Is it possible........

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I don't really have this thing of a lack of recognition. I do get overwhelmed by people's clothing though, it is a huge problem;
patterns and colours and shapes and fabrics jump out at me from all angles and I can't process it properly.
My brain wants to make sense of it, and it is all too much. I get colours and shapes etched into my brain for hours and days.
It bombards me.

Intense World Theory is my way of explaining this to my poor brain.

This mild face blindness is not such a big problem (severe one would be another story). It's just staring at somebody for some seconds. If after some seconds this person doesn't recognize me, well, I was wrong and I look elsewhere with as much dignity as possible. Worst case, this person is thinking 'WTF this guy was looking at me as I had to recognize him?'. Best case, I hook up (though only once. Best cases are not that frequent unfortunately ).

I have been leafing about this Intense World Theory. Interesting, though I have not hyper-memory at all... indeed, I'm completely pattern-focused because synthesizing things is my only way to deal with such a big quantity of information. Perhaps this pattern thinking was a kind of survival method when you don't have a savant memory.

Have you tried meditation?. Unless many people think, it's not about medidate about life or whatever, it's about learning to perceive without processing.

Thank you, I think you make a good point. I should try meditation, because I am distressed on a daily basis due to taking in too much (to the point of tears often), I have found a way to talk my way through it and try to stay calm, but this is a massive effort. Perhaps meditation could change how much I am affected by these things.

I do have hyper-memory. It is not necessarily something to envy; in some ways it is phenomenal, but in other ways it means exceptionally painful times in my life (and there are more than a few to choose from) stay with me vividly and painfully for a long, long time.

I find these subjects interesting.
We have unusual brains. Lots to discover.

And I agree with the Intense World Theory idea by the way. It fits perfectly with my direct experience.

All of my autistic behaviours are designed to moderate the painfully intense intrusion of the outside world. Well, not all as such, but many of the more obvious ones.

Do you think this is true of everyone? Are some of us Intense Worlders, and some of us otherwise???

I don't know what to think.

I am certainly less sociable than some people I have met on the spectrum. I guess we all differ.

I don't know. It's clear to me that NT's brain features are designed to make life easier. A NT brain has an 'automatic' information filter incorporated that decreases the quantity of information to deal with, so it makes easier to deal with it. Many instinctive behaviours and emotions are oriented to make less necessary to think: if you deal with things in an instinctive way, you don't need to think about them.

In general NTs brains are designed to be more efficient with less "CPU consumption", to say it someway. Is it because human beings have evolved this way for better survivial or is it a reminiscence of our less evolved ancestors? Who knows.

Of course, everything comes with a price: NTs find it more difficult to think out of the box, and are easy prey for emotional and psychological traps (as self-deception or emotional dependences).

I don't think that autism involves less or more intelligence. But if you don't have those 'save mind resources' mechanisms and you have average mind resources, it can look like a lesser intelligence. But if you try to reason with many NTs, you end up thinking that they're close to be, well, kind of ret*d. So, how they deal so well with life? In my opinion, not because of their intelligence, but because of their filters and their instincts. But aspergers don't have those instincts and filters, they depend of their pure mind. So, if you're autist and not intellegent enough, you're screwed. On the other side, if you are, it can give you much more freedom to the way you think. It's not by chance that it's said that the guy that discovered fire was probably an aspie.

But it has a price. For you, for example, it's the chaos you see constantly around you. But this is you, too. The way you see the world is part of who you are. Perception is part any intelligent system. Or at least, you own core is how is it because of the way you learnt to deal with how you perceive the world.

Anyway, that comes from my experience. And everybody's experience is different. So, who knows?

This makes sense, thank you.

Yes, I'm glad I have the intelligence to work things out through intellect and manage like that instead.

Yeap, but it takes a lot of energy. A friend of me told that I always looked tired. I never wondered why until I started to know about asperger.

something I say to guys who ask me out:
face blindness is not equal to "I can't tell the difference between an attractive and an unattractive face, it means I can't tell who is the owner of which. In light of that, I am too good looking for you, whoever you are."

Well, the good thing of it is that going out with somebody feels always like a first date

(mine is mild, anyway, I can tell people apart. Though sometimes I'm wrong)

I am fairly mild too, but I can't remember faces and names well, so even people who have walked around me for a long time are sometimes hard to label. Ever notice that ugly people are easier to recognize than pretty people?

Yeap, that's absolutely true!! ! Paraphrasing Tolstoi: all the ugly faces are ugly in their own way, however, every pretty one is similar.

Indeed, I have no problem to tell apart ugly people. The problem is with the beautiful ones.

(Now you have said that... I have to tell this to a friend that doesn't believe that I have face blindness because I never mistaked her )

For me the problem is if they have nothing special about them.. Beautiful people can have distinctive features too! But I've read several articles that say "averageness" is considered more attractive so I guess they are more likely to be generic-looking? http://www.bu.edu/phpbin/news-cms/news/ ... 7&id=41272

Yeap, averageness and simetry in human faces is pretty. Of course, you can considere as beautiful some unusual features: Barbra Streisand and her big nose, Julia Roberts and her big mouth, Christina Hendricks and her big.... well, this is not a facial feautre , but anyway those cases are not the general rule. However, I love those strange and hard-featured faces. For me, beauties with a very 'average' face look kind of 'blurry' or 'foggy', probably due to the mild face blindness.

A good friend of me used to say that this was a good thing, so we'd never compete for the same girl

Yes, I believe that is the norm too. Though they mostly get those results because everyone can agree on the average being "attractive", while those with more diverse features get more diverse answers. Statistics
I wouldn't say my preferences are that unusual though. I'm happily out of the "competition" now with someone that half the towns neurodiverse women were in love with

Absolutely. Here is a video that gives a prime example of how we see ourselves personally, compared to how other people close to us see us:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQXP6BTHwhY[/youtube]

From my experience and knowledge of people, people are often very self conscious of themselves, and are slightly to moderately critical of how they see themselves or their situation. They often analyze things, wondering if what they did was the right thing to do, etc and so forth.

As for how people view others, they typically have a positive outlook on other people, as long as those other people don't break a cultural taboo that is socially looked down upon (like multiple visible tattoos, large ear gauges, eccentric behavior- like talking about weird things, making inappropriate jokes, being manipulative socially/emotionally, stalker-ish behavior, creepy behavior, etc and so forth).

For instance, I rarely smile, but I joke around a lot, and I talk about certain things I know from different subjects, like History, current events, Psychology, Sociology, etc. People have told me that they thought of me as either very intelligent, or funny and likeable. When I tell them I'm autistic, they always say "I would never have guessed that about you."

We're often more critical of ourselves, both physically and mentally, than we are of other people. We tend to think of other people positively, unless they break a social norm.

I like this response to that video..
http://jazzylittledrops.tumblr.com/post ... o-makes-me



So you can either pass for NT and/or "people" in this case dislike autistics.