If you had the chance to cure you're Autism would you?

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I disagree somewhat, John. Though I don't totally disagree.

People with Asperger's, if studying their Special Interest, usually attain very high status within their chosen field. They are more focused than "NT's." They don't do the beer-bong thing, and all the other college hi-jinx.

Asperger's COULD have caused someone to have a high IQ, etc.

I would.

Heck, no. If I did that, I might as well change my name as well because I would be an entirely different person. I don't know who that would be exactly, and I don't want to know.

Special interests often begin with fact memorization addiction. An NT with the equivalent IQ of an aspie is technically more intelligent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism_and_memory

Just one example, yes rote memory is a strength but problem solving and retrieving info from context. No.
Even if Aspergers gives high intelligence, Aspergers means having to think about every action to do it.
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It is exhausting, I wish I could just let my subconscious do things for me but no.

Last edited by johnnyh on 19 Jul 2016, 9:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.

If an Aspie really gets into his/her Special Interest, they learn EVERYTHING about that interest.

Depending on the Aspie, he/she might have good critical-thinking skills as well--especially if he/she makes an effort to get away from Black and White thinking.

What would you say to those of us who find that all noticeable symptoms are negative?



I did study what I thought was my special interest. I ended up burning out and still don't have even a two year degree. As for “the beer-bong thing”, many if not most NTs I've met don't do much of that either.



I hear you. For all the people claiming this stuff is an “aspie superpower”, it's remarkably useless and ranges from mildly annoying to debilitating.

The key, really, is to try to use your abilities in a constructive manner.

I'm sorry you "burned out." I can't deny your experiences. I see where you're coming from.

But I just don't see Asperger's as something tragic. I see it more as a nuisance, and a hindrance. But not a tragedy.

Now....if somebody had Tay Sach's Disease: that would be tragic. Or even Childhood Disintegrative Disorder, where one had abilities, but lost them all by age 3 or so.

Probably but that will still leave me with the other 90% of my mental problems.

Join the club I burned out in year 11 (junior year for you Americans)

Also I hate having special interests because they make me boring to talk to.

The hardest part is not the social problems but the inherent underlying thing.
For an aspergerian, some have to literally move one leg, then move another to just walk. For the rest of us its not that bad but we have no autopilot and must mentally plan to do almost everything from showering to doing chores while NT people have something like that remote from the movie "Click" for their life. I have stressed what that link I posted says and I find it to be so true. I feel like I am entitled as a human being to having it easier like that, to have an AI inside me sharing half the work.
The link again:
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The guy has some success with methylone but to think that drugs with possible side effects are the only thing that makes it easier makes me dissappointed in nature. I saw a documentary on tinnitus and a woman who was euthanised since it ruined her life, to think nature can be so cruel....and the fact that the drugs that help are damaging to one's health has a tantalus effect. I just don't want to live life any more on hard mode, and also so that is why I always stay cooped up in my room after work, the mental exhaustion and sensory issues are too strong to allow me to have fun after I barely manage a day's shift.

I do try to use my abilities in a constructive manner, but autism gets in the way of doing so.

For me it's more dark comedy than tragedy. I have all this potential... which I am unable to utilize because of an accident of nature.

Asperger's has all the usefulness and worth of an umbrella made of Kleenex.

I have a thread about my feelings on this matter in the Haven, right now.



Oh god, yes... and you can feel like a slave to them. Any time I'm worried I might be developing a special interest, I strongly consider dropping whatever causes that feeling and avoiding it like the plague.

I just want you to know I fully agree with everything you've said.
Too often we see people say it's a gift but they can't get out of their little professor phase. And despite all evidence showing Einstein for example was not autistic but had a brain that was completely un-autistic, everything bigger and smaller in the opposite places, they will continue to use him as an example. The sad truth is many of us will be minimum wage slaves or will struggle with regular jobs, not because we are too stupid, but because we are limited by our inability to connect our subconscious as well to our conscious actions.

Aspergers and Autism inhibit numerous areas of our intelligence, we have problems with problem solving, executive function, working and short term memory, understanding or gathering information from context, looking at cause and effect, etc. And to think there are actual autistic adults in big organizations blocking any attempt at curing or at least treating the symptoms just makes me so bitter and angry. Well there is hope from countries like China where human experiments are not out of the question, their suffering will provide some answers.

