Getting Public about neurodiversity.

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Danielismyname, As I say, all of the BAD aspects of AS are also found in the general populace. If you must discredit the good because of that, you must also discredit the bad, and were does that leave us?

To be precise: it is not only ASDers that have sensory issues. Not only we fail to have proper body language, nor the ability to read it. We are not the only ones that dont have acceptable empathy. There are people outside the spectrum that have trouble with symbol processing.

So I ask you this: I keep hearing about the bad things with aspergers, but i never seem to learn which traits we have that normal people cannot. Can you tell me? I'd really like to know.

anbuend, yes, the mechanics behind our brains are different; they had to innately adapt as we developed. Whatever the cause, how we think may very well be due to other parts of our brains compensating for our birth defects/differences; as you see from the article, we don't view things through a social/group eye, we view them from a...picturesque eye (because our social eye is poked out), so we use what we have, and what we have, "normal" people don't use as we do. This is the one positive of the disorder I see, and I've said it in this thread: The only outward difference in how we interact verbally is our lack of care for social conventions. Granted, I forgot to mention how we perceive information too, we perceive it without a social eye. Thanks for the article and the translation.

Fuzzy, to point out the obvious: we have autism, which is a developmental disorder, which has deficits in many areas (with the positive mentioned above). If "normal" people have our deficits, they'd be autistic too (actually, we'd all be "normal" then).

Our cognitive pattern is more splintered than normal people, this can allow for advanced intelligence in specific areas (math for example), but normal people without autism can be as equally as intelligent as us in math (that's if we're good at it).

Of course thats obvious, but its simply a label. But you are unspecific as to the weaknesses as you ask for specifics regarding the benefits. But autism is simply a label or grouping of traits somewhat common to a specific sort of person; none are endemic to autism.. they appear elsewhere. That is, none of the traits assigned to autism occur exclusively in autistics.

So to say "none of the good aspects of autism are only for autists", to paraphrase you, is not proper to assume; the bad traits are not either.

My brother has trouble with symbol logic: hes dyslexic. Hes not autistic though. Hes also sensitive to some noises.

My sister has epilepsy; shes got an abnormal brain structure, but shes not autistic. Shes also got some OCD tendencies...

My friend Mandy has Schizophrenia, which causes her some social interaction problems, including the reading and display of body language; but shes not autistic.

My friend Des has been tested for absolutely everything because hes developmentally behind his peers(maturity and financially), but apparently, is not autistic.

I could go on. Every trait on the autism spectrum appears on its own or with others outside autism. And I know of someone thats got it.

But taken as a whole, the autism traits arrange things so that you may learn or do things with ease that cause others some difficulty. Perhaps you have singular focus with a point specific intelligence; this is equivalent to specialization that a typical NT would take years of education to reach. They might have it, but they paid a different price than you.

Normal is just a vector that is perpendicular to a surface, (Neuro)-typical is just an average that describes nobody in particular.

I have always found social interaction to be a waste of time, and the usual means of attack.

A confidence man must first gain your confidence, trust, to rob you. I do not talk, or trust, it is cheaper.

I have never wanted to get along with humans, I avoid them by choice.

How many people is enough?

How many can you know well, and have some common purpose with?

My numbers are low, and there is turnover.

I am task orientied rather than social. There must be a reason.

So I am socially impaired because I do not associate with thieves, liers, and idiots?

I have had my art criticised, based on, someone, somewhere, is better, when I ask to see the critic's art, there is none, for someone is better than they could ever be.

I paint because I enjoy it, humans who do not paint try to steal that enjoyment.

When I insult their clothing and haircut they get upset, they do have an ugly nose, their ears do not match, and I go after their self image as they went after mine, they do not think it fair.

I am social with equals, that leaves most out.

Everyone who does not paint is a total failure.

Everyone who does not hold patents is a failure,

Everyone who does not write books is a failure,

Besides which they have bad taste in clothes, hairstyles, do not watch the right sports, do no belong to a real religion, and got a waste of an education. They cannot support themselves, they have to get a job, and then to get ahead try to steal from people like me.

They are scum and not worth knowing, and if I catch them in my garage they are going to the hospital.

fuzzy, the weaknesses all go under the label that's called "ASD"; other disorders too, those you mentioned in people you know, have their own sets of weaknesses. Autism itself has deficits in a cluster that are only specific to said disorder, a person with only OCD doesn't have social impairment (whether you like socializing or not is beside the point). Whether it's autism, schizophrenia or being born without legs; these all bestow more weaknesses than strengths onto us compared to normal people.

