Autism Spectrum /keeping records e.g., weather conditions.

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Personally, I used to feel I had to record such things as weather conditions, and even odometer mileage readings during road trips. In the movie 'Rain Man' - the character meticulously recorded situations on being (even slightly) hurt in a notebook, as well as making notes of TV shows.

Have there been studies assessing why people on the spectrum feel they have to record various events in notebooks? How have Internet environments factored into recording behaviors?

One of the common traits in Aspies is
* They are good at recognizing patterns and in classifying things. They are comfortable with order, precision and categorization, which make them successful in following rules, allocating resources and solving problems.

So I think recording events in a notebook is a common trait. Each morning when I get up I record my weight down to 0.2 pound increments. I have years of recorded weight measurements. I use it to look at my weight trends and the try and pin down causes.

It has to do with looking for patterns.

In a recent movie about an autistic girl, "Please Stand By". Whenever something is important to her, she writes it down in a small notebook. In another movie about a person with some Aspie traits, "Richard Jewell", he also carries around a small notebook to record events. It is like a tether to reality.

When I was in my early teens, I had a small weather station and recorded the conditions for a few years. And I have heard of so many Aspies who did exactly the same thing.

Nowadays, for the past 12 years or so, I have kept a spreadsheet where one tab is my exercise program (primarily waking but some cycling too (where I exercised, for how long, distance, etc)), another is hygiene (my weight, when I put on clean sheets, when I got a haircut, etc), another is general for miscellaneous happenings worth noting, another is called tickler to remind me to get my anti-depressant script refilled, to get my car inspected, when my autism support group meets that month, and so on. I have kept records of what I ate when and how well I slept each night but I discontinued that when I got all this data that I never referred back to.

Yes, I think record keeping is quite an indicator of AS.

I love keeping records on myself. It started about 10 years ago with menstrual cycle diary sheets and turned into a spreadsheet with everything else I wanted to track about myself (sleep, diet, vitamins, exercise, mood, etc). I have a bunch of related chronic health issues and tracking my symptoms let me see which treatments/supplements/diet changes were helping me. It worked out well for me and I was able to heal all of my issues but I find I’m still tracking everything about myself. I haven’t decided if I want to ease off or even if I would be able to give it up. My doctor thought I was quite strange when I would bring in graphs of the relevant symptoms over time to get my point across to her.

I have an analemma on my ceiling, showing where a small mirror reflects the sun at noon each day. I've marked other dwellings with the shadows at sunset.
I am currently recording the times my furnace comes on and off, to help determine the size of a replacement unit.

I have a chart showing which pairs of days of the year have the same sunlit period.

On my first tiny computer, I wrote a program to enter the time I spent on various activities. I have never seen anything as convenient to use since.

I often tell people how our weather compares to that at a web cam it this latitude, but about 12 hours around the earth. Until mid-summer, it was near par, but since, they have almost always been far warmer. This tells me that there is no longer enough ice to direct the winds in their accustomed path. I also have pictures showing the retreat of the Banff glacier over my lifetime of visits, and of other historic events. I have a file of clippings from news and others of technical interest.

I have 13 years of receipts, that I know of, plus other batches.

If not for my mother's estate, the only physical object left from my teens is a very battered ID card. I trashed my life about every seven years, often moving on with just a few boxes of essentials, but books, drawings, and notebooks always got priority. My computer backups are better than average.

leahbear--
If I had been AFAB (instead of amab) I would be keeping the same records as you. As it is I pretty much keep records on most every thing except a menstrual cycle. And I bet your doctor did indeed look at you askance when you showed her your graphs. I'm sure she is used to asking patients "How often does this happen?" and they shrug and say "I dunno." And she asks "When did this start?" Same response.

Dear_one--
I have wanted to construct an analemma myself for 20-30 years but have never gotten around to it. I have been envisioning something in the backyard with a small obelisk and then set stones in the ground around it where the shadow point fell at noon on the 21st of each month. Maybe someday...

I have not gone so far as to track my furnace cycles however. Just paying attention to the fact that it does come on, the indoor temp rises some, and then it goes off a reasonable time later. Functioning properly in other words.

Where would we be without our records???

I had several false starts on my analemma when I found it obstructed on different dates. I finally found the only good place for my mirror, but now trees are blocking it progressively, but it is substantially complete with the shady-day gaps gone. Now the troubles are over the frost and humidity moving the mirror, and the leap year variations.

I keep lorry-loads of lists, spreadsheets, text documents of every kind. Some of them date from a long time ago. However, none of those documents is well organised. I simply can't be accurate and organised, I mean, I'm
really incapable of.

Also, I get sidetracked very easily. While I'm writing about those documents I feel the inexplicable urge to go deep into the details of "why" and "how" for each one. Knowing myself, one thing would lead to another until I would go totally out of context.

I do keep a lot of records just for the sake of it - spreadsheets make this a lot easier. The most consistent is probably the one for my weight and height but I've had a lot. I fairly often time things, such as my morning routine, or how long it takes me to walk between certain locations. And sometimes when playing a game I'll keep track of stuff like level over time. I may have also kept a record of... certain private activities.

My furnace-run tracking is getting surprisingly interesting. There are big variations when I use the outside door, use the oven, or just have a shower.

I don't keep much in terms of records myself. The only one that I track is the monthly average temperature in my hometown. Every January, I update this to see how the temperature of last year compares to the ones before. Here's the graph:

Link to the graph (Twitter)

Now I do wonder why the trend seems to upwards. It's almost as if the globe is warming or something...

Personally, I remember something "clicked" with the introduction of the calculator in the 1970s. Back then, I had made much use of mathematical averaging, and the square root function.