Why do Aspergers people have that look?

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This is not to be offensive at all to anyone...

Is there any medical reason that people with Aspergers have that kind of .... cloudy, far-off, feathery look in their eyes? Don't really know how to describe it. I am sure you know what I mean. It seems to be a common physical trait. Is there any medical reason for it?

The eyes of other PDD diagnosis children look different to me, some normal some just not-there, blank and empty. Seems to be somewhat consistent with the diagnosis??

My friend has commented on this . . . apparently I have it too - a sort of other-worldly, away-with-the-fairies quality.

I don't know why.

Yeah, that's a good way to describe it.

I don't think people with that look have a blank expression... just a different one. My son has what my family describe as a "long gaze", he seems to be looking right through or into the things he gazes at. It's disconcerting, or so they say, when he makes an effort to keep eye contact... On the other hand, some of the girls at school have decided that he's mysterious, and they now, officially, like him. It probably helps that he's a very handsome boy... the same expression on a typically spotty teenager wouldn't necessarily be so appealing.

I think it's more that those with Aspergers are always in some sort of "thought". My son is constantly trying to "file away" information being fed to his brain by sight, smell, sound, touch all in a matter of seconds. To a NT, it's done so effortlessly, but to someone w/Aspergers, it's more difficult. This is especially true when he really wants to understand that particular bit of information. I try to tell him that sometimes people find it offensive to stare at a person's face so try to look elsewhere but of course, much of this is done subconsciously so how could he really?! ! People will have to just get use to the look

When I say blank or empty, I am referring to something closer to classic autism.

That's it in a nutshell. We're constantly actively processing. What you're seeing is the facial equivalent of that little circular icon on your monitor screen spinning and spinning and spinning...

We see more dimensions than the others.

+1 When my mind is busy, I'm often told I have a "blank" look. It really is the facial equivalent of the hourglass icon!

That's it,It's the look of a deep , thoughtful person and it is only because we live in a society where stupidity is a norm people like us considered to be sick
it's very disappointing to see how many AS subscribe to views that degrade them.

I have also wondered why millitary personel have a certain look in their eyes. Kind of robot-like.

I'm not at all sure this isn't misleading. To me, you seem to be trying to compare apples and oranges here.

Although someone with Asperger's might be presented with the same number of inputs as an NT, who really knows if the NT is processing all those inputs, or pursuing each train of thought generated by them. Although I can't know what it's like to be inside the mind of anyone who is NT, from talking to those who are, it seems to me what they are really doing is not so much processing all that information, as ignoring most of it. Most NTs are not able to generate the amount of ideas I do on a regular basis. So we are really performing different tasks, and I suspect that, if any NT ever tried to think as we do, they would find it not just difficult but impossible.

To put my objection in more simple terms, you seem to be trying to compare someone who answers every letter that arrives with an individual reply to someone who discards 80% of the mail, stuffs a form letter into an envelope in answer to 19% more, and only actually bothers to write a reply for 1% of the letters. Of course they'll do their work effortlessly, while the first person will struggle! They aren't even trying to do the same thing.

However, your overall conclusion is right. We're thinking.

Do they? If they do, I have no idea why, but I don't think it has anything to do with the AS look, which isn't "robot-like" (to me, anyway).

The AS look is just someone so deep in thought that all of their attention is taken up, and they don't have any left to devote to responding to what is going on around them.

From a NT perspective, filtering is a huge part of processing for NT's. We must immediately recognize what is not important and discard it or save it for later processing.

Oh, I wasn't comparing the two - millitary look is totally different than AS look.

This is probably the way my mom sees me, and it might explain why she thinks I'm not making eye contact when I am.