Personally, living a life with [objective] weaknesses due to a severe disorder does bestow a unique life upon someone; our perspective will be markedly different than those who are "normal" and healthy.

The only "official" benefit that Asperger's bestows is a relatively "normal" cognitive pattern (like "normal" people have), and the ability to focus on parts of things/a select interest that we devote all our attention to. Autism bestows..., I don't know, I guess the ability to form conclusions without social biases (which I've already mentioned).

And speaking in a pure subjective voice (above is objective), I don't understand why anyone with autism would care for "diversity", it's a social construct after all; who cares for recognition from people who mean nothing to the autistic individual (i.e., me)? Is it because people wish to stand out amongst the crowd (i.e., being different but not "disordered")? That's...pride and vanity, both are social constructs again as you're comparing yourself to other social creatures in the hopes of being "accepted" by them (which again is a social construct).

People should accept others for what they bring with them, not what the disorder brings: saying that one wants "diversity" for a group of disordered individuals amongst the very people who label them as disordered is..., it's not the type of recognition I'd like (I don't want any, but that's beside the point).

We already are equal. If one wants something, someone must work for it; if we lack the ability to work for it due to our disorder, that's our problem.

We need a voice. I'm so depressed that I can't find ways to raise awareness atm.

No one speaks for me but me; it's the heart of the pro- and anti-cure debate. Creating a single voice from a multitude of people and saying that they represent the people, no matter who they are, isn't equality; it's just as bad as those who force people to take the cure.

There are two meanings of "different": as above, "standing out amongst the crowd" (one which I personally have trouble understanding because the so-called crowd itself is not homogenous), and "unique, like everybody is unique". It is the second meaning of "different" that the whole concept of neurodiversity is based on. To claim otherwise means to gravely misunderstand the whole thing. It is based on a premise that ALL people are SPECIAL in their own way - and yes, including autistic people. I don't see anything wrong about this.

The desire for acceptance and vanity are not at all the same. I'm not sure that not wanting to be bullied qualifies as "vanity" (I was bullied, by people who are supposed to be very close to me, so I know what I'm talking about). This is pure confusion of terms.

I also don't understand why a person who does feel good about themselves, and does have the things that they want in life, should all of a sudden start to view themselves as "broken" or disordered or whatever, regardless of any label they might have (be it autism or anything else). And it sounds quite twisted to try and convince them that they should, simply because they have this label and, you see, they "ought to" feel this way. Psychologists spend their lives trying to get people out of depression, to convince them that labels don't matter, and that, in spite of any challenges one might be facing, one can still feel worthwhile and complete, and discover one's own way in life; it is not easy either. This is doing the very opposite and deliberately driving a person to depression.

"You have (this and this) label, therefore you MUST see yourself as flawed". How much worse could it get?

I agree with everything else.

I know these people's research, I have followed it and read it extremely closely, and one of the things they have all but proven is that we do not have a "social eye that is poked out".

Even research long before them has shown that differences in autistic people's perception occur across both social and non-social situations. In other words, there is nothing special about autistic people's perception of social situations. They have pulled that research together. They have also done specific research that aimed to prove or disprove whether autistic people experience "weak central coherence", or whether we are experiencing something else entirely. They have shown that, no, autistic people do seem to have such a thing as central coherence on the perceptual level.

The one thing that they have found so far that autistic people seem to have that is different from non-autistic people, is something that non-autistic people don't have. Not the absence of something that non-autistic people do have.

Social theories of autism have for a very long time not held up to actual study. The probable reason behind that is that non-autistic people are as clueless about autistic people, socially, as autistic people are about non-autistic people. The fact that it goes both ways shows that it's not a social deficit peculiar to autistic people, it's a social interface between the two that doesn't work, in other words a two-way street, not a one-way street.

At any rate, their current theory is that autism results from a certain kind of perceptual expertise (not a perceptual deficit that we've somehow "adapted to" -- autistic people can do the same things with perception that non-autistic people can -- which I think you're proving at the moment, by filtering your reading of the article through theories you've already heard, that are not actually mentioned in the article because they're not present in the research -- it's just that we can also do some important things with it that non-autistic people can't, and those perceptual abilities are the things that probably shape everything else about how we grow and develop).

