Attention - Autism Explained

hey uh two days ago i said the end of that video that wasn't going to say what it was but that i would do a video the next day which is now yesterday and i didn't do the video a hilarious bit of irony i uh didn't do the video for the exact reason that this video was supposed to be on oh boy but it wound up it wound up working out just a few hours ago kyle hill put out a video uh announcing that about five years ago he was diagnosed as autistic because it's the first publicly coming forward to talk quite a bit about how uh him being autistic will end up being a major benefit for exactly what we're going to be talking about attention the autistic attention is an interesting thing the common trope stereotype is that the autistic hyper focus it's true to some extent there's also good reason why autism is highly comorbid with the tension deficit disorder now sometimes adhd gets thrown in there i would argue that it's not typically the case that hyperactivity is an additional component in fact the autistic are usually less active the hyperactivity component typically isn't there but like anything it varies there's nothing about the condition that excludes hyperactivity or high energy guy hike ridiculous amounts based on the way the weather's been looking i should be able to do that really soon which would be fantastic get out of the house need it what's been going on the past year now and i'm maybe shooting myself in the foot but i'm not doing these videos for financial being lord knows my viewer account is not high enough to do that i am not scripting this video partially to get the point on what i'm going to be talking about across both add and autism seem to share a tremendous amount of disorganization in thought not necessarily a material thing um back the autistic tend to be very particular about organization not obsessive compulsive in nature but very systematically organized which can present as messy that's a whole other talk though so i don't have the list that i have you go you get disorganization more like the freestyle discussion videos today that's also in part because we don't know why this door's organization happens um if you think do you have research that explains why that's the case uh send it my way i'd be glad to review it and if it's good research i'll do an update to this more likely than not uh from what i've read it's hugely inconclusive and there's a absolute crap of methodological and interpretation errors and the stuff that's out there but the video first or second or something bad with time sequencing i mentioned that the behavioral effects that you see as a result of these things they all converge into common patterns which is sort of why autism is recognized as a behavioral thing it's not at its core but differences in the brain affect the way you think in very consistent ways so unsurprisingly the effect on attention converges in very specific ways you see this sort of break into two different things see normally people's attention is pretty well rounded i don't quite want to say evenly distributed but i much more so than you see autistic um most people can keep pretty good track of the things in their life like where they put the keys you know you still forget about them sometimes but and borrow from kyle hill's video he's bad enough about it he developed a strategy for remembering the keys by putting them on top of the food he was going to bring in the refrigerator because he'd remember the food and so if the keys were on top of the food in the refrigerator you're forced to interact with them i have a sort of similar issue with bills that was not a good thing to have an issue with i have automatic bill pay set up which is a great adaptive strategy love automatic bill pay because it just takes care of it um some people argue what if i want to pay a higher amount then let the automatic bill pay do its thing and then put another payment in for a smaller amount to make the two add up to the whatever you intended but not an issue at least that's the way i do it but when i get paper bills happen sometimes uh like the hospital i had two paper bills sent to me if i don't pay those right away and i mean right away like that moment when i open the thing up i'll forget about it i don't mean oh it's on my mind and it just keeps lapsing i mean i will forget about the bill i will forget it exists until the next month when i get another one like uh hey you didn't pay this um luckily figured that out at a pretty young age like a teenager not even paying bills yet and so i um very rare one will slip through so i i developed a strategy for dealing with that um some people like to more meticulously plan things um which is where you see the rigid bridge schedules in the autistic come from um i just address things right away so if you've ever messaged me on my twitter or whatever you know that i get back to you really quickly that's why because otherwise i'll click on the thing being like oh i can respond to this later and then never respond to it i don't want to do that it's kind of kind of rude and there's no no the people who mean who do that don't mean it it's not pleasant when it happens to you it i i have to respond right away on the other side you see hyperfocus which is sort of more what's known in autism i uh this is this is what happened me not doing video i got really really focused on some programming i was doing forgot to eat i need dinner yeah i don't think i drank enough water either because i woke up really really thirsty it's not in the middle of winter right now so it's not like really dry air fingers are all cracked i feel like i hate the way my hands feel right now and because i'm dehydrated pounding water all day trying to make up for it coffee ain't helping but um paper focus is weird obviously enough i don't hyper focus on these videos otherwise the quality of the content and the videos would come out a lot better a lot more consistent uh this isn't my thing this is something i sort of force myself to do i've talked more about the video i won't get too much into it this is a sort of challenge to myself a little extra thing that i do not something i intend