The essence of Autism!

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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQC-Nk5OOfE[/youtube]

This was a great lecture. I have listened to it several times. I don't always agree 100% with everything he says, but a lot of it is really good and I think enlightning to a lot of people. He doesn't pull any punches, and I appreciate his honesty.

He is correct.

TheSunAlsoRises

This man is a great speaker, thanks for sharing.

Jason

Hmm... A failure to relate to people as special, huh? I suppose so... but my cat is special

If self regulation is a neurological trait and people with Aspergers don't have good self control, then that means that that's the answer to the reason behind hyperfocusing. It would mean that people with Aspergers operate on the neo side of the spectrum.

Good and accurate enough.

Perseveration, and ADHD as a dysfunction of regulation, instead of a simple caffeine type of attention problems.

I myself would easily say ''Perseveration' is it, and the heart of it.
It's scary when he hand gestured with a hit to his forehead and said "like a frontal injury."

Analogously, even before I accurately knew what my affliction was, I thought this mired 'mess' resembled a severe blow to the head.

Well not all people with autism talk funny and flap their hands, while I'm pretty sure almost everyone with ADHD has issues with paying attention. Also, I disagree with his conjecture that autism "the inability to relate to other people as special objects, as humans". I personally think 1. That isn't quite true 2. That description is actually probably closer to how ADHD describes ADHD then the actual essence of autism. Just as the difficulty in self control causes inattentively, something else is making it harder for those with autism to relate. If that's all autism was then why aren't we all sociopaths or something? However, regarding just ADHD, which is what his specialty is, I think he was good.

Maybe I'm being a bit thick here, but could someone explain what the second youtube clip means?
He says "Hyperfocusing is actually perseveration"

Then he says at the end "Hyperfocusing goes with autism, perseveration goes with ADHD"

So is he saying they are the same or different?

He mentions two factors-

Time control;
In my family the (2 certain plus 1 possible) autistic people are usually on time, or just 10 minutes late, its the ADHD ones (3 for certain) who turn up 3 hours late having ruined the big event for everyone waiting! The more autistic ones then get very pissed off and stop going to all the effort of working themselves up to going to a social event in the first place. Then the ADHD ones call us boring (and a lot worse besides).

Interests;
Both groups are obsessive about their interests, the autistic have solo artistic/literary interests, the ADHD have more social "show off" interests.
I see differences in the intensity of focus, but not in the time spent on the interest.

The autistics in our family actually have very good impulse control which keeps us out of trouble, we meltdown mostly only at home. This is a big advantage.

(The NTs in my family are a very small long suffering group who have mostly departed the core family through divorce.)

So what is he saying is the difference between perseveration and hyperfocus, or is he saying they are the same?

^ Maybe one feature for the autism side, is one develops special interests, where it seems that the other is nomadic or drifting in nature -- nothing really settles in.

Thank goodness the one group can read people.

I'm sorry for that distinction, but imagining a further cognitive blur seems quite daunting and unsettling.

And I must say that P. is very disabling, ergo, I personally sense how the personality is developed around it. Quite pervasive and totally explanatory -- quite dramatic--- hence a deeper cut of introversion.

His comment about ADHD being perseveration and autism being hyperfocus is rubbish. He's changing the meaning to make ADHD sound worse. He has a good reason for this (people who try to frame ADHD as a gift or superpower) and I am not even saying that perseveration doesn't happen in ADHD, but he doesn't even have a clear definition of hyperfocus to work from.

I also think that the idea that the core of autism is being unable to relate to people as special is rubbish. I'm not going to say that I relate to people as "special" just for being human, as I relate to a lot of things as special - some of them are people, some of them are books, some of them are pets... but I do not believe that is the central deficit. I believe the central deficit is a matter of processing - information, sensory input, social signals, etc. This is a far more parsimonious explanation of the various aspects observed in autistic people than one which focuses entirely on social perceptions and processing, which leaves out a lot of what autism is (whether deficit or not).

He's one of the experts on ADHD and has done significant and thorough research on the disorder. I like to point people who insist ADHD isn't real or that it's really a gift or it's not a disorder or it is a disorder, but it's mild at best at his writings and videos.

Per Barkley, ADHD is far more impairing than most people realize.

Agreed; if we didn't all "see people as special", we would all have prosopagnosia. But we don't; only some of us do. (I make this statement because it's the face-recognition area of the brain that is shown in functional brain scans to be the area that lights up when you look at people, but not when you look at non-human living things or inanimate objects. Dysfunction of this area leads to developmental prosopagnosia.)

Even those of us who use the same cognitive processes for people and objects can still consider people much more important than objects. I certainly do. After all, NTs use the same cognitive processes to consider a $100 bill and a $1 bill, and they still consider the former much more valuable than the latter. Using the same cognitive machinery to process people-related information and object-related information doesn't mean that you don't consider people-related information more important.