psychic aspies?

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I have this, since I was a kid I embarassed my parents by refusing to deal with people who I thought were mean or 'bad' and in most cases these people did turn out to be quite bad. I can read people quite well, almost to the point it seems telepathic, however this is usually from discreet observation, when confronted directly with someone I find my mind goes a bit blank with the sort of mild panic response that comes from actually having to deal with someone face to face.

For instance, I can usually tell if a girl is interested in me by discreet observation of her on say the bus or train or from across the room, but say if I'm suddenly introduced and have to talk her face to face I seem to lose all my powers and turn into a clueless, bumbling idiot like that guy from the gods must be crazy. No wonder my relationships dont lose very long.

yeah my last gf was a freaky love at first sight, but i didn teven look at her when i "saw" her..i just imagined or perceived a very strong feeling..she said she felt it too....curious aspie awareness.
we broke up thou, but it was a real feeling that we both cpouldnt explain.

I usually laugh if someone is building up to a punch line. I laugh too easily.

I feel I over analyze everything everyone says to me...I always think theres a hidden meaning behind there words and its like there talking in code and I have to try and decypher it all...nothing is clear to me every word enters my head and its like i'm trying to put together a puzzle...sometimes I feel I can sense there pain or worry and it almost hurts to the point where I don't talk about my problems with dealing with AS because its too much to handle...I have only a few people I actually talk too in depth about my feelings my mother and father...everyone else its way to hard because I can sense there frustration and inablity to understand what i'm going thru with AS...


it's a constant struggle...

I had two preminition dreams, but it wasn't about anything big, but both came true the next day. It was freaky. I don't know if that counts, really.

I've had some strange dreams that an event much similar to the dream happened later...

And then I once I had this dream where I had met a friend and went to their house in this nice neighborhood and then random stuff hapened (you know how dumb dreams can get)... but then a few weeks ago, there's a bike path that runs through my town (5 miles long 1-way), and I had never biked to the end, and when I did, a little detour of went to the exact neighboorhood in my dream (which had been several months before this) and a strange feeling came over me... it was very strange, and its not the area of the town I'd expect that friend to live in (I don't know where my friend lives), but still strange...

And sometimes when I'm listening to the radio or my ipod shuffle, right when one song ends, another song starts playing in my head, and then the next song really starts and about always is the same song that started in my head, or has a similar beat at the start to the song in my head. Doesn't happen often, and I'm only completely off about 1 in 10 times...

I do complete people's thoughts a lot. And no, it's not exactly a "psychic" thing (and I know Donkey didn't mean literally psychic!): on one hand, most people are incredibly repetitive, shallow, and predictable, and don't seem to realize it. That means, once they get started talking about the damned weather for the 15-zillionth time, it's pretty easy to know that "Yep, it's hotter 'n hell!" and "It wasn't this hot when I was a kid!" are going to come immediately after "Damn, it's hot out here!"

On the other hand, if it's something logical and technical in a way I can grasp, I can usually follow it to its logical conclusion much faster than the speaker can articulate it. So, an explanation of a new technology, instructions on how to build or make something, an assessment of a person or situation based on a set of clear evidence.... those are things I can finish sentences about with great ease. But gossip about so-and-so, or something involving my place in a power-structure / social situation, a story about a day in the life of the person talking, or a ball game or race or something like that, I have problems with - I don't understand where it's coming from or where it's going, and because the importance of it is completely lost on me, I can't be interested enough to try to follow the logic even if I could see it.



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Now, I DO get "feelings" about people as soon as I hear them talking, or sometimes as soon as I see them... like "something's wrong!", or "I'm going to get along great with this person", for example.

In those rare cases of knowing I'm going to like someone almost instantly: in retrospect, I think that's a case an "aspie radar", as Donkey put it so beautifully, was at work. Because, now that I think of it those people used very little "body language", expressed their emotions very subtly, didn't say a whole lot, and on the ocassions where they did say something to me, they actually talked (as opposed to just chattering, making noise. I always thought of it as being that they were "talking in my language," or that they were the only sane people I knew!) But that isn't just aspies who can do this: I'm pretty sure EVERYONE has an aspie radar, even (especially!) NT's have it, and will be able to tell, sooner or later (probably sooner, in my experience), that someone isn't completely NT.

Now, in the cases where I instantly thought there was something wrong: again, I think I must have been catching up on some body language that didn't seem right, though I sure can't put a finger on it. For example, there was this one new guy at work (a restaurant) who I got to train, and the moment he started talking to me I knew something was wrong, and almost instantly told myself it was because he was a pedophile. I wish I knew what it was, precisely, that set off the red-flags! Anyway, after working a couple months, he said something damned creepy to me in a "ha-ha, only kidding!" way, that pretty much confirmed that I was right about him, although it was nothing I could ever go to the police over. I was glad when he got fired for no-call-no-show a few weeks later, because from his first few minutes there until that final confirmation I couldn't stand to be around him: I never had a moment where I didn't keep thinking "there's just something wrong, I REALLY don't like this creep, and I really don't know exactly why I know something's wrong!"