Yeah, that's more or less how I feel johnnyh. I should hope no experimentation is occurring without informed consent, though.

I haven't heard about this Einstein thing. Do you have a link to any studies or articles about it?

Also, I'd like to apologize to Kraftie. Looking at my last post, it could be read as aggressive and confrontational. That wasn't my intention, but even so I want to clear the air about that. I guess I'm just tired of people giving me the same advice over and over when it has gotten no results in the past. It's frustrating as all hell so I think that came out, there.

Yeah. I often feel like I don't understand how my mind works or like I can't control my own thoughts. I want to do something but my brain makes me do something else. It's like my brain has a mind of it's own

I have a superb memory in all the wrong ways. I can remember millions of useless facts about my special interests but when it comes to remembering something useful I have a memory like a shiv. When I have to read a document for work I find that I retain very little of it. How do people read stuff they have no interest in and retain it?

Another thing is the difference between remembering something and remembering something at a particular time. I've forgotten loads of appointments. Many times someone has said "Did you forget that you had an appointment?" No. I didn't forget. At the moment they ask I can remember making the appointment in vivid detail but on the day of the appointment I didn't think about it at all. It never occurred to me the day but I can remember making it days or weeks after. And people think I "forgot"

Doing tasks that aren't associated with my damned "special interests" is a glacial process. My brain won't cooperate. Some people can work quickly and sustainedly. I used to think they were more virtuous than me and they had a better work ethic and they just tried harder. Now I think rather than thinking they're more "virtuous" than me it could just be that their brains work differently (better).

Even when I'm working in a supportive workplace for aspies, the support is for the more documented well known symptoms. For example, they're willing to dewire fluorescent lights if it's too bright for you. They don't put too many social pressures on you, etc.

But they can't make accommodations for the aspie thought process because they don't understand them. They're unknown to medical science and they're unknown to me. I don't understand my thought processes at all. There's no way I could explain them.

The trouble is, owing to lack of concentration and short term memory problems (I can only remember a very small amount of information at a time so I have to keep looking things up from two or three different sets of data but that requires more organizational than I possess, as I switch between different parts of the same task I forget which one I'm on which leads to major slow down))...

The trouble is, while my mind doesn't work as well as other people's minds do, I'm judged on the same scale. It's like I ran a hundred meter sprint with an invisible ball and chain shackled to my ankle and the other runners were uninhibited. After I cross the finish line very slowly everyone asks why I didn't ran as fast as the runners and then they conclude that the explanation is I didn't try very hard.

Like if I don't work continuously they think it's because I intentionally did it slowly. It's the same at work or in educational institutions. They say I should just work without pause. Believe me I want to do that as much as they want me to but my brain doesn't obey me.

Also a lot of the time I feel tired when I haven't actually done very much. Maybe it's because I spent more than the normal amount of mental energy on socializing. Maybe I wasted too much mental energy thinking about things that aren't related to my task but if I start thinking about a trivial problem I have to solve it before I can resume my task. It's like a compulsion. It's like OCD.

Another thing that slows me down is not being able to block out distractions. Some aspies get traumatized by certain sights and sounds. I don't get traumatized by the things I see or hear, most of it's quite interesting to me. The problem is, when I see or hear something, I have to think about it. That wastes a lot of time that could be spent thinking about my task.

It's amazing how much I get distracted by other people's conversations, especially when, after hearing them talk to someone else about their exciting hobbies or achievements, I think prolonged thoughts about how I don't really have any hobbies or achievements. Then I think time consuming thoughts pertaining to self-loathing.

Depression reeally slows me down because I have to think about it. That leaves a lot less time to think about the task at hand. I have to think about how terrible I am. I have to think about how unworthy I am. I have to think about slow I am. Ironically, depression is the reason I'm slow in the first place.

It's like a cognative feedback loop. Here's another feedback loop. I get depressed about being depressed. Having depression is a bad thing so I feel sad that I have it. A lot of my depression stems from the fact that I have depression.

