[�]TheBananaKing [score hidden] 2 hours ago

There's a whole spectrum of severity of autism - ranging from some social

difficulties, right down to a severe disability in basic functioning.

The most common kind you'll encounter is high-functioning autism, what used to be
called Asperger's syndrome - which mainly manifests as an inability to intuitively
understand nonverbal communication such as tone of voice, facial expression and
body language, and a lot of difficulty with non-literal speech such as sarcasm,
indirect speech and the mess of little cultural conventions that oil the wheels of
normal conversation.

An autistic friend of mine described it as his magic telepathy helmet being broken,
so all the unspoken stuff sailed right over his head - and the bits left over
frequently make no sense, giving the impression that neurotypical people are
capricious and illogical and inconsistent. Autistic people often seek out well-
defined systems with rules and fixed interactions, as something predictable and
sensible in an otherwise chaotic world.

It's called 'autism' as in auto, as in self - the original perception was that
autistic people were kind of trapped in their own heads, with difficulty
communicating with the outside world.

And indeed, more severe forms of autism can lead to difficulties with spatial
relationships, with affected lacking awareness of space they occupy and can have
problems with doorways. Others can be nonverbal, and there's a general difficulty
with empathy and theory of mind; some autistic people have difficulty thinking of
other people as having their own internal mental state. For them, other people
don't give off the sense of being conscious, but are more like robots.

Other common symptoms are what nuerotypical people consider an unreasonable

interest in one particular field of expertise - and can talk about it for hours,
with no sense that their audience lacks their degree of interest. They're also
often frighteningly good at things like computer programming, with extremely good
memory for details and a lot of capacity to model a system in their heads.

Autistic people can have more difficulty coping with on-the-fly changes of plans,
can have difficulty filtering sensory input and can easily get overloaded, and
under some conditions can be prone to melt down and freak out under stress.

From a neurotypical perspective, they kind of human like a tourist, and have to
work a lot of things out manually instead of having an intuitive grasp of them -
and so are often badly overworked trying to deal with it all.

Think of the stereotypical nerd with poor social skills and over-literal
communication skills, and turn it up several notches.

- TheBananaKing post on
https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ki8mzi/eli5_what_is_autism_exac
tly_what_does_it_do/ posted and retrieved 20201222