My People!
I figured if I’m going to obsessively pursue my work & hobbies I might as well do them in a way that may benefit someone/something else.
I’m not formally diagnosed as Autistic but I Identify way too much with those traits and this thread.
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For what it’s worth women are way underdiagnosed and until not that long ago it was literally believed women were almost never autistic. It just looks a bit different.
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I’d like to reinforce this comment. There’s a lot of sexism (both ways… fun…) on top of general misunderstanding when it comes to psych diagnoses. If it’s something big in your life, you may want to proactively talk with your doctors about it.
I’ve got an ex who is an autistic woman. She got her diagnosis at 19 and only after going through a long stretch of depression :(
Oh by the way, to everyone reading this message: if you ever want to learn more / access to more resources / have a question you’re too embarrassed to post in the thread / want a listening ear, I’m here! PM me :)
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I have ADHD and so do a lot of my naturalist friends. Seems natural that people who have an attention to detail and a tendency to hyperfocus would gravitate towards categorizing organisms. iNat definitely hits all the sweet spots in my brain 
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Me too! If i am slow to respond it is due to some kid related issue probably, not disinterest.
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Indeed, That’s what I’ve been reading. A friend from University just had her daughter diagnosed and sent me the book “Aspergirls” and said this sounds like you. Yep, it sounded like me all right.
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i should read that, for whatever reason, while i am male, i fit better in the ‘female autism’ type (or Asperger’s but they don’t use that term any more).
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Thank you for your comments about the “circumstantial speech” and your personal experiences, @teellbee, @mira_l_b, @fffffffff, and @charlie. The “conversations” I have been party to go beyond incessant talking and digressions. (I am moderately patient with those, as long as I can understand the gist at least). There is no apparent awareness, even when asked to clarify. I think that @fffffffff’s description has given me a lot to think about, because I never thought of it being a method of sorting through one’s feelings and emotions. I browsed online a while and found quite a bit about that. Having that concept in mind will give me some more empathy, I hope. It’s interesting to me that I notice it mostly on the phone. In-person is sometimes okay (sometimes not), but text and e-mail are as good as with anyone else.
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I am absolutely horrible on the phone and also have phone phobia. Oddly zoom/Skype/etc is mostly fine but the phone? 
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This was an unexpected thresd to find!
I am 63 - late diagnosis adult ADD at age 53
Diagnosis & treatment spot on … and feeling terric about my future … what followed was absolute chaos.
New to iNaturalist … does one join grouos or threads or just follow them if you’d like noticationd on new posting ?
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Welcome to the forum and to iNaturalist! :) You can set it to notify you of future responses by changing it to “Watching” in the lower left of any topic:
The forum is actually a separate platform from the main iNaturalist website, so things work a bit differently between them. I believe the default settings for the forum might include a summary email notification. You can select your notification preferences here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/u/kwevoel/preferences/notifications
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Yes, Cnidarians stumped me also. I did find a way to remember the pronunciation. You might enjoy this video I made about them after my visit to the aquarium. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNg54Vgnzag.
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So convenient that it is now acceptable to email, Whatsapp or SMS. I avoid the phone and video calls like another plague.
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The discussion here about differences in our sensory experiences is eye-opening and fascinating.
I was diagnosed as “Asperger syndrome / high-functioning autistic” at the age of 33, almost 10 years ago now. During that time I’ve been advised several times not to reveal that fact to anyone, so this is the first time I’ve written about it in a public forum. You’re all just that welcoming.
For me, sensory overload seems to be the basic cause of most of my divergences from the norm, with several dozen coping mechanisms and work-arounds layered on top to confuse things. I liken it to going through life with everything seeming to be a little brighter, louder, smellier, and just generally more intense than it is for neurotypical people. That applies to internal sensations and emotions as well. It leads to ADHD-like symptoms where it can be difficult to ignore seemingly trivial things in situations with multiple stimuli, i.e. getting distracted by a bug or a bird while talking to someone. It leads to avoidance of loud crowds, parties, and other high-stimulus events, which in turn leads to falling behind in social skills through simple lack of practice. It leads to sustained focus on subjects of interest which would be border-line boring to neurotypical people, but generate just the right level of fascinating details and rewarding puzzles for me. For the past couple of years one of my “special interests” has been identifying spiders on iNaturalist, but I’ve had several others over the course of my life, some of which I return to from time to time.
