Smart Software

Asperger's Info

I get a lot of mail from people who think they or someone else has Aspergers (also known as high-functioning autism or pervasive development disorder). One of my first posts was on Asperger's Syndrome, but I also started a category to hold other Aspergers-related posts.

I wrote this questions and answers post so that in the future I can just direct people to it whenever I get mail. I will continually expand on this post over time.

What is Asperger's Syndrome?

There is an Asperger's FAQ that describes the Asperger's Syndrome simply and its history.

To be honest, I am not really convinced that it is a disorder, maybe perhaps a clinical description of nerdiness. I wondered sometimes if Asperger's Syndrome is the result of a breakdown in social interaction, which is why it's prevalent in nerds. Anything in a child's appearance or behavior (intelligence, unattractive appearance, poor hygiene, wrong race) that repels other children from socially interacting with him slows down the child's social development, but, at the same time, may deepen his intellectual development with more time for books and experiments. I know that I didn't fit in, because I was a late talker speaking the wrong language and also a member of the wrong race.

The best analogy I can think of is with feral children, children raised in the care of animals. These children learn to behave and live like the animals, but they typically lose the ability to acquire language after the age of five, rendering them ineffective in communicating with other humans; however, they would more likely than other people be able to survive in the wild.

Nerdy men don't have much social interaction and thus develop the ability to be alone, think independently and have more time to study, but they do often lose out in corporate politics and the social scene. Likewise, attractive women are in danger of being caught up in their own "feral" environment with other social bunnies (and single-minded male friends that promise to care for their every needs) and, thereby, stunting their own intellectual growth and self-sufficiency as can be seen in these gameshow videos [1] [2].

On the other hand, there is a lot of evidence suggesting Asperger's really is a form of autism. I have been known to rock often when I was younger; I am not sure why, maybe because it helped me concentrate. Bill Gates frequently rocks like in this antitrust video. Time also has an article drawing parallels between Gates and autistic children.

Is Asperger's Syndrome a Disease?

If the consequence of a disease is that people become smarter and actually very productive in society at the expense of optimal social interaction, is it really a disease? "Normal" people would like to think so, but many "geniuses" such as Isaac Newton and Bill Gates throughout history have been thought to have Asperger's, so this syndrome may actually be desirable. Is being "normal" while practicing mysticism and behaving irrationally to be preferred?

One reader, who has AS and also a PhD in mathematics, suspects that the field of psychology is still in its infancy with fraudulent and unscientific claims, not backed by evidence. His psychologist diagnosed him with AS after an hour long conversation with no other tests. The reader states at one time, homesexuality was determined to be a mental disease by majority vote and, therefore, could be as justification to force electroshock and hormonal treatments as happened to Alan Turing. Later, by majority vote, homosexuality was declared not to be a disease. With regard to Asperger Syndrome's, there is also scant evidence of its relation to autism and little understanding of how the brain works in both Asperger's and autism cases.

Another reader mentioned Aspies for Freedom (www.aspiesforfreedom.org), a civil rights organization that is dedicated to having the voices of autistics heard. Autistics, he says, are routinely murdered around the world, are required to be reported in some states, may be treated with aversives (electric shocks, sensory deprivation, pinching, etc). He mentions a cure movement for autism just as there was for downs syndrome, which has led 90% of downs fetuses being aborted. This reminds me of an earlier MSNBC article "Would you have allowed Bill Gates to be born" that talks about prenatal genetic testing and abortion.

Here's what to do if you think...

...I may have Asperger's.

There is a site called OASIS "Online Asperger Syndrome Information and Support." There's also numerous other sites that can be found on the Google search results for Asperger's Syndrome.

Mark Segar wrote an insightful guide "Coping: A Survival Guide For People with Asperger Syndrome." The link is unstable, so I have include a few more: [1] [2] [3] There is also a wikibook version called "a survival guide for people on the autistic spectrum. Mark personally believes that "'Autistic people have to understand scientifically what non autistic people already understand instinctively."

Daniel has a blog dedicated to Asperger's.

