Man of Science, man of Art

I grew up as a man of science.

Both my parents worked in the sphere of science – they met when they both joined a large corporate producer of chemicals as their first jobs out of University.

My mother later retrained as a teacher – more specifically a chemistry teacher, and my dad stayed with the same chemical company his whole working life.

So, I guess it felt like science was in my blood. I enjoyed the science disciplines at school, and got good grades in all of them. Chemistry and physics made sense – they were logical and predictable. They explained how things worked, and what’s more you got to demonstrate that this was the case. That suited me.
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Wasn’t it obvious?

If you’ve read a few of my articles, you may be left thinking that I surely must have noticed that I had Asperger’s, or at least that I had something that was causing me problems in my life, and that I should thus have been able to tackle it.

Well, yes and no.

As I’ve written in other articles, I’ve always been aware that I was different. However, I had no well-defined point of reference with which to compare myself. This may sound a little odd, as like everyone else I live in and amongst other people. Don’t they provide a good point of reference?

No.

If you think about it, all you have to go on is what other people do and say, and for the most part this doesn’t give very much away. Also, everyone is unique – that’s easy to see, and frankly, clouds the view. If everyone is unique, and I can see that I’m different to everyone else, well, that makes me pretty normal, doesn’t it?

What’s much more difficult to see from simple observation is that there is an underlying neurological make-up that works in pretty much the same way across all ordinary people, and that it is this that is different in those of us with Asperger’s. You can’t see this through simple observation, and if you don’t know what you are looking for, how are you going to find it? I’m not typical, so how would I know how someone who is typical works? The only accurate point of reference I have is me.

I’ve only recently, at the age of 35 discovered just how different my make-up is compared to a typical person. I’ve discovered it by reading specifically about the differences, and then observing them in action. If it wasn’t for the work of those who have thoroughly researched Asperger’s, I wouldn’t know – they have provided me with the well-defined point of reference that has been missing all my life.

Without a point of reference to lead me in the right direction, I’ve been left for the whole of my adult life with a slight sense of something being not quite right. I’ve made many attempts over the years to figure out what was causing it, but it wasn’t until last year that I had my that explains everything moment.

My usual stock thoughts on my problem have been that I’m shy, and a little under confident. When other explanations have failed to fit, this is what I have fallen back on. Over the years I’ve thought I was suffering from depression – I have been from time to time, but this has been a symptom, not the cause. I’ve also wondered if I had an unusual mix of male and female characteristics – whether I was a lesbian in a male body if you like. It’s not difficult to see how I reached this conclusion – I am very sensitive, emotional, gentle and caring – all of which are attributes I associate more with women than men. Interestingly, my trait of feeling over-stimulated from too much visual and audible input also feels like a female characteristic too. I’m not sure why it feels that way to me, but that’s the way it’s always been.

I’ve had therapy for depression, which focussed on my lack of confidence and tried to teach me techiques to stop ruminating over things. What it didn’t do was address why I was depressed and ruminating in the first place. That remained a mystery. There was nothing that had happened in my life that appeared to account for it. Years later I received another round of therapy to tackle my anxiety. That too didn’t tackle why I might have cause to be feeling anxious, but it did provide useful techniques to help control it. In the end it also proved to be the gateway to discovering I had Asperger’s.

I can’t emphasise enough just how enlightening it was to read about Asperger’s for the first time. It really did feel like it explained everything.

I know why I’m different now. Vivre la difference!

How I was taken in by press distortion

The New Scientist has just published an interesting article by Simon Baron-Cohen about how his latest research into autism got misrepresented in the UK press earlier this year.

Simon points out that whilst the authors of the article, which appeared in The Guardian in the UK, did a reasonable job of reporting the actual facts of the study – how it measured a correlation between testosterone levels  in the amniotic fluid of 235 children who do not have autism and various character traits – the article badly misrepresented the results of the study. Simon feels that the editors of the article distorted the facts by attaching misleading and wrong headlines and by using an emotive picture. The article also linked the research to pre-natal testing for autism – something which Baron-Cohen points out wasn’t a part of the research at all.
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Small mistake, big effect

My anxiety is back once more.

Anxiety is my big co-morbid condition. I’m fairly certain these days that it has been caused and reinforced over the years because of my Asperger’s and my reaction to a world that has never quite made sense or felt predictable to me.

I’ve had a few days feeling very positive and confident, and all of a sudden it’s all evaporated again.
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Don’t answer that…

Compulsion is a key trait in my Asperger’s, and it seems to be behind one of the more annoying things that I do regularly.

I answer rhetorical questions. I can’t help doing it, and even though I usually know these days when they are meant to be rhetorical, I still feel that I have to answer.
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Touch is like tickling, and tickling is like torture

My skin is very sensitive to being touched.

More often than not, and regardless of whether I was expecting the touch or not, I react as though I’ve been tickled when my skin is touched.

If a tickly touch continues, then most of my body quickly turns into a hyper-sensitive surface, meaning that even expected tender touches can prove too much for me. When this happens, it doesn’t matter how softly or firmly you touch me, I’ll still jump, and want you to stop.

