Limitations of Aspergers can be overcome!

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Oh my God! Now I get that joke in IQ...

Einstein said to Meg Ryan's character, 'I was always terrible with mathematics!' I thought that was a made up fact for the story, I didn't think it was true.

Danlo, my opinion has been posted before in context and isn't hard to grasp, why you feel the need to place your own inferences into it I have no idea. Your own criticisms are an inaccurate misrepresentation of what I have said, so I can't really argue against them as they don't effectively argue against anything I have said.

Is it so hard to tell the difference between "I have no problems with social skills or communicating" and your version "You say you have no problem with social interaction" ?

I have problems with social interaction, that's obvious because I'm Autistic. But I do not have any issues with communication or social skills. Is it hard to grasp accurately what I am conveying? Do I need to give other examples?

A foreign person has no lack of communication or social skills, yet will often have trouble with social interaction, as will a Deaf person or even women in a large part of western history. The very crux of what I was saying was that I still ran into problems even when there was no possibility that they could be my fault, you seemed to have missed that.

Lucas, about Spielberg, I wasn't trying to ignore you, I just don't believe it till I get proof. When was he diagnosed? At what clinic? Any specifics? Nowhere can I find this information.

This is where I stand on the matter. A diagnosis is not as important, IMO, as statements from him and/or those close to him revealing this information. It is interesting that it made it into his IMDB profile, but that makes him no more on the spectrum than Daryl Hannah.

The reason why you won't find that information is because of patient confidentiality, so you can stop looking now. Spielberg was one of the scriptwriters for Rainman so he had some depth to his knowledge about Autism during the 80s. Lorna Wing coined the term Asperger Sydrome in 1982, there are some hundreds(maybe thousands) who were diagnosed before it was put in the DSM in 1994.

The diagnosis has been confirmed in the same way that it's been confirmed that Tony Blair's son Leo has had the MMR vaccination- quietly but definitive and the men themselves say nothing more on the matter.

Well, tell me where you got your info from, and I'll believe it.

I was referenced in an Observer article in 2003(Leo Blair's privacy was invaded in a similiar way in the Daily Mail by a columnist) which said no more on the subject other than to confirm it. This leaves a possibility that the journalist was one of the terrible 'Google-ites' who get all their information from the search engine and merely spread the same rumours further. But the Observer is quite a respected British newspaper and it's unlikely the editor would have allowed such things to be mentioned for fear of libel and reputational damage to the upmarket rag.

The possible reasons why there isn't a chance of finding anything but speculation on the internet is because the official confirmation's source is either an illegally-obtained document breaching patient confidentiality or is not otherwise newsworthy enough for any mainstream publication to take interest in. The Observer made a blip and that's it.

It still leaves a chance that Spielberg's publicist could come out and say it's not true, but I've decided to assume the source was correct because no other newspaper had an angry rant about the 'barrel-scraping' rival.

My experience is similar to this... For me though, I have found that I pushed myself to be social more than I should have, sometimes coming close to nervous breakdown. Now that I understand I have AS, I'm starting to see things as more an issue of finding compromise between me and the world and not of trying to force myself into a mold that I can never fit into.



I also feel much the same way about this. I don't want to see AS as being a disability so much as a gene with some advantages and some unfortunate side effects. I still think that I can make my life work for me eventually, just the ideas behind how to do it have changed.

I don't think so.

Different people find different things easy and hard. Many things I find hard are things that are genuinely relatively easy to most people, because they do much more of them automatically than I do. Many things I find easy are things that are genuinely relatively hard to most people, because I do them much more automatically than they do.

It's not like a task has an absolute value of easiness or hardness to it.

To most people, it is genuinely easy to get up and walk across the room. To me, it is genuinely hard. Getting up and walking across the room is not something you can say is "easy" or "hard". You can't just say that because I find it hard then therefore it as a whole is hard for everyone. It's not. It's easy for most people.

To me, it is genuinely easy to carry around a map in my head of just about everywhere I have ever been. It does not take effort. It just happens. For most people, their mental maps are much smaller and cruder. They get lost more easily. I rarely meet anyone with my sense of direction. This does not mean that it's hard for me and I just don't realize it's hard. It also doesn't mean it's easy for them and they just don't realize it's easy.

So... yeah. I'm not really going to believe that most people have a hard time getting up and crossing the room but just don't realize it, any more than I'm going to buy that I have to work hard for my sense of direction. And I don't think language processing is hard for most people and they just don't realize it or something. Nor do I think that I have to work all that hard to understand certain other autistic people (but just don't realize it).

It... yeah, just doesn't make sense to me, nor am I totally sure why it's a big deal in the first place.

OK Lucas I will believe you . But I don't really like the concept of this thread either.
The idea that AS is a "limitation" that we must "overcome" to be successful. Who's to say that Spielberg didn't become successfull, not by "overcoming" his AS, but by working with his AS, maybe even because of his AS and the dedication and creativity it gave him?

GOOD point - i absolutely agree. living in the world is a matter of compromise for anyone, although i do prefer the word "negotiation" to "compromise", as the latter has negative connotations.

Lucas,

The foreign person, and the deaf person, do not have the different wiring. Its an external impairment, has nothing to do with their thought process or brains. You can learn social skills all you like, but they still aren't learnt and processed by the same part of the brain as an NT's. Because of that, your social skills aren't the same as an NTs, and so you have a problem with them.

