A low-cost tool accurately distinguishes neurotypical children from children with autism just by watching them copy the dance moves of an on-screen avatar for a minute. It can even tell autism from ADHD, conditions that commonly overlap.

[u/mvea]

https://newatlas.com/adhd-autism/autism-motion-detection-diagnosis/

[u/ZoeBlade]

I think it's trying to get at special interests. If there are any niche things where you spend a lot of your free time researching them, organising that information, maybe making a database, spreadsheet, or notebook of some kind to keep track of it all, maybe collecting and organising them, stuff like that, that all counts.

If you're really into birds to the point you spend a lot of time reading about them, and bore people with endless fun facts about them, I'm sure that would count.

Birdwatching, and ticking off the birds you've seen so far... that borders on being a stereotypical/canonical example, I think, along with trainspotting, stamp collecting, and coin collecting! But it can really happen with anything.

[u/PsyCurious007 → u/ZoeBlade]

I spend a lot of time & energy researching my interests but I don’t catalogue anything possibly because I think I have ADHD wiring as well. I create systems & forget them. My organisational skills are very patchy at best. It’s so frustrating.

[u/ZoeBlade → u/PsyCurious007]

Autism and ADHD co-occur often, so that's quite possible. I'm not sure what systems you create, but that sounds like the kind of thing someone might describe as cataloguing for the sake of simplicity, maybe?

[u/PsyCurious007 → u/ZoeBlade]

Organisational systems like filing information so I can it again later but I‘ll forget what principle I was adhering to so it becomes useless or I start grouping into collections but fail to maintain them & then I’m onto the next thing & there’s all these unfinished things. I have intense interests but I’m so scatter-brained, it drives me mad.

I have long-standing interests & short ones. Last night I got lost down an aviation rabbit hole. Today I can tell you what altitude planes over fly my house and something about how on board WiFi utilises air to ground signalling systems. All because I was annoyed that my WiFi keeps dropping out. Someone this morning showed surprise I seemed interested in aircraft & got talked at for rather longer than they wanted I suspect haha..

[u/ZoeBlade → u/PsyCurious007]

That sounds like probably AuDHD, autism combined with ADHD. So instead of a fastidiously catalogued knowledge of one obsession, you get a bunch of half-finished projects and notes in meticulous disarray.

...I start grouping into collections...

I think for the purposes of the test question, that counts.

So the longterm interests would be autistic special interests, and the shorter term ones AuDHD hyperfixations. Like, I've had a passion about making electronic music for decades, also computers and programming, writing, Aphex Twin's music, films and filmmaking, probably some others... but as well as those stalwarts, I've also had a string of serial interests that change every few months. The last one was chess (amassing a few sets and about a dozen books, and getting fairly decent at it), before that mechanical keyboards (surprisingly, I've found an off-the-shelf Keychron Q7-N3 to be my ideal combination, after verifying over a hundred other switches and various keycaps weren't preferable to me after all), Lego (to the point of borrowing my partner's calipers to infer their base units), typography, Casio digital watches, Android: Netrunner, C64 tapes, certain neurology, Newton (he was... something), and probably hundreds I've forgotten. (I seem especially susceptible to collecting sets of things, and writing articles about these subjects too.)

Like... part of this, on both the micro and macro level, seems to be that it's really hard to start to focus on something, and then, once you finally manage it, it's also really hard to stop focusing on it. (I say, rewriting this to perceived perfection, when I really need to go and cook lunch.)

The talking at people is called infodumping. What works for us is my partner and I basically take it in turns to infodump to each other.

Anyway, none of these are just you. If you look up these terms, you'll find your people. Amongst us, you're probably quite normal.

[u/PsyCurious007 → u/ZoeBlade]

I spent a good chunk of yesterday rewriting a response before calling a day..haha. Reading your impressive list of interests, I started thinking of mine & went into bit of a tail-spin trying to nail them down. I’m going to admit defeat & generalise wildly. My list would include arts & crafts, nature, language, science, mind & body, psychedelics, nutrition, cookery.

If I had a better memory, I might have been able to become expert in some areas given the deep-diving but I forget more than I remember and have issues accessing on demand, especially post-menopause. It can be really frustrating.

”part of this, on both the micro and macro level, seems to be that it's really hard to start to focus on something, and then, once you finally manage it, it's also really hard to stop focusing on it.”

Yes this is very much what happens for me too.

I’m currently awaiting assessment for ADHD. Both Autism & ADHD run in my family through my father. I didn’t think my ASD-like traits were overt enough to qualify for diagnosis. However, since stumbling across a couple of AuADHD subs, I have been wondering if both may be at play. My ex who remains one of my closest friends is almost certainly both & more overtly so. We both love researching stuff and take it in turns to info-dump too.

[u/ZoeBlade → u/PsyCurious007]

Ha, I wouldn't consider my deep dives impressive... usually I'm meant to be doing something else instead of researching some niche (and often obsolete) thing that nobody cares about..!

Yeah, my memory's pretty bad too. I think I can only really fit one hyperfixation in my memory at once, so writing these articles has been kinda useful to me. I can read old ones from three or four hyperfixations ago and find the details I've long since forgotten.

ADHD and autism co-occur a lot, so it's surprisingly common to have both. At first glance, it seems like one of those "Wow, what are the chances?" things, but upon closer inspection, if you have one, then you're far more likely than the average person to have the other.

I didn’t think my ASD-like traits were overt enough to qualify for diagnosis.

Right, this is the mistake I made until my forties! Like, "Oh, it's a spectrum, and I'm probably somewhere on the narrow end, nothing worth looking into..." But then it turns out that's not how a spectrum works, and that it's affected so much more of my life than what I realised. Once I did the inevitable deep dive on autism itself, it was shocking how much of my personality was just a loose assemblage of traits.

Like, OK, I can somewhat "take credit" for being a musician, writer, and programmer... but if I'm hypersensitive to sound, and can't really filter out sound, then it's not a big stretch that I'd start making weird little sound collages as music, and branch out from there... and writing seems more of a compulsion than anything to me... to a large extent, it's how I think... and programming involves disambiguating and systematising things, which is like a breath of fresh air after unsuccessfully trying to talk to people who consider ambiguity and plausible deniability polite. By the time it explained me being overly sensitive to sound, yet still hard of hearing speech, my near face blindness, and even my propensity to collect sets of things, it was starting to get ridiculous.

So it took me a while to untangle what's inevitable from my neurotype and what's specifically me. It's a good job I already didn't believe in free will, ha!

If you want to make sure whether you're autistic or not, it's probably best to focus on the things that don't overlap with ADHD. Clearly, your string of hyperfixations is a given at this point.

Any given sense being too strong or too weak (and that includes things like motion sickness, and even the ability to feel your own emotions), wondering why people don't just say what they mean, being uncomfortable with eye contact, needing to spend time alone, I believe those are all more on the autism side than the ADHD side.