Sunday 3 January 2010

Scales on the Autistic Spectrum and beyond.....

It is commonly said that Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Alan Turing and Glenn Gould had AS. Fictional characters I have seen Asperger traits include Roy Cropper (A character from Coronation Street), Leonard, the oldest paperboy in Bolton portrayed by Peter Kay in that Peter Kay thing in January 2000, a character from the 1990 Christmas special of "One Foot in the grave" and the Lisbeth Salander character in Stieg Larsson's "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo".

I have devised a theory regarding the Autistic Spectrum and beyond. Those who are on the severe or extreme end of the AS scale are verging towards HFA. I don't believe that there is any such thing as having "mild" AS or "mild" Autism, just varying degrees. I do believe though, that there is varying degrees of NT-ness in NT's. Those in the middle are average, conventional, NT's, whereas on one end of the NT scale you get people verging towards AS.

Along with people from Einstein to Gould allegedly having full-blown AS, and the fictional characters listed above, other famous people I remember, or have read about over the years, who I can see AS traits in, are the late twins Norris and Ross McWhirter, who founded and edited the Guinness Book of Records, Patrick Moore, the sky at night presenter, the late Brian Clough, with his repetitiveness, calling everyone "Young man" and wearing the same green jumper almost everywhere he went, and his outspokenness, the late MP's Robin Cook, Donald Dewar and Enoch Powell, the late Prime Minister Sir Edward Heath, and Bill Gates, the IBM founder. As a coincidence, most of the late individuals mentioned above died in the noughties, four of them within sixteen months of each other (McWhirter, Clough, Heath and Cook).

However, I don't think any of them had AS. They had symptoms, and were, or are, at one end of the NT scale, but not enough to be fully diagnosed. Therefore, they are still NT's, though with Cloughie, you could argue he was also on the other end of the NT scale. He was definitely a mass of contradictions. At the other end of scale? Puzzled? Well, in my evaluation, those at the other end of the NT scale are heading towards Narcissism, as I believe there are extreme NT's. Indeed, some NT's are certainly self-obsessed. They are extremely fanatical about themselves and their image so much that they are almost narcissistic.

Both Aspies and extreme NT's can, and narcissists are, obsessed with their own lives and their own worlds, but for entirely different reasons.....

3 Comments:

Blogger Adelaide Dupont said...

Very interesting and very true.

There have been some interesting suggestions, recently, for example that Tiger Woods and John Edwards could be on the autistic spectrum.

4 January 2010 at 06:54  
Blogger AS-4-L said...

You can't deny that Tiger Woods likes a little variety ;)

6 January 2010 at 17:39  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

absoultley it's ok to have a variety
I have aspergers and I like variety.
Life would suck if there was no variety,novelty, I disagree that tiger and
john edwards is Autistic. Tiger and john
chose to cheat one thier wifes beacuse they
can, and its a human emotion perhaps
primate behavior.

30 January 2010 at 04:10  

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home