I don't know how else to say it because you keep going back to which tasks we happen to be able to complete, and whether non-autistic people can also complete those tasks, and you're using it with tasks like "math". (Which is an interesting one, because I was able to complete certain problems in higher mathematics without any prior training in the area, within minutes of being taught, and these are areas that take grad students weeks or months to grasp according to the grad student who was throwing them at me -- I've never heard of a non-autistic person who could do those things that rapidly and without any more mathematical training than high school or early college level in areas that weren't even similar -- and that's even on a broader level.) The point isn't whether we can do "math" and non-autistic people can't, it's whether there are qualitative differences in how we do whatever it is (whether it's math or carpentry), that result in us getting to the answer in different ways. And we seem to have a whole different set of advantages to our usual way of getting to the answer, that are not present in non-autistic people's usual way of getting to the answer.

There's also something that I'd noticed for a long time, that they finally got into in their research as well: The reason that we seem to have this strange "splintered" pattern of cognitive development (which on a graph would, if non-autistic people are taken as normal, have a whole bunch of up and down on the graph) is solely because non-autistic people's areas of ability and deficit are taken as a flat line on a graph when they're really not. It would be just as possible to take autistic people's cognitive strengths and weaknesses and assume they were the "average" that everything else was compared to, and then non-autistic people would look like they had a bunch of up and down on the graph.

And what they decided in their research was that this was not useful. To very closely paraphrase them, a dog is not a cat with a debilitating deficit in tree-climbing and a splinter skill in fetching slippers. A dog is a dog and a cat is a cat. And while autistic people are the same species as non-autistic people, our perceptual and cognitive modes are different enough that it's not scientifically useful to take one of them as the "negative form" of another (i.e. to take one of them as the other one with parts added and parts taken away). So that's not how they do their research.

None of this is to deny that autistic people have extreme deficits in some areas, but they managed to come up with a way of explaining autism that in many respects ties up a lot of loose ends that other researchers have been reluctant to look at or take on. (I've followed autism research for awhile, and theirs is the first one that seems to take most valid autism research into account, and that also examines research to see whether it's good research or sloppy research, and to examine whether the conclusions of other research are actually supported by the evidence, which they're often not, and then looking at what the evidence actually says.) And in doing so, what they've seemed to figure out is that autistic people can perceive things in a way that non-autistic people can't (i.e. this kind of perception is an area of strength for us), and that it's not as far as they can tell a strength from "adapting to a deficit", but just a strength period, and then the assorted patterns of strengths and difficulties that can happen, all seem to be, if you could say it this way, "adaptations" to that strength, combined with different environments and such.

Their theories may not be precisely accurate, in fact I'd be shocked if they were. But they are closer to what I've been suspecting for a long time than anything else I've seen, and they also take more science into account (and actual research results, rather than strange conclusions from those results) than most research I've seen. They even tie up some of the research results that have seemed contradictory to each other, into something that actually makes sense.

(By the way, I personally tend to see autism as a neutral trait, that happens to include both strengths and weaknesses. But from what they've said, they looked and looked for a core deficit and could not find one, but did find one core perceptual strength that non-autistic people really did not possess, that seemed universal or close to it among autistic people. And that core perceptual strength isn't different because it's social or non-social, it's because autistic people can apparently do a lot of things with perceptual areas of the brain that non-autistic people can't, and this seems to be a result of being able to drop a certain kind of supposedly "higher order" cognition that non-autistic people are always stuck with no matter what (and that comes with its own serious deficits that autistic people can avoid when they drop it). The other differences autistic people show are either outgrowths of that perceptual difference, or else outgrowths of the interface between people who have that difference in perception and people who don't.)

At any rate even if it's got more work that needs to be done on it I find it both fascinating and more plausible than other theories.

But even among other theories, pure-social-deficit models of autism are long dead among serious researchers because autistic people's differences of thinking and perception very obviously do not disappear or change form in non-social situations.

Edited to add some cites of some of their research:

Enhanced Perceptual Functioning in Autism: An Update, and Eight Principles for Autistic Perception (Mottron L, Dawson M, Soulières I, Hubert B, Burack J)

Locally oriented perception with intact global processing among adolescents with high-functioning autism: evidence from multiple paradigms. (Mottron L, Burack JA, Iarocci G, Belleville S, Enns JT.)

Cognitive mechanisms, specificity and neural underpinnings of visuospatial peaks in autism. (Caron MJ, Mottron L, Berthiaume C, Dawson M.)

