 Hello everybody! Welcome back to another video! Today I'm coming from my room with a microphone and a computer and I'm going to be talking about what is Asperger's syndrome? What is... What are the symptoms of... symptoms? Not symptoms. Signs. Signs are better one. Sorry, everybody. Let's try that again. Hello everybody! Welcome back to another video! Today we're going to be talking about what is Asperger's syndrome. I realize that I have done a lot of videos about the signs and symptoms, if you want to call them them, about autism, of autism rather. And I haven't really done a video on what it is. Now there are a lot of sort of theories out there and different classifications that psychologists and psychiatrists use to work with autistic people. Things that researchers use as well to characterize whether someone is autistic. But there is no sort of definitive answer to what it is and why autism makes people different. So in this video I'm going to cover the triad of impairments which I believe is one of the most applicable things to Asperger's syndrome. So the triad of impairments is a triangle and each section of this triangle you have three definitive different things that sort of give an overall characterization of what Asperger's syndrome is. It was invented by this lady called Lorna Wing who basically dedicated her life to understanding Asperger's syndrome and autism and she's made a lot of good progress for the research of autism. So the triad of impairments, one of the first signs of it is difficulties with social or emotional interaction. Now this means anything from expressing how you feel, expressing your emotions, but also being able to read social cues, read the room, understand how you should be acting in a certain scenario and these sort of these two factors in this top of this triad basically describe why it's difficult for autistics or people of Asperger's syndrome to communicate with people and to express their emotions and build connections with people which I can honestly say that is one of the biggest things that I believe is in the way of autistics having good mental health and having a good support network and being you know the reason why this is probably the reason why they get bullied so often. It's a very important point and it's the first point but let's move on to the next one. The next one is difficulties with social communication and language. In general, autistics find it quite hard to communicate their thoughts and feelings into speech. I know this seems very similar to the last point but it's a little bit different. It's about how you use your speech to communicate. It's not about being able to perform in a certain scenario or certain social group or being able to emotionally connect with people. It's just about being able to find the words and find the ways of communicating your mental state to other people. Although this does highlight language, it's not just language. It can be anything from non-verbal communication to actual verbal communication. Non-verbal communication being facial expressions, tone of voice, come on Tom. There's a communication fault clicking in. Body language. That was it. Body language. So anything from body language to facial expressions and all that stuff and this can inherently make it very difficult for people with autism to communicate to their parents or teachers making it very difficult for people to help them and for people to understand them. Now this sort of plays into the first point but it really is just a separate thing because it can be anything. It can be general communication, maybe like an interview trying to put your thoughts and your values into words and in general it can be quite disabling for a lot of people. It definitely was for me until I worked on it quite a lot. That is the second point. So going on to the last point. The last point is difficulty in flexible thinking or inflexible thinking, rigid thinking. In general autistic are very sort of logical and regimented in their thinking. If you imagine like a brain connection, one sort of connection would have to branch off into varying different things and then they would branch off into different neurons and stuff. That sounds very scientific. Terrible example but this sort of regimented branching off of ideas is very very very strong in autistic people. With non-autistic people it's a little bit more flexible so they can pick up things that don't necessarily make sense. They don't have to be rigorously explained to them in a way that they can form new connections and understand things but for autistic people it needs to be very regimented and very logical. There needs to be a strong line of connections and understandings for them to fully grasp a certain idea especially when it's emotions because those are tricky things. Abstract. Abstract things are very difficult. The way that this manifests in kids on the spectrum, children on the spectrum rather, they will usually take part in very sort of rigid play so usually kids develop their their abilities, their communication abilities and their imaginations in a very sort of abstract way. This may not be bound by rules so for example when I was younger I like to play games, imaginary games that had rules. For example I'd play this game where there was you know this one person which was like a boss monster and you'd have another sort of group which would team up and try and take them out sort of like a squadron of soldiers and stuff and that was pretty much the extent at which my imagination could extend to because there needed to be explanations for things. When you look at other kids, when they interact with each other and when they play imaginary games they sort of fluidly move from one scenario to another not really confining the actual play by rules more or less just going with the flow and doing what feels fun and that's a very big difference because although autistics can be very imaginative, very creative, there's a lot of people in music and arts that are autistic and they're absolutely brilliant at it but when it comes to sort of fluid creativity that is inherent in a person, neurotypical people, non-autistics they're a lot better at it. In terms of the problems that this can present to children or adolescents or adults even is that this inflexibility of thinking can make it very difficult for them to interact with people in terms of building connections with others. If they don't think something makes sense it doesn't make sense no matter what the other person thinks, the other person needs to justify things to them and this can make them very sort of appear very confrontational and rude and direct and but it's just a difference in the way that they interact and they process things. It can also really make it hard for them to empathize with people there is this test for a concept called mind blindness which basically means if you know something as an autistic child you expect everybody to know it because it's true and you don't take into account the fact that other people may not have had the same experiences as you but because you have had those experiences your opinion is stronger and that if they do anything that contradicts that it's ridiculous and unintelligent and stupid and that can make it very difficult for children to get on with each other and make it difficult for autistic people to empathize with neurotypical people. So I've gone over the triad of impairments there are a lot of sort of aspects to this there is also an idea which is sort of turns the triad into a quadrant into a square typically because most people with Asperger's syndrome have some form of difference in their sensory profile whether it be hyposensitivity sort of dulled senses or hypersensitivity which is heightened senses anything from noise visuals etc. So thank you very much for watching this video today my lovely viewers hope you're doing all right come back from a long arduous task at university four years four years I'm finished so I've got a lot of time to be talking to you guys on the internet and on a regular basis thank you very much for watching peeps like if you liked the video and subscribe to me please see you later guys