Maybe being better at something isn’t actually a bad thing
I wanted to write this as a comment, but I don’t really want to publish it under this article that I just read. It’s not worthy of a wall of text. So I’ll write it all here and go into as much detail as I need to.
The article is here, if you want to read it. It’s about how autistic people are better at discerning patterns (and mistakes in patterns!) and at other visual tasks than the general population.
And the author describes these abilities as a deficit! Despite saying that their intention is to show that being autistic isn’t “all that bad”. Hey, they have some kind of bankable skills, look here at these research studies that treat children like wild animals (to be fair, I didn’t read the original articles they cite, but I will, out of spite).
Here’s my reply that I don’t want to post there because it’s too long and I’m too angry to condense it into a tiny package because there’s just too much to unpack and I don’t have the energy, there’s a war going on.
You have all this great research that tells you that autistic people have different skills from the general population, and yet the only explanation you have for it is via a deficit.
This is how the scientists interpret a superior ability: “They suggested that attentional disengagement leads to dysfunctional arousal regulation by the alerting system, which causes over-focused attention, and this explains enhanced visual search abilities.”
So even if we do something better than neurotypicals, it’s still due to a “dysfunction” because there’s no way you can accept that autistic people have beneficial skills for society.
Even though you never asked an autistic person what they perceive and how they observe the differences in a visual landscape.
Things that are not in a pattern jump out at me. They literally feel like they will poke me in the eye if I don’t look at them and isolate them.
Yes, I do have enhanced pattern and item recognition skills (I know this based on life experience, not ego) and I do use it to find mushrooms in the forest (where all everyone else can see are fallen leaves) and pick the ripe fruits or just choose the best thing for me out of hundreds of options.
I look at tiles and see all sorts of shapes, I can perceive the repeating pattern in most commercial tile (be it ceramic or laminate flooring — arranging tiles by pattern was a lot of fun when I had to put laminate flooring in my workshop and separated all the 15 different patterns in order to make sure they don’t repeat).
In those examples of “find the odd one out”, I could instantly see the odd one out. It moves, it jumps, it wiggles. Another autistic person that I follow once said that they perceive everything as moving, wiggling, dancing. Patterns are safe, they are clean, they repeat themselves, they are whole. So they are a lot of fun for a brain that is overstimulated by randomness.
That’s probably why I love fractals so much, they are so predictable and yet so fascinating in how they keep growing and yet staying the same. That’s also probably why I love crochet and working on basic, simple, repeating patterns. They are soothing to look at and work on. That’s also probably why autistic kids like to line things up. It’s not necessarily about control, but about silence.
Visual overstimulation feels like someone screaming in your ears. It hurts. Also, random, unexpected noises hurt. This pattern recognition stuff doesn’t just apply to visual stimuli. It applies to sounds, tastes, textures, smells, movement.
All the senses can be involved in pattern recognition and I say this from my own experience. Others can back me up. I can dance in a pattern, I can follow along with music in a pattern. Some people make music in patterns or sing or repeat things (ever heard of echolalia?) because patterns are safe, they are home. They feel good. Some of us eat the same thing every day and enjoy it just as much every day. If something changes, they melt down because the change is painful (so many things make sense now, I’ve never though about them from this perspective).
That doesn’t make my brain dysfunctional. It might actually be an evolutionary advantage and it has been used successfully throughout history by inventors of all things, both real and abstract.
So maybe you can stop with the over pathologizing language and just accept that there are people out there better than others at certain tasks. And some of them are autistic and their enhanced skills stem from their neurological differences. And that’s not a bad thing, it’s just a difference that we can accept, accommodate and learn to live with.
This wasn’t so bad, I learned something about how patterns govern my life. I mean, I’ve known this my whole life, it’s not something new, but I never put it in words.
Some of us live in patterns that grow, evolve, change as we grow older. But we still need some of the familiarity of an old pattern to unwind, relax, feel safe, welcome, home, before we go back out into the wild and unpredictable world of people who live in randomness.
I’ve got some exploring to do, I hope you do to. And if you want to explore this topic with me, please share how you live with patterns, if you do.
