Post 9600 - Random Aspie Bits and Questions - (Part II)

I am wondering if a few key items are the most important in functionality for those with autism. My current nominations are proportionality and insight/self-observation. Though the latter especially is supposed to be a primary symptom on the spectrum, I can think of a few who have plenty of those, right off the top of my head.  So I may be writing about these things and making assertions which I take back later. It will be a good place to give me your own takes on this.

But all that is farther down the discussion, and I'm not even sure I can work them into this post.  Just be alert for it and think about it, as It is where I am heading. And functionality in my sense may turn out to be an elusive term, as I am not looking so much at "what kind of services do they need to succeed at school and in the workplace," but closer to "how much emotional turmoil do they leave in their wake."

Overliteral interpretation is a well-recognised autism trait, but it is very much on a continuum.  All of us have moments of not seeing that something was intended as satire or facetious*, leading to misunderstanding the motives and intentions of others. Or just plain humorous material for our frriends, when we send them articles from The Onion or The Babylon Bee not noticing the source.  Ooops.  Egg on face.  I also wonder if the fondness for puns is more common in Aspies - it certainly seems so - is related to this.  They hear the physical sound and basic meaning first and start a half-step behind on nuance.  For this reason, they are much more likely to insist that the literal meaning is the Real Interpretation, the Only Interpretation. As with couples running down to the courthouse to file restraining orders on each other, whoever (whatever) gets there first has some advantage in how it looks in the news or when being retold outside the hardware store.  This is definitely one where I get thoroughly irritated, but when I am arguing with someone in my head who is operating from the level of reasoning "But you SAID...! But you SAID...!" that five minutes later when I am calmly arguing with the imaginary Them in my head I find myself muttering "But you said [...], and I can only go by the words on the page, you see..." Yeah, same thing, just put in a more elegant package.

Here is a fun one: Middle-school girls might plaster their walls (in the old days) with pictures of some boy or boy band, but when we saw that behavior from a college girl we tended to smirk that it was clearly some sort of presexual thing, indicating a slow development. (Horses were often implicated in the same.) I had one friend obsessed with Jack Lord, which had even influenced her attendance at William and Mary (because he was in "The Story of a Patriot" at the visitors center, and in those days there was no YouTube or even cable TV to give you extra opportunities to watch.) Another loved the Beatles - all of them, and knew an obsessive amount about them - and Joe Namath, and Secretariat and a few other horses. She was a walking target for snickering , even among other girls. She had a Joe Namath quote in large letters across an entire wall at ceiling level "If you're not going to go all the way, why bother to go at all?" I think she got the double-entendre about going all the way and intended it as a rather defensive explanation why she was not dating. (Real reason: no one was asking. I hope that worked out later, because she was brilliant and adorable, just oblivious.) She would have been humiliated if I had pointed out that the saying actually folded back on itself, and if she did happen to start dating a boy, and he did happen to see that poster, he might be over-encouraged, shall we say. She might be unleashing the whirlwind upon her skittish, deeply inexperienced self. I resolved to tell her what she was oblivious to if some boy started hanging around.  But not until then.

Yet we did not suspect males obsessed with a particular band of it necessarily being erotic. Hmm, okay let's not go too far down that road. College age males with a particular female's image all over their walls are considered to be making an erotic statement, usually. 

There can also be a tendency for those on the spectrum to not be able to differentiate between romanitic and platonic relationships - both directions - well into adulthood.  Think Wally and Dilbert in the Scott Adam's strip, or the three males (and then Amy) in "The Big Bang Theory." You'll hear things that make you nervous, like "No, he's just a friend, not a boyfriend.  He just likes having tickle fights." If you wondered which is the aspie, the usual answer is both of them. The saying All the kids in the Anime Club end up dating each other by the end of the year applies. Hurt feelings galore.

There is a lot of anecdotal evidence, and some early research evidence, that people on the spectrum have more than their share of migraines. Anecdote only, that this is particularly true of odd presentation of migraines, impeding diagnosis. It makes a sort of seat-of-the-pants sense - both have strong genetic backgrounds but are very sensitive to environmental changes. They are both brain/neurological/CNS implicated, especially around the idea of neuroinflammation. Both have highly varied presentations to begin with. bsking says she's going to be researching this quite a bit this year, if she gets enough respite from her migraines, so watch this space for further developments. 