A very simple model (maybe simplistic), is that every person has a certain amount of incoming information, and a certain level of processing power with which to analyze it. People with severe autism are getting bombarded by more information each second than they can process in one second, so things get missed and lost, seemingly ignored, and there’s no processing power left over for anything else. People on the high-functioning end, like me, have enough processing power to deal with most day-to-day situations, but have trouble in some high-intensity situations, and spend a greater fraction of their processing power on living in the moment. That can lead to a deficit in long-term planning, just from having less left-over processing power to do it with, but can also make it easier to maintain focus and attention in low-intensity situations.
Anyway, I’ve accumulated a lot of thoughts about autism over the years, and it’s really tempting to do even more of an info-dump here, but I’ve at least learned to recognize when I might be going too far and to restrain myself a bit. Thank you, everyone who shared their own issues, and thank you, everyone who has expressed interest without judgement.
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I am overjoyed to hear this. I was nervous about the sort of response we’d get when I was talking with Charlie about making this thread. It’s refreshing that the thread has been positive, curious, and respectful. You are always welcome to share your experiences, either on this thread or through pm :)
A huge part of the stigma is that many people aren’t talking about neurodiversity openly – as though it’s something secret or shameful, when it’s just another part of what makes you, you. So thank you.
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I’m curious about this. Most humans are extremely focused on vision, as primary sensory input and as a method of creating and recalling memories. The Internet probably reinforces this tendency, as it focuses on text and images, with sound as a secondary sense, and taste / smell / touch totally ignored. iNat is included here. It’s mostly photos with sound also allowed. I wonder whether this focus makes it harder for some people to participate, since they prefer to use other senses.
Also, a few people here have shared their experiences with synesthesia or hypersensitivity, but more generally. If you have sensory differences (including input, processing, or expression), how does this affect your iNat experience specifically?
Do you find yourself compensating in some way? Are there activities on iNat you do more, or less, because of eg sensory overload? Do you think there are ways iNat could accommodate your differences?
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Interestingly, I absolutely dread talking on the phone, and never seem to be able to realize when I should or shouldn’t speak, though I don’t have this issue in person. I have my own issues with in person social interaction as well. I have a terrible anxiety about meeting new people, and can barely talk to them if I don’t know them well. Yet, though I much prefer one-on-one conversations, I find that I am able to speak to fairly large groups of people without feeling uncomfortable at all, particularly if it is about something I am particularly interested in (i.e. I can’t talk to one person about ‘ordinary’ day-to-day things, but am comfortable speaking with groups about natural history). I’m curious if anyone else on here has had any similar experiences to this?
I’ve heard of some well-known naturalists as supposedly having had autism (notably Thoreau), but personally find it a little strange that one of the main reasons cited for these theories are their ‘narrow’ focus on a single subject (i.e. nature). To me, all the ‘normal’ people are narrowly focused on the trivial things in civilization, while Nature is this huge, rich, detailed world all around us which so many barely notice. Funny how this can be seen both ways.
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I definitely am a very visual person (I see images when I read, for example), but I find that I tend to notice things with my other senses others do not. For example, I sometimes find myself following deer tracks and realizing that I can faintly smell the animal that recently passed through, or that occasionally in addition to visualizing what I am reading, I can ‘smell’ it too! I’ve only ever experienced this while .reading about particularly familiar plants or natural communities.
I’m also amazed at what our other sense pick up, but which we aren’t consciously aware of. I mentioned following deer tracks and being able to smell the animal, on another occasion, I found myself following tracks in the leaf litter, though not consciously aware of the animal’s scent, but soon lost the tracks and just went where I ‘felt’ I should, and lo and behold, there was a deer there!
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yes! see my different example above.
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This is why I will avoid seeing movies based on the books I really like. If I want to go back and re-read, say, the Narnia books, I don’t want to be limited to “seeing” the most recent movie portrayal.
Like when I was driving one time in a new area for me. I was fine until I came into the wind farm. But then the spinning wind turbines required me to pull over and sit watching them for a while.
You mean other than being annoyed by blurry photos? Looking at a photo obviously too blurry to ID, and thinking, why would you even bother uploading this? We’re not miracle workers here!
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