I want to say for starters that I find this thread amazing, it has made reflect on many things, personal things too. There is a lot to process here for me.
Yes, face-blindness it is not, I can remeber some faces, face-“short-sightedness” is more like it. Some faces, specially faces of people I instinctively like at first sight, I can remeber much better than others. I wonder whether I like them because they have faces I can remember, some trait combination that fits in my memory module.
I have thought about names for some time. I have trouble remembering them, always had. I came to the conclusion that I have difficulties remembering them because they don’t have a meaning, they are arbitrary. A table is a table, therefore it is called a table, and I can remeber that, even in several languages*. But why is a Thomas a Thomas, or a John a John? It never made sense to me. I have developed the habit of creating mnemonics for names when I am introduced to people. That usually works. I think that shows that my difficulty does not stem from a lack of attention or interest, otherwise I would not go through the trouble of making up a mnemonic aid.
I have also noticed that I can remeber the vowels much better than the consonants, thus a Julia and a Lucía, or a Paco and a Pablo are hard for me to keep apart. No idea whether this is a thing for other people. I wonder whether different parts of the brain process vowels and consonants?
* Yes, I know that the word “table” is arbitrary too, give or take some ethymological factoids, history, vowel- and consonant-shifts… But I see a difference nonetheless. It is evident to me, anyway. Sorry that I can’t explain it any better.
Yes! I used to hear my sister or my friends saying, “Isn’t it great that we have female role models” in X book or whatever, and I’d be like… I guess? There are a lot more now, and a lot more variety, which definitely is nice and I approve of it, I just never got that shock of recognition that other people seem to have.
You know, now that you ask that, I think what I objected to the most as a kid were all the expectations and restrictions that came along with dresses and skirts. You couldn’t do somersaults in them, or climb a ladder, or bike without difficulty, or even spread your legs too far apart without your mom telling you you weren’t supposed to do that. You always had to be careful to make sure the skirt wasn’t flipped up too much, and did it show your leg shape in which case you had to wear a slip, and… bleah. And they rarely have pockets!! And yeah also they could often be uncomfortable. Sometimes skirts could be swooshy and I liked that and still do.
As an adult I actually don’t object to skirts and dresses, but I buy comfortable ones WITH POCKETS and I also don’t really do somersaults or climb on things like when I was little, so many of my objections don’t exist any more. I still usually wear slacks instead, unless at church where dresses are mandated, or formal events like weddings – but now it’s because I feel like it’s hard for me to understand the code around what dresses/skirts are appropriate when, and then there’s the whole shoes thing – it’s much easier to put on slacks, nice shirt, knit blazer, boots, done.
Same. I’ve always had social anxiety but COVID made it worse. It’s also isolating having a kid with special needs. As my husband pointed out, whenever people ask how our son is doing, it gets real personal really fast.
Me too. One thing I did not expect to get out of it is the realization that I may not be as socially awkward as I thought. I know, you would expect it to go the opposite way in a thread about autism. I just haven’t really sat down to think about the nature of my social issues until this thread brought them up.
I can’t really explain why I was such a weird kid, but I had a lot going on.
Oh, I haven’t stopped. I just act on it less, and admit it very rarely.
That sounds like what I’m calling "partial face blindness’. It’s not complete – I can recognize a few people if they show up unexpectedly out of context, though I’ve never been able to figure out why those few. But I can talk to somebody for fifteen minutes at a meeting and not be able to recognize them ten minutes later; and when my sister came back from three months at college with a different hair style, I didn’t recognize her.
I can see the face while I’m looking at it; though I seem unable to distinguish minor features that most people seem to notice, so that people look alike who don’t look alike to most people. The moment I look away, it’s gone. And unless I specifically list to myself, in words, even major features – the person is or isn’t wearing glasses, does or doesn’t have a mustache or a beard, has black hair or blonde – those are gone too; and if I spent the conversation repeating to myself that this is a blond cleanshaven person with glasses so I’ll remember that, then I can’t follow the conversation and won’t remember what we were talking about!
I also have the trouble remembering names; though if I can see them written down that helps a lot.
