When I was younger, I never had friends. Didn’t want them. I was off in my own world all the time. Hated school: if they’d let me, I would have dropped out of school and stayed in the public library from opening till closing, reading everything they had.
I also had that stereotypical-movement thing, in my case rapidly shaking my right arm below the elbow. It gives me pleasure. I never mentioned this to anybody because it’s shameful: it proves I’m a defective human being. Nowadays I only do it when I’m alone, but it undoubtedly made lots of people dismiss me as a weirdo when I was a kid.
I had phases when I’d be obsessed with a single subject. For a while in sixth grade it was cameras, then gas stations. More recently, weather data.
I had weekly appointments with a child psychiatrist from 1977 until 1982, but he never told me what my diagnosis was.
Social interaction &c. is still difficult for me: I feel as if I’m still in second grade while everyone else is in graduate school.
To this day, I’m hopeless at large parties unless I latch on to someone I know and stick to them for the entire evening.
I’ve had phases like that too… for me in the past few years it was area codes and cellphones. However, when does intense interest in something shade over into an “obsession”? I’ve sometimes found myself returning to things simply because they’re famiiar, but on the other hand, sometimes I’m interestied in exploring something new.
I’ve never been diagnosed, but I do display some of the symptoms of Asperger’s, including the stereotypical movement (for me, it’s bouncing my left leg up and down by moving the ankle while the toes remain in contact with the floor). The visual thinking thing I’m not so sure of because I don’t really understand what it means, nor what the opposite means.
I also totally lack two “senses”, for lack of a better word. The first is a sense of music. I love music, don’t get me wrong, but if someone plays an a, and then another a one octave higher, I don’t detect any similarity between them. I can’t tell if the higher note is an a or a b or a g or whatever. I don’t even hear that there’s something there to understand, if you follow me.
The second sense is a sense of direction. I have absolutely no “feel” for directions. If I go up the stairs, I have no clue which way the downstairs door is unless I stand still and really think about it. I have to learn every path the hard way, via landmarks and street corners. I hate streets that curve since they throw off my internal map and make me totally lost.
I haven’t seen these last two mentioned as symptoms of Asperger’s (or of anything else, for that matter). Does anyone recognise them?
What the heck? A lot of this is sounding like me. It’s kind of uncanny. You see, I can’t look a person in the face. I rock back and forth almost incessantly, my dad always comments on how I look like some certain baseball coach (or something) I know nothing about. I can’t make friends or talk to people. I assume everyone is trying to bring me down, they’re all making fun of me, they want me to fail. I try never to play anything competitively because although I don’t really have a desire to win, I don’t want other people to be wanting me to lose, if that makes sense. I don’t know what this is related to, but I also tend to pick at my skin until it bleeds. My lips and one spot on my leg are in fact bleeding as I type. I picture books as well, and was amazed and astounded at how exact the Lord of the Rings movies were to my mind’s perception - right now I have goosebumps thinking about it. And like Priceguy, I’ll mention that I have no sense of direction.
I also totally can’t remember faces, either. I have immense difficulty recognising people who say hi to me out of context. I tend to only remember people by their jackets and hair and once didn’t recognise a guy I had been dating for two months because he cut and dyed his hair.
Anyway, I’m not self-diagnosing or anything, it just seems odd. Also it doesn’t really matter to me, I figure I’ll just try to get a job where I don’t have to interact with people. Just rambling. This topic is educational, so I will leave it and stop detracting from its value.
I remember having the most COLOSSAL tantrum when my Mom as teaching me and a friend to play Checkers. My friend won and I screamed and yelled and accused my Mom of helping HER win and not helping me. Jeez looeez…
check yup
I bounce my feet a lot, swing my foot if there is space. I rarely hold completely still…I tap/ drum my fingers a lot
I used to have trouble with directions until I started delivering pizza… now I have a HUGE road map in the back of my head… still cant find my truck in Wal Mart’s parking lot, my 7 yr old son memorizes where it is so he doesn’t have to follow me around while I go I thought it was here???
obsessions? Oh yeah… snicker you DON’T want me to start on that one!
I’ve never been to anybody for a diagnosis, but I’ve suspected for a while that I may have something that would qualify along the Autistic spectrum. A couple of weeks ago, I spent a few hours on the web looking at various sites and emerged throughly confused. I have tendencies that would qualify as Asperger’s syndrome, but not all of them, and in some ways I qualify better as NLVD or some of the other listed disorders - but not completely. And then I started reading the case studies and they were all of people much worse off than I, and who were completely crippled by what they had.
Pragmatic language - does it count that I’m not really sure what the question means? If I’m interperting correctly, I think yes, often, but mostly because I can’t pick out hidden meanings or non-verbal cues very well. I used to not be able to do it at all (made the higher level English classes in high school, with all of the symbolism in the novels we read, very difficult).
