Did anyone else think when they saw Rainman that there were similarities between their schizophrenia and his autism?
Are you saying that people with schizophrenia are savants?.
No, that’s not what I meant. I was struck by his reactivity to outside stimulation of any kind, and by his inability to put aside his thoughts. His susceptiblity to anxiety, etc.
It appears he was both. Autistic and Savant…
Personally I see some minor autistic traits in my son…
You can actually develop those Rainman abilities in nonautistic people, I remember when I lived in my auto in America and I started multiplying two 5-digit numbers, I actually started ‘seeing’ these numbers and multiplications in my mind, I also practiced to remember long number sequences such as 4857364758690484847325 and so on. I suppose it was one way of mine to survive there in my little auto with all fleas, cockroaches and other insects.
You would never want to live in an auto for few years, sometimes my legs were red because so many fleas had bitten me, and then there were some fast insects that always came in the evening and were after cat food I had for my black cat. In the mornings when I ate some eggs cockroaches seemed to be interested to have a bite.
Then I had a cat excrement box in the same car and I emptied it regularly, but later one Michael who had been in Marine Corp Force Recon told me that in old days they actually manufactured some nerve agents/gas from excrements.
There are a lot of similarities between schizophrenia and autism
Shared clinical features
Although the disorders are distinct, they have shared clinical features. Social withdrawal, communication impairment, and poor eye contact seen in ASD are similar to the negative symptoms seen in youths with schizophrenia.11 When higher-functioning individuals with autism are stressed, they become highly anxious and at times may appear thought-disordered and paranoid, particularly when they are asked to shift set (such as being asked to change a topic of conversation or to stop an activity that they are engaged in and begin a new activity).12 A subset of children (28%) in the ongoing NIMH study of COS have been reported to have comorbid COS and ASD.7
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Thanks @Wave…
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