as small as a world and as large as alone, if it actually has nothing to do with sensory...

5:43pm July 3, 2014

Anonymous asked: if it actually has nothing to do with sensory stuff. and i've NEVER known what cognitive differences really meant. which leaves me zero for three goodbye never mind. help? i don't know, i mean don't actually help, this isn't your responsibility. i'm just confused. and upset by my confusion because my brain is not behaving well today.

Usually when you hear sensory stuff described, you’ll hear about hypersensitivity and sometimes hyposensitivity. But perceptual differences in autism go much deeper than that. It can be something as simple as, autistic people are overall better at finding a rectangle hidden in a complex “distracting” figure than nonautistic people are, and that tells us something about autistic perception being different at the core. There’s all sorts of little tests like that, that show serious differences between autistic and nonautistic perception, even when the autistic person themselves might not be aware of it.

Cognitive differences are differences in how we think compared to usual. Temple Grandin talks about thinking in full-scale pictures that she can use to literally do entire blueprints in her mind and then model them as running machines that she can then troubleshoot… and that’s just one way that some autistic people have massive cognitive differences from the usual. Some are to our advantage and some are not. If you have trouble with language in any form, that’s a cognitive difference. If you take things literally, that’s a cognitive difference. If you are getting confused because the things I’m talking about are too abstract and I’m not being good enough at providing concrete examples, that’s a cognitive difference.

Movement differences are more than just trouble moving your body or having motor coordination issues. The following page has the easiest chart I’ve ever seen to describe movement differences in autistic people:

http://www.iidc.indiana.edu/?pageId=468

“Marked difficulties in {starting, stopping, executing, continuing, combining, switching} may impede {postures, actions, speech, thoughts, perceptions, emotions, memories}.”

So that covers movement differences and cognitive differences as all sort of, part of the same overall pattern. I have not met an autistic person who doesn’t have any of those troubles.

The problem is that when autistic people are taught about perceptual, cognitive, and movement differences, we’re taught in a way that simplifies them and pushes them off to the side.

We’re taught that the only perceptual differences autistic people have are hypersensitivities that make us overloaded sometimes.

We’re taught that the only cognitive differences we have are, sometimes, low IQ.

We’re taught that the only motor differences we have are coordination problems.

And then we’re let on our merry way and left to believe we don’t have any of these problems, when I’ve never met an autistic person who didn’t have significant differences from the norm in all three areas. It’s just how we’ve been taught to view them that makes it confusing. It’s the way people use words.

I’m going to stop now. You seem overloaded (which would be a cognitive and possibly perceptual issue, if true) and I’m probably making it worse. You don’t have to believe anything I say, if it makes it easier. I’m just a random autistic person, my views aren’t better than yours.

Notes: