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Message: [QUOTE="Stephen Horne, post: 1732232"] :-) Actually, getting back to being serious... There is a common misconception that Asperger syndrome is 'mild autism'. In a sense this is correct, but in terms of causes it is fairer to say that there are two types of neurological damage. One damages social intelligence and is present in autism and asperger syndrome. The other damages general intelligence and is present in mental retardation and the certain types of autism. High functioning autism and asperger syndrome are much the same thing, and some people with asperger syndrome should be considered low functioning - low general intelligence isn't the only way to become low functioning ('executive function' deficit - another prefrontal cortex issue - seems to be a major cause of the 'low functioning' label). Basically, the original Kanner autism is in fact a combination of two disorders - mental retardation plus a disorder which includes all the autism features that are not mental retardation. Because the parts of the brain involved are close together, there is a significant statistical link. MR has a cutoff point at an IQ of 'around' 70 (there is room for judgement, and additional symptoms are required beyond the low IQ), but the IQ scale is continuous. What I am getting at is that if you were to read that people with mental retardation 'find academic study difficult', you might well decide that you were retarded - after all, we all find academic study difficult at some point, after all. But you may believe that even if your IQ were actually 130. There have been attempts to create a scale of autistic symptoms. You might like to take the AQ (autistic quotient) here, for instance... [URL]http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.html[/URL] This test was one of those used in screening prior to my diagnosis. My score then was 38. I just took it again and got 42. I guess I'm feeling a bit more pessimistic these days. What would it look like to have asperger syndrome, but milder? [URL]http://www.udel.edu/bkirby/asperger/putnampaper.html[/URL] So basically, yes, some of the autistic symptoms seem an aweful lot like things that are common in normal people. Women will probably tend to think that all men have asperger syndrome. And nerds will have more autistic tendencies than other men. And many autistic symptoms can arise through other causes. But that doesn't mean Asperger syndrome doesn't exist. You can see the effects of the neural damage on a PET or MRI scanner, so it is very hard to claim it doesn't exist. BTW - the criteria used for my diagnosis are the CLASS criteria, which are stricter than the DSM IV criteria. They were very interested, for instance, in symptoms such as my headbanging when I was 3 years old. I don't think that is particularly typical of programmers. Neither is the fact that almost everyone with Asperger syndrome reaches adulthood with severe trauma related disorders due to the stress in their childhood. [/QUOTE]

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