THERE IS NO MYSTERY

Post Reply New Topic

I’m 38 and only just discovered that I’m an aspie, but I’ve been spotting aspieness in others since around the age of seven without knowing what I was looking at. For three decades I’ve had the experience of occasionally seeing a person on TV or on the street and feeling a shock of recognition -- my eyes lock onto them and I can’t look away, and I feel a strong and mysterious sense of affinity. Now I understand. But here’s the thing -- it has nothing to do with their bearing, dress, or expression, but is purely a morphology issue, i.e., the shape and proportion of the features. The person will usually have several of these traits:

-- Deep-set eyes with a pronounced epicanthic fold, large round eyes (sometimes frog-like), or eyes whose inside corner is lower than the outside corner
-- A cupid’s-bow mouth that’s higher in the middle than at the sides
-- A nasal bridge that lies about 45 degrees from the vertical or is curved like a ski jump, and the nose flares out slightly at the bottom and is often round or triangular and visibly divided into two cartilage lobes
-- Elf ears that are large, pointed or square
-- Cheek dimples or a chin dimple
-- High forehead, or a large head in general
-- Fair, often translucent skin
-- Short fingernails
-- Fine silky hair
-- Thin tapering eyebrows that look like they’ve been penciled in, long lashes
-- An off-center left eye that’s sometimes slightly higher than the right eye
-- Glasses for short-sightedness (never far-sightedness)
-- Large rabbity incisors, often with a gap between them
-- Short legs or long legs, pigeon-toed walk
-- Subtle androgyny

This is the look of Pervasive Developmental Delay. All infants have proportionally large ears and heads, epicanthic folds, cupid’s bow mouths, et cetera, and when development is delayed these features are carried over into adulthood. (On the inside, the brain’s physical development is similarly delayed, accounting for aspie emotions and behaviour.) The following people have the “developmental delay” look:

ACTORS – Napoleon Dynamite, Heath Ledger (RIP), the two leads in “Twilight,” Sarah Michelle Gellar, Keifer Sutherland, Bette Davis (“Bette Davis Eyes” are aspie eyes), Glynnis O’Connor, Jodie Foster, Ben Stiller, Sara Silverman, Parker Posey, Brad Pitt, Anthony Hopkins, Shelley Duvall, Judi Dench, Mark Walberg, Harvey Keitel, the entire cast of “Party of Five,” Liam Neeson, James Dean, Johnny Depp, Hayley Mills, Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, John Cusack, Harry Potter and his girlfriend, Charles Durning, Glenda Jackson, Keanu Reeves, Claire Danes, Alan Alda, Andrew McCarthy, Mary Stuart Masterson, Jean Harlow, Alfred Hitchcock, Richard Burton and Liz Taylor, Greta Garbo, and most manga and anime characters

POLITICIANS -- Richard Nixon, Margaret Thatcher, Adolf Hitler (also Bormann, Hess, Goebbels, Himmler), Tony Blair and Gordon Brown

MUSICIANS – Elvis Presley, Kurt Cobain, Suzanne Vega, Nancy Griffiths, Glenn Gould, Tori Amos, Kate Bush, Paul Hyde, Bela Bartok

SCIENTISTS -- Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, and, of course, Hans Asperger himself

SERIAL KILLERS – John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, James Brady

AUTHORS – William Shakespeare, Romantic poets (Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Shelley), the Bronte sisters, Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf, Patricia Highsmith, Friedrich Nietzsche, Camille Paglia, Yukio Mishima, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Samuel Beckett, Paul Bowles, Ian McEwan, Hans Christian Anderson, Marcel Proust, Martin Amis, Stephen Fry, Robert Stone, William Burroughs, Hunter Thompson

…And hundreds more. (The current Pope has some of these features as well.) If you look at WP, a lot of us resemble the people named above, and sometimes use pictures of them as icons. (I look like the Boticelli figure to the left – Boticelli specialized in painting this look.) Anyway, here’s the theory: Humans are a neotenous species of chimpanzee, i.e., our maturation is delayed. The skeleton of a baby human and a baby chimp are pretty much identical, but when a human grows the maturation process is slowed (like dogs, which are neotenous wolves). This means that ALL humans are developmentally delayed, even neurotypical ones. It’s just that when they delay is pronounced enough, adult physical features don’t quite develop and an adult brain doesn’t quite develop. Why neoteny should be so exaggerated in some humans is a mystery, but it clearly has something to do with genetics (aspie parents) and something to do with the environment – perhaps cold or a lack of sunlight, since many aspies seem to come from Scandinavia or Scotland. So there’s no mystery involved. Whether you’re slightly more intense and sensitive than average, or a highly-strung person with obsessive interests, or a savant like “Rain Man,” it’s just runaway neoteny. Feedback?

