 This is Autism Spectrum, Atypical Minds in a Stereotypical World by Sprouts. When we examine 100 random teenagers, we would find that while they all look different, their minds work in very similar ways. One or two, however, have minds that are atypical in a particular way. They could be diagnosed with autism. This happens to boys four times as much, perhaps because diagnosing them is easier. It's very true. Good thing to point out. I think that there is a lot of, like, a grey area around the diagnosis from men to women. I think there's a lot to do in masking and also a lot of the diagnostic processes that we have out there at the moment are very much based on stereotypical representations in boys. I am in contact with someone called actually Aspling who was trying to try to mend the diagnostic stuff that they use so that it's more applicable to that. I don't know if it's something that she's still working on at the moment. Children and adults who are considered autistic experience the world differently because they were born with various degrees of neuro-atypical traits. Most autistic children have more refined senses and share a deep desire to bring the logic into their surroundings. Not always refined senses. Sensory systems tend to differ very heavily between people. Some people, they can, as with the brain sniffing the flowers, some people are very hypersensitive to their sense of smell. I know a lot of autistic people who are analismic, so they pretty much have no sense of smell. But I do find the logic aspects of it quite interesting. I wonder if they expand on it. Some seek repetitive behaviors that follow specific patterns and many appear to be asocial and avoid eye contact. So the logic aspect is something that I've thought about quite a bit because I very much felt growing up as a teenager that a lot of the people around me, they seem to just feel things and then do things rather than kind of sit back and contemplate like I did. I used to feel like a lot of the other kids at my school, teenagers at that point, they're kind of like rabid animals in my mind. Like they just acted based on how they felt and it was very strange for me to look and watch and see that kind of thing. I think there was some research about autism and systematizing versus something else. I know that particularly stuff around repetition tends to be quite good for us because mostly because that provides us with a sense of certainty, which is important to us because if we don't have certainty, it can often cause us a lot of anxiety. And the asocial part, it's a little bit... I think for a lot of adults, it can be very much the case that our interests pull us in more than other people and people do around us. I know that when I was younger, I was quite a social kid actually, but only in this particular setting. If I was in a setting where I was socializing with other kids at school and that was the point of it, then I would be. But if I was in class, if I was outside doing an activity and there were other people around that I tended to stick to myself and not really interact with people as much. Autism is not a disease and therefore cannot be cured. Since all our brains are different and there is an endless range of nuances in their architecture, autism is defined as a spectrum. On one side of the spectrum is high-functioning autism, also known as Asperger's syndrome. These children are highly intelligent and have extreme abilities and interest in specific areas. In the middle are those with average intelligence and some problems learning new things in school. On the far end of the spectrum are children with severe learning disabilities who may require support in their daily lives. This is really interesting because the way that they're describing it is a scale of intelligence. And that is not how the autism spectrum works. It's very much dependent on needs and traits. It tends to be the individuals who are considered to be AST. How old is this video? It's a good point. 2021, so it's actually a couple of years ago. It's not that old, to be honest. But this is a very incorrect representation of the autism spectrum. As I've said many times, when people have tried to explain the autism spectrum and just done it wrong, it's less of a linear thing. In terms of diagnostics, ASD 1, 2 and 3, that is very much dependent on support needs and ability to function independently. Not necessarily tied always to intelligence. Not necessarily. Sometimes does, but the actual spectrum is more of a characterisation of the individual differences that are represented between people. People on the spectrum. Different signs, traits that that person has in different levels. That could be the sensory, the social stuff. It could be things around focus. It could be all sorts of different things. Just because one person has very high traits in one area does not mean that they have traits in other areas. I don't think it's that old, to be honest. I did see a video last time that we did this stream that was probably four years ago and it was a little bit more concrete and up-to-date as opposed to this. The other parts have been good so far, so let's give it a go. If it's mainstream, it'll talk about kids. That is true. I tend to binge sometimes on autism content and it makes me feel bad about myself. It tends to sometimes be a little bit negative. It depends what you watch, who you watch. The mainstream stuff definitely has a tendency to seep more into the negative side of perceiving autism. Some channels, kind of middle of the road, some channels quite positive. This place, probably about middle to positive is kind of my views on it. Hopefully I can offset some of the negative views. Timo, a young boy, can help us understand how living with a neurodivergent mind can be. His mom noticed early on that her boy would avoid eye contact and that he would often become upset if she hugged him. He never returned smiles and engaging him in play with friends often ended in a tantrum. I mean, it's a pretty good