pfh has a hypothesis about autism on his website, which is quite interesting but also explained in quite a mathematical way. Here is my attempt at explaining it in everyday terms.
The hypothesis posits that NT and autistic people have a different balance between small, medium and large variations/steps/deviations. Everyone has lots of small, some medium and few large; but NT people have somewhat fewer medium ones while autistic people have somewhat fewer large ones, compared to each other.
This has consequences both as a difference and in its own right.
For instance, a shared-attention task between people with different balances of small, medium and large shifts in attention is likely to be mutually frustrating and tiring, as they will have difficulty following each other's trains of thought.
Autistic people will be surprised or even distressed by the more common large deviations from usual behaviour of an NT person, while NT people will be surprised or even distressed by the more common medium-sized deviations from usual behaviour of an autistic person. (Whoever's socially dominant will label the other's behaviour "pathological". As a coping strategy, the autistic person may reduce their scale of what is medium and large, so that their medium-sized deviations count as small for the NT person and do not distress them; this is then labelled "pathological adherence to routine".)
Pretend emotions practised with an NT audience will be unconvincing or even incomprehensible to an autistic person (and, presumably, vice versa). Environments, textures, noise levels etc designed to be OK for NT people may be distressing to autistic persons (and, again, vice versa).
In its own right, the posited autistic perception will have difficulty distinguishing two sources of sound. The autistic person will lack "common sense" reasoning, while the NT person will have difficulty coping with truly large shifts in the way the world works (and will tend to ignore or deny them). Two NT persons presented with the same data in different order may come to different conclusions, while autistic persons are less susceptible to this.
Notes: (a) I do not know whether the hypothesis is true or false; neither I nor (as far as I know) Paul are in a position to test it. (b) This is my interpretation of Paul's hypothesis, and while I've tried to be faithful, some differences may have crept in.
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11 July 2011, 7:43 UTCcomment by Paul Harrison
This is a pretty good summary, and I very much like your analysis of autistic-normal interaction.
I don't know if it's true or false either, but it makes many testable predictions.