Imagine then, what it’s like when someone tickles me.
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Digging a hole the Aspie way

I’ve spent much of the last three weekends digging a big hole in our back garden, so that we can get some flat land onto which to build a garden shed.

The hard manual labour involved in the digging and disposing of five-or-so tonnes of soil and clay has had a wonderful effect on my mood, and the time spent alone doing the job has helped me to see just how some of my Asperger’s traits show themselves.

The soil I’ve dug out has been put into large plastic bags weighing something like 40kg each when full, and has then been loaded into the back of our car, fifteen bags at a time and driven to the local tip, where it has gone into the rubble skip to be recycled. I’ve so far filled, driven and emptied 120 bags-full over three weekends. Doing so has shown a very exacting repetitive aspect to my nature. After a little experimentation in the first couple of trips, the same pattern was then followed each time:

The bags were loaded three at a time into my wheel barrow (same order of loading the barrow each time), and wheeled round the house to the car. Once there, they were off-loaded in the same order and stacked into the boot and folded-down back seats of the car, once again in the same order. With the car full, I drove to the tip, and then unloaded in the same order once more, in the reverse of the order that I loaded, with the last six bags coming out via the rear door of the car rather than the boot.

Repetitive. It felt right, and it felt good – this was the way to do it. Loading and unloading in a different order simply didn’t cross my mind – I knew this was the best way to do it.

The actual act of the digging itself put me deep into the zone. I was at one with my spade and the hole I was digging. The rest of the world was a blur around me. I worked for hours at a stretch and it seemed like no time had passed. It was hard work, and I was sweaty and achey at the end of each day, yet whilst I worked I didn’t feel it. I only felt tired and sore once I’d stopped and sat down.

The exercise and alone time really did wonders for my mood. My anxiety is pretty much non-existent right now, and I have a huge sense of achievement and of peace and calm in me. I’ve written recently about not knowing if I’ve done a good job or not, well, in this case I know I’ve done it. But then again, I know we need the shed, and I know that if I don’t do the digging we won’t be getting one. I can see the results. I know I’ve done a good job this time.

And then there was the hole that needed filling…

Our garden has a couple of feet of soil, and then below that is solid orange clay. I needed to remove an old wooden gatepost from part of the area I was digging, as the new shed was going to be on top of it. After digging round the post and using my own weight to pull the post over and out of the hole, I was left with an eighteen inch deep and foot wide hole in the clay where the post and it’s concrete footings had been.

I decided that I had to fill the hole with clay. Not soil. Clay only. In my mind there was a logic to this – if I filled this big hole with soil, then when it rained it would fill with water at a different rate than if I filled it with clay. The hole was going to be near the edge below my shed, and I didn’t want my shed to subside where the hole had been.

I know it’s crazy, and doesn’t really make a lot of sense, but I spent 30 minutes separating clay from soil in the large pile that I’d dug out that hadn’t yet been bagged up. The big bits were easy, but the little bits took a while. In the end, the hole was filled. With clay.

At the time, this made perfect sense. It was the right way to do the job. Would it really have made a difference if I’d filled the hole with soil? No. It was a hole surrounded by miles of clay. The soil wouldn’t exactly go anywhere, would it?

So there you have it – a simple thing like digging a hole in the garden shows a whole range of my more Aspie-like behaviours.

Bulldozing new neural connections

The ever thought-provoking John Elder Robison has an interesting new article on his Look me in the eye blog regarding some research work that he is involved in as a test subject. The experimentation involves looking at brain plasticity, which is the ability for your brain to make connections – to learn things – and whether this ability differs between those on the Autism Spectrum and not.

I found the article, and the research behind it fascinating.

The Harvard team behind the test are finding that indeed there does seem to be a difference, with those on the Spectrum better able to make new connections than those who are typical. John uses the analogy that he has a bulldozer for clearing new paths through his brain, where as those without Autism have machetes.

This rings true for me, and coincidentally I touched upon my ability to learn new things easily in an article I wrote just a couple of days ago.

If you give me something to learn that enthuses me, then I will learn it backwards and inside out in a surprisingly short period of time. Clearly, the mechanisms that surround special interests come into play, and I will consume and store many facts about the subject very easily.

This is a skill that comes in very useful at work, where I can be given something to investigate, and I’ll do a good job of it quickly, without fuss, and with a detailed written report at the end. I may even appear excited as I dig out details, making all sorts of little noises and giggles. It’s a skill that I’m valued for at work, and it’s one that in my experience people without Asperger’s seem to lack most of the time.

The other thing that grabbed me was John’s description of how his son can learn things easily, but if he concentrates on more than one thing at a time then the data gets mixed up and confused. It’s great to hear that others experience this too.

