posted on Wednesday, March 29, 2006 6:10 AM
by
Endie
Yay.. I am special!
My mum always said I wasn't different, just special...
Every week or so, someone sends round one of those quiz things at work, usually the BBC website ones assessing aptitude at various subjects. This week was a questionnaire assessing tendencies towards autistic behaviour, originally printed in, to give the full citation, the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 31, 5-17 (2001), and based on work at Cambridge in 1998. You can find it at Wired.
The article presented this as "are you a geek or autistic". I was pretty certain that I would rate towards geek, towards the lower end of the scale. The average control-group score was 16.4. Eighty percent of those already diagnosed with autism or behavioural disorders scored over 32. I scored 36.
36?!?
Of course, the idea that there was a binary opposition between geeky and autisticic behaviour patterns was a false one. I see the traits that boosted my points score as being extremely useful in my job, allowing me - as they do - to hold large state machines and call stacks in my head, so long as nobody manages to hammer their way into my consciousness with a question about something. And the idea that out-3-nights-every-week-minimum, social butterfly narcissist Endie is autistic is a moderately funny one. But the bits of it I do, I do well.