Did you do this as a child?

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Ever since I was a child I was curious about the world around me WHY was Clifford spelled C-L-I-F-F-O-R-D and why paint was the color is was the sky blue grass green etc. I've always been curious about the world. When doing Homeschool the person who assigned the textbooks took notice of this and raised me up a grade which I didn't find out until the math work was really hard. As an adult I took an interest in Psychology what better thing to analyze and understand WHY than are own behaviors (BTW NO not disorders more your brain since every brain is different) Then I got to thinking is there other fields revolving around analyzing and the question of WHY? Also as stated I was curious if anyone else on the Spectrum did this as a child (if I'm given another topic than Psychology I'll look into it since I can't think of any right now LOL!)

I was always questioning everything about the world around me. I found the fact that you can have a sentence such as:

They're eating their lunch over there.

This has three their sounds all spelt differently! I got so annoyed with that. I also became quite phobic of certain words which I thought sounded stupid or were spelt weirdly and would get in a rage if someone said those words. It was only really words that I got narked about though, I wasn't too interested in colours and stuff.

I've always been a question asker. Drives my boyfriend nuts.

He will tell me that I should do something, or I'll do something that is "social" but horribly uncomfortable, and I'll spend hours after we get home asking "why" I had to do this or that. Of course, he can never give a really good answer, but I still keep asking.

My ultimate goal in asking is to gain full understanding of everything.

I don't recall asking things about the sky being blue and all, but I do remember pointing out in class when coloring that water was not blue and asking why we had to color it that color. There were a few other things like that, but I can't remember much of my childhood.

My son is a big question asker. "Why is it important for us to complete chores every night?" "Why does the autism center say we need so many charts?" "Why do you hang up every picture I make in school when I bring it home?" "Why does my teacher want your signature on my homework every night?" "Why do the leaves change colors every season?" "Why do we have different seasons?" "Why does it rain all of a sudden then stop a few minutes later?"

Lots of things like that. But for he and I, most of the questions always revolve around why we have to do certain things, not a whole lot about the world around us aside from meeting others' expectations.

Yes. As soon as I figured out what a question was, I was asking them. It probably accounts for my reading/research addiction. You can find out answers to questions from books!

I think most kids are little scientists that way. I still am, which is appropriate because I'm studying to be an actual scientist, if engineering counts.

It's too bad that a lot of kids lose that curiosity eventually. I think formal education has a lot to answer for in that respect. (Home-schooling included.)

I'm still addicted to asking questions. I have promised myself to limit to one question per lecture at school, and my profs still all know my name, sometimes because I get interested and pester them after class. I judge a good professor by how much he is willing to allow this!

Last edited by Callista on 19 Aug 2009, 11:28 am, edited 1 time in total.

I used to wonder all kinds of things when I was a child. Sometimes about spellings. What came to mind for me (for some reason talking about clifford reminded me of that big red dog called Clifford and that reminded me of Sesame St) was that I always wondered what it would be like to eat a tyre. they always smelled so nice.

I also had strong food associations with words. Like the name 'Vicky' reminded me of biscuits (sounds like 'biccy' i guess) and the name 'Katrina' I associate with beetroot. Douglas reminds me of egg (boiled eggs). Some seem less obvious like Milly reminds me of chocolate chip cookie mixture and Priscilla often reminds me of chocolate soft serve ice cream. So, there you go.

Hey, I think it's common for most children to do this, and it's not abnormal. What doesn't a child think about? Children are in development, after all.

On another point, babies touch things and bite them, to check for edibility, pretend play, and explore it's texture. (I actualy remember doing a little bit of that.) So, if this is an exploratory thing, than yes, Autistic things do seem to cause that to linger a bit longer. I hear it's common for this exploratory thing to linger a while longer than NTs. Normals are sure missing out on how pleasureable it is, in my oppinion. What I mean, is somethings neuro typicals 'grow out of', I think it sticks around with Autistic people of any sort much longer. We carry the curiosities, obsessions, and questioning habits into later years than NTs. Just what I suspect, anyway.