I’ve always described this attribute of my character as being ‘linear’. I do things one at a time. I learn about one subject at a time, and I experience and express emotions one at a time too. When I tackle a new project at work, I find that it very quickly tramples on my ability to access data from the previous project. Someone will ask me me about something that I knew in detail the previous week, and I find I have to refer to notes I took to jog my memory. It’s not that I’ve forgotten the information, it’s just that I’ve lost the ability to recall it easily – the pathway to accessing it has become disrupted by my new project. Once I’ve looked it up in my notes then the information comes flooding back. This feels very like the confusion and disorganisation that John describes in his son.

It’s wonderful news that people are researching differences in thought processes like this, and that they appear to be finding real evidence of how the differences work.

If you’ve not read John’s article, go and do it now – it’s a great read.

Could I use Special Interests to my advantage?

Talking in depth about my special interests is easy. I could do it for hours, and sometimes as a proper two way conversation with someone who is interested too. Yet making small talk with other people is excruciatingly awkward for me most of the time.

I’ve had a crazy thought about this, and it stems from something my wife has said to me. She’s seen my indulgence of special interests from long before either of us knew about my Asperger’s and has observed that I can quickly learn things in areas where I had no previous knowledge.

Based on this, could I make small talk and other social interactions a special interest, and thus sort them out?

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and have decided that it’s not quite that simple. Here’s why:

My special interests are all very specific things, and whilst they have covered a multitude of different areas over the years, they usually have one of a few threads in common. They mostly involve something technical that has a well mapped out sphere of knowledge readily available, either in book or Internet form. Local history often pops it’s head in too. Thus over the years I’ve looked in depth at things like the Space Shuttle, the London Underground, maps, underground passageways and bunkers, mobile phones, Apple Macs, Linux, coal mining in the area I live in, historical photographs, the history of London Docklands. This is only a small fraction of the list, but I hope you can see that there is something of a common theme that runs throughout.

I feel like I don’t choose my special interests, more like they choose me. One often flows from another, and they have some link not just to whatever my previous focus was, but also to either my current environment, or a current technology.

My current special interest is Asperger’s itself. This in turn flowed out of learning about anxiety. If you thought that these two special interests didn’t follow the usual pattern, then you’d be right. The trigger for these has been to do with how something affects me personally, rather than anything external.

My special interests are all about the consumption of information, and from time to time the regurgitation of that information. Sometimes that is done appropriately with someone else who is interested, but often it is done in the more typical Asperger’s style of talking at someone else who isn’t really interested. As I’ve written elsewhere, this isn’t really something that I have much control over – a connection is made from a talking point to some piece of information I’ve got stored away that may only be tenuously linked, and I then feel compulsion to talk about it.

So – lets say for the sake of argument that I could persuade myself to get immersed in learning about social interaction.

If I did this I would end up with a lot of facts. I could talk about these facts  until the cows came home. Could I learn from the information I’ve read? Yes, to a degree. When I looked in depth at anxiety, I learned a few things that could help me reduce my anxiety levels, and I use them regularly. To be honest, however I learned far more about how anxiety affects people, how to treat it in general, and how it often goes hand in hand with other conditions, than I did about anything else. Facts like that are background information and less useful to me.

What I’d need to learn were techniques that I could use to interact – information that has an application rather than just being fact. I’d then need to apply it rather than just regurgitate it.

If I could do this about social interaction then I might just make some headway.

There is a catch though.

I have, in a sense, being doing just this all my life. When you don’t understand the subtle social interactions of your peers as a growing child, you find ways to make yourself fit in. As I wrote in some depth here, I observed others and stored away how they interacted in the hope that I’d be able to use what I’d seen as templates for similar situations as they arose for me. I already have a databank in my head of probably many thousands of reactions to things people say to me, that I hope are roughly suitable.

Making social interaction a special interest might gain me a few more.

I probably have the ideal opportunity now to find out. Investigating anxiety lead to investigating Asperger’s and that in turn could flow into investigating social interaction. I say could, because frankly, it hasn’t grabbed me yet in the way that my special interests usually do. I doubt the investigation of Asperger’s has run it’s course yet, and it’s unusual for me to have more than one special interest at a time.

I will keep you informed of how this develops.

What age am I?

The man in the Indian Restaurant asked my age the other night when I was picking up some take-away food.

I told him I was born in 1973. “No way!” he said, “I’d have guessed about 1965! I was born in 1973 too. Maybe it’s your hair that makes you look older?”.

I was a bit taken aback by all this. I’m suffering a little from male-pattern baldness, so I cut my hair short these days – it seems to be the best way to make it look tidy. I didn’t think it made me look older though – quite the opposite.

When I look at other people, I like to think that I can guess roughly how old they are. Indeed, upon reflection, 35 was about the right age for the man in the restaurant.

When I look at myself in the mirror, I find this much more difficult to gauge. I tend to see someone younger than me looking back at me.

I wonder if this is because I don’t feel thirty five years old?

I’ve never really felt like an adult. Adults act in a certain way – with a certain type of maturity. I suspect to a degree I judge the age of other people based on how they act as well as how they look. And as I don’t act the way a thirty five year old does, perhaps that’s why I don’t see a thirty five year old looking back at me from the mirror.

Do any of you also experience this strange sort of age dislocation?