Comments

Catherine,

I scored a 23 within is probably within the spread of normal data.

That was fun.

-- AnneDwyer - 08 Jul 2006

22

I memorize the license plate numbers of people I know, am fascinated by numbers, and see patterns everywhere and automatically.

Those things probably put me over the 16.4 average. The social questions kept me below 32.

-- JdFisher - 08 Jul 2006

25

I found it interesting that there was no difference in scoring between "slightly" and "strongly" responses in any question. This might be a reasonable way to score the test, but it still seems odd to me.

-- DougSundseth - 08 Jul 2006

22

But if you ask me on another day it could be drastically different.

I don't know what test there is for that.

-- SusanS - 08 Jul 2006

Susan - lol!

I've got a story about that.

Years ago I met John (Ratey) while doing an article on adult ADHD.

I was interviewing zillions of experts and they all kept saying there were two key symptoms of ADHD:

• physical hyperactivity

• attention deficits

Finally I asked Ned Hallowell, John's frien & coauthor, "Well, what if you have physical hyperactivity but your attention is OK?" (that's me)

He said, "Oh, that's bipolar."

-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Jul 2006

Simon Baron-Cohen is a serious guy, btw. This test is "real," i.e. not cooked up for a magazine....

-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Jul 2006

I got 35.

I suck at the social side of things.

-- SamanthaRawson - 08 Jul 2006

Samantha, I'm sure you excel in other ways that will benefit us all. Just want to make sure you are not bummed.

Which reminds me of the discussion a few months ago at KTM regarding the inability of autistic children to lie... Those of you with autistic children assured me it is a "bug" not a "feature" after I joked that it was a "feature".

I strongly take the point.

Yet on reflection I must say that I really love my boys who don't lie to me. I don't see them as lesser children. I see it as their way of being.

So I don't lie to them.

But because they have been slow to learn about lying naturally, through a process of trial and error, I am trying to teach them how to deal with it in other people.

I try to take it as a position of strength, that we will work from.

-- BeckyC - 09 Jul 2006

Thanks for this--it was very interesting. I agree with Doug's analysis. I got a 27 but they were almost all "slightly", not strongly. I'm definitely an introvert (Meyers-Briggs INTP) and a social klutz but I don't think I'm on the spectrum.

I found another copy of the quiz that I could print out and think about in more detail and would probably change a few answers that would all lead to a lower score. My guess is that those of you with more experience with autism are much more likely to agree to something like, "It does not upset me if my daily routine is disturbed" than I was because you are comparing yourself to someone who gets upset by a minor change to a daily routine that is rigid down to where the spoon is relative to the edge of the table.

I said "slightly disagree" because I get upset (disappointed?) if I'd planned to do something I was looking forward to and then don't get to do it. (And I definitely get grumpy if I don't get my morning caffeine.) But that's probably not what the question meant at all. I don't even have a "daily routine" in the sense of doing the same thing everything day or even doing the same thing the same way each time.

I didn't know how to respond to "I am fascinated by numbers." I enjoy mathematics and I'm a programmer so I thought I should choose "agree". However, I'm not fascinated by numbers per se or by anything like numerology.

I'm also wondering about the scoring for women like many of us here who are interested in math or science or engineering and probably feel that we are different from the female majority and from what we think that society expects of women. So we may have interpreted terms like "frequently" or "easy" as "frequently in comparison with what we were taught that women are supposed to be like."

-- SusanJ - 09 Jul 2006

My score was 28...

SusanJ, I'm an INTP too, heavy on the I side, but I really enjoy people (new people are scary though). A lot of these questions are just introvert questions. I suppose autism and introversion are correlated, but not completely... Ben is very extroverted, for example.

I'm not fascinated by numbers at all, though I remember phone numbers automatically. I forget dates, names, and yes, even certain faces.

You know what really bothered me about this test? From left to right, the answers went from strongly agree to strongly disagree. That's just so backward. I had to keep scrolling up to make sure.

Catherine, you only got an 11! That's wild!

-- CarolynJohnston - 09 Jul 2006

My score was 11.

I am very happy without structure.

But I think it's partly dependent on time. Eg "Question 13: I would rather go to a library than to a party. " Well, this is a question about the margin. I would not like to live a life where I always went to parties, but not to the library, or vice-versa. At the moment, my life is arranged so I'm pretty balanced between the two, but that's because I'm living in a city with very good library opening hours. When I was in Chester I could only get to the library at lunchtime (if I was working nearby), late nights on Thursday, or Saturday mornings, and I was feeling seriously library-deprived.

