Is there an equivalent of Asperger that tends toward abstract thought and novelty?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’ve noticed a few people who at first seemed like they might have Asperger syndrome. I’ll name a few eventually but for now, let’s only look at the characteristics to avoid biasing the question by making it about this or that public figure.

They appear to have low empathizing skills, little eye contact, flat voice intonation and a poker face. They can also be highly intense and focused in their interests.

However, instead of having inflexible repetitive routines, they seek novelty and experimentation. Instead of a few narrow interests, they’ll be interested in many unrelated topics. Instead of collecting and memorizing a high quantity of details, they’ll seek insight into underlying general principles. Instead of stereotyped and repetitive motor behaviors like flapping or twisting, they’ll tend to have military-like posture. Metaphors are usually not a problem for them and they joke a fair amount. People with Asperger often fail to suppress internal thoughts but they don’t seem to have that problem.

Any ideas?

2

Aspergers is a spectrum, not a gradient. One person can have a completely different set of symptoms (or lack of) from another person. I don’t know who you’re talking about, and I wouldn’t presume to diagnose anyone, especially if I didn’t know them. But it is entirely possible to have Aspergers to have some common symptoms and not others. It’s also entirely possible for a person without Aspergers, or with some other disorder to not be empathetic, show little eye contact, etc.

My son as Aspergers and is pretty much as you describe, FWIW. Hell, I’m pretty much as you describe.

3

My son has some characteristics on your first list, some on your second, and some that don’t fit in either. He has a formal diagnosis of Aspergers.

Without knowing more about the people you’ve identified, it’s very difficult to answer the question you’ve posed.

4

R. Buckminister Fuller was a noted thinker in various fields who speculated that his interest in overall patterns was related to the fact that he was very nearsighted as a child, and this wasn’t recognized until he was 5 or 6 years of age. So it wasn’t until then, when he first got glasses, that he realized that a tree canopy wasn’t just a fuzzy green ball, but actually made up of branches & stems each with individual leaves. He felt that his poor vision for small objects as a child affected his thinking.

Also, the image of the absent-minded genius is common. And at least somewhat accurate. For example, Albert Einstein couldn’t/didn’t bother to remember his own phone number.

5

They dont have the ability to empathize well and they are frequent joke tellers? Seems like an awful combination. ��

6

This isn’t quite what you’re decribing, but I’ve always thought of Williams syndrome as kind of an opposite of Asperger’s. They tend to have low IQ but are very verbal and gregarious, and their language is filled with colorful and bizarre ideas.

7

OP, is the person(s) you’re thinking of musically inclined? A lot more people with Williams have perfect pitch than the general population does.

8

No. There seems to be a trade-off in brain networks between the ability to systemize and empathize. I’m referring to people who are heavily on the systemizing end but are abstract rather than concrete thinkers. Like a scientists vs an engineer, a screenwriter vs an actor or a choreographer vs a dancer.

9

Well, that’s two things I have in common with Einstein. The other is a fissured tongue. Neither has proved particularly useful.

10

Maybe, but it does accurately describe a number of comics I’ve met.

11

Were they good comics?

12

The autism spectrum is really broad. Asperger’s has been recognized as being on the autism spectrum for a number of years. My layman’s understanding (and I have a child that’s middle to high end part of the autism spectrum) is that broadly speaking the previous Aspergers were folks that had fairly normal verbal language skills vs Autism with poor to non verbal language skills. That may be a helpful way to look at the fundamental difference in these definitions.

To personalize it, my child basically couldn’t speak at all until about 3. The only had about a 20 work vocabulary with echolalia. She would learn a new word and lose an existing word, and roughly a 20 word vocabulary until 5.5 when she started to expand from that 20. But even now at 14 years old, we cannot have a rich conversation. She can communicate general needs and wants, can simply explain some of it, but there are quite significant limitations.

My understanding of “Aspergers” on the other hand, is that they have fairly normal language acquisition, but have the other more general autism spectrum traits such as stimming, lack of eye contact, etc.

FWIW, those on the autism spectrum do NOT suffer from a lack of empathy. It is a lack of being able to communicate that empathy. My child, for example, definitely has empathy.

13

There’s one issue I have with the commonly-used word “spectrum” with regard to ASD - although it does get right the fact that ASD presents in a myriad of different ways, it still implies a linear process from one bit of the spectrum to another.

I prefer to think of a hill. If you’re on top of the hill, you’re neurotypical. If you’re off the hill, you’re in ASD territory. It’s easy to see that two people who are off the hill, are not necessarily anywhere near each other. Bonus points - it’s an eleven-dimensional hill.

So while there are some things which are characteristic of ASD, like many things it doesn’t really have an opposite

14

Insult comics seem to fit that description and a number of them have been very successful. (See Don Rickles.)

15

I like your hill. :slight_smile: It is hard to explain the concept to people who are not familiar with it. I will be using this.

16

The person in question is my stepsister. She was 6 and I was 12 when our parents got together and although they’re split, we still keep in contact. She’s somewhat unusual and I’m concerned that if I don’t put it in the right way, she’s going to think I’m saying she’s just a weirdo. Since she’s looked up to me since we were kids, I think that would hurt her.

You know how people at the lower end of the Dunning-Kruger effect tend to overestimate themselves? People at the higher end tend to underestimate themselves and I think that might apply to her. I want to know what I’m talking about and hopefully present her with actual research or some kind of term that isn’t “smart weirdo”. She’s so used to being told she’s smart that it’s like a great looking woman being told she’s pretty.