Rapid mathematical calculation shows up a lot. I swear this is especially true of auditory presentations of arithmetic.  It certainly was for me.  I can look at the arithemetic strings (6÷3+7x4...) and do them faster than most, but when Mrs. McKeon would read them out at the end of the day in 6th grade to kill a little time -"Six, divided by three, plus seven, times four..." she stopped calling on me altogether, and the other kids would start doing it with bigger numbers to see if I could keep going. And the answer would just pop into my head, with I not all that sure how I had gotten there. I was always jealous of the lightning calculators I would read about or see on "I've Got a Secret," because I felt like I could almost do that, though not quite. There used to be a category called Idiot-Savants (another potential name for this blog that was rejected) of people who could factor huge numbers in their heads instantly, or distinguish how many individual pins had dropped on a floor and then factor it instantly 37...37...37 for 111 pins, for example. They were, in retrospect, all very likely autistic. When I took the WAIS, I found digit span, forward and backward, to be virtually automatic up to 12. (Interestingly, that's more of a fight for me now, almost as if I have let a part of my thinking slip away with disuse.)

Dyslexia is supposedly a common aspie trait, but my wife and second son are almost inhumanly fast readers. I have kidded for years that Tracy reads books by mistake.  I make a slurping sound and then say "Oh, I'm sorry, did I read that?" They must bring up the national average for aspies all by themselves. We have again this presentation at the extremes issue coming up for those with Autism Spectrum Disorder. We are supposed to prefer nonfiction - I certainly do now - but those two are both very big on numerous categories of fiction, and I can think of others who are always saying to me, when impossibly diverse topics come up "Have you read any of..." usually sci-fi, mystery, or fantasy, to give an illustration of how that plays out. My brother did that all along as well.  Korora has mentioned that those with autism sometimes learn their social cues from movies, cartoons, books, and the like rather than personal interactions.  There may be something to this.

They can read with intensity, too. They don't hear you. It may also be that they have this ability to tune out preinstalled neurologically.

We think of autistic children losing control and screaming or throwing things when they get overstimulated**, but among my people, the HFA's, the Level Zeroes, freezing, shutting down, running to their rooms, crisply putting down the receiver, or blocking people on FB is more common. What makes me think these are just different sides of the same coin is the speed with which it can happen. Helluva a thing to have happen when you're at a dance, let me tell you. "That guy over there is being such a jerk.  We have to leave." "Just ignore him." "No, we have to leave."The other piece is that while half of these notice that they have done something odd and take immediate care to make sure who is not offended, the other half still doesn't notice that their reaction was at all unusual, even years later.

But here I am getting into the disproportionality and self observation issues, which I'm thinking I can at least start on. 

Disproportionate is one of the key items in functionality, and this is downstream of Self-observation. There is simply a world of difference between someone whose responses are a little odd, and maybe even difficult, but notices that results are different and even place themselves along a continuum on it. "Yeah, I think I have a lower threshold for feeling intruded on than most people," which allows them to adjust and modify. As opposed to "No, she's just wrong! She should never have said that!" One reason why this gets obscured is that the people who write about this - for example Temple Grandin, Claire Jack, and Simone Collins, are by definition the self-observant ones. People who don't self-observe have no clue that what they are doing is upsetting others. They just assume the others are wrong. Not that noticing such differences means that it must be the Aspie who has to change.  Sometimes they are the ones who get policies fixed because they are absolutely adamant on some principle.Sometimes their persistence is the only thing that's going to work.

Yet I have worked with/coached  non-autists in very hard situations - men who were trying to deal honorably during a divorce with wives who had intentionally and spitefully bankrupted them; with women who were confronting (by letter at first) the fathers who had molested them. They were more polite than some of my aspies who were merely irritated - though usually "triggered" would be an appropriate term here.  I of all people  should be more understanding.  But those self-observation and proportionality issues loom very large for me.

*One of the two words in English with the vowels once and only once in order.  You can swap in "facetiously" if you have that touch of obsessiveness. 

**I still get annoyed when so many pages about autism are illustrated with a photo of a boy in meltdown with rage or tears. I do get it.  The people seeking the pages are often panicked parents whose kids are doing exactly that, and they want to know that they've landed on the right page.