The Passionate Mind: How People with Autism Learn

difficulty getting, being and staying organised and yet I need obsessively to organise things my way!

She states that it is only when such learning styles are not accommodated or when autism impacts on an individual’s life to the extreme that the label ‘autism spectrum disorder’ (ASD) be considered rather than ‘autism spectrum condition’ (ASC).

Whilst if you are monotropic and autistically developing, such as I am, you will be good at either thinking, or feeling, or noticing, but in serial fashion, one at a time. I can multi-task, but only if I have available attention, am interested and have energy resources within my interest tunnel. This suggests that attention and interest are partner

For many of us sensory issues are uppermost (e.g. Kern et al. 2006, 2008; Lawson 2000) whilst others do not appear to suffer with sensory discord (e.g. Prince-Hughes 2002).

Without interest, Dewey stated, attention and connections to learning not only are less available, but individuals lack the needed perceptions to stay motivated, and their needs, as well as their relationships and values, cannot develop to their fullest potential.

Mesibov, Shea and Schopler (2000) agreed with this, but they added ‘the inability to organise oneself’ to the array of difficulties experienced by us as the AS population.

childhood disintegrative disorder

however, this may vary from individual to individual and even vary immensely for the same individual. It is this pattern of uneven skill and variation of skills that is so complementary to an assessment of AS.

Some of us are echolalic and use idiosyncratic language such as pronominal reversal (reversal of personal pronouns, e.g. I and you), but we may not always do this.