 Felly ydych yn yw porfyniad yw'r arddangosol, mae'r ysgolio maeth yw'r ddweud yn siaradau, mae'r ddweud yn siaradau. Felly rydych yn ystod yn ysgolio, mae'n rhani'n eu bod yn ysgolio, mae'r ysgolio'n wedi bod yn ysgolio'r cyflei. Felly mae'n rhani'n ddweud, a'r ysgolio'n ddweud yn ysgolio'n ddweud yn ysgolio'n ddweud. there's nothing else up there at the moment, apart from that, this talk, and you can follow along at the moment, it should be up at the moment. But I'm hoping there will be in the future because I want to talk about this and share information about this topic a lot more. I'm hoping to be a bit more proactive. Me? I'm autistic, particularly, specifically aspergers. I'm high functioning. I actually realised about a year ago at Pycon UK, and then I got a formal diagnosis. I would say I'm 80-20, I'm 80% high functioning, completely normal, get on okay in social interactions, and I'm 20% completely dysfunctional. So, rather than being an even mix, I'm sort of some things, I'm perfectly fine and some things, I'm terrible at. So, as an example of that, I've been trying to work out ways of putting this in context. I've only been thinking about myself as an autistic person for a year. But I have never decided where to live. I'm 39 years old and I've never made that decision. I've only made it for the first time in my life, this year, as part of realising that I need to change and grow up and take more control of specific parts of my life that I've been allowing to go unthought about. Autism in general and aspergers. Autism and aspergers have been merged together in the latest DSM, which is the dictionary that defines particular psychological disorders. So, aspergers doesn't exist anymore. There's just autistic spectrum condition. Now, I don't think that's a particularly useful combination because for some people with autism it's an utterly crippling disability and for quite a lot of other people it's something that you can live a normal life. To my own perspective, 16% of autistic people are in full-time employment. For disabled people in general it's 48%. Actually, in this country we're doing fairly well, I know in other European countries like Switzerland, it's only 8% of autistic people are in full-time employment. And that includes the aspergers people. So, a lot of that 16% are the high-functioning people. High-functioning is defined as an IQ of over 70, which is quite a low IQ. I'm sure most of the people in this room are past that anyway. And aspergers is defined as not having any language difficulty, whereas classic autism includes language problems, as well as an IQ of below 70 if you're not high-functioning. Clearly, I'm at the very high-functioning level in terms of autistic people when I sort of go and spend time with them, I realise that actually most of them wouldn't even put themselves in the situation of standing up here and talking and also wouldn't be able to sort of cope with it. I don't want to spend too much time looking at a formal definition of autism. You can go on Wikipedia or anywhere like that, just read up on it. I would like to talk about some of it from the inside out. Just give my picture of it, which I think is particularly interesting in a STEM environment because it definitely seems to occur a lot more in these environments. And also I think a lot of people in an engineering, science background are sort of partially autistic or just somewhere up the scale. Repetition and obsession is one of the most notable, famous characteristics of autism and social awkwardness. There's over stimulation is one of the things that's less talked about outside of autistic circles, but it's one of the things that most affects high functioning people that you feel as if there's this flood of sensory information coming in all the time. There's no filter, there's no sort of... Whereas it feels like there should be a layer between you and everything else that sort of thins this out. You've just got this flood of visual information, of audio information, of smells, things like that sensation. And it's absolutely overwhelming, just this sort of influx into your brain. This leads to meltdowns, which can be from too much social problems when you've been socialising a lot and you can't cope with it, or sensory input. If there's excessive sensory input for a long time, you can completely lose it. I'm at the level that when I completely lose it, I'm often quite good at hiding the fact that I'm having a meltdown, or of stopping myself, seeing that this is coming, predicting it, and going, okay, I just pulled myself out of those environments, go for a walk, and you just wander off. That's fine. When people at the lower end, this can be a complete breakdown for hours and hours and hours. And it ties in with... This is not a medical term, but fizzy mind. This is my term for what's kind of going on in your head of this, with this sort of sensory input flowing in constantly, and it's just bubbling and bubbling and bubbling, and you can't control it, you can't rest, you can't manage it or deal with it. And also, this isn't something that's in the official definition of autism, but it's something I have massively noticed in my dealing with fellow autistic people that I've started to meet, is stubbornness, and a willingness to sort of be completely unreasonable about things, because arbitrary reasons. It's whatever it is