Introduction: theorizing and applying the meaningfully anecdotal patient in neurodiversity research

In the introduction to this issue of Notes and Records, I discuss key arguments of each of the essays and draw links between them. This volume is a rendering of both theory and practice in the history and narrative of neurology, facial difference, autism, face blindness and traumatic brain injury. The essays offer deep analytic insights but also a provocation: how do we frame individual cases and lived experience in the literature of neurodiversity? The scholarly essays offered by Stephen Caspar and Jonathan Cole theorize the role of the individual and the anecdotal as valuable both in framing empathy and diagnostic relationships and as a particular and often overlooked form of data. We see the manifestation of these theoretical arguments in Chloe Silverman's article, which draws our attention to the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, a widely used instrument in autism research. Accompanying these pieces are two interventions of creative non-fiction: Heather Sellers's essay on discovering her own prosopagnosia, and Jenny Edkins's poem on living with and being face blind. These pieces manifest the theoretical and grounded work of this volume, arguing in powerful ways for the individual story and sharing it here.