-functioning that describing their state as autism essentially takes the meaning from the word.
The truth is, people have different skills and talents. My brother is exceptionally good at video games, for example, while I lack the attention span and motor skills to effectively play them. I'm better with people than he is. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, because we are not all alike. Serial insensitivity to other people's emotional state and a predilection for consistancy are symptoms of autism, but possession of symptoms is not sufficient for diagnosis.
While I have met at least one person that is actually a bona-fide sufferer of Asperger's -- ie, he was diagnosed as such by someone other than himself or a well-meaning school counselor or "psychologist" who said something like, "Well, you might have a mild-form of Asperger's..." when trying to explain to a confused kid with no social skills and an unsual love of math why he doesn't fit in -- the truth is, the impression I have of most "Asperger's" sufferers is that they're mostly just normal geeks that would rather believe that there is something chemical that prevents them from engaging socially rather than just plain not being good at it.
I mean, when someone isn't good at Math, we don't start saying, "Well, maybe you have a mild form of mental retardation." After all, retards aren't usually good at math! Heck, maybe it's true! Why don't we say this? Because we understand that some people just aren't as good at math as others. This is true of all skills.
I hate to say this, but all this "I have a mild form of Asperger's" or "geek behaviour is a manifestation of Asperger's syndrome" is what I would call, plainly, a load of crap. Pop-psychology at its worst.
So why do we accept it? Why do people keep up this charade? Because we want to believe that there's some more exotic reason for our shortcomings than them being just that -- shortcomings.
Believe it or not, for 99% of us, social ability is something that is well within our reach. All we need to do is work hard at being better at it, practice, and want to get better. It annoys us that frat-boy John that we've always resented and that we privately think beneath us can so easily master a skill that seems beyond us; fearing failure, we find a thousand reasons we shouldn't even try to play his game. But were we to actual set our minds to it, we could overcome these barriers, because despite our fantasies of neurophysiological differences that neatly explain our lack of social skills, we are able to learn these things. We just never bother trying.
It would simply be too embarassing to fail at something that people we discount as morons do everyday with ease. It's painful.
Painful, but possible.
That's the difference, you see. People who are actually suffering from Asperger's are blind, in a way. They can honestly not perceive things like sarcasm, emotional stress, etc. There is a part of the world they cannot perceive. This is not the same as the geek who is frustrated by his dating difficulties. This is a real, bona-fide disability, which is relatively rare and quite difficult to overcome.
I don't have a lot of respect for all the people out there who write off their "inability to be socially adept" as a mild form of Aspergers. I've worked in IT most of my life; most of my friends have been geeks. And while 99% of them are hopeless socially, autistic they most definitely are not.
Just like people who suck at math aren't retarded.
Re:Savantism (Score:3, Insightful)
One thing that has to be remembered is perspective. Most non-autistic people I know seem, no matter how bad they are at doing anything else, to be savants in such obscure skills as recognizing people entirely by their faces. They also often have splinter skills in areas such as multitasking, keeping track of large amounts of social information, relating to whole objects in their environment, and many more. At least some of these things seem to hold true even if they can't do simple things like finding their way around a new location without getting lost, even if they're otherwise considered intellectually disabled.
When I was diagnosed with autism, the doctor apparently speculated about whether or not I was a savant. I don't believe myself to be one, but I think he must have been noticing what appeared to him to be a strange combination of extreme abilities and extreme difficulties. Having to live with myself every day, I can't consider myself that exotic.
I write a lot. I sing with perfect pitch. And I don't get lost, having detailed maps in my head of pretty much anywhere I've been since I was three. I have a strong suspicion that if all of my other abilities were average, nobody would be making a big fuss over this kind of thing.
I also can't speak, not with communication in mind. I have to work to understand sensory input as more than a chaotic and undifferentiated mess of colors, shapes, tones, pitches, textures, scents, and tastes, that also tend to blend into each other. I have enough trouble coordinating perception, thought, and action that, despite a good deal of teaching, I can't do a lot of things that other people consider basic -- food, water, hygiene, and so forth. I need someone either doing those for me or walking me through every step, or else I either get everything out of order or don't do it at all. Someone is paid to do exactly that.
I have trouble deliberately moving around my house unless it's in a specific path, and have to use a number of outside cues to move where I want to move at any given time or else I just get stuck. While I can find any object based on my memorization of its location, if someone moves it a few inches I might as well be blind as far as my ability to recognize it. I can't cross a street safely. I can't pay attention to more than one thing at once, and that can go as basic as color or pattern or shape, not all three at once. No matter how many rules and ideas I learn when I'm not doing things, I won't be able to remember most of them while I'm trying to keep up with moving and perceiving so in practice act like I don't know them. I have a lot of difficulty with things other people consider everyday life. You get the general picture.