...my child has Asperger's.

There is a book by OASIS called, "The OASIS Guide to Asperger Syndrome: Completely Revised and Updated: Advice, Support, Insight, and Inspiration," that mostly deals with children. Here's the table of contents:

PART ONE: Asperger Syndrome

Chapter 1: What Is Asperger Syndrome?
Chapter 2: What Asperger Syndrome Looks Like
Chapter 3: How Asperger Syndrome Is Diagnosed

PART TWO: Taking Control

Chapter 4: Can This Be My Child?
Chapter 5: Building the Foundation for Success
Chapter 6: Interventions and Therapies
Chapter 7: Medication
Chapter 8: Special Education Basics

PART THREE: The Whole Child

Chapter 9: Your Child's Emotional Life
Chapter 10: Your Child in the Social Realm
Chapter 11: Your Child in School
Chapter 12: Growing Up

... my boyfriend may have Asperger's.

Apparently, you are attracted to men with Asperger's Syndrome. Email me your photo, and I will let you know if should dump your current boyfriend and go with a better option.

... I am a woman with Asperger's.

Send me your photo, and I will let you know if there is a boyfriend out there for you.

The incidence of Asperger's in women is an order of magnitude lower in women than in men, but I have been contacted by a few rare women such as Megan, who started an online comic strip about Asperger's Syndrome.

Do Autistic Savants Really Exist?

I used to think not in many of my earlier posts, but some readers got offended, so some of the posts that I have written may not actually exist anymore. Many of the date and math tricks and other memorization feats are actually easy to perform.

There are some experiments that showed that normal people can be temporarily made autistic by connecting an electrode to their head. When they electrode is turned on, they have been able to quickly and accurately calculate the number of several dozen jelly beans on a table, a feat which they were unable to repeat when the electrode was off.

The explanation was that when the electrode was turned on, natural connections between neurons were disabled, thereby inhibiting the brain's natural tendency to cluster objects together. When the objects are not cluster, it becomes easier to see the beens as discrete objects that can be easily counted. In autistic people, the connections between many neurons are always off.

The loss of clustering ability means that autistic people cannot easily make sense of chaotic events. They miss the big picture and are perpetually attempting to systematize the world in order to compensate for this--a valuable trait for the budding scientist.

This is supposedly why autistic savants are sometimes able to memorize great detail like this artist who recreated Rome from memory.

Introversion

Steve Pavlina is a former software entrepreneur, turned self-help guru. He recently wrote about his self-induced transformation from an extrovert to an introvert.

Since many developers are introverts, I point to these recent couple of articles of his:

• How to Go From Introvert to Extrovert
• Improving Social Skills

 

Savants in Slashdot

Slashdot has an post on a interview with Daniel Tammet, an autistic savant who explains his genius abilities. I was not really impressed with some of the claims, especially since these abilities can probably be mastered by other people with a lot of time in their hands, which autistic people tend to have.

Whenever I read about impressive feats, I always asked myself if there was any way I would be able to accomplish that. In many cases, people aren’t born with the ability to, say, calculate the day of the week an arbitrary date falls into. Some people see this as a divine gift. My view is that a seven-day week, 12 month calendar of an earth-year is a random human invention, that none of us should have evolved a skill to calculate, especially correcting for leap years on every 4th, 100th and 400th year. These are skills, that have to be learned. I actually figured out the date trick in college and impressed quite a number of people with it. I wrote up the trick in an earlier post about idiot savants, but killed the post because some people were apparently offended by my unspoken suggestion that idiot savants were indeed idiots.

• Daniel speaks seven languages. While that’s not a very common skill, I have known a few people who know that many languages. My college roommate, David Carlton, knew eight languages. That skill is also more common in Europe.
• He can calculate cube roots faster than a calculator. Given that there are only 100 cubes under a million, that’s not an especially difficult skill to acquire.
• He knows over 20,000 digits of pi. I have memorized 100 digits of pi in just two minutes back in my college days just by grouping the digits in five and singing it repeatedly. I supposed, with over 200 times the effort and time, I might be able to match his feat, but it would not be a valuable use of my time. Apparently, Daniel sings it too backwards and forwards.
• He multiplies multidigit numbers very quickly. After thinking about this, I wondered about the impact of learning one’s multiplication tables up to 100. It’s, of course, 10,000 associations to learn, but a lot of it is redundant.

