Saturday, July 17, 2004
Are you autistic?
Speculating that autism/Asperger's represent a continuum of related problems, the paper introduces a short autism self-assessment test that generates scores over the range from 0-50 with 50 indicating a strong possibility of autism (or Asperger's), scores above 40 a weaker chance, and increasingly lower probability as the scores decrease. The authors use this test to draw some interesting results (though as it's a sociological study, it's stuff that you kinda already knew).
There's a strong gender component as males scored much higher than females, in general. A similar relation was noted in this IHT article
"Boys are four times as likely as girls to have the disorder. This sex ratio has led one researcher, Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the autism research center at Cambridge University in England, to speculate that autism is a form of "extreme maleness," but the theory has yet to be supported by research."It's also generally known that autism and science/engineering ability (as well as encyclopedic recall) are strongly related. Enough so that the rate of autism is significantly higher in Silicon Valley. To study this relation, the authors gave the test to 16 winners of the UK Math Olympiad with the result of the "mathletes" scoring significantly higher than the control groups.
Being an engineer, having been on math teams and on Tech's trivia team (as are many of the readers of this blog), I can say that we were pretty messed up, statistically speaking. I can say that a significant percentage of the team members exhibit or exhibited Asperger's like symptoms. Further, most of the members of our high school math team who displayed autistic tendencies were all male and there's a similar gender relation on our collegiate trivia team. Then again, for most years, trivia practices have also been sausage fests, so there may be sample size problems.
But wait, the attentive reader notes, "Jody, you're an engineer, a math guy, and a trivia guy, wouldn't you be dispositioned to displaying some symptoms?" Well, anyone who knew me in high school or undergrad wouldn't ask that, they would just know. While I scored a 20 when I took the test today, I am well aware of how I would've answered in previous years and am fairly certain that I would've scored above a 40 then. I have countless stories of when I would get uncomfortable in social situations and just leave and wonder "WTF is wrong with me?" I had real difficulties feeling any sort of emotion towards people (whether positive or negative) and really preferred to do things by myself rather than with other people (like video games - ask me about StarCraft sometime). Though I was always able to logically deduce what was meant later (sometimes months later), my inability to read others' intent and some odd behavior messed up a lot of relationships.2 At the time, I self-diagnosed myself as a disorganized schizophrenic, but now view myself then as having a mild form of Asperger's (I would do some pretty bizzare things for my personal amusement and the difference between autism and schizophrenia wasn't always so clear.) Fortunately, I was also rather athletic and rather funny so I was never ostracized unlike a lot of others' would've been.3
Well, if I'm not that way now, what happened? Well, I still do some odd things, am still sometimes slow to identify emotions, still sometimes shun social situations, and still have some difficulting vocalizing thoughts4, just not anywhere near as much as I once did. I'm not certain of the exact cause of the change, but I have three speculations. 1) I just grew out of it, 2) I categorized situations and imitated what I thought was "good" or successful behaviors, and 3) I self-medicated with alcohol.
On growing out of it, many researchers have speculated that superfast brain growth leads to autism (scroll down a bit, there's not a good permalink - also draws links to Thomas Sowell and Einstein). I'm a fairly bright guy, at least from self-perception, got noticably brighter during adolescence (though most do). Indeed, as covered in this FuturePundit article, during adolescence most teenagers experience rapid brain growth and rapid drops in social abilities. Eventually growth slows and people learn how to engage socially again. Consider the number of fights you see in highschool versus the number of fights you see in college - a dramatic decline (at least for me). So I may have been just a little further down the distribution curve, for both good and ill.
On the second point, a lot of learning is just imitation- monkey see, monkey do, and what doesn't come naturally has to learned. Not just because I had a friend in highschool tell me that he was explicitly imitating people in order to act appropriately in social situations, I suspect many teenagers have to do the same. I base this speculation on my observation of the cliqueish and group-think behavior that so many teenagers engage in - each member of a group imitating the other members of the group because they don't naturally know what to do. Again, I feel that this may have just been a matter of degree for me.
On the alcohol self-medication, this is a close time correlation between when I started drinking and when my more autistic symptoms started to abate. Whether this is from killing brain cells and slowing growth, the accompanying increased social interaction, or was completely unconnected though correlated in time (like these time-correlated unconnected events), I can't say, but there definitely was a time correlation.
So anyways, that's my little pseudo-autism story. So take the test, see where you stand in the continuum, and relate any thoughts you might have.
Footnotes
1. Math competitition is not a sport, but my high school math team was quite athletic (some were quite unathletic, though). In addition to beating down every other school in the state in math competitions, we would also take on 2-4 other schools simultaneously in ultimate frisbee and win. Of course our math team also included a starting pitcher for the school baseball team, a starter on the tennis team, and a state qualifier in swimming and various other swim team members. Plus a lot of the competing schools were quite unathletic - more evidence for competitive math not being a sport.
2. There's nothing quite as frustating as realizing months after the fact that a girl was interested in you and was expecting a certain response, but since you didn't recognize this, you missed the opportunity. Later never works cause by then you've become trapped in "friend hell." This eventually led to one girl saying to me, "Jody, you're really cute, but you're really weird." The only upside to that moment was my rejoinder, which still amuses me, "Well, thank you..... and fuck you."
3. Recognition of this fact has always led me to be nicer to and more accommodating of the socially maladept.
4. Oddly, I've never had this problem with writing. Indeed I'm a somewhat prolific writer.
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