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How do you describe Autism?

Lotus

I identify with these points that Wendel1994 wrote:

"I can study how other people who are not on the spectrum live and compare it to my life and see what is different, and the fact, no matter how hard I try to get what they have, it never feels right, it feels like an awkward replica of what they have..... people with autism are different and mine is as far from who I am as possible! Autism is not my personality, my true personality cannot be let out as it is being weighed down"

I have recently come up with an idea of how to explain what autism is. I think of our brains as computers which are not connected to the mainframe of society, like NT brains are. I see NT brains as being part of an interconnected web, like the world wide web, but we don't have the correct software to connect to it. This means they can't read our "code" either and so often fail to understand us. I've often been frustrated by well meaning people who think they know me, when they really don't. And I'm a fairly well adapted female Aspie who is assumed to be an NT by most people.

But I think that autism may encourage individual thought and development, often giving us insights and skills which NTs don't have. (Star Trek fans - think of Seven of Nine and her struggles to become a free thinking individual). 

Maybe our society, in it's struggle to become less prejudiced against people who are a different colour, race, religion, etc has promoted an idea that we're really all the same under the outward appearance. Of course, treating people badly because they are different to "the norm" is totally wrong, but treating everyone as if they are the same seems to me to be the way to stifle individual development and creative thought. 

What do you think?

Parents

  • I use that computer idiom to explain what goes on "under the hood". My brain's using between 30 and 100% of its capacity, per an MRI/EEG study, but is structurally normal. The NT norm is 10%, of which half is taken up by daily experience waiting for overnight reassessment in beta phase sleep. Mine is vestigial, because I process it real-time, making me very fast and accurate on the uptake. But it means I cannot communicate my 70% to their 5%. My simile is that of two identical PCs, one with an updated Opearting System running at 100%, the other with an out-of-date OS only able to use 5%. Which is disordered?

    What I don't accept is that we can't communicate among ourseles. I'm not the only high-functioning Aspie in the family, another's the grandson of an Oxford Regius Professor of Mathematics. I think we're slughtly telepathic.

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  • I use that computer idiom to explain what goes on "under the hood". My brain's using between 30 and 100% of its capacity, per an MRI/EEG study, but is structurally normal. The NT norm is 10%, of which half is taken up by daily experience waiting for overnight reassessment in beta phase sleep. Mine is vestigial, because I process it real-time, making me very fast and accurate on the uptake. But it means I cannot communicate my 70% to their 5%. My simile is that of two identical PCs, one with an updated Opearting System running at 100%, the other with an out-of-date OS only able to use 5%. Which is disordered?

    What I don't accept is that we can't communicate among ourseles. I'm not the only high-functioning Aspie in the family, another's the grandson of an Oxford Regius Professor of Mathematics. I think we're slughtly telepathic.

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