When she was in 1st grade, she made a painting in art class that I found striking. One side of the face she painted was highly lit while the other side was in dark shadow. Later, I found out that style is called chiaroscuro. In 3rd or 4th grade, I don’t remember which, she mentioned that the teacher would line up the class in two rows and they’d have to ask each other math questions like “2+3=?”. She asked something like “3-6=?” without being taught about negative numbers. In 5th grade, she said she was congratulated by the teacher in front of the whole class after they did a poetry writing exercise. She had a crush on a boy when she was a teenager and she wrote him an acrostic with a quality of his with every letter of his first name.

In 7th grade, she got a bad result on an ESL test and decided she’d learn on her own. A year later, she was two grades ahead. A year after that, high school ESL had pretty much nothing to teach her. She started reading The Economist magazine at 16. By age 19, she wrote better in English than most native speakers.

I asked her why she applied to medical school and she said that she had something to sort out at the registrar’s office and that a clerk who looked at her file mentioned she should apply. It hadn’t occurred to her and she got in at the one place she applied.

One time, someone complimented her that the dresses she wore were always nice and she matter-of-factly replied: “I made sure of it.” Another time, she was embarrassed because she was the last to complete a test and the test givers were waiting after her. One of them said, presumably snarkily: “You gonna get 100%?” and she replied: “Almost.” She thought it might sound arrogant even if, to her, that was just what she expected. Another time, a professor in medical school made a mistake in the phrasing of a question so she went to the teacher to point it out. He blew her off. She went to her seat, made double sure then went back to the teacher to insist that he’d made a mistake. He’d made a mistake. I pointed out that telling a medical school professor he made a mistake in writing a test question was unusual but that going back insist that he, not her, was making a mistake if she couldn’t understand the question was even more unusual.

I work out from home and wanted to work my lats. She MacGyvered a rowing machine using a barbell, straps and a resistance band. I asked her for advice on her to dress and women do double takes on me with stuff we bought at Target, an army surplus store, $15 biking gloves and a $15 baseball cap.

She does things like get out the door at 4AM on a Saturday to run a half-marathon on her own.

As for her sense of humor, she sent me this link Imgur: The magic of the Internet and told me it looked like “angry Jesus on a windy day”. She said this Imgur: The magic of the Internet looks like someone covering his eyes with his hands and saying “NOOO”. She joked that these: https://www.amazon.ca/Dimples-Excel-Squeeze-Strengthening-Set-Resistance/dp/B01HD5L3YQ/ref=sr_1_3_sspa?keywords=hand+strenghtener+egg&qid=1567872654&s=gateway&sr=8-3-spons&psc=1&spLa=ZW5jcnlwdGVkUXVhbGlmaWVyPUEyMFcwTERYNlcyWFZOJmVuY3J5cHRlZElkPUEwMTYzMjgyNFEwN0lVNFY1OEgwJmVuY3J5cHRlZEFkSWQ9QTAwODU1NjczTU5PTERQRVEwREpHJndpZGdldE5hbWU9c3BfYXRmJmFjdGlvbj1jbGlja1JlZGlyZWN0JmRvTm90TG9nQ2xpY2s9dHJ1ZQ== are feminist exercise equipment.

I know that if I come to her without something more informative than “smart”, she’s going to politely humor me and then dismiss it. If I come to her with something she can research, that will likely interest her and she might look into it further.

17

EDIT: Woops, thought I was in IMHO. Leaving this up but sorry it’s not a GQ answer.

Everyone’s unique. Diagnoses of mental issues are probably, in many cases, misleading. It would probably be more accurate to tell a person that their body produced serotonin at a 2% greater rate than most people and testosterone at a 4% reduced rate, than to tell them that they have some particular ailment. Aspergers, depression, bipolar, etc. aren’t diseases that you caught, they’re just the outcomes of the way that your DNA put you together. There is no “depression bacteria” that you can track down and eradicate. And, more importantly, there’s nothing about how DNA works to say that if someone is a +2% serotonin then they will also be a -4% testosterone.

Lumping people together like the variations in how our bodies are constructed are going to get out of wack in a consistent way rather than on a bell curve is, probably, not a particularly great way of doing it. It is possible that, because of the basic outlines of how the human body is put together, some patterns of misconstruction might be more prevalent - but assuming not is probably the safer way to operate.

But in terms of your sister, she sounds like a cool lady. If she’s happy and doing well in life, then she doesn’t have anything, she’s just a unique human being, the same as everyone else.

18

Be my guest! The good old “If you’ve met one ASD person you’ve met one person with ASD” still has legs to, just I personally got bored with it :wink:

19

@MichaelEMouse you might want to look into the term “twice exceptional”. Basically it refers to the phenomenon of people having stand-out skills in one area of life (usually academic) but severe problems in some other thing - often a non-academic one like social skills, but sometimes a different academic area.

(For some reason, it doesn’t count as “twice exceptional” if you have awesome people skills and can’t add 2+2 … maybe because we don’t have exams in the former)

I’m going to assume from your OP that your sister does have some areas in her life where she’s struggling and can’t really operate effectively, even though your actual post about her shows only a fully-awesome person who totally has her life together in every way :wink:

“Twice exceptional” basically says yes, it’s possible to be way in front of the bell curve on something, and way behind on something else, and we make no assumptions about what exactly those things are

20

Shizoid Personality Disorder is marked by autistic thinking and abstract creativity. Though gregariousness is usually anathema.

My psychiatrist’s working diagnosis of me is SzPD, but I’m currently scheduled for Asperger’s assement on account of my regimented behavior and stubbornness, but I attribute those to trauma more than an innate desire; that is I purposefully narrow my interests for fear that my first experiences will be associated with stressors like they have been in the past.