Published on 12, July, 2020
There are so many aspects of autism that you wouldn't know about from reading the diagnostic criteria - which I guess is to be expected because those criteria try to focus on the core or roots of autism whilst our lives are more about the shape of the whole plant and its foliage.
Watching this video for instance made me wonder if my autism lies behind the fact that when out walking with other people, I'm the one who stops to pick up screws from the gutter in case they get into people's tyres. No-one else seems to notice them. I do notice, and sometimes get quite annoyed about the carelessness that leads to the screw being there in the first place!
Then I start to wonder.......I thought that my visual perception was "normal" (obviously, having grown up with it and having no way to compare with anyone else's). But now I know about this feature, and I also know that I have better visual acuity (when optically corrected) than average (we did experiments on it at school and I'm *very* fussy about the prescription in my specs being right) - which again seems to be correlated with autism.
Fascinating............wonder what the world looks like / feels like to "most" people?
I am very visual. I do maths in my head visually and if I can't imagine the maths like the sides of a dice.. Then I usually need to write it down to do it.
I remember an image in my head and then have a name for it. Or hear the word and think of the image.
I do look at details but sometimes I don't see things as others do. While I looked at the detail of the knitted wool of someone's jumper and the way the fibres wisp off the wrist/ cuff.... Someone else say a person in a jumper stood in a hallway etc... They saw the full picture and I examined details.
Yes, I know what you mean - I'm very good at missing the wood for the trees, too. If I'm out for a walk and see an interesting bug or fungus, I can be quite oblivious to the fact that I'm kneeling in a puddle or about to get scratched to bits by a bramble.