"the little professor"

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in the original diagnosis for asperger syndrome, hans asperger describes "the little professor" who continues talking and talking.

if you can, please take 3 minutes and watch this segment of the video. particularly note these timestamps:

3:02: ignores indicator to stop talking

3:59: mike wallace: "may i interrupt now"

5:02: ignores another indicator to stop talking

end at 5:15

in case you continue, you'll see she does it again at 6:31. i'm sure there are plenty more if you watch the rest of the interviews.

here is the link to click: http://youtu.be/7ukJiBZ8_4k?t=2m10s

thoughts?

Last edited by guywithAS on 09 Sep 2011, 10:00 pm, edited 4 times in total.

I was the "little professor" as a kid. I would blab away at anyone who would listen to my monolouges about my obsessions. My obsessions were always animal related and I was always gobsmacking zoo keepers with how much I knew. My school teachers hated me because I knew so much and would often try to prevent me from learning more about animals.

No, I didn't notice. This doesn't seem to be different to me than most new interviews today where the person keeps talking, however today the person keeps talking because they know if they don't they won't get a chance to represent themselves properly.

Concerning Ayn Rand, I don't agree with her views at all but I think it's important to understand her views in the context of society at the time. During Ayn Rand's time, communism was major world economic and political power and was a real threat to the west and her views seem to be based on an opposition to those communist ideals, which in practice did result in a lot of needless misery and death.

If she had been born today, her views might be completely different.

so in fact you did notice. please ignore the drama that comes with ayn rand for this thread if you can.

i also point out the "john galt speech" which is long and unedited in atlas shrugged.

and the same thing happened in the fountainhead movie with howard roark with the courtroom speech: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc7oZ9yWqO4

all of these prioritize intellectual precision and accuracy ABOVE human relationships. we saw ayn rand doing it in the interview above. and little professor syndrome is pretty much a key trait of aspergers. i know its how i have been. i want to tell the other person what i think because i am right and i know more than they do.

^

What do you think about yourself when you're like that?

that i know exactly what i'm saying and the other person doesn't really get it. why do you ask?

did you watch the video? i'd be curious as to your thoughts

I'd say that most people don't really get it because the little professor also lacks central coherence and to an NT, your story or explanation or information is told in a confusing way, even though it makes perfect sense and is in fact right.

I wish people would open their ears, so to speak. If they actually listened, really, truly listened to what was being said, they would realize how much sense it makes. Sigh....

Ayn Rand was probably an Aspie or something similar. However, to be fair she came from communist Russia, where no one had ANY rights, Ayn Rand managed to escape that, so her views were naturally affected by her living there. Lots of people think her views are terrible, but to her, they made perfect sense.

Kind of like how you're right and the other person doesn't get it, guywithAS.

This thought pattern, right here is absolutely a grand example of lack of ToM that I am getting at in the other thread.. You feel that your view is the only one that can be correct, and can't in that moment, imagine that someone else might hold a different view or have something to add to your POV.. I can be quite guilty of that sort of thing, though more unaware, until it's pointed out to me. Though, I am not the talkative type of aspie. If I am willing to debate on something it means that I know what I'm talking about and the other party better be well versed and ready in the topic. It's not often that I will I care enough to argue/debate, as I'd rather just let others be. I'm downright passionate about some topics, but not many.

About the video, as someone else said, it's not unusual for some people during interviews to completely ignore cues that the other person wants a turn to speak, however her what I noticed almost immediately was her eye contact was very poor, and shifty. My take on it was that either she has had a very hard life (embarrassingly I admit I don't really know who she is) where she was taught for survival purposes to not make eye contact with authority figures, or she does in fact have an ASD, or anxiety disorder.

i disagree. i posted the video with a request for comments on it, and ended up getting several people changing the topic, so i tried to put the thread back on track. maybe i could have been more tactful about it.

as for your second paragraph, your comment about the eye contact being very is very interesting; i hadn't picked that up.

