Coming of Age With Quantum Information: Notes on a Paulian Idea
CAMBRIDGE UNIV. PRESS: 2011. 543 pp. £45 / $70
There are books that just never let you go. Maybe they haven't changed your life, but they crop up time and again on your mental radar, often in the unlikeliest of contexts. For me, one such book is a collection of texts that appeared in 1993 under the title Ich will kein Inmich mehr sein. The texts were written by a German teenager called Birger Sellin. Sellin is autistic, and his only way of communicating is through the use of a keyboard, in a process called 'facilitated communication'. That process is controversial, but, apparently, doubts have been dispersed over whether he, rather than his mother who assisted him typing, is the originator of these texts. The texts first appeared as random strings of characters, clumsily put together, but then, as Sellin became more proficient in using the tool, there emerged poetry of stunning beauty and depth. His words provide a look deep into the mind of a person who has no other means of expressing himself, and into a mysterious and foreign world; the “autistic dungeon”, as Sellin puts it.
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