The autistic person, in this view, is someone so self-involved that he (it's usually a he) is blind to the needs and feelings of others. Equally prevalent is the idea of autistics as a species of uber-nerd, the control-freakery of the stereotypical male mind developed to a morbid degree.

Such a view will not survive a reading of this slight, modest yet highly provocative book, in which it is made clear that all these tendencies – as the novelist David Mitchell notes in his introduction – are "not symptoms of autism but consequences of autism".

What's the difference? Those diagnosed with autism, Mitchell is saying, have an excess of the very qualities they are thought to lack. They are not insensitive but hypersensitive, and the classic autistic traits (lining things up, for example) are ways of keeping a relentless perceptual onslaught at bay.