I've become aware of how weird this seems to people who aren't autistic. They seem to think that you can either do lots of things or not do any things. But it still seems weird to me that most of them can do such a useless thing as recognize faces despite the fact that they get lost so easily compared to me. The fact that I can do the things I do and can't do the things I can't do doesn't confuse me at all. The fact that people with much less intensely focused minds than mine can do such specific tasks as recognizing faces, does confuse me.
While savants have talents even more extreme than mine, I often wonder what the reason is for the specific category. To me, what looks to others like a very uneven mix of skills is totally normal and even given that I understand the way my mind works and grew up in it. I can do direction and layout without thinking. Other people can multiply large numbers without thinking (which I can't do). The fact that they can do large numbers is only marginally odder to me than the fact that most people can do small numbers.
I've speculated that the idea of the autistic savant or idiot savant came about when someone looking in from the outside decided that it was really weird that his assumptions didn't fit. Here was som
Re:It's not intelligence in any conventional sense (Score:3, Insightful)
It is likely that people actually know exactly how many objects they see e.g. walk into a room and know instantly how many chairs there are.
However that info is abstracted away under layers and layers of abstraction - e.g. one, two, many, dozens, hundreds, thousands, enough, not enough - after all most people spot desks without chairs quite quickly, this is not necessarily such an easy thing.
These abstractions were probably very useful millenia ago. There's no point knowing that there are 23312 wildebeest on the plain if you don't even have a number system, much less express it to someone who doesn't. Just have to give the appropriate grunt(s) or clicks.
And these abstractions probably allow us to avoid the detail and focus on the big picture - the guy has problems going to the supermarket or the beach.
Even if you can count the number of hairs on a lioness instantly, I doubt the lioness bothers remembering how many bites of meat you make up - it's probably "enough for me and cubs, or need one more".
I suspect some of these people would be troubled and have difficult working if you gave them 1001 bolts and only 1000 nuts and told them to fasten stuff together. Most normal people won't even notice till the last one, and then they'll just shrug and go whatever...
Modern software can easily count how many light and dark pixels there are in picture. It has difficulty seeing how many chairs. But soon programs will count X chairs of type A, Y chairs of type B etc, but the next step then is "few, many, enough, not enough".
Re:It makes one wonder.... (Score:2, Insightful)
I would never have thought of it back when I was in my 20's. It got more acceptable in my early 30's, and now in my early 40's it's just the 'right thing to do'. I love her, she's my sister, and as my parents have aged and I've seen them struggle.. well there you go. My brother, however, has not stepped up to the plate with this, and is unlikely to do so. Siblings differ, he never got on with her well at all.
I guess I'm just trying to say that it'll all come out for the best. Don't put any pressure on yourselves about it. Ohh and, my sister improved greatly once she was out of those teenage years. She's still severely autistic, but she's manageable, friendly most of the time, and even a tad bit flexible. And yea, my parents went through hell to get that little bit of flexibility. Good luck to you and yours.
Re:Resume Puzzle (Score:5, Insightful)
You're trying to draw a dichotomy where nothing exists. It's all chemical (unless you're a dualist).
Whether you're a moron, a pedophile, an asperger, a socially inept geek, or a low functioning autistic, there's a neurological explanation somewhere, whether genetic, environmental or a combination of both.
You seem fixated by these black and white labels; this person has that disease, but that person is ok, they're just inept.
???
The truth is that there's a broad landscape of ability and disability. For purposes of mental health treatment, it helps to draw circles around certain peaks and call them disorders, but in reality it's all shades of gray on a huge multidimensional surface.
It's extremely likely that some subset of the genes that cause autism/aspergers are active in the socially inept. Why do you take such offense at this? Does it make you feel better to tell these people "no, you're just inept, you don't get to claim that it's because of the way your brain is wired."
YHGMTNO spectrum disorders (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:homosexuality (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Savantism (Score:2, Insightful)
Fortunately, my difficulty with "ordinary day-to-day things" is manageable, and my social interaction skills have been slowly growing since I was young. Sometime after college I reached the point where people stopped noticing anything unusual, though it still takes me 10 times as long as an average person to be able to put a name with a face.
The thing is, growing up I never felt unusual. Instead, I always wondered why I everyone I met was unusual.
While I don't have a savant's friendship with numbers, that ability has never seemed like a mystery to me. I suspect my mind works with numbers in the same way, but I'm just not very good at it - I can juggle numbers quickly, but I work faster using a calculator for large numbers. My "direction and layout" skills impress some people, but are clearly not as good as yours. I think there's probably a tradeoff between processing power devoted to unconsciously turning sense data into managed orderly input, and processing power left over for (other) mental abilities that seem amazing to those who don't have them.
Do you enjoy music? As a child I could only listen to very quiet and orderly music, but now I enjoy just about everything. I guess expanding my musical taste was, for me, the safe way to challenge myself with ever more chaotic sensory input while in a safe physical environment. I'm curious whether anyone else has had that same experience.
