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Summer_Twilight
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02 Nov 2022, 5:17 pm

Hi:
I wanted to bring to the attention that alarms a lot of people who often associate with people on the spectrum. I wanted to mention that our minds tend to move very fast which puzzles and frustrated those around us. As a result of our minds moving fast, we face impatience and impulsiveness. Therefore, other people are trying to either slow us down. What are your stories?

I have two grocery store examples

1. Four years before I got diagnosed with P.D.D, I went grocery shopping with my mom and sister, which I hated because she took forever as she has mental health issues. She would stare at everything in a cooler or a shelf for a long period of time before putting something in our cart. This one time, we happened to be in the opened ended freezer section and there were two older ladies giving out samples of cheese cake. Being that I loved samples at the store, I eager to get over there. Meanwhile, my mom did her thing. So, I finally got frustrated and tried to grab the cart which she also grabbed. As a result, a front corner of the cart hit the outside of the freezer. ( I will use my WP name) She was displeased and said, "Summer?"

2.My second story was about a friend, who's daughter is autistic." Anyway, I happened to call my friend while she was at a grocery store with her daughter, who wanted to go shopping for a few treats. As we were talking on the phone, my friend kept telling her, "Just a second," and "You don't run in the store." When I asked what was going on, she was trying to run in the store so pick up her items and her mom wanted them to go together incase she ran into a problem that she didn't think her daughter didn't handle.

Anyway, I could hear her starting to get frustrated in the background as she started making buzzing noises. Well in her mind she was going to go in with mom, get treats, check out and then go home to take a nap. So I had my friend put her on the phone so I could apologize to her which seemed to help.



klanka
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02 Nov 2022, 5:33 pm

I laugh before someone is finished telling a joke often, i dont know if thats normal.



Edna3362
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02 Nov 2022, 5:54 pm

I sure do for varying reasons.
Yet it's mostly emotional at the core than rational.

From compensating at "being too slow" or "being sluggish" to holding myself back into doubtfulness and passivity.

I suspect this is just another executive functions issue, just like any other cognitive and emotional dysregulation related issues do.


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temp1234
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02 Nov 2022, 6:34 pm

I think in my case I'm the one that could frustrate others. When I go to do grocery shopping, I tend to want to look at things closely and compare different options, which takes time. If choosing fruits and veggies, I closely look at them to find the best one. I can't just casually grab one and put it in the basket. However, luckily for me, my mum and sister like grocery shopping and don't mind me spending time looking at stuff. I love grocery shopping because it is an opportunity to look at and buy yummy stuff.

In general, I tend to be rather slow because I tend to look at some details that other people don't bother looking at. I thought that was an autistic trait.



Dear_one
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02 Nov 2022, 9:11 pm

If you see a multicolour LED set on amber, it is actually red and green being rapidly and alternately flashed. If you see such a light in your peripheral vision as you move your eyes, you may see an afterimage of those flashes, or you may not. This depends upon the basic frequency of your brain, like a CPU rating on a computer.



IsabellaLinton
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02 Nov 2022, 9:27 pm

I have ASD and ADHD, both quite severe.
I also have synaesthesia, meaning all my senses overlap (words and numbers have colours, etc)
My mind goes at laser speed and makes connections faster than I can pay attention.
It's why I have an auditory processing delay.
If someone speaks one sentence to me, my mind is able to go in about 30 different directions at once.
Then I forget to hear the end of their sentence.
Then their sentence clicks in but it takes me 10x longer to process what it means.
It's not because my mind is slow, but rather it's too fast and loses focus.
It's the same with speech.
Speaking is laborious and frustrating because it's always 100 paces behind my thoughts.
Speaking also needs to be linear, whereas my thoughts are like a mind map.

I do focus on details but I perceive too much information all at once.
I'll notice 100 details on each of 15 different topics when only one topic was needed.
I can't filter out what's important or not unless I happen to go down a rabbit hole.
At any given moment I'm aware of thousands of details and connections at the same time.

No, I don't appear hyper.
I appear a little spaced out, but inside my mind never stops - not even in my sleep.
I read and write books in my dreams and never fully rest as confirmed on sleep studies.



ToughDiamond
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02 Nov 2022, 10:06 pm

I usually describe myself as having a slow-but-careful brain, but I often surprise myself at how fast I can move when I feel the need to, and I'm often surprised how long a lot of people take to do fairly simple things. I seem to have a "minimum of fuss and bother" mode for when I'm in a hurry to get a task done.

I dislike shopping in crowded supermarkets so I just make a beeline for what I want, and at the checkout I whip the items out of the cart onto the conveyor belt, and off the output chute thing into my rucksack pretty smartly. I intuitively put the items in an order such that the more delicate things end up at the top of the bag so they don't get crushed.

I get the breakfast (egg and cheese on toast) ready in about 5 minutes, with the frying pan and egg-lifting tool wiped clean into the bargain, ready for the next morning.

