'People with autism have stronger connections between brain cells'

Another thing is music.  As a younger man, and essentially throughout life, I used to be really infuriating with music.  I'd keep stopping and rewinding a particular section - a guitar riff or drum solo - and play it over and over.  Or I'd put a song on, play a bit of it, then put something else on, then something else - never getting the whole way through.  I used to work in a shop that sold stereo equipment, and I'd pre-record tapes of my favourite music and just play them all day until someone else would say 'Haven't we heard this enough already?'  I get stuck on particular bands or singers (or authors) and will listen to (or read) nothing else.  I don't like getting used to new music or literary genres because I like to stay with what I know.  It takes a long time to move on to something different.

Working with autistic people has made me recognise a lot of my own habits and routines.  We have people who will simply play the same piece of music over and over for hours on end - and keep going back to favourite parts before the whole thing has finished.  I'm very much like that, at a different level.

The music thing is so familiar to me - in the car I will replay one song on a CD over and over again for a few weeks before shifting into something else. I like certain sections of songs too. I knew someone who wore out several vinyl records of The Sound of Music - she had Down Syndrome but I now wonder if she was autistic too. Another man I worked with played a few lines of a Barclay James Harvest song over and over again: "we will survive beyond the grave and while we sleep we will be saved". I remember puzzling over what he was trying to communicate as he never explained his fascination for this lyric. 

The music thing is so familiar to me - in the car I will replay one song on a CD over and over again for a few weeks before shifting into something else. I like certain sections of songs too. I knew someone who wore out several vinyl records of The Sound of Music - she had Down Syndrome but I now wonder if she was autistic too. Another man I worked with played a few lines of a Barclay James Harvest song over and over again: "we will survive beyond the grave and while we sleep we will be saved". I remember puzzling over what he was trying to communicate as he never explained his fascination for this lyric. 

During my teens, I really listened to no one except Neil Diamond.  Every week, after I started work, I'd go to the record shop and get another of his LPs, and no one else's.  In the end, the guy there greeted me one day with 'Here comes Neil Diamond's number one fan.'  That embarrassed me, and I stopped going there.  Then it was Mike Oldfield.  And then Wings.  They were pretty much all I listened to until my late 20s.