Impaired Face Processing in Autism: Fact or Artifact? (Boutheina Jemel, Laurent Mottron, and Michelle Dawson)

It depends on the research; one theory states this, another states that, the only anatomical evidence they have is knowing that certain types of brain damage can cause autistic symptoms in individuals without them prior (plus some neurotransmitter abnormalities).

I kinda lack the ability to perceive social situations how we're supposed to; it's clear as day. I perceive it differently for I don't see it at all; if I cannot interact socially in person with verbal and non-verbal communication, there's obviously something "wrong" with that area of my brain. Hence, I'm "special" compared to "normal" people. Now, I am also special compared to normal people for I don't care how I appear to them when I point out the factual truth. Yes, our perceptions are different across non-social areas too, fascinated with parts of objects, lining up toys and whatnot.

If they say so: I know I lack something in social perception, I know I have something else in non-social perception (the causes aren't known).

I'm just as clueless concerning autistic people as I am "normal" people; I have sympathy for certain actions I witness that autistic people exhibit for I have them, i.e., when autistic people stare at the ground in an overwhelming environment, I understand why they do this for I've experienced it.

Ha, yeah, I do what some in the article say they do; I don't read the whole lot, I cannot do it, and then I fill in the gaps with other theories out there to come to my conclusion, a conclusion that makes sense to me. It makes sense to me that our brains have adapted to the deficits we were born with, there's many theories out there that postulate this. That's a good point.

Well yeah, I'd like to know what it is that autism has given me that's deemed as "good" objectively. Our ability to be innately good at something (yeah, I have the math thing too; I failed tests in high school for I only gave the correct answer, I didn't know how I came to see the correct answer other than knowing it) is said to be due to our splintered cognitive pattern, i.e., good in some things, bad in others; the extremes rather than evenly across the board. There obviously are differences due to the aforementioned pattern of abilities, but do those select few abilities offset the "bad" of our disorder (not everyone with autism has these abilities, which is why I like the damage to anatomical structures of the brain in varying severity as the cause of autism; one can...grow stronger by lifting stuff, I'm sure the same applies to using our brain in a different way because the "normal" way is damaged). Concerning math, the other students who were correct received the same answer as I did, we are equal in effect, how we got there is different (obviously, it's unfair to those of us who cannot set it all out how they want us to, and they then fail us even though we know the answer; I can see how "diversity" is lacking in this area).

Point. However, using me as an example, I have a below average verbal IQ, my spatial/performance IQ is high; the psychologist told me that this is common (not the scores), this massive discrepancy between the areas that normal people are judged on in Asperger's (she didn't mention autism, but they tend to see autism without mental retardation as Asperger's there).

Point again. As you said, we're the same species.

I understand. I was going to say this, but it's furtive of me to say that there's autistic people without some of the strengths (perceiving things differently, factual truth at the expense of social standing and whatnot) and all of the weaknesses, as "normal" people aren't exactly the same just as autistic people aren't.

Personally, I see autism as neutral too, it's just another way of existing to me; everyone has their strengths and weaknesses no matter the disorder or lack of the same. I know of a core deficit, it's our social impairment compared to the majority of individuals; there's many out there with autism who'd like to interact with others, interact normally and form normal relationships, but they cannot due to their social impairment; we all have this deficit to some extent when compared to the majority who don't have it.

We know the effect of autism; the cause is still up there in the air.

(Yes, I reiterate a lot, I reiterate to see if I still agree with myself or not after I've read it.)

QUOTING ANBUEND
(By the way, I personally tend to see autism as a neutral trait, that happens to include both strengths and weaknesses. But from what they've said, they looked and looked for a core deficit and could not find one, but did find one core perceptual strength that non-autistic people really did not possess, that seemed universal or close to it among autistic people. And that core perceptual strength isn't different because it's social or non-social, it's because autistic people can apparently do a lot of things with perceptual areas of the brain that non-autistic people can't, and this seems to be a result of being able to drop a certain kind of supposedly "higher order" cognition that non-autistic people are always stuck with no matter what (and that comes with its own serious deficits that autistic people can avoid when they drop it). The other differences autistic people show are either outgrowths of that perceptual difference, or else outgrowths of the interface between people who have that difference in perception and people who don't.)

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OH YES, OH YES, OH YES!

I don't think I've ever read such a brilliant summation. This should be a STICKY

Thanks for the refs too - will follow them up where poss.