First
Failure to develop friendships or seek shared enjoyments with others, lack of social or emotional reciprocity, impaired nonverbal behaviors such as eye contact, facial expression, posture, and gesture.
Engages in one-sided, long-winded speech about a favorite topic while misunderstanding or not recognizing the listener’s feelings or reactions, such as a need for privacy or haste to leave. May appear as disregard for other people’s feelings or insensitive. Displays selective mutism, speaking not at all to most people and excessively to specific people.
Second
Behavior, interests, or activities that are restricted and repetitive and are sometimes abnormally intense or focused. Sticks to inflexible routines, moves in stereotyped and repetitive ways, or preoccupy themselves with parts of objects.
Pursuit of specific and narrow areas of interest.
Repetitive motor behavior such as complex whole-body movement.
Third
Speech abnormalities include verbosity, abrupt transitions, literal interpretations and miscomprehension of nuance, use of metaphor meaningful only to the speaker, auditory perception deficits, unusually pedantic, formal or idiosyncratic speech.
Poor prosody, tangential and circumstantial speech, and marked verbosity. Speech may be unusually fast, jerky, or loud. Speech may convey a sense of incoherence; including monologues about topics that bore the listener, fail to provide context for comments, or fails to suppress internal thoughts. Fails to monitor whether the listener is interested or engaged in the conversation. The conclusion or point may never be made and attempts to elaborate on the speech by the listener is often unsuccessful.
Has an unusually sophisticated vocabulary and tend to use language literally.
Fourth
Demonstrates enhanced perception of small changes in patterns such as arrangements of objects or well-known images.
Poor coordination, have an odd or bouncy gait or posture, poor handwriting, or problems with visual-motor integration. Problems with proprioception (sensation of body position) on measures of apraxia (motor planning disorder), balance, tandem gait, and finger-thumb apposition.
Conclusions
Must do more reading.
I guess I can see some of it. But I wouldn’t read too deeply into it. You are you. A uniquely gifted, talented, quirky individual… who I’m proud to call my friend 🙂
I agree really. I think it’s more a category or classification that helps Rita understand why I do things the way I do. With this sort of thing, Rita can find books on the subject and on how to cope. Less of a “WTF did he say that for!” and more “Honey, do it this way.” or a quick nudge 🙂
We had that last night. Someone in the drum class said they were rehearsing Thursday to be a member of a “flash crowd” at an upcoming event. I know what a flash mob is in relation to where the term was coined (Larry Niven’s 1973 story, Flash Crowd; transfer booths had been invented so when a news story broke, people would hop into their booths from around the world and converge on the event causing a “flash crowd”). So I was being literal “that’s not really how a ‘flash crowd’ works; you don’t rehearse” 🙂 but instead of silently being upset, she gave me a nudge and said to stop (being so literal).
So at least she has an understanding of my behavior and that it’s the way I am. And me being aware of it might help me stifle some of it from time to time. We’ll see how it works as we move forward.