that you've decided is your way of doing something, you will stick and fight to that. It also has lots of correlations and what they call co-morbidities. There seems to be a cluster around ADD and ADHD to the extent that these may even be different aspects of the same condition. But not a lot is known about sort of where autism comes from. It is defined from a symptomatic point of view, so it could even be that there are multiple conditions which all cause the same symptoms, but around dyslexia, dyscalculia, dyspraxia, ADD, ADHD, autism, there seems to be a clustering around them. If you have one, you're much more likely to have another. I have dyslexia as well, it happens. Insomnia is really common in autism, and one of the greatest benefits of being diagnosed as autistic is, oh, okay, my insomnia that I've had for so many years, turns out actually there's things I can do with it, simply just sleeping with a blindfold on. You have an eye mask, something like that, block out all sensory, all visual sensory input, has a massive effect. My sleep has gone from, I pretty much get good 7-8 hours every night. The other thing that works really well about putting an eye mask on is it's a signal to yourself. You can't do anything else, you can't sort of, oh, actually I'll just read, I'll play with my phone, because you're blind for the moment. That's been wonderful. Low muscle tone affects 40% of autistic people. This isn't just a neurological condition, there are issues outside of that. Now these may be secondary that are caused by, I don't know, not exercising or something like that, but low muscle tone and clumsiness are heavily associated. Alcoholism correlates very highly with autism. I myself drank very heavily, consistently for about 15 years, and again one of the benefits of realising that that was a way of coping with fizzy mind, insomnia, stuff like that was alcohol. It also makes social interactions a lot easier when you have awkwardness, you are with a group of other people who are all drunk and you care less about getting things wrong and they care less. Eating disorders, particularly anorexia and bulimia in women correlate highly with autism and digestive problems in general. Again, no one knows why, but there are physical symptoms of autism, not just neurological. There's lots of neurological differences. Two interesting ones, autistic people on average have larger brains than neurotypical people and even in brains of the same size they have more neurons and more connections between neurons with less large branch connections throughout the brain. If you imagine, if this was a street map, this is like a map of lots of tiny back streets and the way I think of it is, for thoughts to get from one place to another, it's a much finer journey of lots of tiny back streets you haven't got this simple straightforward, oh, I can take a highway from there to there. Everything's always going through these tiny roots and at any point it's subject to, oh, actually I'll go this way or I'll go that way or things happen like that. Benefits, there are benefits to being autistic. If I was given the option to be neurotypical and just be completely normal, I'd like to do it for a day, maybe two days, try it out, but no. I like who I am anyway, so I like the benefits. A lot of my success in my career has come through the benefits. Systemising, thinking in systems, constantly thinking in systems and seeing the systems, pattern recognition, all these things are a common aspect of autism. To the extent that actually you can go too far. A common thing I do is over-systemise things including the way I walk down pavements where I'm looking for dualities of slabs, triples are bad and I mustn't step on them. You over-systemise even things like that. In central London I'll just leap into a different vein of traffic in order to correctly touch those two slabs because otherwise I'll have to do a three over there which is no good and doesn't make you terribly popular. Repetition and obsession aren't definitely their positives and negatives, they're on both sides. If you're obsessed about something good or useful, that's actually really useful and tied in with insomnia and things like that, I have in the past spent insane numbers of hours just focused on building things, creating things and the repetition is useful in learning. I'm happy to repeat things over and over again until I get them right. I enjoy trampolining and unlike most of the other people there, I will happily do the same jump over and over and over again for an hour, fine-tuning it, perfecting it, whereas they need to keep changing and doing different things all the time. Radical honesty is something I value in other autistic people and autistic type people. If you ask an autistic person for their opinion on their honest feedback on something you've done or think about you, you better be prepared because it will be genuinely honest and it will just... I value that and I enjoy talking to other autistic people about things like that because we're just completely open with each other. In a work context, sometimes too open, don't always know which parts of my life I shouldn't be sharing with my colleagues. Originality of thinking, certainly you see in Aspergers a lot, it might just come because of a low inability to learn what we should be thinking. We don't take feedback well from society