Not all autistic people are caucasian you know.

Also the list of authors is questionable

That is interesting.

I too have a cupid's bow mouth.

When you say James Brady the serial killer, do you mean Ian Brady?

Yukio Mishima is not Caucasian. I could also add Will Smith and Condi Rice as having these features.

Re: the list of authors being "questionable," I didn't say they were autistic, I just said they had these physical features.

Yes, by James Brady I meant Ian Brady.

it is,
Einstein used to attribute his original views on time and space to his maturing late (relatively:-)
and many aspies look much younger the their age and retain a very child like behavior for many years
it looks like maturing late is not sign of a development error but an advantage as the more advanced a species is the later it mature
perhaps this fact also lead to the angery image and identity struggle some of us r having with the NT as in some aspect they develop faster which makes us look a bit ret*d compared to them but from a bigger point of view we r tend to be much more advanced than them in many fields, we just need time to develop our unique solution to exitence instead of just following what everybody else does like NT do

I'm not sold.
One little problem is that, going from memory, I don't see any similarity between the people listed. If you collected a bunch of pictures on your blog or something, that might help.
I still doubt that I would buy it.

Sorry but Ted Bundy isn't autistic and you're trying to claim there is no mystery in autism and you can peg by phyiscal traits yet Ted Bundy was a psychopath.

Since people are sometimes confusing psychopath with autistic, please be more aware. I've come across some sociopaths in my lifetime. They pick on people they think are easy targets mostly trying to manipulate them by using emotions or anything they can find but it doesn't work well with those who are critical thinkers and more analytical than easily swayed by emotions.

Sociopaths are way different than autistics but can also try to fool others by claiming their lack of empathy is a trait of autism however there is a difference.

The sociopath fakes having feelings, the person with autism doesn't fake usually or has a delayed response to empathy scenerios usually when it comes to someone else mentioning them.

Here is a good short list.

http://mindofasociopath.com/stopVictimAbuse.asp

Not all are killers. Chances that you've come across a sociopath in your life is high.


So if you think Ted Bundy is autistic, it's still an unsolved mystery if you are trying to tie in superficial traits only.

Some people like to say "but so and so was quiet" sorry but that doesn't make someone autistic.

So and so stimmed. That's not exclusive to just autistics.

Some peopel like to claim Mozart was autistic but he was a social butterfly, lush, didn't have problems making friends, was well groomed, didn't have meltdowns and loved attention. Where is the autism in that? Oh he played early? Sorry, that is a prodigy. Not all autistics are prodigies.

I’m not saying I’m completely sold on everyone on his list, but if you compare pictures of Ian Brady, Heinrich Himmler, Albert Einstein, Hans Asperger, along with many more of the people he listed, they do seem to fit almost all of the physical features he described. I seem to fit almost all of the physical features too as you can see from my avatar.

I never heard of this theory he talks about, and am not sure what to make of it right now, but it is interesting to say the least.

I don't see the autism.
Do you?

In order for your observations to have relevance according to what you think of as exclusively autistic traits, there should be autism present. Autism comes from within.

Yeah, I pretty much agree that there are some well identifiable Aspie phisical traits, after all it's a genetic mutation (or something similar) that of course manifests itself also phisically. In my friends' list on Facebook there are two guys who I strongly suspect may have AS traits (my age or similar) and if you take out the different hair style the similarity betweem the three faces is plain scary, actually we are practically the same. Elf ears is funny BTW (and it applies also)

Well, that description fit me very well, actually. What that means, I don't know. I don't like to generalize.

My dear, you have just about covered the entire gamut of the western world in that opening post, with a small sprinkle beyond just for safe measure.

Who, pray, is not on the spectrum?

Hmmm... I bet this is how witch hunts started.


Edit: You sure you're not thinking of elves?

That's the feeling I got.

George Bush. He's pure sociopath.

A sociopath is the opposite of an Aspie.

Has no genuine feelings --------------- Does have feelings
Pretends well, shows feelings -------- Expresses differently, hard to read
Understands people, doesn't care --- Does care, doesn't understand
Nonstop lies ------------------------------ Loyalty to the truth
People fall for the lies ------------------ Tells truth and no one believes
Predator ----------------------------------- Prey
Full of himself ----------------------------- Social anxiety

You put it in a very great way. That was excellent. To the point.