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0 pointsspartanatreyu3y ago0 comments

Tangential personal anecdote.

I am autistic and I have two unusual informational input traits.

I would consider myself a good reader. A sizeable chunk of my life has been dedicated to reading (and absorbing other forms of media). I can't read at a 950 wpm (that figure is immediately raising suspicions for me) but I'm still fairly fast.

The first weird thing:

I taught myself how to read and I've been reading since I was 3 years old. Apparently this freaked out my aunt when I was in her car reading street signs aloud. I still have memories of being far ahead of my peers in early childhood. School was unable to challenge me and this led to me having a lax study attitude and I became lazy. As an adult I'm still lazy, but I've been able to turn this into a strength as a programmer. (See Bill Gate's quote on "a lazy person").

For anyone else who has or knows someone who is experiencing this: HealthyGamerGG's video: "Why Gifted Kids Are Actually Special Needs" can give some great information to help understand this.

The second weird thing:

I regularly watch informational/tutorial/conference/etc... videos on youtube between 2-4 times their standard speed. I do this in the browser's console with the following command:

$('video').playbackRate = x;

Where x is a number. (e.g. 1, 3, 2.75, etc...)

After you've already typed it once, a simple press of the Up key will bring it back as if you had just typed it.

I've been told there are extensions that do this while avoiding the terminal, but this is already ingrained in my muscle memory. (F12 -> Up -> Delete -> type number -> Enter -> F12.)

Understanding sped-up talking is a skill I've built up over time. To other people around me who have tried to follow along it sounds like gibberish. I've heard of deaf developers who commonly develop this skill so that they're listening 600-800%+ standard speed but I don't think the upper range is possible on videos with different voices and accents using a wider vocabulary.

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smeej3y ago

I'm like you in both respects, but I also read as fast as the parent commenter. My operating theory had been that, since nobody had taught me to read one word at a time and subvocalize them, I just developed a different means of reading than most people, reading several lines at a time rather than individual words.

The jury is out as far as whether I'm also autistic, though. I have a great many traits in common with people who are, but I've also found a surprising amount of success reducing my more frustrating symptoms by a combination of working through early childhood trauma (which has helped my nervous system stop overreacting to stimuli) and extremely strict regulation of my diet (I have only eaten 10 foods, prepared in two ways, in the last year and a half) to reduce gut leakage and brain inflammation. (The diet is not expected to be this severe forever. Foods are reintroduced in stages. And it includes slow-cooked meat on bones and organ meats, so it's not as dire/risky a nutritional thing as it probably sounds.)

Because I had no language delay as a child and Asperger's was not a separate diagnosis until I was well into elementary school (and they certainly weren't looking for it in girls), I was never tested or diagnosed as a child. I also haven't identified enough advantages to pursuing a diagnosis as an adult to choose to pursue it now. But if healing my nervous system and my gut eliminates my symptoms (eventually), I'm inclined to think that would indicate I didn't have autism in the first place, just a cluster of overlapping symptoms.

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