I was shown a picture of lots of different activities at a seaside. I was asked describe what was happening in the picture. So I described the individual activities. The fact that I did that instead of describing the larger picture as ‘vacation’ is evidence that im autistic. But those people could have lived at the coast, it might just be a saturday for them … right?
So the mark of not being autistic, is to draw assumptions based on partial evidence? I joke, but also I dont really joke.
I was at a training course for work and they were talking about the difference between big picture thinking and evidence based thinking - as though those two have no crossover. They show us a picture of stone henge and tell us to say what we notice about it. I get picked first: “it looks like the grass has recently been cut”. Everyone laughs, its probably an odd thing to point out. Next person: “its summer solstice”, very good, well done. But is it?? Why? “The sky is red”. Yeah okay, I saw stonehenge and thought summer too, but nothing in the picture shows that. So I looked for evidence of summer - the grass is yellowed, parched? No its only a patch, the rest is quite dark and the stones appear to be damp, the yellow is probably some dead grass from having been cut - yes, the grass is short around the bottom of the stones and there seems to be some grass blades powdered to them, the grass has been cut, there is no evidence of it being solstice. Red sky and damp, its probably dawn.
Back to the test, the theory is that someone with autism cant assess the outer context, or the big picture, in the first instance of thought (<200ms). But actually maybe that is what is happening to me if im dismissing the context as not proven, its coming later in my processing of what I am looking at 🤔 either way, whether the test works or not, those people could just live at the coast 😤
Psychology is doing their best, it’s just that their best isn’t great compared to most other modern medicine. At this point, autism is still held by many in the same way it was in the 90s, only the negative traits, as some developmental disorder, etc. Some of the best tests compare the average answers to questions like that from previously diagnosed autistic people and non-autistic people. The way we think is so different, I’d wager studies would find this sort of difference with anything they asked, assuming they asked the question in a certain way and the autistic person gave the first answer that came to mind instead of the answer they’d give when masking. That doesn’t make the test invalid, it just proves how profoundly different the neurotypes are.
Autism wouldn’t be a disorder if everyone had the neurotype. The label is still strongly attached to the diagnosis given to people with this neurotype who also have severe mental disabilities. People still resist giving the diagnosis to high functioning adults, which muddies the field’s ability to study the neurotype and throws off all the statistics.