Spogg wrote:I wonder if your experiences are due to some quirk of attention control interfering with performance…
That's some very insightful wondering! Yes, indeed attention control is very much related - there's a big overlap between autism and what they call the "primarily inattentive" form of AD(H)D. The name sounds like it describes people who just can't concentrate, but it's usually the case that they can - so long as there is only one thing to concentrate on (to use a PC analogy - I think of it as having a "single-threaded" brain). When I say to people that I have trouble multi-tasking, I don't mean juggling home chores, work, and relaxation; I mean that I can't take in a word that they're saying at the same time as making them a cup of tea (unless they find stone cold coffee + cocoa with ten sugars an acceptable substitute!)
And worse performance when paying too much attention - oh boy, yes; it affects even my sensory perception. For example; the "instantly forgotten" walks that I mentioned aren't so much "forgotten" as "never recorded" - it happens when my mind is pre-occupied with thinking about something else, and my body just seems to go onto "autopilot". When I'm not so distracted, I often find myself stalling whenever I have to step over an obstacle like a puddle - my brain just won't tell me whether it's a distance that I can step over. When I eventually give in and go for it anyway, it's not uncommon that I could easily have stepped three times as far - or that I don't even come close to reaching the other side! Yet when walking "on autopilot", with barely any conscious awareness of my surroundings, I usually come home without so much as a splash of mud on me!
Many of the social problems associated with autism are related to these kind of effects too - it's simply not true that we're born asocial. For example; If I make a conscious effort, I can observe and comprehend body-language and eye-contact reasonably well. The problem is that it's not done automatically as a "background task". I'm effectively blind to them unless I make a conscious effort to focus on them, and I get no "gut feeling" reaction to the way people are interacting with me. But doing that means that I can't process the words I'm hearing so well, nor formulate what I'd like to say - I can process content or context, but not both at the same time. I know full well that staring blankly into space gives the impression that I'm not listening, but ironically, it usually means that I'm listening very hard indeed because I'm so captivated that my brain's "single-thread" is dedicated to processing the words that I'm hearing. Hence why so many of us love digital communication using text - it levels the playing field by making the non-verbal social cues unavailable to everyone else, too, and there's no problem with long pauses to employ "offline" processing rather than "real-time" multi-tasking.
Spogg wrote:I realise now that maybe it was a bit crass of me to kinda dismiss what you described as being normal
Honestly, don't worry about it; I really appreciate your comments. I learned long ago to judge people by how open they are to learning rather than by their (usually endearing) instinct to find common ground, or "politically correct" shibboleths. The traits of autism
are all just extremes of mental processes that every human possesses - it's just that we're statistical outliers in multiple traits which interact in ways that magnify each other. There's even such a concept as the "broader autism phenotype" (BAP) to denote sub-clinical expression of these traits - a lot of people have one or two of them, or just experience them to a lesser degree. Where one draws the line at which it becomes a diagnosable "disability" is a vexed question, of course - how severely one's everyday life is affected depends as much on the environment as the cognitive traits that are present. I wouldn't claim for a moment that my experience is comparable with that of an autistic person who is entirely non-verbal, for example.
As my rather lengthy posts demonstrate, there often isn't a snappy way to describe these things. In our little online enclaves, we do have a little jargon of our own that we use, but trying capture the effects of autism in soundbites using "relatable" language isn't easy without making it too "relatable". Having grown up with them, we also accept them as our personal "normal", so might use very understated, or even flippant, language to describe things which might elicit a far stronger reaction from someone who's not used to them (when my brain gets confused whether my real body or the other one in the mirror is the one that it lives in, it usually just makes me giggle!) We can even be unaware of them ourselves for decades; when I underwent my assessment, I was rather shocked at first to learn that by most people's standards, my sensory perception has rather a lot in common with an LSD "trip" - but I'd just learned as a toddler which information wasn't to be trusted. I gained a lot of insight into why I've always been so clumsy and why conversations about such things often stop dead when I chip in!
PS: I feel the same way about mindfullness meditation. I'd go so far as to say that I find it rather too difficult
not to be mindful! I have no doubt that it's very effective for some people, but it does seem to have become rather a faddish thing - it would do many people's mental health the world of good to stop expecting a "one-size-fits-all golden bullet", IMHO. Likewise for medications and cognitive-based therapies, I'd say - a lot of autistic people find that CBT can be counter-productive unless the counsellor accepts that their model of cognition is based on the maxima of the bell-curves of humanity's infinite variety.