I've always thought my high-speed, high-efficiency mode came from being in work for decades, where I was under pressure to get a lot done but didn't want to be there any longer than absolutely necessary. But I suppose it might be an ASD thing.



Summer_Twilight
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03 Nov 2022, 2:30 pm

temp1234 wrote:
I think in my case I'm the one that could frustrate others. When I go to do grocery shopping, I tend to want to look at things closely and compare different options, which takes time. If choosing fruits and veggies, I closely look at them to find the best one. I can't just casually grab one and put it in the basket. However, luckily for me, my mum and sister like grocery shopping and don't mind me spending time looking at stuff. I love grocery shopping because it is an opportunity to look at and buy yummy stuff.

In general, I tend to be rather slow because I tend to look at some details that other people don't bother looking at. I thought that was an autistic trait.


That was sounds like something that my mom would have done when I was a kid which caused me to hate going grocery shopping. As for me, I sort of pre-plan what I am going to get, make a list and then put them into the cart or the basket which I grocery shopping now. :D

I used to hear stories about a former autistic crush of mine from one of his former housemates. Apparently, he would take off and then finish grocery shopping long before his housemate even finished. Therefore, his housemate had them shop for things together because his mind would move that fast.



Dear_one
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03 Nov 2022, 2:53 pm

Do you fast shoppers read the ingredients, consider the supplier's ethics, or work out the unit pricing in your heads? I can shop quickly if I'm returning to the same place for the same item, and there are no sales to consider. I shop very very slowly if a piece of hardware I wanted is out of stock and I have to re-design a whole project without use of paper.

One time, I couldn't find a bit of hardware in my shop, and the last place I could remember seeing it was in a semi-industrial electronics supply store where I'd been looking for parts that fit it. So, I went back to the store, and my part was still sitting on the shelf after two days.

Sometimes, I spend days on comparison shopping, but then find out that I'm not using the thing, such as an electronic camera, as I had expected to, and so I have to shop again on different criteria.



DanielW
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03 Nov 2022, 3:28 pm

IN THE STORE is not the place to comparison shop, look at ingredients, and dilly dally. Figure that out at your leisure before you go. Them make your list (have al alternate product in case of out of stock items or buy a different size. Go in, get what you need and get out again.

I swear, people have forgotten how to do things :D



ToughDiamond
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03 Nov 2022, 3:56 pm

Dear_one wrote:
Do you fast shoppers read the ingredients, consider the supplier's ethics, or work out the unit pricing in your heads? I can shop quickly if I'm returning to the same place for the same item, and there are no sales to consider. I shop very very slowly if a piece of hardware I wanted is out of stock and I have to re-design a whole project without use of paper.

I have a similar tendency. A lot depends on the "store experience" - i.e. if it's a crowded, nasty supermarket then I just want to get it done and get out. If it's routine purchases, I usually know exactly what I want, from past experience. I have a somewhat restricted menu for meals which makes both the chore of preparation and the chore of shopping much quicker, until the vendor changes something, which usually annoys me. But sometimes I've noticed myself adapting to sudden changes very efficiently.

I much prefer online shopping, particularly for non-routine items, and in some ways I'm glad the high street bricks-and-mortar shops are dropping like flies. Of course it means I don't get my stuff immediately and I can't physically examine it before buying, but the "real" shops seem to have mostly reacted to their challenges by stocking less of the useful, "boring" items and more useless crap that's easier for them to "market" (yeuk!), and I got sick of going to town only to come back exhausted and empty-handed. So I'm getting used to going online by default (it took some time to break my lifelong town-centre habit), and when I do that I'm usually back in the land of time-consuming diligence. But more recently I've started to cut corners even there, because I often find my online research is inconclusive, so if I'm going to have to guess in the end anyway, I may as well just take a gamble and hope for the best without doing all that work.

I'm afraid the suppliers' ethics tends to be pretty low priority with me, except when a vendor has deeply offended my sense of justice. If I boycotted every business I had ethical concerns about, I'd buy very little. In fact I probably buy less stuff than the average consumer.



ToughDiamond
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03 Nov 2022, 3:57 pm

DanielW wrote:
IN THE STORE is not the place to comparison shop, look at ingredients, and dilly dally. Figure that out at your leisure before you go. Them make your list (have al alternate product in case of out of stock items or buy a different size. Go in, get what you need and get out again.

I swear, people have forgotten how to do things :D

My grandfather would have liked your attitude. So do I.



Dear_one
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03 Nov 2022, 4:01 pm

DanielW wrote:
IN THE STORE is not the place to comparison shop, look at ingredients, and dilly dally. Figure that out at your leisure before you go. Them make your list (have al alternate product in case of out of stock items or buy a different size. Go in, get what you need and get out again.

I swear, people have forgotten how to do things :D


Where else can you quickly find out what is in stock and what's in it? On-line information is slower and less complete. Are there actually people who learned that first?