representation. His mother suspected something to be wrong when Timo still wasn't speaking more than two or three words at a time, even after turning four years old. She sought help. That was not something that I've experienced. I was very much the opposite. I was very... I was more along the lines of hyperlexic than nonverbal. You know, I spoke like an adult when I was quite young. I mean, there's someone in my life within my family who is autistic. They're like age 10 or something. Very much the same, very massive vocabulary that you just don't expect them to have. It's really funny sometimes. They come out with some really interesting comments. And Timo was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, or ASD for short. Timo has an atypical perception. When reading books or watching movies, Timo's brain picks up and organizes the information differently. While his neurotypical peers categorize things and form schemas, for example, they identify everything with four legs that barks as a dog, for Timo, each type of dog is unique and categorized in Timo's mind individually. His attention to detail and inability to generalize makes Timo more objective in his perception of the world and less prone to a framing bias. This is really interesting, like the concepts of kind of generalization, because it does make sense to a certain degree. Like, definitely, like, have had a lot of... I think it's just liking specificity around things, because I think any kind of grey area or anything like that tends to be a bit annoying, if anything, really. I always like the intense levels of detail, but I definitely don't struggle generalizing in adulthood. However, it also makes all sorts of new experiences incredibly complex, which is why he loves to follow a rigid daily routine to limit his sensory input. That's not true. It's not limiting your sensory input. Limiting your sensory input would be, like, literally just, like, wearing some noise-cancing headphones or shades or things like that. This is about routine, this is about certainty. It's about avoiding the unknown. Timo is highly sensitive. His brain amplifies whatever input it perceives. He hears everything and has a heightened sense of touch. However, this superpower makes situations where many people speak simultaneously very challenging. Timo hears everyone but understands nothing. Interesting frame of words, superpower. I can see that they're trying to add in a little bit of kind of positivity to it and, like, empowerment. It is not super hearing or super touch. It's not actually to do with the sensory organs, like your ears or your, like, receptors in your skin. It's actually to do with the way that your brain processes information. So it's a processing thing. It's not from the source, we just have super hearing, super sight, things like that. It's just that our brain sometimes amplifies those signals and other times it can do the opposite so it can suppress those signals. That's why you have things like hypersensitivity and hyposensitivity. But also why, like, armies are not, like, invested in understanding how autistic people have that like hearing. You know, because obviously, like, if we did have those as, like, actual superpowers, I felt like there would be a lot more research into why. Sativity to touch makes eating an intense experience. If a texture or flavor is too much to handle, Timo won't eat it. Also walking barefoot on wet grass or playing in dirt overwhelms his brain. He has a fascination with logic. Timo naturally looks for patterns that bring logic into this world. Sometimes he also tries to bring order into his own behavior and ways of moving his body. When structured patterns are broken, he gets upset. It freaks him out when someone counts to eight but doesn't continue to ten. Doctors call it an obsessive compulsive disorder or OCD. I suppose that there is some level of, like, co-occurring this with OCD. Not all autistic people, though, of course. I wouldn't really categorize the, like, lining up of things and organizing things necessarily as OCD. I think it's a lot more to do with, well, it's all about obsessions and compulsions, you know? You have an obsession about a certain thing and the compulsion helps you manage that obsession. That is OCD. Timo experiences social disconnection. He has trouble connecting with others because social settings overwhelm his sensitivity and desire for order. Because human emotions are incredibly complex and don't follow a set predictable pattern, Timo often finds himself in misreading situations and upsetting people around him. I think you'll find that if you talk to any autistic person who's quite like a kind of, like a people-pleaser kind of character archetype who really does, like, enjoy people and understanding others, they will tend to be very heavily into, like, psychology or, like, philosophy or, like, things like that. Some kind of, like, objective way of understanding the world. Even things as out there as, like, don't know if you guys are as chronically online as I am. I've seen a lot of stuff online. But you have, like, this whole pickup artist community within, like, the manosphere on the internet. And it is theorised by, like, a few of the streamers that I watched that these people, like... The way that they talk about dating and relationships is very, like, a formulaic, like, structure of how to do things. Obviously it's not gonna work, like, for a lot of people. And it shouldn't, you shouldn't really do that kind of thing. But I think a lot of autistic people will gravitate stuff to that. Just because it is kind of, it's a formulaic, it's like, do this, do that, do this, do that. The only issue with that kind of stuff is that people are not easily characterised. And there's so many factors going on in different people's lives that it would be very difficult to provide a straight and narrow path. As Zaya says, I compare the autistic experience to a dog. It bark at every little sound and can smell stuff from far away. Kind of like we can, obviously not to the same extreme, but there are definitely a lot of similarities. 