In a presumably unrelated but sequential post, she goes on to describe how her "kids and husband have an intuitive grasp of things that I have to work very hard to comprehend" -- regarding the foreign language of math. She sets up an interesting contrast between her world, and that of the mildly austistic: Maybe everyone's doing dozens of calculations per second, but instead of math, most of us are calculating the meaning facial expressions, gestures, tone and inflection.
More in Mark Haddon's new book, the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time -- written from the perspective of an autistic teenager.