Ditto on the theatre question.

I'm surprised my score was so low though. On the social questions I was comparing myself to my mum and my brothers, who have very good social skills, and I thought that might drag my score down. I guess my complete lack of memory of birthdays and phone numbers balanced that out.

Also: 46. New situations make me anxious. - well yes, that's why I seek them out.

-- TracyW - 09 Jul 2006

Late to the party, but I had to add: I scored a 3!

I'm sure that pushes off into some other sociopathic realm.

FWIW I always test out in the Meyers-Briggs as a strong introvert -- iNTj.

-- BenCalvin - 11 Jul 2006

33

But I'm not surprised. Very high on the patterns/numbers/categories/collections side of things, strongly sucking at the social chitchat / trying to guess what people are really saying side of things. (But low on "talking about my obsessions" because that would involve talking to people and letting them inside my head.)

At my best friend's birthday party when I was 9 or so, I hid under the family's model train table for probably almost an hour.

My score would probably be higher if I weren't sufficiently aware of the "outside world" enough to have learned these things about myself already and worked on them.... which is one reason I'm not bothered by being on that end of the spectrum.

Carolyn -- re the backwards left-to-right thing, and scrolling up -- me too.

Tracy -- "would rather go to a library than a party" is a no-brainer for me. Parties are stressful; someone might come up and try to talk to me! Getting locked in a library would be my idea of an adventure, not a nightmare. Um... is this the point where I confess to saying "Booooookssssss..." whenever I'm riding in a car and we pass a library or bookstore?

It's funny... when I was a kid and first learned about autism (was there a movie in the 1970s with an autistic kid? for some reason I'm thinking Kramer vs Kramer, but I never saw it and the reviews don't mention autism), I thought I was autistic because I was always off in my own world, avoided eye contact, and thought that if I pretended that I didn't notice people were there, they would leave me alone and I wouldn't have to interact with them.

Then I figured I wasn't, because -- please excuse the uninformed stereotypes I had -- I wasn't retarded and I didn't spin plates on the floor.

Then I grew up and heard about Asperger's...

Meanwhile, because I am so introspective about my own behaviors and motivations, I have modified my behaviors so that (I think) I appear to be merely odd or dorky.

About the test itself, I found that (a) many of the questions were quite familiar to me from having taken other online personality-type tests (e.g. the M-B), (b) for many of them it was obvious what the "autistic" answer was, and (c) for some of the questions, none of the answers applied to me. For example, "When I'm reading a story, I find it difficult to work out the characters' intentions." -- my first thought was "Huh? The characters have intentions? Why would I want to figure out their intentions?" So... I guess that translates to an "I agree".

So... who knows. Maybe the test measures something else. What results does someone with HFA get?

-- GoogleMaster - 12 Jul 2006

Getting locked in a library would be my idea of an adventure, not a nightmare.

In my experience this is difficult to achieve as they come round and check.

Um... is this the point where I confess to saying "Booooookssssss..." whenever I'm riding in a car and we pass a library or bookstore?

My husband now knows if he's walking down the street with me and suddenly notices I'm not there to backtrack to the bookshops we've pased. Though he still doesn't believe me when I tell him that it's not a conscious choice on my part, instead the bookshop extends its forcefield and scoops me in.

But parties, in moderation, can be fun. Sometimes you meet people who are prepared to talk about books.

-- TracyW - 12 Jul 2006

A 3!!!

wow!!!

I am fascinated by numbers

yeah, I'm not quite sure what that means, and I didn't know how to answer (don't remember my answer now....)

I assumed he meant some kind of autistic-like fascination, like Andrew watching the ticker tape on CNBC.

But I don't know.

Susan J's point that those of us who live with autistic people probably read these questions differently is important, I think.

-- CatherineJohnson - 12 Jul 2006

I answered I am fascinated by numbers as a NO, because I'm not.

I am interested in what they indicate (economic statistics, for example) but I really don't care about numbers as a system at all.

