Aspergers without NLD

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A site that someone referenced on another thread, said that 80% of folks who are Aspies also have NLD. I have found articles that discussed children who had NLD but not Aspergers, but not the inverse. Does anyone know what Aspergers without NLD would look/be like?

As far as I know I don't have NLD, but I do have Asperger's. Does it have to do with executive functions? The psych said I have no learning disabilities, just a very uneven cognitive profile and a tendency to focus on details...

An Aspie without sensory sensitivity, dyspraxia, or visual-spatial difficulty? Not too unusual. You'd still have the social and communication component, and of course the special interests. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if the learning style of that particular type of Aspie were hard to distinguish from that of verbal Kanner's people, because the lack of visual-spatial problems could easily swing the IQ gap to performance>verbal, or at least to equality.

NVLD:
--Difficulties with movement and orientation in space
--Difficulty with visual and spatial problems
--Sensory integration problems
--Social skills deficit

Anyone who had AS would probably come rather close to NVLD, but some mightn't have the full picture.

It is pretty possible to be AS without NLD, if you don't have motor issues and/or don't have visual-spatial processing issues. Even though I have some motor issues and used to have poor orientation (even for someone with a visual impairment, visual processing wouldn't count since my sight has alwways been too poor for htat), I don't have many NLD traits that are put on checklists. Fo rexample, my math was always better than reading in childhood (in fact, I was a pretty poor reader).

I was wondering if this might describe me, but you just eliminated that I think. I do have sensory sensitivities, and maybe mild dyspraxia, or at least my penmanship is crappy, and I have intermittent problems getting my pen to write the same characters that I am thinking. But I consider myself a visual-spacial learner, and all of my learning disabilities that I am aware of are verbal, not spacial; as in constant struggles with word recall, frequent decoding problems with verbal speech, problems remembering verbal instructions, consistent spelling is not a gift that I possess, and I have trouble perceiving when someone is teasing me when I cannot see their face. I have few problems with reading body language, I have excellent facial recognition, and I can practically see into people just from viewing their photograph. For instance I can often perceive whether a person is introverted or extroverted from a photo. I have always been socially inept, awkward and somewhat rigid externally, and I have always been a stimmer, but I have no problems with eye contact though I did when I was younger, but that was because I thought other people could see into me as easily as I see into other people through their eyes. I still sometimes look away from people while they are talking to me, but that is more about it being easier to visualize what they are telling me about if I am gazing off into blank space. I pick up on people's emotions through their eyes, and can get a bit of a high from people who are happy, and can feel a bit depressed from people who are in a bad mood. I have interests that function like special interests, but they aren't my only interests. Oh well.

To be clear - what specifically does NVLD represent?

'difficulties with movement and orientation in space' means CLUMSY, right?

'difficulties with visual and spatial problems' - this I'm not clear on. I get 'visual' and 'spatial' - difficulties how, and what sort of problems?

also, 'sensory integration' strikes me as an amorphously vague description.

Could someone please clarify?

I think it means stuff like being able to rotate things around in your head.
I actually have no problem doing that, I did it constantly as a kid, actually. Come to think of it, even though it wasn't a physical thing, it may actually have been a stim. I'd look at things, and in my head I'd flip them around and rotate and turn them to make them fit together with other nearby things. It's weird that with all the talk of people with AS lining things up and stuff like that, it never occurred to me that that's what I'd been doing. It all just took place completely in my brain.

I think easily in three dimensions, and can move them around, but I was told that this is considered an unusual visual skill. I also enjoy doing this with ideas, that is turning them around so they fit into other contexts. Not exactly a visual skill I guess.

I have big problems with Spatial/visual perception. It took me a really long time to learn how to read graphs. I had a lot of trouble with spatial math, geometry, slopes, etc. I also have trouble navigating.....I have a very poor sense of direction. It sometimes takes weeks of going to the same place, by the same route, before I really know how to get there......i HAVE aSPERGERS With NLD.

Thank you for explaining that. I have the opposite extreme. I can walk into a store, and feel my wife, and I know she is over in that direction, and approximately how far over she is. If she is with someone that I recognize, like our daughter, I will often feel that person standing with her. Or I can be driving in the direction of where she is waiting for me, and if she decides to walk across the street, I will feel her moving from location A to location B when I am still a mile or two away from her. It is kind of like I feel the image, or see with feeling.

I think the statistic is actually the other way around. 80% of those with NLD also have AS. NLD is caused by right hemisphere brain damage.

Is it weird to have NLD yet no difficulty in higher mathematics or higher sciences? I have difficulties in neither since I use simple 2 dimensional visual images to understand many of the concepts. I've also used simple visualization to win contests in creating aerodynamic designs for miniature cars. However, I often have difficulty with directions and putting puzzles together. The block design portion of the Stanford Binet was sheer torture.

It seems like a lot of it has to do with clinical definitions for diagnosis. How many things on the checklist, and how severe. But the checklists are pretty arbitrary, and are changing all the time. It seems like Asperger's is becoming the 'big tent' in practice, though not necessarily in formal diagnosis, with the spectrum adding 3rd and 4th dimensions. As we learn more about the neurological mechanism, new categorizations will be made.

Was there a specific combination of talents and impairments you were checking on?

A couple of examples:

I have good dexterity, am not generally clumsy, and have very good balance. But in a crowd, especially in a social situation, I bump into people a lot because of the processing time lag.

I'm pretty much ambidextrous, and don't always know when I've switched hands, but I don't make mistakes between right and left very often. But I always do a quick 'right-left' check.

Most people think my handwriting is very neat, because I learned to 'letter' in drafting class, and I've done some calligraphy. But when I write notes to myself, I can't even read it half the time. It's a different part of the brain.

Because I've adapted work-arounds for most of the impairments, I would not meet the NLD criteria at all, but definitely have aspie neurology.

I don't think that NLD owns all of the rights, as it were, to sensory sensitivity, dyspraxia, or visual-spatial difficulty. It's also a matter of degree and quality. If I actually do have AS, I don't consider myself particularly NLDish, yet there are elements of it in me, like not being able to find objects practically in front of my nose. I don't have trouble in math, but I usually have some issues with math equations with lots of symbols in them.

Part of the reason for so much overlap between NLD and AS is because they describe the same or similiar condition (i.e. brain neuroprocessing differences); it's just from a different angle.

Brains are complicated organs. There is almost nothing cut-and-dry about any of this stuff.

I would say that this isn't particularly weird. Have you read Look Me In the Eye by John Robison? He describes exactly this phenomenon, how he visualized all of the circuitry and mathematics to create some wicked good designs.

I don't know. All my life I have been very very socially inept, and have always stimmed. But I feel very very very very very driven to find ways to connect with people anyway, and I have developed all of these work arounds, and ways for intuition to compensate.

I just wondered if I might be explained as an Aspie without NLD. I am actually the opposite. There is no convenient acronym that I am aware of for someone who has a left brain weakness and strengths in the right brain. Evidentally right brain deficits are much more impairing than left brain deficits.