(Could this be why most NTs think we act young at heart or like teens in adult bodies? I don't know)

As a child, I was busy mastering the various art of day dreaming, smelling crayons, feeling things, stairing at my surroundings for pleasing visual stimuli, and zoneing out 3-4ths of the time. My norm peers were busy socialising and playing games. Ah, they didn't like me anyway. Not that I care to this very day, though.

I couldn't stop listening to things. A few years ago, I had come to the conclusion that I primarily experience my world through sound rather than the other senses. I thought this explained why I am unusual. Then I found out about AS...

I had to ask "why" to everything, and still do. I need explanations, reasons, and a coherent structure before I'm satisfied. Much of what I read as an adult is for the purpose of answering questions.

As a child, I was the bane of the existence of any adult who would listen. I also asked "what" questions, such as "what is under the road?". I was equally fascinated by the concept of a "soft shoulder" on a road, and spent years trying to puzzle out what was soft about what was, to my mind erroneously, being called the shoulder.

I suspect I will continue with this for the rest of my life. I'm already over 40 and the need to know hasn't changed.

Yep, I'm a very curious person. I love learning, it just has to be on my terms. It's very exciting. Psychology is great, in the last year or so I've also gained in interest in anthropology. I think cultural anthropology goes great with a field like psychology. I don't know, but maybe you could look into it too.

Oh yes, I questioned everything, from big things to some of the most oddest details. Knowledge is my crack.

We have this baby picture of me where I'm in a blue outfit sitting in front of a bookshelf. It's a professional portrait. My grandmother refers to me as "the professor" in that pic, yet nobody ever knew about Asperger's.

This is a brain development issue. There are sections of the autistic brain that do not develop in the same way as the NT brain past adolescence (this is apparently what causes the 'executive function disorder'). I was just reading something about this last week, now I've forgotten where it was. Oddly, I agree that it's rather sad in a way - NTs certainly miss out on one of the true blessings of AS, which is an insatiable curiosity, a hunger for information - the eternal 'why?'.

Unfortunately, it's the major reason I never functioned well in the workplace. I did the job just fine, but Alpha management type personalities go ballistic when you question their methods or their reasoning. I could come up with a million questions and a dozen alternate-case scenarios for any scheme posed to me. Drove bosses crazy.

funny enough the one thing that's missing from my autistic son's vocabulary is the question "why?". come to think of it he never asks "how" either, just what, when and who....

My AS son is 11 now. He began talking at the usual time, but his language development was a little odd. He acquired several new words a day, like, "porthole" and "radiator", until he had about 300 words at the age of 1.5. Then he started talking in sentences. He talked about the world around him, and was clearly interested in things, but he didn't use any questions like "Why, Where, How, What, When?" We didn't know he was autistic; at that time we thought autism was a kid silently rocking in a corner, so that never even came up. We just thought we got lucky in that our kid didn't drive us nuts with the same unanswerable question over and over. He just observed things and talked about them.

I also remember that my "How to be a Parent" books said that by a certain age (1.5 to 2) he should be understanding what "No" means. I tried to think if he understood "no", and I couldn't answer that, because I had never had to tell him "no." He never tried to touch the stove, or grab something from me, or any of the typical toddler stuff. He was a fascinating and brilliant kid, though, so it never occurred to us to be worried. (Well, until he turned 3, and suddenly developed what we believe is childhood-onset bipolar; then all he** broke loose.)

I still remember when my parents bought me my first dictionary as a birthday present, because I wouldn't stop asking for the definition of every unfamiliar word I came across. Since then, dictionaries have been my answer to everything. The first time I had sex education, I already knew the dictionary definition of sexual intercourse. I do wonder about other things too. I'm often the one to ask a question nobody else even bothers to think about. I've sat for ages before just thinking "why amI me and not somebody else?"

Yup, I did that. One of my most common words was "Why".

A question of why topic

Always Y. I still do not understand why others do not question as much as me. I just love the letter Y in analyzing. Y right in the middle of the word!