STAND STILL, DAMMIT!

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I sometimes run the whole autism thing round my head trying to find some explanation for it. After a lot of coffee one night, plus an extended stim that involved playing Inaya Day's cover of Nasty Girl about twenty times, I found myself thinking this:

Human beings have evolved to notice things that move. Especially things that move in a lifelike way. Presumably, this came about because we needed to hunt living things and avoid being hunted by other living things.

Useful though this is, it limits your awareness to things that move around and look alive. Static scenery just doesn't get you pumped up. And so you miss a lot. That tree bark that cures pain. Those black rocks that burn much better than wood. Relativity.

But DNA's a jazz thing; always improvising new tunes. One of these tunes creates a brain that responds the opposite way to normal human perception. The autistic brain instinctively focuses on what stands still. Objects, ideas, order, precision... eternity. If it stands still, or evolves predictably, or has some unchanging, eternal quality to it, it lights up for us like a Christmas tree. It stimulates our emotions.

On the other hand, anything that moves is a bother. It only becomes likeable if it's constrained in some way and made predictable, like the spinning wheels that attract autistic children. And if it's dynamic - chaotic - magical, like a human personality, it's downright ugly! Like biting down on tinfoil. There's no mechanism in the brain for grasping spontaneous change.

Might this explain the poor co-ordination of many autistics? If movement does not stimulate us at an intuitive level, we have less ability to respond to it. We have to calculate the response, which takes rather more time than intuition. This might also explain our infamous lack of empathy. Human body language is made up of small, subtle movements. If your emotions respond to what stands still, rather than what moves, you feel no emotion whilst watching someone's body language.

I wonder if this is why few aspies seem to like sports. It's two hours of watching spontaneous human movement, back and forth. To NT's this feels like being tickled or stroked. To the autistic, it's like watching paint dry. And as for playing sports yourself - how the hell do you know which way the ball's going? After six years of learning kickboxing from a very talented professional fighter, I still see blows coming - apparently - from the left, which turn out to be right-handers.

Now think of the Aspie's opposite number - the mildly psychopathic jock or princess type. They famously have trouble with academic work. They wear their shoes out from the inside, clenching their toes all through math class. They are specialised the other way - hypersensitive to movement. So sensitive, in fact, that they have trouble focusing on anything that stands still, like a mathematical formula. That seems boring and ugly to them. In fact it's scary, because their warrior instincts are telling them; if it's not moving, it's not a threat. Go look somewhere else. It's not the math that freaks them out, it's the pagan fear of what might be creeping up through the jungle while they're distracted. And within that portion of the world which they see most clearly, it's true! If they stay in and study on a Friday night, somebody runs off with their lover.

So I'd like to put forward a new definition of autism - an intuitive grasp of the unchanging, and see what others think of it.

that's a rather interesting theory... But i have to shoot a few holes in it.
First, i am nediocre at math, while i was good at it in grade school, and reasonably good in junior high and high school, college level math hit me like a brick wall, i had to drop pre-calculus the first time i tried to take the class.
Second, speaking from personal experiance, i can't stand or sit still... at all. Even as i'm typing this, i keep compulsively tapping my foot. I have a friend who also has Aspergers who is far worse, when standing, he will start pacing, and when forced to sit, he starts rocking back and forth, moreso the more he gets agitated.

That said, i would like to present an alternate theory based on personal experiance. Aspergers is REALLY about seeing fixed systems. Things that may move, but repeat and do not change. It would explain why we tend to do well with routines, and get upset when they're broken. We like to settle into something that makes sense to us, and when that is broken, we do not know how to react.

I do like you idea that there is a sort of reverse aspergers syndrome though, someone needs to look into that, it might yield some interesting results..

Thanks for your reply, and the holes!

I had a very similar experience to yours - great at math at the beginning, then getting poorer and poorer at it as my schooling went on. I think this may be to do with autism-averse teachers, or that my savant skills are with words and language.

Of course, aspies stim in all kinds of ways. I didn't say we stand still. Far from it! But that stimming seems to be an aid to concentration, rather than an attempt to avoid it. And what we concentrate on tends to be things with a static or repetitive nature. Also, the stimming tends to be rep, thougetitive movement, rather than something open-ended and spontaneous.

It'd be interesting to find out what most aspies were good at at school. I'll have to check round the forums and see if anybody's done a poll.

When I was a very young kid I found mannequins to be deeply disturbing. They looked like humans but humans are always in motion whereas they stood eerily still...

I used to think the mannequins were funny, because they looked human, but stood still like statues. I hated going with my parents to buy clothes, but seeing mannequins in stores was a mildly redeeming part of the shopping trip. Now (at 25), I find mannequins slightly creepy, perhaps due to the Uncanny Valley effect.

I was always creeped out by mannequins. I think it's because I was just the right age to start watching Dr Who when the killer mannequins smashed their way out of the shop windows and started killing people!

Deep, your theory sounds very true for me!