What are your NT traits?

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That is so massive- I guess generally everything that falls outside the accademic descriptions of us?

Try looking at this
NT Syndrome

Thanks for the replies, repliers. The reason I made this thread was because I didn't know what was considered an NT trait and what was not. I scored 2/200 NT on the rdos quiz, so I couldn't identify much in the way of NT traits for myself.

For example, even the eye contact thing is confusing, especially to clinicians trying to diagnose us. A lot of people can make eye contact one-on-one, but only as an AS-to-NT adaptation. When I was little, I never looked anyone in the eye. I only started doing it as I got older, because I discovered that it was expected from me. To this day, I still have to remind myself to look people in the eye, which I do by saying to myself, "Don't bless them with the Aspie Stare".

I don't have any evidence for this, but my gut feeling is that a lot of NT traits in people with AS are actually AS-to-NT adaptations. If those are disregarded as NT traits, then many people with AS may not have any NT traits at all, but only AS traits that are more or less obvious depending on the situation.

For example, when I am in a social situation, I might engage one person intensely on one topic, or I might fail to engage at all in a group doing smalltalk. Both are manifestations of AS traits, but one is obvious, and the other just makes me look shy. The NT trait of engaging naturally and casually does not exist, nor does the AS-to-NT adaptation of engaging casually, but working really hard to do so. Each AS-to-NT adaptation carries a significant cost of stress, and I use them very sparingly and only for the most important applications. Even then, most of them are more like Obvious-AS-to-Subtle-AS adaptations than AS-to-NT adaptations. John Elder Robison said in an interview that he's learned enough about the NT world to go from looking "weird" to looking "eccentric". I think that's my approach as well, when it's important for me to avoid putting people off.

This is what I kept running into - I could connect these things back to autism.

Hmm, not many and to not much extent.

The one I'm really proud of is the ability to think in grayscale, to build independent structures of thought, and the ability of abstract thinking.

I don't stim like the stereotype, I do very little repetitive movement (I don't like to see it either, it irritates me). I mostly stim by smells and touch, if riding a bicycle or listening to music doesn't count.

My sensory issues are not so severe, but they are there, significantly.

I like to seek for interactions, but only with a very limited number of people. Perhaps, it's my need for somebody to be by my side and help me when I'm not prepared to do something, due to my immaturity.

And yes, I can be very emotional, but that's not considered an exclusive NT trait, as far as I know.

Everything else is AS-to-NT adaptation.

This is also why I am skeptical of the idea of Half-NTs or Half-Aspies. I don't think that there are significant numbers of people with significant numbers of AS traits and NT traits. People who score in the middle on the rdos quiz are either NTs who have some autistic traits but never to the extent found in autistic people or Aspies who have adapted a lot in a wide variety of ways to display NT traits but never as naturally as NTs. I really think that a person is either autistic or not, but I'm not using this idea to undiagnose people who have NT traits, only to question whether the traits are adaptations instead. And certain supposed NT traits, like a sense of humor, are not NT traits at all. A lot of Aspies have senses of humor, but there are noticeable differences in the reception and expression of the humor, so NT humor is often not funny to Aspies and Aspie humor not funny to NTs.

Maybe this statement sums it up: The behavior is a spectrum that blends smoothly into neurotypical, but the neurology is not.

Do you have any proof that natural neurology must conform to such a strict dichotomy? As long as nobody has discovered some single genetic grouping or physical on/off switch that makes one autistic as opposed to neurotypical, it isn't logical to make such an assertion.

Do people need to subscribe to a dichotomous view because their personal identity is caught up the labels they apply to themselves? Labels are just labels IMO, things humans invent for the convenience of classification. Arguments over the concrete meaning of labels is meaningless without a good backing definition, and even with a definition such as the DSM, behavioral criteria will have subjectivity.

I don't think we know enough about the neurology to say if there is a spectrum or a dichotomy or a trichotomy or a 11otomy or whatever. I'm just trying to break through the idea that the neurology is definitely a spectrum, because the behavior appears to be a spectrum. Questioning the assumptions and teasing out conflating factors is what I'm doing, and that has nothing to do with the relationship between personal identity and labeling.

fizzicksgirl,
It's a splendid dissertation.
But not to put too fine a point on it, it is also several years old, unpublished, and without a noticeable compliment of ripples. If it fell in the forest, who heard it?
Happe et. al have enlarged the category, and merely added the possibility of sensory issues, and time marches on without real change.
Still, thanks for the lovely read.

I don't find eye contact difficult, and as far as I can recall I never have.

