Help understanding NVLD

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Well, I am diagnosed with NLD, and I don't believe I experience the same social difficulties as someone with an ASD. Looking at my early childhood, my interactions with my parents were completely normal. The only odd things in my early childhood probably would have been my intensity in pursuing interests and difficulty dealing with change. As I got older, my visual-spatial deficits became more obvious (around early elementary school), although I was not diagnosed until I was 22. My social difficulties have always been fairly subtle- much more so than they would be in an ASD. I do have some difficulty detecting sarcasm, my eye contact is not the greatest (although I have worked hard on it), my friends in college used to call me "blunt", and most of my friends consider me very naive and gullible. I also don't pick up on the subtle things people do socially, like when they are snubbing someone. That kind of stuff goes totally over my head. But I can carry on a conversation, and have no difficulty with emotional reciprocity.

Some people do think NLD is an ASD (although main NLD researchers such as Byron Rourke do not), but I believe it is more an "autism cousin," like ADHD. One NLD blog calls it "one foot on the spectrum," which I think works well. As already discussed, many people with AS also have NLD, and I'm sure there are those with NLD who could also be diagnosed with AS or PDD-NOS, but I don't think NLD should be folded into AS, like some people have suggested. Many people I've worked with (to whom I did not disclose my diagnosis) assumed that I had a learning disability based on my performance in certain areas of work, but only one person to my knowledge thought I had AS (and one person thought I had brain damage!). I just don't think my social difficulties are severe enough or pervasive enough for an ASD. Additionally, the visual-spatial deficits clearly run in my family, but I have no autistic relatives like many people with AS do.

I realized my previous post didn't really address many of the OP's original questions, so here goes:

I already described the social difficulties I have, so I'll skip this one.



This one is awfully broad- think I'll skip this one too, and go onto the specific ones.



Honestly, I process visual information very poorly, and I am extremely unobservant. I have no idea what I focus on when I look at someone's face. I don't think I really focus on anything in someone's face, unless there is some unusual facial feature. I don't process most of the visual information from my environment at all, which probably contributes to my horrendous visual memory and difficulty recognizing places/people.



I don't know whether I pick up on hints in e-mails or not. I know I miss quite a lot of subtle things in verbal communication, because when I hear people talking about a particular encounter/conversation I was a part of, they talk about all sorts of things I didn't pick up on (like, "Can you believe she looked at me that way?" Me: "Um, what?"), but I don't have that same experience with e-mails. I definitely do tend to take people and the things they say at "face value," and I do sometimes take things literally.



I think my theory of mind is fine, and I am very empathetic.



I really don't know the answer to the first question. I don't believe this has ever been specifically studied. As for the second question, I think it depends on the individual. I was just reading a post on a forum (not this one) last night where a girl with NLD included NLD on the autism spectrum. I don't personally believe it goes there. My brother has called me "pseudo-autistic" which I think kind of fits, because I do have some autistic traits, but I am not autistic.

Hopefully this was somewhat helpful. Sorry about the ones I didn't have an answer to. I know there are a few people on this board diagnosed with NLD (we used to have a sticky in fact, but it got unstuck some months ago), so maybe they will chime in. If you want some more info, you can also try searching for our old sticky- I think it was called "NLD Information and Support Thread."

To make this short and sweet, are you familiar with the concept of computer emulation? A Windows Intel computer emulating, let's say, a Super Nintendo, so you can play Super Nintendo games on it. That's the way it is for me and emotions. My actual emotional "self" is irrational and stupid, so to compensate, it's rarely ever on, and the intellectual part of my brain emulates for the rest. I have to literally think almost everything out, verbally. Like if I'm driving, I have to think "what if that car...was that understeer, wait, do I have enough time for the yellow" all the time, verbally think it out. I overcalculate, overplan, everything I do. It works out for me well most of the time, better than most "normal" people.

With people, I find it easy to be one on one with a person to a point (not for terribly long, but for a couple hours) and I'm also not scared of crowds and rather like going to crowded places like carnivals, fairs, sports games, stuff like that, but at the same time, I really don't like being in a group of like 5-10 people or so in a house or whatever, I find that the most stressful.

I'm DXed NVLD.

Thank y'all for the answers.

I've been wondering about NVLD vs. ASD, because I've been reading up on social cognition in general. The research is confusing and difficult to conduct and difficult to interpret.

I've always wondered if people with NVLD had more advanced ToM or more intuitive ToM than autistic people, and if that accounted for the difference in the depth or breadth of social interaction difficulties. I feel like most of my social difficulties are caused by a nearly complete lack of the social brain that synchronizes NTs with a shared stimulus-to-response profile in social interactions and relationships. Someone says or does this, everyone responds the same way and as expected, except for me, who responds differently or not at all. So I was wondering if people with NVLD shared more of this profile/ToM than autistics do, but have trouble processing the non-verbal communications into states of mind. It seems to me that autistics share little of the profile/ToM, and don't do the automatic processing either.

The reason I asked the question about the human face was because I focus so much on the minute physical details that I miss all the social/emotional content and the idea of there being social/emotional content crosses my mind very infrequently. So, in my case, social information is replaced by physical information during social interactions. When I'm watching movies, I notice all kinds of details in the background, while barely paying attention to the characters. For me to pay attention socially, I'd have to unlearn this automatic physical focus first. It's similar to the test with the socializing triangles. I'd be talking about the color of the triangles or what the angles are, and perhaps never mention anything social. My mind doesn't go there much, but I don't know if people with NVLD experience the same thing.