A 2008 interview with Neurologist Oliver Sacks, a Columbia University professor, explores possibility of positive aspects to disorder!   Sacks discusses two interesting disorders in less than five minutes; first, a novelist suffering visual alexia due to a small stroke found a way to read again with his tongue!   The neurologist then addresses the less familiar aspects of Tourette’s syndrome (TS) that  “… can make life very difficult for one. But, in a sense, there can be another side to it as well, because one’s thoughts are accelerated, one’s coordination may be particularly quick in motions and imagination, may be stimulated, and there’s a sort of positive side to this, in a way, Tourette’s is a turned-on state. And this can sometimes be utilized. There’s some very good athletes with Tourette’s. There are good musicians and performers with Tourette’s. And perhaps if one sees someone with something like Tourette’s Syndrome, it’s good to explore possible, positive sides of it.  I don’t say there’s always a positive side, but I think it’s very important to look and not just simply to think in terms of defects and problems, but of different ways of doing things and different ways of functioning.”  You can go to bigthink.com for additional short interviews with Sacks.  It’s good stuff!