Camilla Pang’s Explaining Humans wins Royal Society prize

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Dr Camilla Pang, whose debut uses science to explore the complexities of human behaviour through the prism of her autism spectrum disorder, has won the prestigious Royal Society science book prize.

At 28, the post-doctoral scientist is both the youngest writer ever to win the £25,000 prize, and the first writer of colour. She beat former winners Bill Bryson and Gaia Vince to take the award for Explaining Humans, which chair of judges Professor Anne Osbourn called “an intelligent and charming investigation into how we understand human behaviour, drawing on the author’s superpower of neurodivergence”.

Pang hopes, she told the Guardian, to be “a voice for the neurodivergent community in shining a light on the fact that it’s OK to feel outlandish in a system that you’re basically allergic to, because you’re designed to make a new one”.

The author, who has a PhD in biochemistry from UCL, was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at the age of eight, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder at 26. She wrote Explaining Humans, she said, “in order to survive and process my thoughts into coherent modules”, creating a “manual for humans” she could consult, looking at what proteins, machine-learning and molecular chemistry can teach us about human behaviour, from decisions and conflict to relationships and etiquette.

“We get information from all of our different senses, but what if they’re all really loud, and everything’s really intense, and you’ve got no filter, so you’re stuck in this kind of soup of limbo, when you’re trying to interpret these different signals that are really quite quiet? Most of the time, I was trying to figure out what was going on,” she said.

She wrote for herself, but also for her mother and her family. “Up until the age of maybe 16, it was really hard to communicate what was happening, and all my mum wanted to do was understand the person that she loved and made. So it was a thank-you letter to my mum and also a love letter to science, to highlight how understanding and support can change someone’s life, by seeing what a person is, as opposed to what they should be.”

Pang hopes the book “will give people that missing link so that they can feel complete enough to take the next step.” At school, she struggled to make sense of the “ecosystem of playground species” and never fitted in.

She decided she wanted to publish her writing “during a panic attack on the commute”, and did a “sprint Google” to find out how to go about it.

I won’t lie to you, it’s been an absolute ball ache, but it has made me realise that even though you can’t celebrate and hug the ones you love when you win awards because of lockdown, that doesn’t take away from the fact that what you’ve done is actually all right.

GROWING UP AUTISTIC in a non-autistic world can be very isolating. We are often strange and out of sync with peers, despite our best efforts. Autistic adults have, until very recently, been largely absent from media and the public sphere. Finding role models is difficult. Finding useful advice for navigating life’s problems, even more so. In “An Outsider’s Guide to Humans: What Science Taught Me About What We Do and Who We Are,” Camilla Pang maps out rules for life for young people on the spectrum, as well as anyone else who would like to come along for the ride.

Her writing is engaging, funny, intimate, and educational. Using scientific principles and a smattering of pop psychology, Pang explains, with accompanying hand-drawn diagrams, how she navigates the world. In doing so, she provides an insightful glimpse into a different way of being.

“Since I can remember, my life has been dominated by one question: How do you connect with other people when you’re not wired to do so?” writes Pang, who is on the spectrum. There are so many unspoken rules that autistic people miss. Typical children learn appropriate behavior from these invisible signals. Pang painstakingly taught herself, and in this book, she lays out her methods. “There are people like me,” Pang writes, “who have had to ask how long you should hug someone to offer comfort.” The answer, according to Pang, is “two to three seconds,” and “four if it was a really bad breakup.”

In each chapter, Pang links common social challenges autistic and non-autistic young people face, with scientific concepts. She uses machine learning to explain decision-making, proteins to explain human social interaction, and the wavelengths of light to explain fear. Fundamental forces of the universe map onto humanity, explaining it in a way that is painstakingly detailed and beautiful.

I dislike the caprice that autistic people are aliens — beyond it being cliché, so much language around autism is already dehumanizing. But I understand feeling like an alien. And I recognize Pang as someone like me. We are from the same country, and it is a rare delight to meet a fellow traveler so far from home. We speak the same language, and it is a language I’ve never seen in a book from mainstream press before. While I know very little about machine learning or network theory, I know the specific problems Pang addresses. They’re questions I had when I was younger, too.

For example, many autistic people struggle with chaos and the unknown — they are terrifying and uncomfortable in a way that is difficult to explain. But chaos and the unknown are also intrinsic to living in the world. “Without disorder, you might as well be living as an inanimate object. A chair perhaps (but not mine, since it is already taken),” Pang wryly notes, and I can’t help but laugh and agree. It is impossible to achieve a completely stable existence, and even if we could, it would not be advisable or optimal — the only way to be entirely stable is to be dead, according to Pang and the laws of thermodynamics. I and many other autistic adults learned that lesson the hard way, but perhaps an autistic young person who reads this book won’t have to.

Pang is a little younger than I am, in her late 20s, but she had insight into some issues I’d essentially written off as unsolvable. At times, she gave the kind of pep talk I can’t imagine getting from a non-autistic person. My favorite chapter, “Learning to embrace error,” was full of things I desperately needed to hear, even as an adult. “Experiencing a setback of some sort is not sufficient evidence to conclude that everything has failed, or that a system or decision should be abandoned wholesale,” Pang maintains. Her perspective is refreshingly realistic: This is not a self-help book full of chirpy positivity. The advice is practical and direct, and involves no wishful thinking.

“An Outsider’s Guide to Humans” also serves as a sort of Rosetta Stone, translating an internal autistic experience that non-autistic people may normally find unrelatable. Pang spends considerable time explaining autism to a non-autistic audience. There is great risk in doing so. One can unintentionally become a “self-narrating zoo exhibit.” The term, coined by early neurodiversity advocate Jim Sinclair, describes a large body of autobiographical work by autistic people. We can become objects for typical people to gawk at, or worse, pity. We are rewarded by doing so. Most of the time, Pang manages to avert the problem. Her voice is authoritative in a way that the self-narrating zoo exhibit is typically not allowed. However, she does occasionally veer into a space that I found uncomfortable. Not everything needs to be explained to everyone. Not everything needs an explanatory comma.