What is an autism trait that everyone on the spectrum has?

[Answered on Quora.com by Kenneth Childers]

Some of the other answers [on Quora] disingenuously suggest that autistics don’t have any commonalities with other autistics, but I think there are some near-universal trends. They don’t all occur all the time in all autistics, but almost all of them occur at least from time to time in most people with autism, as far as I can tell:

1. We tunnel. Tunneling is hard to describe, but easy to notice. I’m coming home from a basketball game with a couple of colleagues one night - I co-sponsor a special ed basketball team - and all of a sudden feel compelled to comment to my colleague and friend on a very arcane matter, to which students individual educational plans may apply in the United States. When I had been discussing this with a teacher mentor form my school district, my department head had butted in and insisted that I was wrong - no, IEPs in the US can’t be given to non special-ed students. All of a sudden, that discussion came back to me on the bus, and I felt compelled to revisit it with my friend. Figuratively and sometimes literally, other matters fall to the backdrop, and my focus zeros in on such a matter. The matter can be almost anything, from gender in Spanish language geographic terms to something awry in the school kitchen.

2. We perseverate. To perseverate is to detain oneself on something intensely. That sounds like tunneling, but it’s a bit different though arguably related. Speaking of the above-mentioned department head, she brought to my attention some months ago that 1) I hadn’t been consistent in using dollar signs when teaching math, and 2) I had been a bit loose about decimal points. In point of fact, I had varied on the dollar signs but had taken an ink pen to sharpen up decimal points in a certain lesson concerning money. Oops. She should have checked her facts before presenting these admittedly small grievances to me as fact. Notice that the facts were only half awry. Nonetheless, I bitterly and unrelentingly refused to let the conversation move on, even telling her, “I will not let this conversation move on as long as part of your perceptions are grounded in error.” When I get caught up in such matters in the moment and everything else goes to the backdrop, that’s tunneling - and I was tunneling at that moment - but my remembrances on the event over these many months has been perseveration. Now I’ve also generalized that event to a broader skepticism of that colleague’s accuracy, and I think about THAT too in all and sundry situations.

Notice that this is not really a matter of “he said, she said,” nor a matter of “everyone’s entitled to their opinion, and we just have to be understanding, Kenny.” Autistics often get accused of being insensitive to or imperceptive of the feelings and ideas of others, and people trot out cases like this as examples. But there’s really no room for, “well, I know you have your way of seeing it, and I have mine” in this case: I either sat there for half an hour with an ink pen sharpening decimal points on my assignment, or I didn’t. And you better believe I did!

3. We notice little things that allistic people miss. Excelling at seeing little details of the world really isn’t that hard, especially when one is comparing oneself to allistics. That’s because a huge amount of allistic perceptual energy doesn’t go into rock formations; water lily types; the energy efficiency of a car’s air conditioning and heating systems; the statistical validity of international wealth comparisons; and so on and so forth. Oh, no indeed - you almost can’t even meet with non-autistic people on THESE MATTERS and keep the focus on THESE MATTERS! Silly me - I’d have thought that water lily types would be a great topic at a garden club meeting as compared to neighborhood scuttlebutt and someone’s grandkids. I could even live with water lily types being on a par with the grandkids, but needless to say they aren’t, particularly in a place like the US, where people are endlessly wrapped up in their own pet issues. When you add to that the obsession neuronormals have with social interactions, body language and hierarchies - sometimes their perceptual world seems just a series of flirtations and winks and nods - it’s no wonder they don’t see many things that are right under their noses.

4. We have sensitivities, often hypersensitivities. Formal and anecdotal writing on autism is full of examples, ranging from shirt tags to noise to even Sponge Bob Square Pants episodes. My own sensitivities are not over-the-top, but they are pronounced.

Here are a few good questions spearheaded by the autism specialist Dr. Natalie Engelbrecht ND RP a couple of years ago on sensitivities. I answered each question below, so you can just look the threads over quickly or read my own answers by scrolling down:

What challenges do you face regarding visual hypersensitivity as someone with ASD, and what solutions have you found to compensate for this?

What challenges do ASDs have regarding auditory hypersensitivity, and what solutions have you found to compensate for it?

5. I think that the social awkwardness of autistics - so pronounced that in the past it was proposed that autism was a social impairment or even a form of social retardation - is both well-known and overstated. Dr. Natalie Engelbrecht ND RP and I concur that neuronormal social skills ain’t what they’re cracked up to be EVEN under the terms of neuronormal society. Conversely, autistics can be very social and socially able, and can have many friends. However, we do seem to be a bit set apart socially. We don’t seem to care for small talk or banter, and avoid them. Likewise, though we can be socially graceful and good at conversation - when we care to converse - a lot of our etiquette and pleasantries can come across as - and indeed are - the result of reading and study, not natural social instincts. Conversely, good social reflexes among neuronormals are rarely the result of formal study.