My thoughts on the many aspect of NT/Aspie's

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This was originally a reply to another post about a study done that shows gamers show autistic traits, I stopped once I realized the length and decided it was best to post as a new thread. I can't like the article or the thread because I'm still on the 'new user' list which prevents links of any kind.

I have some problems with fast paced high speed first person shooter type games, but that's cause I suck at those type of games not cause I have any motor problems =) The clumsiness of an Aspie is not a required trait for many other symptoms.

I think that the motor control symptoms of an Aspie are only one aspect of it, I personally think that it has something to do with the way the brains networks communicate with each other causing say an emotional mood to either accentuate or dull a given motor movement or otherwise interact with normal behavior. There are many forms of neural feedback, Sense of touch, taste, smell, hearing, and site, all of these senses are processed in different parts of the brain, same thing with neural output, such as body control which rely on feedback from the senses to function, that doesn't even mention that brains own internal connections between each sub network which develop for many reasons. It's my laypersons guess that there are an almost unlimited combination of Aspie traits and severity based on the actual portion of the brain that is wired differently from a neurotypical. That's one of the reasons why ASD is such a heated debate in the medical and psychological community, there are no boundaries, there are no rules, although they're trying to come up with them. The current basis for a clinical Aspergers syndrome diagnosis I think is based on the severity of the traits which other people notice most. Where people such as myself I 'look' perfectly normal, in general most of my social interactions are if not smooth and least controlled enough to pass muster that I'm just an 'odd' person.

I personally believe that there is going to be a split (if there isn't one already) between a medical and a psychological diagnosis of Aspergers vs Aspie traits which simply interfere if not preventing normal functioning. I'm sure there are both genetic and environmental (both psychological and medical) aspects that will have to be medically understood. But persons such as myself (as far as I can tell so far) where most of the changes in the wiring upstairs are because of a high intellect and psychological development during my early years, there are millions more that have the same traits to a greater or lesser degree.

Personally I lean towards it being for a person such as myself and others with more mild traits in socially unacceptable aspects of being Aspie simply a function of the increased complexity and density of social interaction, basically the old wiring of our brain is changing due to the massively drastic changes in human culture in the last hundred years alone let alone thousand. I view it as natural selection in process but on a mental functioning level. Those with Aspie traits too severe for common society will not end up breeding, those that slip through the cracks will, those that are neurotypical will eventually be outnumbered as social norms shift as the old systems are replaced by later generations. Things like this have probably been happening for thousands of years but we're only reaching the density of society and true science to even begin to understand the process now, and seeing it on a scale so large that it actually manifests itself as a scizim of 'NT' vs 'Aspie' I'm not comfortable with being called NT, nor with being called Aspie, even though many of my traits heavily lean towards Aspie.

That's probably a bit of a radical view of things but it's also a continually developing one, that's just a mental snapshot of what I'm thinking right now.


Thoughts comments from others?

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Epiphany, It's not that radical of a conclusion. There have been discussions where our older members, who remember what the world was like before the rise of the "social skills" movement, point out that what we would now consider "Aspie" was not a drawback at work, and was often well regarded.

The root cause may be a bit more economic in orgin. Since the industrial revolution, and the development of industrial-scale agriculture, far less labor has been required to work the fields, manufacture high-quality goods, or to service complex equipment (except IT service). In those fields, Aspie traits would not have been discriminated against. Instead, the labor force has been squeezed over to the "services sector", where dealing with the roughly 85-99.5 percent of the market that is NT is prized far more than skill and knowledge. Note that the current known stronghold of aspies is the IT field.