Headphones help block out the conversations a bit but after a while they're too loud so I have to stop. Even with noise cancelling turned on I can still here snippets and then I have to pause the music to make sure I don't miss any talk about people's hobbies and achievements because that might cause me to miss out on self-loathing.

No really. When I try to think positively, it somehow feels wrong. It makes me feel strangely guilty. Like I'm having a higher opinion of myself than I should. Like I deserve to be depressed so any attempt to not be depressed is somehow an obstruction of justice.

In school and community college I failed a lot of tasks that were designed for NTs. I was judged on the same basis as NTs by two groups of people. The first group was me. I judged myself on the same level of NTs, even though the tasks were suited to them and not me. The second group was everyone else.

Not that I think all aspies are like this. I've met aspies who excelled at both work and studies. I've met aspies who seemed like Einstein on speed. I've met aspies who were more charismatic than NTs. What I say about me doesn't apply to all aspies. I can't use asperger's as an excuse because not all aspies have those problems.

I can't use anything at all as an excuse because if I did I'd be "just making excuses instead of getting on with it".

I love how other people can work until they feel really tired and then continue working, overcoming their fatigue with their indomitable will. That doesn't happen to me because tiredness just increases the amount I think non work related thoughts. Good thing I didn't go to school in Asia. Tiredness is par for the course for them. If I had gone to school in Asia I probably would have died from spontaneous cerebral explosion.

(then again I love how their schools are largely free from distraction, unlike western ones)

The higher up you get in education, the more self-organizational skill you need. It's a sign of maturity so that's why they require more of it as you advance through the years of school, university, post-grad, etc. I have about as much self-organization as a bowl of spaghetti. I guess I must be pretty immature then.

As for the connection between memory and organization. People tell me to use the calendar on my phone. Great idea. It even sends a notification to my smartwatch. Great. It works really well... when I remember to use it.

Real work example from last week, my grandfather tells me I have to see him on Friday night. I think "Maybe I should put a reminder in my phone" and then I don't. Partly because I forgot to in the few minutes it took to conclude the conversation.

That's like when I changed my password at work and thought "I'd better update the password keeper on my phone". That's as far as that thought went. Remembering things for days and weeks seems like a distant goal when I literally can't remember something long enough to write it down.

What do you mean johnnyh?

Does anyone find they can't sustain concentration? Like, they try to do something and end up pausing a lot?

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This is the billionth time I've linked this, this is the one thing I finally found that explains my entire life's struggle.
I don't completely believe the guy's science but it feels true, the description at least.
Xanax always makes it easier for me at high doses, I can do calculations in my head that I would never be able to do without it since it's so difficult to hold any thought, it also makes me retrieve things from my memory from contextual situations like NT people do. (Remember to make an appointment, put it aside, five minutes pass, memory kicks in again from seeing phone in front of me. etc.)

To further describe me, I never did any activities in school, I always hated leaving the house since I was young. Outside my special interests I never had hobbies I truly practiced with passion. Things like cleaning or showering are grueling, to get started feels like jumping into a pool of cold water and I get mentally tired with it all. If you saw my facebook page you would not see many pictures or customization as it feels like too much work. I don't have projects and pursuits,

I see many aspies, mainly female who can keep interest in reading numerous books, trying out new activities, and getting into other things don't mind cleaning up etc. but not me. I am always on my desktop or watching TV the second I get home from work. I have been groggy 24/7 since I was 5, before then I felt like I was alive. I think that since certain symptoms of autism get worse over the years, I was maybe more normal when I was still a toddler but degenerated. Heck, It seems female aspergians seem to not suffer from the special interest and negative symtpoms for some reason, their mental abilities seem intact! They are just "quirky", and once they get over their meltdowns and some issues with sensation, they can get a good career etc. But male aspergians are predisposed to becoming like me!

I feel the ages from 0-22 when I got so caught up in special interests I lost all my drive to live life. Learning new languages, trying sports, etc. impossible, I have ZERO motivation for my entire life. My special interest stuff was drug like, I did not ever truly enjoy it but was drawn to collect trivia like a drug addict and had meltdowns over my obsession with it, there was no true motivation there. What launched me into my greatest depression during my young adult years was coming to terms with the fact I was no genius at all like all the adults kept saying.....