Do you mean that showing the human form of the fear grin is autistic? I don’t think so. It’s quite commonly done; it just isn’t commonly called that. Women in particular commonly do it to placate men; but I’ve certainly seen men do it too (it was a man in the particular instance I’m thinking of.) But most humans don’t seem to recognize it as such on the conscious level – even if they’re verbally demanding it.
It doesn’t necessarily indicate fear of imminent danger, though it can. Sometimes it just indicates general submission – which has an element of fear back there somewhere, of what might happen if the smiler weren’t submissive, but the fear can be pretty far back.
Mostly that every description I’ve ever read doesn’t fit in significant areas; though the areas do sometimes vary.
And also, does the disability prevent them from accomplishing other things not essential for actually doing the work, but essential for getting and/or keeping the job?
Huh. It makes sense. But now it makes me wonder if that sort of thing might have allowed you to make up some deficits you would have had otherwise. My question would be this: do you feel like you had to consciously try to learn these things, or does it feel like you intuitively picked it up?
For me, my perceptions that others seem to miss feels entirely intuitive. But I also am aware that I was much, much worse as a child, being oblivious to things I would now consider obvious. It’s more like there was a period in my past where I suddenly started noticing things. And it was round the time I got a proper psychologist, the one who said I didn’t in fact seem to be on the autism spectrum.
I think I’m similar to you. I have some things that people might associate with autism, but I lack the most key characteristics. I’ve watched autistic YouTube and learned things that I didn’t know were a thing. I don’t think I ever had a hyperfixation. I don’t get sensory overload. I’ve never had a moment where I “go blank” or can’t speak. And I’ve run into level 1 autistic people who were clearly “off” in a way that I find autistic people usually can’t detect.
Of course, I know there are situations where I have been oblivious. It’s just the fact that I still seemed to have learned things by intuition that makes me wonder.
Perhaps that idea that autistic people can’t pick up social things by intuition is incorrect. An old book I read on the subject said that, for autistic people, learning social skills is like learning to play the piano. In context, they clearly were referencing formal piano lessons and such.
But there are also those of us who play by ear, who practiced on their own.
Anyways, sorry for going off on a tangent like this, but it’s something I think about that I don’t get to talk about much.
Table and ‘Dave’ are equally arbitrary words. Is it because one is a word for a class of objects, while the other indicates an individual? Or simply that there are a lot more individual names to remember, so they don’t get reinforced as much as generic nouns?
Sounds like you have it worse than me. When we learn to read, the part of the brain that recognises faces is repurposed to recognise letter and word shapes, so spending a lot of time reading is probably at least a contributing factor.
Is this like the men telling women to smile thing?
That would generally be the issue for people with autism or ADHD. But there’s not much incentive for employers to make allowances, unless the person has already demonstrated unusual talent. And most people are not unusually talented.
I did somersaults in my dresses, climbed climbing frames and trees, and biked wearing them, and I don’t remember anyone ever telling me I shouldn’t. If it stopped me being active, I probably would have refused to wear them too.
Socks and shoes are my biggest issue with skirts as an adult: you can easily wear practical shoes with socks if you’re wearing trousers, but not with a skirt. There are no comfortable and practical footwear options unless it’s hot enough for sandals, which rarely happens where I live. And pockets are also an issue now I have things to carry. I’ve started going dancing once a week, and I do wear skirts to that, but very rarely otherwise.
And now I have a daughter who always wants to wear a dress just so she can look pretty. At least she has got over the desire to wear all-pink outfits.
Oh yeah, Covid has made me feel way more awkward and nervous about socialising. And working from home means it’s unlikely to get any better. It’s very convenient, but I think it’s unhealthy in general to be so isolated, and at some point we’ll end up back in an office again.
You don’t have to go into details if people ask about your son, but I can see how it can be difficult.
It’s a spectrum that fades into ordinary personality differences, and there are people at every point along it. So there’s never going to be a clear line where you can say this person is definitely autistic, and that one isn’t. Nor can you say every person with autism has X symptom, or is unable to do Y. Different people have different issues and different abilities.
Both words are equally arbitrary, of course, with respect to the letters they are written with and the sound they have. But table is not arbitrary with respect to the things it is applied to: when you understand what a table is, you recognize one when you see it, even if it is different from all the other tables you saw before. I can use the word “table” as an intrument to denote tables, to recognize them, to classify them.