100% and it's interesting, because whenever I have been, like, it was a time where I went out with a friend, out into, like, a big city and we had a dog with us. That was interesting, because I felt when... I felt calmer, obviously, when there was less going on in my environment, when it was a little bit less hectic, less people, less noises. And the dog's behaviour kind of mirrored mine, like chilling out when it was a bit quieter. And I think in a lot of ways I feel quite connected to dogs. I mean, my big brother was a dog for the longest time. So, yeah, I can definitely see the similarities. It's always a filler psychology majors, too. If you want to understand people, I mean, being a different person, it kind of opens you up to wanting to understand how people think and why people do what they do, you know? It's interesting. Consequence, he avoids people and rarely makes eye contact, which doesn't matter that much to him, since most of the things other people talk about are illogical, irrelevant and boring anyway. Oh my God, yeah. Very much mirroring my thoughts as a child, I would say. But also, the stuff about socialising, I wouldn't say that it's the social environment all the time. I feel like in the right social environments where the topic of conversation is somewhat condensed or all directed in a certain way, like, for example, you're at like a tennis club, you talk about tennis. It makes it a lot easier to connect to people because you actually know what you're talking about and you can avoid all of the mumble jumble of like the small talk and things like that. For four years, his mother had him treated by a therapist who would show him images of faces to help him learn to identify feelings. This meant he got better at identifying facial expressions and corresponding emotions. However, personally, he is still not very interested in reading faces or establishing new social contacts. He has two friends who share the same interests and couldn't wish for more. There we go. Shared interests, 100%. I never went through anything like that in terms of facial expressions, but I have heard from a lot of autistic people within the community that movies, films, series, things like that. Movies and films, the same thing that I'm talking about. They can actually help sometimes with understanding social things. They're not always the best because you can, depending on what you watch, get very different representations of what social life is like in real life, you know? But this is all about the aspects of cognitive empathy and there are two types of empathy within the scientific literature. There are some other ones that people have created in blogs and stuff that I've seen. Cognitive being you're able to read people, basically. See it, understand how they're feeling without them telling you. The adaptive element is doing the right thing and that's something that we, as autistic people, don't necessarily have a death set in. But the cognitive empathy part, it's not as natural for us. We don't just kind of naturally pick it up as much as neurotypicals would. A lot of people would say, oh, we shouldn't do this. This is like masking, but I think it's reasonable to be aware of how people are feeling because it definitely helps us interact neurotypicals. And I think I like to strike a balance, you know? It's good to be yourself, of course, but learning how to interact with people around you who more than likely are going to be neurotypical, especially in job situations, school, closed environments that you don't have control over. Actually being able to get along with people and not have issues is important. How can we learn better? There are a lot of things you can do. There's this thing called the eyes test that you can take to understand your level of cognitive empathy. I took it a while back when I was quite young, sort of late teens, early 20s kind of age. I did it very poorly on it. Going through and sort of getting out in the world and socializing a bit more, doing my podcasts, understanding a little bit more of psychology. I'm actually a lot better than most people in terms of cognitive empathy, but it's always like a cerebral process. It's not something that just naturally always happens. I'm chill, I'm in my own space, I'm trying to relax. It doesn't tend to be something that I focus on a lot and therefore I don't necessarily pick up on it. Different situations, like actual social situations that I'm going to do out in the world, it's a different story. Because Timo's autism is not an illness we can treat, but rather a different way of him experiencing the world, the question remains whether we should try to change him through therapy or accept him for who he is. So what do you think? Should we treat children with autism with therapy or celebrate them for who they are? Or perhaps do both? Maybe it's not their atypical minds, but our stereotypical way of looking at them that needs correction. To get a three-dimensional glimpse of how an autistic girl experiences her own surprise birthday party or to download this video without background music, check the descriptions below or visit SproutSchools.com Interesting. Their approach to that, asking us about this seems like they're not wanting to make a particular stance. I would say that I'm... there are definitely some things that we need help with, support with to exist in the neurotypical world. It would be nice if there weren't. I think there is definitely elements of both involved. If someone can't communicate, I think that's quite a big hindrance to them as a person. It's not representative of their worth as a human being, but it definitely can cause issues for them in life. I think striking your balance is definitely important, but this has been a very mixed video, actually, from Sprout's autism spectrum atypical minds in the stereotypical world. Very interesting video. Didn't expect the ending just due to the content, but interesting.