What are the advantages of being Autistic?

Careful, you are not supposed to notice those things!

I always wondered if most people just intentionally ignore things, because once you see certain patterns it becomes unmissable and undeniable. But when I've tried pointing these things out to people they get angry or switch their brain off. For them, the problem is that I've noticed, rather than the pattern existing.

Anything that threatens someone's world view is almost like a personal attack on them, so they ignore facts. But my brain doesn't work like that. I will keep pulling on a thread and even become obsessed.

Running ON a pool of custard

Sally, are you open to offers of marriage? :c)

IF my O/H ever saw this post I'd be dead or worse, but she doesn't look here, so I'm safe..

I'm messy, by nature. But I bought a dustpan and brush this afternoon at the local shop. (cancelling the one I ordered on Amazon last night)

As a young child I picked up on the fact that although a great deal of cinema was reputed to come from America, only the actors, actresses & crew seemed to have american looking names when the credits came up...I actually asked my parents "Why is that?" but they neither knew why, nor found the data point interesting. Learning the answer to that question bought me to learn about some very unsavoury characters, and to be honest I often wish I hadn't noticed then in later life followed up on that particular detail  I know you asked JN91, I hope my answer isn't also unwelcome. 

In me there is seems little in the way of "kind of details" it's more that WE NOTICE. 

We often do not understand what we notice though, but also the N.T's often find our casual questioning of the many untruths that prop up their worldview (particularly when they come form a child or subordinate) very irritating, just as I find N.T's almost blanket refusal to "take ownership" that often hides behind those casual "fibs" very irritating.

It would appear to my way of thinking, that once society loses it's love & promotion of casual dishonesty an awful lot of our "disability" will melt away... So keep noticing those details, folks.

What kind of details?

Same here. It can literally save your life.

They do. We don't have to do their job for them though.

If they need to search my belongings they are always welcome to, but they need to be able to put it back together again afterwards. (or at least pay me to do it..)

Picking up on details and oddities that neurotypical people might or choose to miss/ignore. I call it my ‘Spidey-sense’

For me it's that I'm very honest and I also have a great memory and also keep everything neat and tidy. If there's even a little dust in my home I get it cleaned straight away. 

wow --- but i guess they have to do their thing

Great story! Sadly, I was stopped at the airport once because I had too many hard drives and electronics in my carry-on luggage (we were moving internationally, I didn't trust checking it). They forced me to unpack my bag (it also was a giant Tetris board!), they fairly quickly checked my stuff and okayed me to board the plane, but it then took about 25 minutes for me to reorganise everything. I had stuff all spread out on the floor and tables, and delayed the queue quite a bit. I believe security probably wished they just let me pass without inspecting!

Jon from Big Brother.

I got stopped by customs once and sent to the green shed to have our car inspected.

They opened the tailgate, took one look at the 3d Tetris I'd been playing earlier that morning and instantly decided against trying to take it all out and put it back. We were back on our way in seconds. 

Good question - I'm appreciating everyone's responses. I'll keep mine simple - my own "special abilities" (not just talents or skills) I believe are observing and sorting; and I am far more advanced with the logic part of my brain than I am with my verbal/language part.

fair enough :)

As I said, it was the foundation for something Nobel Prize-winning. But that's a conflict of values to me: I prize humility. Seriously. I know my CV's ridiculously achievement-orientated, and so can appear boastful, but I've whittled it for over-statement and Mittyism and it's fair. When the Secretary General of NATO calls across a reception full of Heads of State, by my first name, astonished to see me there, because he knew me in another context, you can't play the mouse any longer, however much I was supposed to: it took another name he knew and the memory of how I first came to his attention to help him place my move, for all that it caused considerable debate in NATO because I was the first, and so far only, spouse to meet the criteria of one of the unwritten rules, the Rosenberg Interdict. Many jumped to the obvious conclusion strings had been pulled, but at the end of the day, even my harshest critic apologised, when he found the reality, that I'd run the finances on a shoestring of a budget.

The important message here is that nobody'd interfered by telling me I'm Disordered. I'd been built by slow degrees to the point where I was taking the authority of a Head of State, leading the team which restabilised the Albanian economy, under authority delegated from the UN through NATO to us in WEU, I did the pathfinding for Malta's accession to the EU, and completed the work Gandhi left unfinished when he was assassinated. Nobody else did those last two, I did, without a mandate, because the ball fell in front of me, I picked it up and ran with it. I'd been positioned to do this, not by decisions of my own, but because it was so written, a Muslim would say. We each have our own paths, and looking back with that Gandhi deal in my pocket, full of praise and thanks on high, I realised it had been managed long before my parents met: when I tried to follow my own less ambitious agenda, it was immediately blocked and a series of serendipities then placed me exactly where I was supposed to be. There's only one step upwards from changing world history, and it indeed came my way, but that's for another time.

My message is that telling High-Functioning Aspies they're useless, troublemakers, incompetent, is one huge, malevolent lie: prove them wrong by diligence. Craig Wright's written on the subject, The Hidden Habits of Genius, for a class of those who haven't yet stood out. I left my eternal mark on the world aged 14, by suggesting "not a bad idea" which was actually such a good one it's at the heart of almost all computer code, unnoticed, as such an idea should be.

Nick Hine's saying the same thing. The David Bretts of the world may hate your guts, but that's because you're the real deal, and they aren't. We don't conform to their norms? Good, all their norms do is hold humanity back. We're the cutting edge, so find your Milk of Human Kindness (an engineer's term for lubricant, but it does here!) and something needing to be reamed, bored and countersunk, and do so. Polished to perfection. A good job jobbed.

well done you

A viva-voce exam is normally run by the professors to make sure you know your stuff, by going into details face-to-face. This one was from the UK Security Services, who have an interest in strategic issues: my take-away from it was that I'd spotted something very serious indeed. It wasn't the first time I'd dealt with them (age 11) nor the last.

Whats is a MI5 Viva ?