because we're sort of slightly stepped out of it, we're not involving too much. We just haven't been railroaded into a particular route and therefore we can think of these stupid, insane things without any checks, more spare time. I read insane amounts of books and when I talk to people, how do you manage to reach so much? Well, if you don't go out and don't socialise, you can get loads more time to do stuff. This is actually a benefit. It's something I'm trying to work back on and spend more time socialising and being that kind of person actually. It's been unhealthy for me to... but actually I've learned so much that I wouldn't have done if I had a social life. Attention to detail, focus on detail. Partly we can see things. It seems like we can see things that other people can't just because all that raw input is coming in and you can like... Oh look, there's a thing over there. People haven't seen it, they haven't noticed it and also I think a literal mindedness of caring. That's there to tell me. I've spent too much time on that slide. This is why my timing is terrible because another common thing you see in autistic people is just when they start talking they just pause out, they're just sort of splurging this torrent of kind of all the thoughts coming out and I have trouble actually pulling back and only saying small things. There's an archetype of an aspergers person. I think this... you see this, it tied in well with Eiffel. Daniel Procedars' talk earlier. He was talking about the naive programme of the naive artist. I think that's actually an asperger's artist. The people who can stay naive for their entire career. And you see this sort of archetype of the mad scientist, the mad artist sort of... In fact, Hans Asperger himself said it seems that for success in science or art a dash of autism is essential. I think there's some degree of truth to that and I think that's possibly why autism exists. We have evolved to have autism in society. It's there for a reason, and I suspect that might be the reason that one or two people... It's crippling to the vast majority of people who have it, but one or two people benefit greatly from it. And quite a few self-made billionaires have aspergers. Bill Gates, Warren Buffett probably does. If you read any biographies of him, he comes across as aspergers. Ray Dalio as well. So, the workplace bit. How does this affect the workplace? Oversimulation. This is really common in open-plan offices and as we seem to be moving more and more towards open-plan offices and no personal offices, the flood of nights, the movement. If you've got one of those... a desk where you're facing onto the open-plan office, this constant shifting movement is awful. Noise as well, conversations constantly sort of trying to tune out other people's conversations and only focus on the conversations in your head. I find particularly difficult and I find myself listening to everything everyone says in the office. And actually what I've just done is got quite good at listening to other people's conversations while still working and then just interrupting when I've noticed that they're wrong about things. Smell is one that people kind of forget about, but if you wear strong perfume or strong deodorant, that actually really affects us. One of the changes I've made that's been beneficial is unscented washing powder, unscented shampoo, unscented shower gel, things like that. And just get rid of as much of that sort of artificial sense from my life and it's had a huge benefit for me. Unfortunately it means I'm now even more sensitive to the smells of other people. And if you ever spray deodorant in the office place because you're off to the meeting, I hate you. And there seem to be people who can't quite tell the difference particularly in gym changing rooms. You can't tell the difference between deodorant and air freshener. You don't need to spray it in a big thing around you. And I think we all know headphones are a huge benefit. You don't have to listen to music. If you find music distracting, noise-canceling headphones or just big headphones, a signal that you're doing something, and b, block out lots of annoying noise. Oh gosh. Resting whatever face. So my default face, fairly austere, slightly sort of not welcoming, I didn't know that when you make eye contact with someone and they, if you don't smile or respond, that's actually quite aggressive. So for 39 years, whenever someone, I made eye contact with someone, I just kept my default slightly austere face. Turns out people thought I was deeply arrogant, aggressive, you know, had its benefits. Apparently I came across as quite a powerful person in the office because of this. I've now got, oh okay, right, so when I make eye contact with people, I need to smile or react in some way to the fact that we've made eye contact. I'm still learning, trying to turn that into a habit, I'm learning to do that and actually I have to constantly be in my conscious mode of thinking about who am I making eye contact with, am I doing the right facial expression, and also trying to make it genuine, because if I'm concentrating on too much on that, I can actually do really stupid smiles, which makes people think I'm autistic. So in the work plate, and one thing I found from this is, okay, you're right, I'm actively practising, correctly smiling at people, making eye contact, I