As a boy, I had two small aquaria in our backyard in which I watched, each spring, the nest building and other fascinating behaviours of sticklebacks.

I was not much interested in school, and both at secondary school and at university, I only just scraped through, with as little effort as I judged possible without failing.

Proper stance and movement are obviously genetically old, environment-resistant behaviours. Misuse, with all its psychosomatic or, rather, somato-psychic consequences, must therefore be considered a result of modern living conditions - of a culturally determined stress.

Relatively many autists are first-born children. There is also a pretty widespread conviction that the parents of autists are somehow different - for instance, many of them are very serious people or people who are themselves under some sort of strain.