AS Thinking vs. NT Thinking: An Analogy for the Masses

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I like this analogy, but what about macs? Don't they reach their top of capacity from time to time?

I very much like your analogy.

I'm NT and I have a son with AS. I've always felt that the main difference between my social judgements and his are that mine are automatic -- it's like a "social interaction" program that ALWAYS runs in the background with no user input required. With my son, it's as if he has to consciously run a long list of "social commands" in DOS.

I explained it to my son that way. I told him that automating a process has both advantages and disadvantages. With social judgements the advantages, of course, are that it's fast and efficient and uses very little -- if any -- attentional resources.

The disadvantage of automating a process is that you lose a certain kind of flexibility. If the NT social judgements are mostly automatic, it becomes very difficult (not impossible) to use our intelligence to alter them. This leads to racism, sexism and -- I would argue -- is a major contributer to war. ("Those people over there are bad -- just look at them!") It took me several YEARS to stop being annoyed by my son's lack of eye contact even though it only took me 5 minutes to understand -- at an intellectual level -- that it shouldn't bother me.

I told my son that my way is not necessarily any better than his. It's just that they lead to different kinds of problems.

My thanks to all the Aspie's pointing out the functional details in my analogy. I kind of expected it. What I am going for is a broad generalization that even a soccer mom who only uses the computer to check Facebook and download songs to her Ipod can understand. I think if I introduce Linux in that mix, I'll loose my core audience.

But the points are very well taken!

@rudolfsdad - thank you for that perspective! Your insight into the potential faults in an automatic social program are simply brilliant and ring so true. A good analogy for this would be Damn You AutoCorrect - automatic function with a mind of its own.

Rudolf is one lucky guy!

I was also going to say that you should use Linux instead of Windows to represent the aspie brain. Also, you might want to include specific examples of "add-on software", such as antidepressant medications, stimulants, etc.. Otherwise, your analogy is pretty good.