The point that I was trying to make, is that just because you don't have problems with social skills or communication, doesn't mean everyone else is in the same boat.
You are basing your argument on your own circumstances. I have problems with social skills and communication, I can just say that its a myth that autism doesn't have problems with social skills and communication, and it would be no less valid than your view.

In addition, I might also add that eye contact and social reciprocity are social skills.

Ok, can you find me a study that proves there is a problem with communication and social skills in Autistics instead of just assuming it at the beginning?

I am not basing my opinions on my own experience, there are studies which show the presumptions to be wrong from the university of Montreal.

In addition I may add that eye contact is a cultural inheretence; there are plenty of places on earth where it is offensive, it is not predetermanately social.

Your assertion that I have a problem with social skills because they are not the same as NTs relies on the following:

That all NT social skills are the same.

That there are no circumstances under which I can effectively communicate and be social with NTs.

The fact is that I have absolutely no problems functioning socially in many foreign countries, the same counts for almost any Autistic who has been to other countries from a young age. I do notice how NTs often have the same problems Autistics have with other NTs and I watch it carefully. Your dismissal of my foreigner/Deaf/women example was pendatic and avoided the actual point I was making.

Now that's me out of the way, let's talk about Autistics universally. My first big insight into disability was when I asked my colourblind teacher while he was driving the minibus if colour really existed and if people were just making it up to make fun of him. I knew he was thinking about it because ten seconds later a rabbit went spalt on the windscreen.

So when you ask an Autistic if they have problems with social skills and communication, it is like asking my colourblind teacher that same question, they will say "Absolutely" but they have no actual first-person way of knowing. So how do you know you have problems with social skills and communication?

Anbuend,

I think you misunderstood me, I was speaking in terms of perception and how people who seem to find everything easy have a severe lack of it, which is the reason why they find things easy.

I'm glad you brought up a physical example because I'm trained in sport science and movement and I teach a dance class on the weekend. If there is one thing that is hardest for my students to understand it's that no matter how good they get, difficulty remains the same, the change is perceptual. The perception of something becoming easier the more you do it is relative and subjective. But the grinding of bones, strain of muscle and Kj of energy spent on something is an absolute constant. Many dancers become overconfident because their muscles gradually make them percieve things as easier as they increase in mass, but the bones tell a different story; deformation tells me how someone has ignored the science, instead choosing to believe their lying senses. Many ballet dancers will have taken several visits to the chiropracter and physiotherapist before the age of 18.

If you find standing up and walking across a room hard and others don't, then you are the only one doing it correctly and they are left with severe back damage by the time they're 60. I always wondered what my teacher meant when he said "Always look out for the laziest person in the workplace; they're the only one doing the job correctly" and I found out.

I gave mental examples with those questions I posted, they're designed so that a person who thinks they are easy will fail them and a person that stops and thinks and sees how difficult they really are will be correct. This is why a person's ability to 'hear themselves think' is important, the whole point of sentience is that a person can observe their own inner workings and alter them. But it only works if they take into account that any error they percieve in themselves will affect their very perception of it.

I was not talking about the physical aspect. I don't think the physical aspect of those movements is that different for me. I was talking about the process of moving from thought to action, and combining different actions, in the brain, not the amount of muscle or joint strain involved.

Most people can walk and direct the motion of their walking at the same time. I often end up walking around in circles, or not walking at all. If I, as I did the other day, walk around a pet store looking for pet food on foot, I can't see, hear, think, remember what I'm doing, or direct where I'm going. I'm sure my muscles were exerting the normal amount of effort, but my mind was working overtime and I needed to be led around by someone. When I got home I could comprehend maybe one word per sentence of speech or writing if any and ended up spending the rest of the night stimming on a ball-point pen.

Since this doesn't happen to most people who walk around pet stores (and much of this is the effort of walking, not the pet store environment; I usually don't walk in stores and am much less disoriented when I don't have to concentrate on walking), I'm going to conclude that I don't find walking all that easy and most people do. This doesn't say anything bad about me or good about most people, but I don't think it's an "illusion" on their part that they can do this and still be able to see and hear and go about the rest of their day. Any more than it's an illusion on my part that if you take me somewhere new I can find my way home without effort, whereas lots of people I know exert at least some mental effort on that.

This is why I also gave non-physical examples, the same thing still applies.

If it's a case of moving from thought to action, then it is impossible for it to actually be more difficult for you than for others but you will percieve it as so. There will be a reason for this but it may be beyond anyone's means or not worthy of the effort to find it out and just put it down to everyone being different. But this means that the reason why it is actually more difficult is because it is not the same thing for you.

It's been noted that Dyslexics on average can do the 2x, 5x and 10x multiplications with greater ease than non-Dyslexics, but this is because they are not doing the same thing as others, they are doing something different which reaches the same result and is universally easier, their mindset simply allows them to see a different internal method. It would be inaccurate in this case to say that Dyslexics find the even numbered multiplication tables easier then, you have to point at why they get the results faster and say they are good at that. It's not objective to measure certain kinds of results in standardised terms because internally different people are doing completely different things to do the same task.