On my main blog, Interdisciplinary World, I wrote about a CNN article that discusses some of the more recent work that has been done on the connection between fiction and empathy-creation. This connection suggests several things to me regarding the gulf between autistic and neurotypical people.
One of these is perhaps very obvious, which is that autistic people need to read more fiction, and neurotypical people need to read/view more fiction with autistic characters. What is perhaps less obvious is that autistic people don't actually seem to read much fiction or be all that interested in it (perhaps because too many works of fiction do not have many characters to which they can connect). Further, there is probably not a lot of fiction out there with explicitly autistic characters.
This means that autistic people cannot create the anchor needed to become interested in fiction and thus be exposed to other minds than theirs, and neurotypical people cannot delve into the fictional minds of autistic characters to develop empathy for them.
Meaning, we need a literature of autism. Or, at the very least, a reading list of autistic authors and fiction with autistic characters. Anyone care to contribute to creating that list?
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