On the other hand, I will allow for the fact that he may have an exceptional memory, which can make these feats a lot easier for him than the ordinary person. This could be the result of a rewiring of the brain during fetal development that has lead to his autism; or it could be the strengthening of one portion of brain to compensate for the weaknesses in the other, the way a blind person develops an acute sense of touch and hearing, or a foreign-born student excels in math and science, but can’t read functionally in a non-native language.

These tricks have redeeming value, a sense of worth, for people, who are otherwise disabled, and their families. In this particular case, Daniel can’t drive a car or tell right from left. He gets to appear on Letterman and have Discovery channel special based on him. He garners more respect from friends and family. Considering that one-third of Americans presently have some disability and all of us will be partially disabled if we live long enough, something like this reaffirms our dignity even if we may not be very productive and are dependent on others. With my memory, learning ability, and energy levels much less than ten years ago, I personally feel my options becoming more limited as I age.

Lastly, while I am skeptical that Daniel’s abilities can’t be taught to others with time and effort, I do applaud them as they are still rare and astonishing.

Socially Clueless

Sometimes in social situations, I feel totally clueless—like an idiot, surrounded by masses of people, who clearly understand something that I don’t.

Professional sports.

Next week is the Superbowl. More people will be watching this event than any other televised show, and advertisers are going to use up their marketing budget to reach these viewers. Maybe, I might tune in myself merely to watch some of the commercials.

I can’t figure out why people talk about and watch sports so much. Why are people so invested in their local teams and players? It doesn’t seem to be educational or humorous. I went to a few baseball games out of curiosity and it was somewhat interesting and suspenseful, but I could not understand why people would buy season tickets. When I am at the stadium, my mind keeps thinking about the abundance of food being sold.

One theory that I have is that people identify with the team, and the continuous coverage from the local press creates local celebrities that people can learn and talk about. (You see this in the way people describe their team. When the home team wins, fan’s usually say “we won,” although when the teams loses, fans say “they lost.”)

I used to watch and enjoy the Olympics, when I was younger, but the Olympic Games feels very different from professional sports. Gymnastics and figure-skating are pure eye candy. In other sports such as track and field, there’s a sense of awe in that athletes have maxed out the human potential in their respective sports, and that no average person can ever expect to match the achievements of Olympians, who dedicate hours every day for years to their discipline. Also, the notion that achievements of the athletes reflects in some way to those of their nation probably has a stronger basis in the Olympics than in professional sports.

Drinking.

I was a non-drinker until I was 26 years old; even then, my reasons for drinking was to eliminate awkwardness and later to ease conversation. It’s only recently that I have taken to drinking a small cup of alcohol on a regular basis for reported health benefits, such as mental clarity (true!) and reduced risk of strokes and heart disease.

While I do enjoy expensive food cooked in wine, I never actually took a liking to alcohol, especially beer, which seems strikingly bland. I just don’t understand the popular attraction to wine and beer or how anyone could actually become addicted to it.

In my MBA program, there was an event every Thursday night called Beer Bust in the campus yard, in which students could drink free beer and talk. I could not understand the allure of this event, just drinking and chatting. I couldn’t understand if this event was enjoyment in itself, or does it have a function like relieving stress, networking, or improving communication skills?

Clubs.

My brother recently asked me if I ever went to any clubs. I told him “no,” except for the three times I was invited by friends. He looked quite surprise; oh, I could tell that our lives were quite different. I know that he goes to clubs on a regular basis. That’s why he works as an investment banker in Wall Street, and I’m a computer programmer.