-- BenCalvin - 13 Jul 2006

I suppose there could be an argument that the test is one of how you read the questions rather than how you feel. To take Ben's example, I answered that same question as a yes, in part because I don't really abstract the symbol from the thing it symbolizes in the context of the question. (I mean, I'm not fascinated that a "3" is rounded on one side and spiky on the other, which could certainly be one meaning of such a question.)

If autistics read such questions in a systematically different way, it should be possible to write a test to discover this.

I suspect I've dropped off the meta-analysis cliff here, but when dealing with questions of mental function, there's not much of a guardrail at that cliff's edge.

-- DougSundseth - 13 Jul 2006

My definition of I am fascinated by numbers is: Do you enjoy exercises like the one below for their own sake? If so, we can mark you down as a yes. Me, I'm a definite no.

http://www.olimu.com/Notes/BorisZeldovichTriangle.htm

Boris Zeldovich's Triangle

——————

This one, courtesy of Boris Zeldovich. Boris credits it to V.I. Arnold, author of this fine Francophobic rant. Here’s the puzzle.

For ten years a teacher exposed his student to the following test:

A right-angle triangle has hypoteneuse 10 inches, and the height drawn from the right angle to the hypoteneuse is 6 inches. Find the area of this right-angle triangle.

For 10 years the students satisfied their teacher with the following answer: Area = (10*6)/2 = 30 square inches.

Then at the eleventh year a smart student came, who could not solve this problem. Why?

Boris adds: “In Arnold's presentation the puzzle is somewhat politically incorrect. The teacher and students are American, and the smart kid is Russian.” No comment.

———————————————

Solution

Data (i.e. the things given): Angle at A a right angle, AP perpendicular to BC, BC = 10, AP = 6.

Quaesita (the things sought): Area of the triangle ABC.

Naive approach (wrong): Area of a triangle is half the base times the height. In this case the base is 10, the height is 6, so the area is 30 square units.

Smart approach (correct): Construct a circle with BC as diameter. Plainly the radius of this circle is 5.

By a well-known theorem of plane geometry (Euclid's III.31), if the angle at A is to be a right angle, then A must lie on the perimeter of the circle.

It follows that the maximum possible value of AP is 5.

The triangle as given is therefore an impossible object, and the problem has no solution.

-- BenCalvin - 13 Jul 2006

To me, at least, the interesting parts of that problem aren't the numbers, but rather the clever way that the student proved that the construction is impossible. I see this as related in some way to what your post was referring to: the interest is in what the numbers indicate.

I think I understand you to be saying that you aren't interested in "math in the abstract" rather than "numbers in the abstract". This strikes me as fundamentally different from the way that (for instance) a numerologist sees numbers.*

The point I was trying to make in my last comment, though, is that it might be possible to create a test in which autistic subjects would systematically read questions entirely differently from the way that a more typical subject would read the same questions. I went down this alley in part because of the odd scoring method used in the instant test. (FWIW, I don't think this test is likely to be such a test.)

As a last point, using your understanding of the meaning of the question in question (!?), I would (and using a very similar definition of my own, did) answer "yes". (Which is probably enough convolution for any one comment.)

ps. The problem and proof really are interesting to me; thank you.

*For an example of how a mathematician might have a fascination with numbers qualitatively similar in some way to that of a numerologist, see this proof that all numbers are interesting. (It's not exactly the usual such proof.)

-- DougSundseth - 13 Jul 2006

BenCalvin says:

My definition of I am fascinated by numbers is: Do you enjoy exercises like the one below for their own sake? If so, we can mark you down as a yes. Me, I'm a definite no.

Mark me down for a yes.

Also, to me, I am fascinated by numbers immediately conjures up thoughts like "Here's a number X. What are its interesting properties?" and examples like "28. Oh, that's a perfect number." or "363... a palindrome, divisible by 3, and oh hey, it's actually 3 times 11-squared.".

If you find yourself factoring phone numbers and license plate numbers, then you should probably answer yes to this question.

-- GoogleMaster - 27 Jul 2006

Also... does anyone else have "searching for equilateral triangles in Christmas tree lights and other groups of points or dots" committed to automaticity?

-- GoogleMaster - 27 Jul 2006

Catherine, you only got an 11! That's wild!

party girl

-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Jul 2006

12

Apparently, my hatred of structure trumps my hatred of chit-chat.

-- KDeRosa - 03 Aug 2006

wit and wisdom

-- CatherineJohnson - 12 Aug 2006