I went to school in the '90s, and back then, autism wasn't nearly as clinically well-known as it is now. It was in seventh grade that I really started having problems ('93-'94), and was referred to my school's special ed staff, who did some tests on me and concluded I had a "pervasive developmental disorder" (autism) but that the programs they had available wouldn't really be able to help me.

But I'm digressing from the thread's original topic-- in eighth grade, my English teacher, who I'm pretty sure had no knowledge of the tests performed on me the previous year (and likely didn't know what PDD was anyway), gave me the nickname "the little professor." So I am a member of this special club that has offically been ordained with Hans Asperger's original moniker.

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Check out my IMDB page!

Hans Asperger had obtained a research paper by Ewa Ssucharewa published in 1926 in the Soviet Union in Russian and translated into German. Ewa had actually identifed autism in a group of Russian children but labelled the kids Schizoid psychopaths.

Asperger had a group of boys which he identified as having the same traits as identified by Ssucharewa. In diagnosing the children with a new condition (Aspergers) he was protecting the boys in 1944 from being sent to a concentration camp and being gassed with Zyklon B. He coined the term "little professors" to convince the Nazis the children had potential to be highly skilled in one or more areas and would contribute to the Wehrmacht.

A nasty reminder that the Nazis considered children with autism as a "life not worthy".

I am John Galt.

"The Professor" was one of my grandfather's nicknames for me when I was a child.

Sorry for the delay. I hadn't watched videos at the time. When I first responded to you I was pretty much responding to this sentence only: "all of these prioritize intellectual precision and accuracy ABOVE human relationships"

I was wondering why you thought intellectual precision was worth prioritizing over the social/conversational needs of the listener. I probably would have responded earlier but I sort of lost track of thread. Anyway...

I have now watched the first video up 5:40. Personally I think she was right to continue at 3:02. I was listening and waiting for her to elaborate, and the dumb ass interviewer tried to cut her off before she'd got around to making her point.

What I saw beyond the 4:00 mark was closer to what you were getting at. She either missed or ignored the conversational cues to stop and the content of what she had to say as she continued wasn't of much value.

I'm pretty sure I used to be like this when I was younger. Nowadays I'm much better at both recognising and responding to turn-taking cues. I'm 19 now and when I went to see counsellor for the first time a couple of months ago they actually told me that I look and act normal (not that I feel that way).

I haven't read Atlas Shrugged so I can't really comment on that. Do you recommend it?

Her eyeballs were going crazy there. When I saw it I did not consider it to be normal. I thought she had something slightly wrong with her. They just wouldn't stay still!

@cyberdad: In his defence, Ayn Rand does look a little bit like a schizoid psychopath. Maybe he was onto something.

AFAIK, Asperger totally ignored the work of Ewa Ssucharewa / Granya Sukhareva. And we can't say that «Nazis considered children with autism as a "life not worthy"»; after all, "autism" was not identified in their time.

I also think that the idea that much of the work of Asperger was with the intention of protecting the children from euthanasia much over-enphasized (in 1943, euthanasia had largely become a secret project).

since you posted interesting feedback and some others have made good comments, i'll share my larger theory.

i believe ayn rand may have been on the ASD spectrum. and that her work such as atlas shrugged and the fountainhead was about moving people up developmentally. she's probably teaching about about value. think, if you've never learned turn taking properly, you don't understand some of the critical "value sharing" dynamics that go on in human interactions properly. you're just always going your own way.

so i think ayn rands work helps move people up the spectrum. she does it in her own way, in a very harsh way which turns off a lot of people, including a lot of aspies. but for some it does reasonate and has a real impact and enables some to be more successful in business.

obviously a video interview from 50 years ago is a little hard to make a diagnosis. but it does seem fairly clear from what we know of "the little professor syndrome" that she is acting like a little professor in this video.

and i know how my brain felt like it was being rewired after i read atlas shrugged. it changed everything. i'm ASD.

please note: i am not trying to promote ayn rand in this thread. i just wanted to share what i'd noticed about her not turn taking properly.