to monetize ever it probably would be 20 25 before i even start making a few pennies off these videos whatever keep doing them no um in kyle hill's video which did i say i'll link to that i will have a link to that he's a much bigger creator you'd have an easy time finding it anyways but i will link to that um he talks about hyper focus being a major part of why he's able to produce the high quality content that he does he does and a huge benefit it it is it's a huge benefit at the expense of other things like i said i forgot to eat yesterday sometimes you forget to shower which is embarrassing gross schedule your showers there's no no other way around that the schedules the autistic this this is why you don't schedule it's not an anxiety thing if you don't schedule you just forget to do it and you need to do it you need to eat you need to take a shower you need to other things schedule you forget about cell phones have been an absolutely fantastic advantage to the autistic because you can not the basics of you know smartphones became a thing pdas combined with cell phones put your whole schedule down in there in the calendar you've got the right thing set up you can even sync it between multiple devices jot something down in my phone and have it come up on my computer i happen to be here like hey you have this appointment that i know you're going to forget about which used to happen too and um you gotta you gotta do that get up helps a lot i um i remember i'm a kid i used to read non textbooks a lot more read the first three or four harry potter books it's not being interesting to me after uh after a while but it was one one night got the new book and went through the entire thing that night didn't even sleep just read through the whole book because that's what i was focused on there are a lot of times where we'll be programming from seven o'clock in the morning to [Music] eight nine ten o'clock at night just keep programming almost straight have to pop up to my computer and hey you should probably eat you're gonna forget about it it's useful i don't wanna it it's useful but you gotta learn how to deal with it so if you're the your parent younger autistic child start setting these things up get them in place fairly early it's going to help immensely just it's not it's not necessarily anxiety i mean it can anxiety can be a component of it but that's usually because maybe a component of it if um just just get them in place it helps note that it usually doesn't need to be extremely rigid it's not like oh 1205 we do lunch it's usually not that rigid something else i wanted to talk about this what was it what was it i don't know okay now so i will wrap it up then you can see it goes much better if i list which is also why you should make the list uh might even be why tend to script parts of conversations at that time probably why i'll let others who talked about this and did not show the level of disorganization and thought and then they scripted the video explained this in much more entertaining ways but yeah attention in autism is a weird thing and i would describe it fairly simply as just rather than being nice and well-rounded and lopsided focus really intensely uncertainty barely at all on others yet to do basic self-care problems but oh bad highly beneficial a disproportionately large amount of the autistic and a disproportionately large amount of people with adhd don't want to be entrepreneurs this is partially because of difficulties in the workplace that will not be accommodated for um there are some that i disagree with who are overly focused on trying to get everybody to accommodate tend to be rather hostile call everybody ableist that obviously i'm not being hostile with these videos i'm explaining things hopefully that perspective helps but it's also to help those who've been diagnosed parents of those who've been diagnosed black accommodations is not something i'm bitching about as much as it's just like it's not just a disability thing that happens all sorts of things is actually partially the result of the oxytocin and group binding bonding uh thing that i talked about in the previous video just part of biology kind of evolved to do that really hard to undo thousands of years of evolution so yeah but um disproportionate amount of autistic and adhd go on to the entrepreneurs because it works in both cases there's really nothing that gets in the way of the job itself it's other people in both cases you think differently than other people and there in the minds of problems it's not a disability of the job i don't know of any stance or autism but adhd there are adhd is four times over represented among entrepreneurs so that is what are the rates of adhd right now i don't know but you sample entrepreneurs they're four times more likely to have adhd among successful entrepreneurs they're also five times more likely to have adhd again i don't know the stats for autism but it's expected to be pretty similar because it's the same underlying thing going on here the entrepreneurs more likely have adhd and is more likely to be successful because of that hyper focus if you learn to deal with it it can actually be a huge asset and let's face it the world isn't going to accommodate you but you're going to accommodate your customers they only care they want the product good product good service they really don't care that's the best kind of accommodation and that's not oh woes whatever that's actually like the best way to do it be mine to not be negatively judged it's a lot easier to take the things that you're good at the ability to hyperfocus the the incredible passion you have for things the incredible attention to detail it's a lot easier to take that brush up on entrepreneurial skills than it is to do what we did for decades berating the person for being different and not being able to do things the same way that other people can attention is different but not good not bad use it the right way you'll be glad i have no idea what i'm going to do for the next video then like last time where i knew but i wasn't going to say i have no idea what i'm going to do for the next video so until then have a good one guys