You’re saying there are no people who can consistently report how their brains work? This doesn’t seem correct. There’s no question that most people can’t, but whenever I write down how I think my brain is working, I always find that the model I came up with is either directly support by academic literature, or else is consistent with the existent academic literature. (And thus is what we would assume to be correct based on science.)

And, similarly, it clearly isn’t just me that can do this. Anyone who has ever read Temple Grandin’s book Animals in Translation should be able to recognize that this is a real ability that some people have.

You can’t just ask people things because people cannot be trusted. Not even autistic people. Self reported experiences are notoriously inaccurate. People try and figure themselves out, why they do things, what it all means. The second you begin thinking about yourself is the second you can no longer be trusted to accurately self report the nature of your experience.

But you know, oddly enough, it probably WAS talking to autistic people who gave them this idea, its just that then, they had to find evidence.

1) Autistic Symphony by Alan Griswold http://autisticsymphony.com/

2) The Neanderthal theory by Leif Ekblad http://www.rdos.net/eng/asperger.htm

3) Autism and the Four-pole Hypothesis by Andrew Lehman http://www.neoteny.org/2009/01/20/autism-and-the-four-pole-hypothesis/
http://www.originsofautism.com/ http://www.neoteny.org/ http://sexualselection.org/

4) A Topological Theory of Autism by Gregory B. Yates http://www.autismtheory.org/topotheory.html

Now I can restore ASD to the list of suspects after misguidedly ruling it out on the grounds of its supposed attenuation of empathy. Self-diagnosis appears to be the only option for ASD under the NHS.

I do not know if its devastating (for many it may be), but it’s sure not easy to be hypersensitive or autistic or whatever you want to call it. And it’s even harder when people take your withdrawal (which is for pure survival) for all the wrong reasons.

Excellent rant. Wow. You said it all so well, and with just the right amount of outrage.

I’ve just published a rant on my blog largely inspired by this post (and my bad temper…). I haven’t figured out how do ‘backlinks’ yet (I think that’s what they’re called) and wanted to let you know you’d been referred to. Here’s the link: http://paris-ankara.blogspot.com/2010/04/boys-will-be-boys-will-be-autistic-my.html
Needless to say, I’d much value your feedback!

I have seen bits and pieces of this theory floating around the autist blogosphere for many months, but this is the first research article I have seen that takes a scientific approach to the idea–whatever that is worth; I know opinions on science vary, especially on NT approaches to science. I can’t find any better description of my fear responses that I apparently started to exhibit in infancy in reaction to any but a very narrow set of stimuli, as well as my rather deep attachment to the intensity of my sensory and emotional experiences right up to the point where they pass the limit into pain. Sometimes I can stay with them a little beyond, sort of surfing an intense pleasure/pain circuit, but there is still a limit beyond which I cannot function.

Sociability is so fraught with emotional traps and overloaded with symbolic meaning that I feel paranoid sometimes, as though I am purposefully, or rather obsessively, reading too much into things when I have a personal stake in what they “really” mean, while remaining completely obtuse to those interactions that hold no consequences for me that I know of.

I still am not sure whether I seem like I am on the spectrum because I have become very sensitive to stimuli as a PTSD reaction or whether my PTSD reactions are so severe because I am hypersensitive to stimuli and therefore more easily and more deeply traumatized than another may have been in my place. I tend to think the latter when I recall stories my mother told about my behavior as a very young child, before the really major traumas occurred. Not that minor ones didn’t occur everyday–they did.

Anyway. Thought I’d share what this post brought up for me. I will go and read the article now. I’ll just bleep out the more ridiculous remarks. Thanks for posting this.