I don’t understand clubs. They are always so loud and noisy that I am surprised that other people can actually hear or speak to everyone else; perhaps, there’s an adjustment stage over time one must go through. Even then, the people in the clubs are all random. I have been told that a club is actually a pre-coital ritual, but I doubt that is the primary function of a club; isn’t it scary that one could wake up in the morning with a stranger on a regular basis?

Enlighten me, people!

Nerd Score

Here's another personality test that I took, which indicates the percentile I placed at in my level of nerdiness... I am surprised that I scored so high, since I didn't think I scored that well (if that's the right term) in the test.

Personality Tests

You speak eloquently and have seemingly read every
book ever published. You are a fountain of
endless (sometimes useless) knowledge, and
never fail to impress at a party. What people love: You can answer almost any
question people ask, and have thus been
nicknamed Jeeves. What people hate: You constantly correct their
grammar and insult their paperbacks.

What Kind of Elitist Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Some are these personality tests are surprisingly perceptive. I took a class on Career Management in my MBA program. While aspects of the course dealt with salary negotiation, management, reviews and the like, much of the course consisted of taking over a hundred different personality tests on a wide variety of areas. I probably learned more about myself in those three months than at any other time since childhood.

While there are flaws in asking qualitative questions and assigning numeric values to responses because of weighting issues as well as larger issues of appropriateness, these tests do have a certain validity to them. They cluster a population into several segments based on a few set of attributes, which can be compared and contrasted with each other. This is what marketing people supposedly do, by the way. Members of each cluster are interviewed to expose more similarities within clusters and differences between clusters. This allows tests to be predictive and explanatory based on empirical and historical data--similar to collaborative filtering techniques one finds at Amazon, which refers customers to books purchased by other like-minded buyers

For example, some tests, like the Myers Brigg test (which declared me to be a borderline INTJ/INTP) can conclude what one's ideal job should be. (I must say that a personality test that I was forced to take in high school predicted that I would drop out of college, and stated that my ideal job would be a bus driver. It looks like a missed my true calling.)

 

If I were smarter,

If I were smarter, what would I be doing? I had a roommate, David Carlton, in my first year at Harvard, who studied mathematics and computer science just like me, except he seemed much smarter--a strict superset, in fact. He took the silver or bronze medal at the International Mathematics Olympiad; his best friend, Jordan Ellenberg, took the gold and also won first place at the Putnam math competition. I think he graduated summa cum laude at Harvard. He was always taking more advanced classes and one or more steps ahead of me. Check out one of his posts on sci.math.research. He was a fan of Go, whereas I preferred chess; one difference is that computers can beat people at chess.

He would always look down on other classmates, who jumped into the Microsoft ship, like I did. In addition to being smart, he was very hippish. He had a beard, dressed down, walked outside on the streets in bare feet, and looked like Jesus Christ. He still looks like Jesus Christ with glasses.

I recently looked at the Internet to find out what he was up to more than ten years out of college.  It looks like he did his doctoral studies at Stanford, taught at a few universities like Princeton, Berkeley and MIT, married and had a daughter.  He also seems to be a Linux Junkie, writing parts of GCC, the gnu compiler, and GDB, the gnu debugger. He then worked for a startup, Kaelia, which appears to have been bought by Sun, and it seems that he is at Sun now.

It looks like if I were smarter, I would be working on open source projects and using Linux. Now, my question is, what if I were smarter and rich?

 

My Peek at the Curious Incident

I walk through Barnes & Nobles and located the book The Curious Incident of the Dog. I read through the first several chapters (all in prime numbers) of the book, but I didn't purchase it. I probably will but I am not prepared to lose my day today. Some of the protagonist's experience resonates with me, though others seem foreign. It does feel that the author is dramatizing the effects of Asperger's to the reader. I'm sure the experiences and mental processes of each person with AS are unique.

A commenter wrote on my post,

"Can't you invest time to learn about how humans express emotions and use that to understand how other people feel and pick up social cues? You'd never achieve the social sensitivity of somebody that is hardwired with that ability, but you might become good enough to improve the quality of your everyday life."