A Dave is a person, and nothing in him says “Dave” to me. No matter how many Daves I know, I will not recognize the next one. And if I forget I saw his face before, I will not even recognize the last Dave again. I see no Dave-ness in him. So I have the feeling to have to learn it by heart (or via mnemonic tricks) every time anew.
That’s an example, though not the only example; and the men may not consciously realize they’re asking for submission. But the whole ‘women must put on a pleasant smile when in sight of a man’ thing is a way of saying ‘women must look placating when around men’. Whether or not it’s conscious, they’re not just demanding that women look pretty for them, they’re demanding that women look pleasing – in the sense of looking willing to please – whenever they’re in sight of others. (I’ve occasionally known women to make this demand also. It’s a ‘you must obey social rules’ kind of demand – if women aren’t smiling in public, they’re not obeying the social rule about looking willing to please, and not obeying social rules is Dangerous and Wrong. Which is partly true – signaling that one won’t obey social rules is signaling that one might be dangerous – but part of what’s going on is disagreement about what those rules are.)
Smiles get complicated, because a smile in humans can mean anything from ‘I am afraid of you’ to ‘I am genuinely delighted to see you’ to ‘I think I’m about to get to seriously damage you and that makes me really happy!’ Or, of course, can mean ‘I have been socially trained to smile in this situation and the fact that I’m doing so means nothing whatsoever about my intentions towards you except that I’m going to be surface polite in public.’
I learned these skills as my brain was growing so maybe I had to learn it, but I don’t remember it being a conscious process. I suspect there was some kind of inborn ability there that was enhanced by necessity.
However, what you say about feeling superior to other kids really resonates with me. It’s embarrassing to admit I thought I was so much better than everyone else, but I did. They weren’t my intellectual equals so I felt we had little in common. I remember in fourth or fifth grade someone asked me, sneeringly, why I used such big words. I said it was because that’s what it takes to succeed in “the real world.” Childhood was just this temporary place until I could become an adult and do things that mattered. At that age, my plan was to become a clinical psychologist. (Kind of funny I married one.) I got ahold of a college textbook on psychology in grade school and I really believed I was going to figure out what causes schizophrenia.
It’s possible that rather than autism, the reason I was so weird as a child is that I was gifted. It didn’t make me any friends. My mom was extremely resistant to having me be separated from other kids or labeled or treated differently, but my reality might have been different if I had been around other kids like me.
As I got older, the cognitive gap between me and other kids got smaller, so that by the time I got to high school I had a lot of typical adolescent relationships. I was never popular, but I had a lot of friends (and a fair number of bullies.)
As far as obsessions, I had them. I was obsessed with Jesus, I was obsessed with writing, and when I finally got a good group of friends I became obsessed with them. But people with ADHD tend to have hyper fixations as well. And writing has been a lifelong passion. It’s just in my blood.
“Lexico-semantic processing [associated with consonants] is lateralized in the left hemisphere but prosodic processing [associated with vowels] requires the integration left and right hemisphere brain areas.”
So, I would have thought, just based on this, that vowel distinctions would be harder to remember — but if your idiosyncrasies are mostly in the left hemisphere for this sort of thing, it would be the consonants that are more affected.
…hold on, are you trying to tell me that most people don’t apologize to inanimate objects? (“It’s not you, you’re a good computer, it’s Windows I’m annoyed at.”) I thought this was something everyone did…?
(It wasn’t until my daughter was suspected of having ASD that I said to my husband, “But all geeky kids have to learn how to look other people in the eye when they talk to them, right?” and was utterly shocked when he gave me a shocked look and was like, “No, other people don’t have to learn that!”)