Theory of mind; Relatedness; Empathy - I can manage empathy ok in theory, but maintaining it in practice is difficult, even with my family. It can be tough on my husband, because he often thinks that I’m being unsympathetic about a particular problem, when really I feel kind of bad that he feels bad, but can’t really relate to the problem or respond correctly to his pain. I don’t think that I respond properly emotionally at all to anyone, which worries me sometimes. I’m afraid that my husband (whom I do love very much but I can’t often show him that) might get frustrated someday and leave. I do know that I frequently hurt my parents by my seeming indifference.
Eye contact problem - Most definitely yes. I try sometimes, but it’s quite… well, painful isn’t the right word, but I don’t know how else to describe it.
Restricted/stereotyped range of interests - Yes. I get obsessed about something, and do nothing else for weeks or months, after which I may or may not abandon it entirely. I also sometimes exhibit what I would consider some basic obsessive-compulsive disorder behavior. For instance, the basement door in my mom’s house has a hook holding it closed. The light switch is inside the stairwell down, on the left. For most of my teenage years, I would come out of the basement, turn off the light, close the door, hook the hook, unhook the hook, open the door, check that the light was off, close the door, hook the hook. Repeat anywhere between two to ten times.
Appears unintersting in making friends - Is it just appears? This is one of the things that threw me. I am interested in making friends, I’m just terrible at making them and even worse at doing things to maintain that friendship. To an outside observer it might seem like a non-interest.
Pretend or symbolic play problems - Nope. Most of my playtime as a child was spent firmly in a fantasy world, and even as an adult I spend a considerable percentage of my time making up little stories in my head.
Spatial problems - Yes, but not to the degree that the articles I was reading about NVLD was describing. I’m very clumsy. I am incapable of telling the distance between objects. I often miss steps.
Fascination w/ written words - Don’t all bookworms qualify for this?
Gross and fine motor problems - Other than as described under “Spatial problems”, my gross skills are probably ok. I have no fine motor skills - my husband gets nervous whenever I handle a butter knife.
Reading up through the posts above, one thing not mentioned is that I’m largely a visual thinker, though when writing I can hear the words I’m writing in my head.
Actually, Krisfer the Cat’s first post could have been mine, right down to designing houses as a hobby. If I had better spatial skills, I would have become an architect. I almost went for it anyway.
Yes, yes, and hell yes.
Oh, and by the time I hit Preview Reply, rinni had posted this:
Also, hell yes. Immediate family are the only people I have a hope of recognizing by their faces, and with a radical enough haircut even that can be iffy.
Hehe, I did that too! Except it was two of my friends, instead of a friend and a mom, and it was Chinese checkers. Not the kind with pegs that go in little holes; the kind that you play with marbles that rest in little divots. And we were outside. I accused them of cheating, picked up the board and threw it, marbles everywhere, and went inside. They had to pick them all out of the grass. I don’t think they ever found them all. I used to have this ridiculous temper that I’ve since learned to control for the most part.
They WERE cheating and I’ll argue that to this day.
I don’t understand how people who think visually rather than in words have problems recognizing faces. This thread is fascinating.
Princess Ana said, “Thus, I have begun writing a series of essays on normal people’s behaviour from the point of view of someone who just arrived on Earth. Sometimes it comes as useful to be not-quite-normal, especially with my sense of humour.”
I would absolutely love to read these. Do you happen to have them online somewhere?
Hah! Good point, though I never really took the time to think it through.
Off the top of my head (and speaking only for myself of course):
Not being able to look someone in the eyes, I very seldom spend much time looking at their faces at all. If I am looking at someone’s face, I’m usually focused on a particular part of it in order to give the impression that I’m listening to them. This is a learned behavior on my part - my natural tendency is to be looking in a completely different direction while I listen, which can bug people.
When I think about people, I tend to picture them in a particular context that I associate with them - for instance, my current mental picture of my Dad (who is recently out of a 4 month stay in the hospital) is of him lying on his new beige couch in the living room, blue pillow bunched under his head, tan pillow between his knees, grey sweatpants, white socks, grey short sleeved shirt, hair recently bleached to nearly white and cut kind of spikey, about 30 pounds unweight and much less muscular than normal. His face doesn’t really enter into that mental picture at all - it’s just a blur in the appropriate spot.
I graduated high school with a GPA of 2.4 or something. I was labled learning disabled, etc. but no one knew what to do with me. When they finally gave me an IQ test I scored 149 I think but that wasn’t until the 11th grade.
Most of my childhood I remember just being confusing. I really, really felt like an alien who had been misaddressed to Earth somehow. I still get queasy just thinking about entering a public school. Kids are harmful enough to each other when you can understand what the hell they are doing. When everything comes as a blind side hit it just gets that much more dreadful.
Thank goodness for college. They expect computer majors to be a bit odd and they actually wanted to know what I thought. I was on the deans list most semesters there. I probably would have 4 pointed it but for a whole bunch of bad habbits I picked up in public school, like not handing stuff in that didn’t interest me and handing stuff in late constantly.
