How Can I Talk If My Lips Don't Move?

Inside My Autistic Mind

Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay

• Publisher: Arcade
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781611450224
• eBook ISBN: 9781628720273
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Diseases & Allergies

An astounding new work by the author of The Mind Tree that offers a rare insight into the autistic mind and how it thinks, sees, and reacts to the world. When he was three years old, Tito was diagnosed as severely autistic, but his remarkable mother, Soma, determined that he would overcome the "problem" by teaching him to read and write. The result was that between the ages of eight and eleven he wrote stories and poems of exquisite beauty, which Dr. Oliver Sacks called "amazing and shocking." Their eloquence gave lie to all our assumptions about autism. Here Tito goes even further and writes of how the autistic mind works, how it views the outside world and the "normal" people he deals with daily, how he tells his stories to the mirror and hears stories back, how sounds become colors, how beauty fills his mind and heart. With this work, Tito—whom Portia Iversen, co-founder of Cure Autism Now, has described as "a window into autism such as the world has never seen"—gives the world a beacon of hope. For if he can do it, why can't others? "Brave, bold, and deeply felt, this book shows that much we might have believed about autism can be wrong."—Boston Globe

Table of contents

• Also by Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Author’s Note
• Through the Mirror
• The Color of Basic Words
• The Color of My Scream
• Following the Belief
• What Could the Upstairs Mirror Tell the Handheld Mirror?
• No Wonder I Don’t Talk!
• Shadows Don’t Tell Stories
• Flapping My Hands, Flapping My Shadow
• Autism! A Fancy Word
• Shadows the Color of My Scream !
• Tracing the Shape of Shadows and Trapping Them in Place
• My Story Forms around Staircases
• Railway Staircases
• Why Was Mother Stopping Me from Climbing?
• Those Building Blocks
• I No Longer Need to Climb
• Escalator Ride
• The Power to Control Darkness and Light
• Unpredictability
• The Power of a Ceiling Fan to Make Me Feel Sure
• Power Outages Happened, Despite the Moving Fan
• Power Outages Followed through My Older Years
• Feeding My Body
• “Wish He Could Dress Himself”
• When Learning Turns to Obsession
• The Torn Shirts
• Walking in My Shoes
• A Grip on the Shoelaces
• “How Do You Perceive a Linear Situation?”
• Perceiving a Nonlinear Situation, with Unpredictable Results
• In a Crowded Place
• On a Swing
• Perceiving Faces
• Everyday Faces
• Magazine Pictures
• Exposure Helps Shape Visual Perception
• When I Think of the Wind, I Am the Wind
• Overperceiving and Underperceiving
• Why Couldn’t I Draw a Sun?
• A Game of Catch
• Ball-Man
• “What’s Going On Here?”
• Scattered Senses
• The Boy Who Does Not Talk but Solves Jigsaw Puzzles
• “Who Knows What I Had Written Down as My Answer to 4 + 2 = ?”
• Learning to Write
• Divine Phenomenon !
• Writing Down Dictated Words
• It Worked Better than a School
• Struggling Our Way Out of a Belief System
• “I Need You to Prescribe Me Some Medicine”
• Obsessions to Count
• Power Outage in the Metro Rail
• Reaching the Other End
• “Tell Us What He Was Reading”
• Why Factual Memory Is Safer than Episodic Memory
• Talking About Memories
• How Do I Recall?
• Am I in Pain ?
• Final Words