I can also usually tell, more often than not, I think, rather quickly if a guy is gay. For example, my only two friends from high school and college introduced me to one of their childhood buddies, "Travis", whom I'd never met before. I took one look at the guy the moment the car door opened and before he ever stepped out, and knew instantly that he was gay. But nobody mentioned it or anything, and I had no reason to say anything either, and so we all just played board games and watched movies all night, and after that I never saw Travis again. Several months later one of my friends mentioned Travis again in a story from "the good ol' days" when they were kids, and the name didn't sound familiar to me at first, so I asked "oh, wait - you mean the gay guy with the red hair, the one we watched Pink Floydd videos all night with a couple months ago?" When, after some mild arguement over it, my friend finally realized we actually were talking about the same Travis, he got mad because he thought I was insulting his best childhood friend, and stopped talking about me for a while over it. When "Travis" came out of the closet a couple years later, I was apparently the only one who wasn't surprised. I mean, he didn't look or act different in any way I could point out, and I have no idea what tipped me off... I just knew it. There've been a couple dozen similar cases where I was the only one who wasn't surprised when a guy tells everyone, for example, that the "wife" he keeps talking about is a man, or something like that.

I can also usually tell at work when something Management is telling us is an outright lie, with no real evidence, even if I never understand exactly what the truth is. For example, on my last job on one of the times they changed management, they new managers announced that they were going to open up a new midnight shift, and pay a couple of people extra to work on it. They'd apparently pulled a lot of strings to make it happen, and they made a point of telling me that I was their first choice for the job. Although it sounded perfect for me - I'd be there all night, by myself! - I instantly realized that something was wrong with the whole situation, and declined, even though they kept insisting, and I began to have a seriously bad feeling about the whole thing. I kept telling my co-workers there was something wrong, and everyone thought I was just being my usual weirdo self. When management pulled me into the office and tried to browbeat me into taking that job, I told them I would consider doing it only if they paid me another $7.00/hour, which I knew would be so outlandishly high a raise that they couldn't accept it - and I almost began to panic when they paused, and gave each other a weird look I couldn't figure out, but which seemed like they were actually considering it, while at the same time they looked like they were even further into panic mode, which really confused me. I told them I changed my mind, and wouldn't be interested even if they did pay me that much, and I'm glad I didn't accept that position. That's because, about three months later, the managers were fired after it turned out that a frightening amount of food, supplies, and money had gone missing from the workplace, and that the managers were the ones who had been stealing it all; it took a while, but I realized that they wanted me working there all night alone, because they were trying to frame me for their embezzlement! (There've been a lot of similar situations at work, where I never did figure out exactly what they were up to - finding out the truth like in this example is very rare for me, but every time I've ignored my "intuition" on this sort of thing, I've ended up regretting it.)



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In any case, I think the reason this sort of thing is possible, and has an almost psychic or magical appearence to most other people, is because the only way someone like me can stay afloat in a social situation is to become a sort of super-calculator for the little things. I mean, to keep an eye and an ear open for the tiniest details and deliberately add them all together as best as we can. I think NT's have natural shortcuts for doing the same thing more easily and effectively, shortcuts that just skim over the details that we need to pay so much closer attention to and work harder to understand, if we are to get anything close to the same effect. NT's might get an instant "big picture" and move on effortlessly, but never notice the way certain words are stressed, or notice laughter or exaggerated body language that doesn't seem to make sense in a particular context, or the way a particular subject keeps coming up in such an awkward way with certain people, or what isn't being said or done, or things like that. We depend on recognizing a certain formula to tell what's going on, and when something is even slightly off-kilter or a new ingredient is added, it is alien and confusing enough to really stand out to us.

Aspergers are smarter than most people, right? Higher IQ. NT's often need a lot of "steps" to explain things and when they have things explained to them. Aspergers needs fewer steps, to many steps is confusing. So, one is explaining something to you and he needs like seven steps to do this, and when he gets to step three you've already got it and states it.
It could be as simple as that.

Or it could be that we are more sensitive in oh so many ways.

I have experienced this some times, bur feel it's because I'm faster in my thinking than most people.

But I could be wrong

Yes, I guess it is how we process information differently - there are some things we pick up on at lightning speed compared to NT's, some things we're slower than molasses at because we can't understand it as instantly as NT's can, because we don't understand it using the same process.

I shy away from saying I'm smarter than NT's, because I know that there's a whole range of things that I'm super-stupid figuring out compared to the average, or even below-average, NT. Rather, I think it's more accurate to say that I think and communicate differently from neuro-typical people, with some ways of thinking being more natural and easier to me and others being easier and more natural to most other people.



In other words, the same thing, I think, that results in high IQ test results and apparently lightning-fast technical and logical deductions actually interferes with and slows down or eliminates my ability to perform as well or as quickly as even an NT child in many other things, such as simply understanding what someone is trying to say to me.





So, I think that in the case of this "psychic effect" in certain conversations, our difficulties in understanding "normal" NT communication actually work in our favor for a change - we're ahead of the speaker on certain things only because we're completely incapable of taking what we're seeing and hearing for granted the way an NT would. It's because we don't easily understand what most people are actually saying, meaning, or feeling, and so we have to work harder at it and figure it out in our own slow, complicated way, that we can catch things that most NT listeners would notice only with special training that doesn't come natural to them.

In fact, it may even be a case of the NT's unconsciously having to "switch gears" to communicate certain ideas that force them to think and speak in Asperger's-language, completely un-natural to them, so that they end up thinking and communicating more slowly and awkwardly than we do for a change! (That's an idea! Now I'm going to start paying attention to which conversations I can keep ahead of like that, to see if they are, in fact, an awkward, unconscious NT attempt at thinking and speaking in aspie-mode... this could be a very entertaining opportunity to see the NT's in our position for a change: an opportunity that I've been looking right at all this time without realizing it!)

Wow, you're deep man!

And you're right I shouldn't say we're smarter than others, because everything is relative, I just meant we have an higher IQ, and I know there are social IQ and all that.

I don't know if I quitefollow you in the end, but its an interesting idea.