I would be glad to answer and other specific questions that you might have.
dorkus, I seem to remember reading somewhere that face- and people-recognising is a specific skill, hardwired in a specific part of the brain, and is separate from the kind of general visual imagining we’re talking about in this thread.
When I visually imagine, I imagine things, landscapes, places, objects, shapes, concepts, etc. Any people tend to be rather generic, even if they have a particular kind of hair or something.
I think part of it also isn’t so much that we can’t imagine people, but that we have difficulty connecting the image of the person to other information about them, such as an internal sense of who the person is and what they are doing. Connected to this, I’m sure, is difficulty in apprehending body language, flirts, subtle facial expressions, etc.
I think this holds for recognising how people sound as well; I know I’m absolutely terrible recognising people on the phone.
In one of the linked sites upthread, there was mention of difficulty in keeping an internal model of the other person as a person.
I know that under stress, I sometimes flip into a mode where I totally lose connection with the other person, and they just look like a big meat robot. I start to concentrate on physical details of their appearance, like a hair growing in an odd place, and my mind wanders, and I lose track of what they may have been saying.
Actually it was spotted by a friend of my wife’s who happened to get a job working with adults with various conditions of this sort and she recognized me in their diagnosis. I had to search a bit and finally found a psychologist at the local university who knew about it. Until me she had only worked with kids though.
Since then I have been able to find a therapist who specializes in Aspergers. In fact her husband is an Aspie as well.
If I may ask, what kind of therapy is there for this kind of thing? What does the therapy do?
I’m under the impression that a lot of these social skills can be learned (“flirt school”, anyone?), but as an adult? Are we forty-year-olds set in stone? (And I guess that it would be different depending on what the person needed.)
My major problem with my student with Asperger’s is that he refuses to focus on my instruction. He actually reads other books in class until I tell him to stop, and then denies that I taught what I was teaching! He told his resource room teacher I didn’t give the notes that everyone else copied while he was pretending to copy them but doing something else.
Is this a function of the Asperger’s, or is it something particular to him? I don’t want to be too hard on him if his Asperger’s is driving this behavior, but if it’s not, then he’s just being passively defiant and then lying about it later, which isn’t OK. When kids have a special ed classification like this, it’s important that I know exactly what the deal is so I can address the behavior properly and fairly.
This kid also, like some of you said, won’t look me in the face. Today, when I was telling him he could not read other books while I was teaching, he stood at a 90 degree angle from me, facing left instead of straight on. I actually walked around him so he would have to look at me while I was talking. Was that a bad thing to do, or should I make an effort to catch his eye and look at him when we talk?
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I think that it it’s him choosing(as an individual) to do what he wants, but just rationalizing(Asperger’s) it so that he’s in the ‘right’ about reading a book. Since to him you were not teaching what you were supposed to(in his mind), it was ok for him to read. I’ve done that in the past, so I think it’s part of Asperger’s, but he shouldn’t have been reading in the first place. So it’s mainly his choice, because he choose to read.
I find that looking directly into someone’s eyes is ‘painful’(hard to explain, but the urge to look away bulids up the longer I look at someone in the eye), so it’s not a good idea to have him do so. Have him face you and look around the direction of your shoulders, not directly into your eyes.
Also consider that he might’ve been taught to not to look in people’s eyes(and the Asperger’s might cement it), or that looking someone in the eyes connotates something else, like a direct challenge.
**Ruby **, it’s possibly a bit of both. What happened in previous classrooms? At the heart of what you describe is Aspergers type issues but if he’s never been properly scaffolded to address the issues then he may have learned behaviour to compensate. If that makes sense.
What’s in his IEP about taking notes? Is this the first time he’s had to take notes? How can the task be broken down into small units? With my kids when they are being given instructions (esp instructions which are not in tune with their infinite ) it is imperative that they make eye contact, even if they cannot hold the contact. Just so that I know I got through and that they are listening and not just tuning me out completely.
It sounds to me like your student is not fully comprehending what is being asked of him. While there’s some defiance present from the sound of it, I think you need to make contact and make sure he knows precisely what is being asked of him. I think the moving around him to make eye contact may have been uncomfortable for him but even so it’s important that you get through to him.
Is a system of picture cards or cards with writing on them possible? In the unit my younger kid will be in next year, he will be given the day’s timetable in picture form so that he knows what is happening in the day.
Ok, the eye contact thing might just be my kids <G>. It’s not too challenging for them to do that and if they do it then I know I’m getting through. If your student can’t do it or becomes overwhelmed, then don’t push it.
I like to read, I read voraciously, constantly like I breathe.
However I absolutely HATE to read long blocks of information on the computer. I loathe having to scroll down when the cursor hardly moves. I rarely read threads on SDMB if I come on them after they have gone over 2 pages. If I MUST read something long I print it out and read it on paper.
BUT give me a 500 page book and I will rip through it! Turning page by page …
It just seems that the computer screen is too bright, too vertical, and too hard to gauge my progress on…
Just rambling. This topic is educational, so I will leave it and stop detracting from its value. 