Re:Resume Puzzle (Score:3, Insightful)
This 'store [nopityshirts.com]' is run by a friend of mine with severe CFS and a cocktail of other problems. You might be interested in some of the shirts or their slogans.
Re:Resume Puzzle (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree. The only difference between Asperger and Kanner autism is language-onset delay. Not very telling, in my view.
It's not unusual for people with Aspergers to have trouble recognizing the "correctness" of behaviour, facial expressions, etc. Sure, it's not universal, either, but it's definitely not a rarity.
Do I care? No. But, then, I'm not built to care about things like that. This isn't an "I can't help it", because that implies it's wrong to be anything other than a highly socially-aware, socially-structured individual.
Idiot Savant is the same thing. It is just a description, no different from "hot", "yellow" or "crispy". Someone might get angry with the words, finding them offensive. That's not my problem. How you choose to understand words is entirely up to you.
You miss my point. I was talking to someone I thought was an NT, in a forum primarily composed of NTs.
NTs think in language. But an effect of this is that the words they customarily use effect the way they think. In other words, if we let NTs continue the use words like "idiot savant", then this will contribute to them continuing to think of autistic people (with savant abilities or otherwise) as basket cases. Riders of the Short Bus. Members of the Helmet Brigade. Twitchy, non-lucid people who must be 'taken care of' rather than understood. You get the idea.
I'm not *personally* offended. Being who and what I am, I attach importance to principles, not individual interactions.
But principle is what I'm talking about here. Twisting a few arms to get people to use "politically correct" language is sometimes appropriate, not because of the meaning (or lack thereof) of words, but because it forces them to acknowledge the existance and humanity of those for whom they must change their behaviour.
Does that make a little more sense to you?
Re:Resume Puzzle (Score:2, Insightful)
Consider this analogy: if someone who ordinarily uses a wheelchair is able to drag himself up a flight of stairs using only his arms, no one would say, "Well, he can get up the stairs on his own, so he's not really disabled and doesn't need a ramp or elevator."
Re:It makes one wonder.... (Score:2, Insightful)
It's also important to find someone who likes her and respects her, and who she appears to like.
I've had a lot of experience with support staff, having had many myself. One important thing to remember is that it's different from a nanny. This isn't a babysitter for a child, it's someone who helps an adult with things the adult has trouble with. Some agencies have sent people who walk into my house, stereotype me as childlike, and try to mother me. These people frankly scare me. Especially when they take it to the point of patting me on the head or trying to cuddle.
The person I've found who had worked out the best for me doesn't fit any particular mold, and throws a lot of conventional ideas about what staff should and should not do out the window. This would normally be a warning sign, and normally is a warning sign. But this person makes it work. The key is that she is not throwing these rules out the window in order to be a controlling force in my life, but rather because she has a gut-level sense of ethics and what needs to be done, learns from experience, and knows that no set of rules truly fits.
I've had people before, for instance, who worked for me more hours than they assigned and then used this against me when they did something wrong. Sort of, "Yeah I may have done this wrong, but look what I did for you, so don't say anything to anyone." This person has never done that. She has worked longer hours without pay before, but she never used this as a means to control me. She just knew it needed to be done and did it.
It's not as important to start out with someone who already knows, or think they know, how to interact with autistic people. It's important to find someone who learns from experience and is dedicated to applying that learning to everything they do. A person like that, whether they even knew what autism was before they started the job, will be more able to see a person as an individual and base their decisions around that person on who that person is rather than something they read in a textbook about the best thing to do in a given situation. If you want to read up on what that kind of person is like, I'd recommend the complete works of Dave Hingsburger. In print and out of print, just stock up on his books and read them. He's someone who learns from his mistakes, whether sooner or later. I use his work to train my own support staff.
It should preferably be someone who genuinely enjoys the job. People who don't enjoy this job are not all that pleasant to have working for you in this capacity. And it is important that the support staff is working for the autistic person. Even if that autistic person doesn't have a standard means of communication, it's not good at all to have to go through life with other people deciding everything for you. There are ways to figure out what a non-speaking autistic person wants and doesn't want if you're patient, observant, and creative. The book, again by Hingsburger, called First Contact is useful for clearing away preconceptions in dealing with people with very non-standard communication.
Failing this really cool kind of staff, it's best to find someone who can practice professional detachment to some degree. It's not that my current staff has professional detachment, but that someone who isn't as far into the job as my current staff is will need professional detachment in order to avoid doing a lot of things wrong. When someone doesn't have or develop a gut-level sense of what to do in a situation, rules can be important. This goes for support staff as much as anyone else.
This is definitely possible though. I need assistance with most things, and I have someone around most of the time to provide that assistance. I didn't even need to move to a group home to get it, which I'm thankful for because I've done enough time in institutions, of which I consider group homes the miniature variety. It's good to be able to move away from my family and at t