Hm, that’s really interesting. I’m sort of an in-between case? I don’t get sensory overload and I don’t mind masking. And while I definitely studied social skills and I feel like I learned most of my “advanced” social skills by intellectual study rather than by intuition, I did learn some of them (especially lower-level skills) by intuition as well. I look at my daughter and there are a number of low-level things that she doesn’t understand how to do, like how to transition to another activity with the other kids in the group (instead of still getting caught up with the activity they were previously doing) that I never learned, I just did. I suppose that’s the “spectrum” part…
Huh. This whole thing is interesting to me because I’ve been approaching it from the other end, and telling my daughter she has to smile a lot more, because she doesn’t do it enough. Like in situations where you meet someone you know, the smile is a signal of “hi, person I know, I am glad to see you or at the very least would like to signal I don’t hate you.” Just today she saw a person she knew from school at a community activity and said hi (this is progress from a couple of years ago!) but with an extremely flat affect and no smile at all, and I internally winced because the other kid kind of wilted a bit as the nonverbal message she was sending, without meaning to, was that she didn’t like seeing him.
I mean, I see what you’re saying, there’s a difference between that and the sort of “you need to smile all the time” sort of demand, but it was interesting to read because smiling more is literally one of the big things we’re working on right now.
Yeah, there’s definitely a lot of overlap (as you know) between the symptoms of being gifted and the symptoms of being autistic, what with the asynchrony and all. (To the extent that a couple of kids at my kids’ gifted school have been misidentified as their problems stemming from being gifted rather than autistic, which has led to a world of problems, but that’s a whole other story).
To circle back to our previous discussion, I do think that becoming “too” gifted in certain ways can sometimes tip over into Aspergers-like autism. Like, my theory is that there’s a fuzzy line, and on one side we think of the kid as “gifted” and on the other side we think of them as “autistic.” Not always, of course – I’ve certainly known people who were extraordinary at math who were also amazing at communication and emotional understanding – but I feel like it can happen. And maybe you (and maybe even I) come down on one side of that fuzzy line, and our kids come down on the other side.
That’s an interesting way to think about it. One thing I learned after Wee Weasel’s diagnosis is that hyperlexic kids are usually autistic. Well, I was hyperlexic.
So it’s like, something was there. It just didn’t get fully switched on somehow.
That’s almost another kind of smile, though it does come somewhat under “I’ve been socially trained to smile in this situation” – but it also sometimes comes under “I’m genuinely glad to see you”, either because the person smiling already knows and likes the one they’re smiling at or because they’re happy about meeting somebody new. I think its meaning is often mostly “I am signaling that I’m going to obey social standards and am therefore not dangerous.” But it’s not necessarily a submissive smile, though sometimes it is – it can also be a smile exchanged between equals, or even one given by somebody who’s in a superior social position (or thinks that they are) to someone they think of as inferior.
I think maybe what you’re trying to get your daughter to express is partly that (“if you don’t give this social signal in this situation you may disturb people”), and also partly that if she actually is glad to see somebody (or genuinely pleased to meet them) then they’re going to expect her to look pleased; and maybe that particular person needs to learn how to look pleased to another human, instead of being able to do that without having to consciously learn it?
(If I’m entirely off the wall here, please just say so.)
I was identified as “gifted” at a young age. I may or may not have some form of adult ADHD (tests have been inconclusive). My son was diagnosed with Level 1 autism at around age 5. I do notice a lot of similarities in some of our interests and behaviors.
My experience was almost exactly the opposite. I had friends at primary school and fitted in okay, but as puberty started, the other girls grew up and developed new interests, and I… didn’t. I did well academically, but I was years behind socially and emotionally. At secondary school I felt like I had almost nothing in common with my peers - I hung around with a group of girls who more or less tolerated me, but they were talking about boy bands and soap operas, while I was interested in relativity and evolutionary biology. And I didn’t feel superior; I was desperate to be normal. For years I tried to limit my vocabulary, and never talked about the ‘weird’ things that actually interested me. But that just meant I had nothing to contribute to their conversations and mostly stayed silent. That’s no basis for friendship.
Only when I went to sixth form at 16 did things start to improve: I had matured a bit, and I was able to find a group who were more ‘quirky’. And I slowly started to have the confidence to be myself, and feel like I could contribute something positive for others.
A major reason I want to see some kind of gifted education in the UK (and think it’s terrible parts of the US are eliminating it) is for the social side. Even those with good social skills benefit from spending time with people who are more like them. It’s important to learn to get along with different types of people, but it’s even more important to have the chance to make friends that you actually have something in common with, and to know there are other people like you.
At least she has got over the desire to wear all-pink outfits.