I have tried to better understand people, but the problem is that the best way to understand people is to interact with them. It's like a spiral or negative feedback loop: Without the interpersonal skills, people tend to avoid interacting with me, and, likewise, for me, socializing is unpleasant and drains my energy (whereas for other individuals, it actually is a source of energy). In high school, I picked up a book on reading body language, that greatly aided my ability to guess people's reaction. I picked up a book on etiquette, but it never quite addressed my concerns.

I sometimes look back at horror at all the various self-inflicted embarrassing events in my life, which occur on a regular basis, but gradually decreasing in frequency as I age and become more aware of myself. My social development is behind my mental development; there as countless examples, my skipping the prom or learning to drive at 25.

Some of my eccentricities:

• Just like the protagonist, I do think very mathematically (as when I apply complexity theory to the way to way I organized my room) and solve puzzles and play board games (chess, scrabble) on a regular basis. A couple years I played three games chess blindfolded for the first time at a party (to avoid socializing); I won all three games, one of which involved a gambit, a sophisticated tactic, and a checkmate no one saw coming. Earlier in the game, someone suggested that I could see through the blindfold, so I just turned my back towards the game to answer all doubts. People were afraid to play me after that surprising win; even, I was surprised at the outcome.
• Like the protagonist, I frequently find myself trying to piece together what people are thinking, because it doesn't come naturally. I believe that I do eventually understand people, but there is certainly a delay in my understanding that prevents me from instantly reacting in a proper way.
• When I talked, it feels as if the area in my mind associated with my thought process is disconnected from that associated with communication. My thoughts are always going through a filter. Even people who have heard me talk, have suggested that this was case. I was on vacation with my parents and siblings in May, and my father pointed out that I didn't start talking until around five-years old and he was concerned. (I probably spoke years before that, but my father, being a doctor, wasn't around much, and probably didn't help much to speak French in the US) I took about five years of speech therapy from first to fifth grade.
• I am pathologically mute. I never developed this reactive reflex to maintain a conversation with other peoples. It might be because, at one time, my speech was probably not very pleasing to listen to. I have difficulty conversing in groups, but one-on-one conversations are much easier, precisely because of the clear awkwardness that would result in my non-communication. I can't (or perhaps don't) defend myself against false accusations. Some of my "friends" at Microsoft would take advantage of this.
• I am not very emotional. I am not even sure if I can deal with emotions in a proper way. Sometimes, I feel that, when I am emotional, I become a spectacle to watch.

The Curious Incident

Joel just wrote a review of the book The Curious Incident of the Dog , written from the perspective of a fifteen-year old who has Asperger's Syndrome, which is a kind of high-functioning autism that has a disproportionate presence among software developers such as myself. Those with AS tend to be very logical thinkers yet socially inept, lacking a theory of "mind" which allows one to sympathize with and understand another person. It's has a rank of 24 at Amazon; I am going to check it out.

Tests

A comment from my Asperger's post reads:

You sound like a super-genius. So why is your writing replete with the types of errors you're required to identify and fix on the GMAT? After all, you only missed one question.

Well, I have noted in a prior post that I make a number of grammatical errors in my posts, that even shock me, since I actually know a great deal about grammar. The truth is that, when I write, I pay little attention to what my fingers are typing and I do little editing.

As proof, I have been declared a grammar God.

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!


If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!


How grammatically sound are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Secondly, I don't know, if I would call myself a super-genious or even a genious. What I do know is that I score extremely well on standardized tests and that I have Asperger's. Interesting enough, I have been called both genious and retarded often in the past. On two occasions separated by years and geography, two different people have told me that I was book smart, but I lacked common sense. Perhaps, related to that, I have often found some ordinarily easy tasks hard, especially those involving repetition, and some hard tasks easy.

I do like to take IQ tests for fun as my prior posts suggests, but I don't believe these tests really measure pure intelligence. Liberal arts majors, who avoid math and science classes, tend to do poorly in IQ tests, regardless of their brilliance. Plus, the accuracy of my performance on these tests are skewed because my hobbies include taking tests in addition to solving puzzles, playing chess, and other mental pursuits.