paolo wrote:
Attention deficit. This should perhaps be called misdirection of attention.
I agree, though the misdirection can be debilitating in frequency. I was listening to an autism podcast today, and a woman was explaining how children in particular with autism have far more frequent peaks and troughs of attention cycles per minute than is usual for a neuro-typical. She went on to say that while this leads to the hyper-focus we all know about, it's opposite is a form of stimulatory blindness. When in the trough of the cycle, the autistic mind is compeletely blind to stimulus. So an example of this could be while driving home, say for the thousandth time, and you drive staright past your turn off. Why did that happen? You have done it so many times before and never missed your street. The explanation is that the mind was elsewhere, thinking about something completely unrelated.
The link to the site is here:
http://www.autismpodcast.org/index.htm
I think it was episode #56 or #57. Though all of them are interesting to some degree.
24 Jul 2007, 4:30 am
