Autistic scientist’s ‘manual for humans’ wins top book prize
AN AUTISTIC scientist who asked for a “manual for humans” as a child to understand people’s perplexing behaviour has won a book award after writing her own guide to life.
Dr Camilla Pang, 27, felt like “another animal” growing up, alienated by an inability to understand social rules.
Her autism spectrum disorder was so isolating she pleaded for a manual to help decipher the emotions and interactions that passed her by.
She has now won the £25,000 Royal Society Science Book Prize for Explaining Humans, which she calls a “love letter” to the science that “saved” her.
It gave her a grasp of confusing interactions through a scientific lens, including seeing social cliques as just like proteins with different jobs in the body of society. Her book urges mankind to take notes from these proteins, thermodynamics, and artificial intelligence.
Dr Pang, who has a PHD in biochemistry, said that being recognised for explaining fears and foibles from an “outsider’s” view had helped her feel “a little bit human”. She said: “I often think of myself as another animal who sees and experiences life in a similar way as I do.”
For perfectionist readers, Dr Pang suggests they look to the Second Law of Thermodynamics for reassurance. The governing principle of entropy finds that disorder is inevitable.
Those who see themselves as scatterbrained and find decision- making under pressure difficult, should learn from AI, she argues, by treating their brains as an algorithm and feeding them with data to make the best decisions regardless of the situation.
Dr Pang said she was surprised to find that her sister, who does not have autism, was interested in how she had come to use science to understand human behaviour.
She said: “I wasn’t aware that people would find this useful, but, when I realised it was, I thought about sharing it as a science book to make ‘scary’ science human.
“It is a love letter to science and a book of hope to those who want to understand a new perspective on life and neurodiversity. After all, humans are continuously evolving.”