I understand facial expressions and tone of voice mostly subconsciously, not by conscious reasoning. (Likely not as well as most NTs would, but I do get a significant amount of understanding, and it is not by conscious processing.)

Those are the first two that come to mind.

The bit I can't ( serious point) get is the disproportionality between the degree of most of our differences in behavior and attitude and the responses they invoke.

Ok - In my day you got whacked with a plimsol at school for breaking soical rules. Those days have passed. Say you stared at a sports teacher for 1.5 seconds longer than the norm- this guy actually physically assulted you with a bit of PE equipment. You'd have caught his eye for less than the time it takes to look away and back again as you are supposed to, and the response is (est.) 50ftb ( forgive the pun) of kinetic energy being transferred into your body,causing damage to skin and deep muscle fibre and possible organ damage . What harm did you do to this guy? I still don't don't get it.

So we can say some aspects of NT behaviour are not measured or rational and seemed linked to a very complex set of social rules and behaviors and they take these very seriously.

So one NT trait is taking rules and micro rules very seriously , as well as enforcing them, even though there seems to us to be no rational grounds for doing so. Eye contac tis something very important to most of them in some social situations.

This is not a trait of mine and I really don't care if someone is weird as long as they don't smell too bad. There's usually a good reason.

Disliking daily routines is not an NT trait, since all humans need a routine to a certain extent.

Another thing I've noticed is that because of these conscious or subconscious rules and microrules and nanorules that comes naturally to NTs, I think that I appear much more NT than I actually appear NT to NTs. I've always believed that I stand out a lot less than I actually do stand out. The issue of "mild" vs. "severe" Asperger's often appears on WP, and I'm wondering if many people appear less mild than they believe themselves to appear. I've often believed that I was putting up a truly convincing act, when in fact I was awkward both in the act and in the act of acting. It's like NT actors playing Aspie characters in TV shows and movies. What looks right to NTs often looks fake to us. I wonder if that's how we appear to NTs in real life when trying to modulate our behaviors closer towards the norm. This is the reason I've given up trying to be anyone but myself. It takes a ton of work, and it usually doesn't work!

I think they have a better set of innate faculties for processing social data. They they grow up within the parameters of acceptable processing hence they get the social learning as well. I have said this on another thread . I think they have a bell curve of intelligence just like us. The difference is some of that is social intelligence and they can turn this to tmico and nano social states. Our minds left out of the loop occupy themselves with interesting but sociallially irrrelevant stuff
like calculting square roots of numbers, the biography of some obscure writer or maybe guessing the number of rings in a tree by the width of its trunk. To quote my kids our heads are "chattin sh*t" to occupy us because they know they are supposed to chat something but can't connect with the intended subject matter.

Unless someone comes along on the top of the bell curve and gets the whole social thing down to a formula we can grasp and apply then we are stuck with this.

One key thing I have always held onto is that there is no hard science behind the rules. They don't exist "out there" in a Newtonian sense -they are created and recreated in every social interaction by the players, but are very real in terms of their human consequences. They are a product of evolution an dexist to some extent outside biological evolution, almost as if they had a degree of independant life on their own. They are like a wave collapse in quantum physics and are wonderful things to think about, but this kind of thinking doesn't necessarily comprend them.

One thing I have found is that I have riased my kids I have had to do social learning . Learning to play better a second time around has made me realise how important this is. It's kind of the opposite of analytical states of mind, and I think those first kicked in early on in the playground when we had to think of stuff to fill the gaps we couldn't comprehend in the play of the kids around us, you know kicking our heels on a wall trying to figure the games out the other kids were playing.

It's not a cure, but playing more does help with grasping these soical rules. It's like an unexpected way of learning
that goes in at a tangent and you know something without having to think it through before you act.

Now when you get some of these rules like this you actaully realise how bad a lot of NT's are at understanding them.
They are just able to appear more confident to some groups of people. That is a weird thing to realise.

That thing about spotting NT actors playing us an dus acting in their world is really profound and only just hit me. Did you just come up with that- that's flash of brilliance!



Meme

Last edited by memesplice on 08 Jul 2011, 5:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Guy's I now have room full of donated bits of PC's ( dumped I think) -please where is the spell checker on Windows- I've only ever had mac's:)

I think you have something there - at least it seems to be applicable to me. At first I knew what I put into trying to come across like everyone else, and I know the effort it cost me. Over time I've become aware of so many things I didn't know about, and when I am trying to pay attention to my speech and movements during a conversation, it's kind of apparent to me that I stim a lot, have a lot more trouble verbalizing than I realized I did before, and slip into monologues very easily when I start to feel tense.