[links.Autism Spectrum]

[wispfox]

Via conuly, Girls' autism 'under-diagnosed'.

"Hyperactivity, and interests in technical hobbies have been seen as characteristics of the disorder.

But Christopher Gillberg, of the National Centre of Autism Studies, said girls were often passive and collected information on people, not things."


*pauses*


"collected information on people, not things." A-yup. My fascination, once I was in school and saw the need, was with people, and social interaction and trying to understand why the hell people did the things often very strange things they did. My fascination is with minds and social interaction and such, not machines.

I'm an awful lot less likely to be watching from the outside now, although sometimes I still do. Almost certainly due to the large number of people I know now whose behavior makes more sense to me, so is less likely to cause me to be distant while trying to figure things out. Instead, my investigations into friends' minds are part of my interaction with them.

Heh.

Comments

[griffen.livejournal.com]

*laugh* Oh god. When I was in high school, I had a dossier on all the people I was interested in. I kept notes of their names (first, middle, last), best friends, class schedules, phone numbers, addresses - I probably would have looked like a Columbine-in-the-making if anyone had ever got hold of my notebook!

[ayalanya.livejournal.com]

fascinating! i actually tend to find myself wanting to collect information on both people and things, and sometimes much more interested in things, but then i think i'm slightly more male-minded than female-minded.

[rosefox]

I've often wanted a Farleyfile (cf. Heinlein's Double Star) but have always been too lazy to compile one. *) My low-effort equivalent is that before I go to meet anyone I don't know well, I look up that person's LJ and read through the last twenty or thirty entries.

[drwex]

My first serious g/f and I got together in part because I called her a "closet autist" - not to her face, but in a context I thought was confidential. However, the remark leaked out to her, she took umbrage.

What can I say - the universe is kind, and I talk fast. Story details on request.

Re: obsessively collecting

[wolfieboy.livejournal.com]

So, there are studies that show I might've had girls' autism? Fascinating.

I've always found people much more interesting than computers or other things. Ultimately, computers are always predictable. That's boring. People on the other hand, are black boxes. You put an input in and the output that you get out could be virtually anything. That is so much more interesting and wonderful.

It saw all these people that seemed to be able to socially interact and wondered how it was done. I observed the people that did it effortlessly, and those that struggled; those that were able to flow from group to group and those focus on one or two groups only. I thought that if I observed enough, collected enough behaviours, I could finally see what it was that I was missing in terms of social interactions. I occasionally stumbled across rules that would work but I never found how to -really- do it. I did study all the Judith Martin books that I could. Those were rules that I could actually follow. It's also much better to violate rules by choice rather than through ignorance. I am still learning and observing and have bundles of rules that work sometimes and other times I have to fall back on being cute and cuddly.