How do you explain Asperger's in 30 seconds or less?

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But that could apply to a lot of people, not just aspies.

I have a suggestion which is not an complete description, but could be a way to give someone a rough idea about Asperger's in a nutshell. Many people are familiar with the film "Rainman." Everyone knows what a nerd is. So it could be described as something between the two in terms of traits and severity. You do run the risk of making it sound trivial, however. So you might also mention the challenges which go along with AS.

(Edited for word choice)

The best shortest description I've heard is "an inability to distinguish between knowledge and social learning."

Don't know if that would make sense to most people though.

Please define "social learning." Is it learning from other people vs from printed material or empirical learning?

Recently I've been thinking about how I'd answer this question a lot.

In the end I came to the conclusion that if the person asking knew nothing/little about the condition I'd probably say that its a neurological disorder that causes me to have personality traits and process information in a different way to most other people.

I'd then briefly say something about how it affects me in my life and how it makes me different. For me personally I'd say it means that I am very analytical, and I don't like being in noisy places where lots of people are talking loudly, especially in enclosed places. Also, that I can get into the "Flow" very easily when it comes to doing something i enjoy (we've been learning a bit about Csikszentmihalyi "Flow Theory" on my course recently so if I was talking about it to my course mates then they'll find it a bit easier to understand what i'm saying).

I wouldn't try to go into much detail as I don't want to bore the other person, and will probably only say more about it if they express interest (ie ask more questions about it).

I know this is a very general answer as almost anybody can xpress these traits and, of course, there is a lot more to autism than this as I'd guess many of you would be aware. However in order to not confuse the other person, or get into an uncomfortable situation where they ask a question I don't particularly want ot answer (as theres some things about me that I dont want people to know about if I don't feel they understand it fully) I would try and stick to the "basics" and talk about things they can relate to, as well as some of my behaviour characteristics that I believe are quite clearly seen by others (for example i am quiet) or others have commented on in the past.

I hope my post was clear and you could understand it, as I'm not great at explaining things in words

Since that there have been a lot of posts on this already, I am going to give one I use sometimes to get a laugh.

My wife comes home from the grocery store carrying a bunch of food-filled sacks. Barely able to open the door, she begins clearing her throat repeatedly as she makes strange gestures with her arms at me. Finally I realize what she needs---I get her a cough drop. That is Asperger's .

Oooh, I did! I just read it a minute ago (several days after you posted), and was just skimming through the other responses, with the intention of making my own reply to yours.

I was just about to type something like:

I like the way you think, b9! This is one of the reasons I enjoy coming to WP!

well that is a nice thing to say and i not know how to respond.
i am a bit ret*d when it comes to my response to compliments. they make me feel good, but i can not formulate anything to say about them.
usually compliments make me feel uneasy, but sometimes i think they are nice, and your compliment was nice and i think you are a fair and true thinking person.
i can not think of anything else to say.

LOL. Love it.

Also have to say I 100% agree with Willard. It's time ASDs became recognized outside the cloistered clinics and doctors offices. It shouldn't be a shameful thing or a dirty family secret, it should be openly accepted and supported the way other challenges/disabilities are. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm sick of being basically attacked by self identified "normal people" for something I can't change.

Inspector Gadget.

That would also cover most of Attwood's positive criteria.

I've thought about this and all I can think it to mean is "learning to socialize." Knowledge (very roughly) means facts, reasoning, systematic method etc. Socializing is nothing like this but we (myself certainly) tend to apply knowledge methods to social situations - learning bits of conversation by rote or looking for systems to help understand what goes on around us. We don't use whatever crazy intuition NT's do.

Something like that. Really, I posted this because someone mentioned it to me and it rang very true. I was hoping it would ring true with other people too.

Incidentally, when you say "learning from other people," that doesn't really get to the point - you can learn knowledge from other people, or you can learn how to behave around them, only the latter isn't taught explicitly - people just pick it up (somehow.)

The way you responded was just fine. Thanks. (I wasn't sure which emoticon to use, but I liked this one, so that's why I chose it.)

I usually simply say it is a form of high functioning autism.

Ha! I was just going to tell people when they ask me, "I'm clinically strange," but now I think I'll say, "It's like being Inspector Gadget."

no! bad computer!! !

Last edited by heliocopters on 08 Nov 2009, 11:46 am, edited 1 time in total.

I think a good explanation would be "It's social dyslexia."