make eye contact with someone, smile at them, I get nothing in response, they've just got this stony face. What a horrible, and then I went, oh, no, no, that was me six months ago, yeah? Maybe the person who isn't responding to you, or who seems austere, or who seems powerful but distant, is actually just autistic, and they don't know any better, and they don't know how to come forward and come out of this. So in the work place, one thing I'm trying to do is also forgive other people who aren't correctly being as friendly to me as I feel they should. Don't fall socialising in the work place. It's great that it happens, I'm perfectly happy for you to go off and socialise as a group, I don't need to be part of that, sometimes I might try and come along, sometimes I won't. I actually quite like socialising one-on-one, I will go out for lunches with my colleagues on a one-to-one basis, and that's great. I don't like group situations, and I don't like stupid socialising where you're doing something pointless, just for the sake of everyone kind of sharing meaningless conversation. I like to have serious conversations about a topic. If we tolerate meltdowns, not just autistic people have them, other people have them, we don't need to turn it into a whole issue that if someone has a genuine breakdown it doesn't have to be something that is then analysed and everyone feels sorry about or awkward about. Equally if someone blows up in anger because that might just be because of sensory issues throughout the day, just let it go. Certainly if they are autistic or of that type it will just sort of go away an hour later. Nothing, it's fine. You can have a massive argument blazing around with someone and then it goes away and it's fine. Autistic people are less liked to be mentored, they're less likely to come forward and ask for help. This isn't just autistic, there are also shy people as well. But I've never, and again this was something Danielle was talking about earlier, that you get these people who have been autodidactic for in my case 12 years of programming with no real mentoring or guidance from anyone else so I've developed a very idiosyncratic style. By coincidence it's a very good style but it's my own very idiosyncratic one. Work patterns, I won't go into this too deeply but the future is scary and the unknown is scary particularly when you know you're going to struggle adapting to it. Agile and campan are wonderful, anything like that where you can see the future, this is what the next few weeks is going to be like, this is what I'm going to do. I just have to work through a list of things. Someone is juggling that and thinking about that so I'm going to sit down and concentrate and do this ticket, this ticket, this ticket, this ticket. A prefiguring change, if you're moving offices, if you're going to change the code base, if you're going to change libraries, change language, anything like that, just coming in one day and going right, everything has now changed, we're doing things differently, you will certainly get autistic people fighting you just on principle. They may even want the change but they don't want sudden change that they can't control. Just prefigure it over a series of time leading up to it and it's all much easier. Meetings don't expect people to speak up. I particularly notice this in engineer business meetings where there's both sets of people there and the engineers would just be silent or when we have retros, we had mixed retros, there was commercial people and engineers. The engineers had massive problems, they were so... There was such a culture clash and they were really upset and they were angry and had all these issues but they wouldn't speak in retro and the commercial guys, it was just all them talking. They were very much at the not at all autistic end of that spectrum and they dominate that. You need to actively manage discussions. The other problem being when autistic people do get to speak in those meetings, someone sort of said, what do you think, like me, they just spew out tons and tons of information and won't know when to stop and can just keep talking and talking and you need to actively manage that and shut people up sometimes. All meetings benefit from conscious active management of the discussion rather than just letting this sort of amorphously flow because then you only get stuff from the confident people who are all agreeing with each other as opposed to people with these new ideas, things like that. So in general, there's lots of things I can see we can change, we can improve. I think they will help everyone. I think less noise, less smell is going to be a problem for anyone. It will benefit everyone in the office. I'm particularly interested in it from the point of view of autism but I think it's good for everyone. I think managing meetings is good for everyone in the workplace and I think the STEM environment engineering science skews towards autism so I think it can help this environment more. That's it. Please give me feedback. I love feedback. I prefer negative feedback to no feedback. Please ask me questions. I want to try and make more noise about this and do more talks. If you know of anywhere where I can try and talk, I would love to. Hopefully I will actually stop blogging and talking more about autism within a sector. This is my first little foray into it. Thank you.