What's the opposite of Asperger's...

…and should it be classified as a disorder?
If Asperger’s lack cognitive empathy (but not necessarily emotional empathy or sympathy), coordination, dexterity, but are often, not always, but usually good systematizes, perhaps to consciously, psychologically, subconsciously or unconsciously, neurologically compensate for or counterbalance their lack of empathy and athletic prowess, than the opposite would be people who’re highly empathetic, athletic, but who’re poor systematizers, people who prefer chaos, change and disorder, variety, spontaneity and multitasking to order, regularity and predictability, narrowed hobbies and interests.

There are such people, who’re indecisive, poor planners, bad with math and analytical, concrete, systematic thought, but who’re good with people, animals, or with their hands, and perhaps these positive and negative traits not always, but tend to go together, just as Asperger’s positive and negative traits tend to correlate.
People who’re poor planners and thinkers, who’re irrational, flaky and so on, can have a lot of problems in life, holding a steady job, deciding what they want to do with themselves, or being decisive at all, planning for the future, or just being logical, rational, objective in general, they prefer to be intuitive, fanciful, flighty and subjective.

So why are, you could say, extreme left brained people considered disordered, impaired, and extreme right brained people as, perfectly normal and healthy?
Or perhaps something like schizophrenia is the opposite of Asperger’s disorder.
Schizophrenics are bad at compartmentalizing things, the self from others, fantasy from reality, this from that, they see patterns where there are none, or highly dubious patterns, often missing out on mundane, obvious ones that’re right in front of their noses, where as Asperger’s are great at compartmentalizing, and being scientific, but lack creativity (althou they can possess a kind of linear creativity, they can create or uncover x, the new or novel, but only painstakingly beginning with A, then B, then C and so on down the line, where as schizophrenics might get flashes of creativity and insight, seemingly from out of the aether, they might even attribute their epiphanies to the Gods, or some mysterious force or source they’re connected to), imagination, humor, poetry and so on.
Schizophrenics aren’t really known for being good athletes or with people thou, but their thought patterns can be somewhat juxtaposed with the thought patterns of Asperger’s.

What made you pick Schizophrenia as the opposite to Aspergers? Why not Bi-polar’s Mania? With mania, everything’s heightened and sped up, sensory input, thinking, emotions, etc.

As far as I know, bipolar manic/depressive is a mood disorder, where as Asperger’s is cognitive.
Bipolar is characterized by wild mood swings, where as Asperger’s has nothing to do with mood, Asperger’s can be moody, or not.
Asperger’s is characterized by lack of cognitive empathy and coordination, but are sometimes-often good system builders, where as bipolar has little-nothing to do with cognition.
I don’t think they’re especially comparable, nor contrastable.

Asperger’s and schizophrenia are both cognitive disorders, thou schizophrenia can affect mood also, especially schizoaffective, which’s kind of like bipolar and schizophrenia combined, their neuotypical when depressed, and neuroatypical or crazy when manic, what a trip eh?
Asperger’s lack communication and people skills and sometimes schizophrenics do too, but in different ways.

What makes them good to juxtapose in my mind, is Asperger’s are mathematical, scientific, fact oriented, and are attracted to order, predictability and regularity, their speech is very concrete, dry, literal, straightforward, where as schizophrenics are intuitive, religious/spiritual, fiction oriented, and are disorderly and erratic, in thinking, speech and often behavior, they’re attracted to dark, esoteric, mystical subjects, and are holistic, poetic and whimsical in thinking and speech.
Both of them tend to be introverted loners, having difficulty expressing themselves, with fitting in, but for very different reasons.

I’m not sure if schizophrenics are better or worse with coordination and empathy, it doesn’t seem to be about that, but in terms of their thought and speech patterns, they seem opposites in many ways.
Asperger’s would have trouble forming an opinion on what other people are thinking or feeling, where as schizophrenics might project thoughts, feelings and intentions onto others from their own imagination that aren’t there.

You could say asperger’s are like mental tortoises, conservatives, attracted to the simple, mundane predictable things, like the hard sciences, where as schizophrenics are mental hares, liberals, and are prone to wild speculations and flights of fancy, attempting to make broad connections between vastly different people, places, things and subjects, that often aren’t connected at all, reading too much into things.

Asperger’s focus is too narrow, too precise, which is why they have trouble with things that’re too varied to process by linear, rigid, sequential thinking, where as Schizophrenic thinking is too broad, wishy washy, all over the map, or at least too much for our tastes, as neurotypicals.
But who is a neurotypical anyway, am I, are you?
Neurotypical is just an average, and none of us are average in every way, all the time, we all diverge from the average from time to time, from way to way, more or less.
Averages are abstractions.

Bipolar is a cognitive deficit disorder accompanied by what has been casually termed “mood swings.”

https://annals-general-psychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12991-015-0080-0https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2041824/

The research on neuropsychological rammifications regarding Bipolar is sorely lacking but a few studies have compared it with schizophrenia and they share much, Bipolar patients showing milder cognitive deficits (so far…few studies have been done remember) than schizophrenia, but in the same boat more or less. Slowly but surely, it seems that neuroscience is finding genetic factors and frontal lobe correlations shedding light on the neuropsychological deficits found on the Bipolar spectrum.

It’s not just a mood disorder, I know from experience. :evilfun: It may be a brain disease or a different brain type rather than a simple chemical imbalance. We need more research done!

Are there types of human brains? I don’t know but folks with debilitating mental health issues, their brains may actually be different, wired differently with even more neurotransmitters and those transmitters could be overly sensitive.

I keep editing…sorry. This topic is personal so I’m finding it difficult not to let my mood :wink: take over.

How about Nigger’s syndrome?

I don’t think Asperger Syndrome implies any exceptional ability, just relatively normal abilities. That people with Asperger’s tend to have narrow and repetitive interests does not mean that they are savants or especially gifted. The opposite would simply be someone who is socially adept and who has wide-ranging interests/skills.

Average type is the most common type within some set of types. My question would be why would someone measure what is optimal in relation to what is average? Why would someone take that which is average as that which is optimal? Unless, of course, what is average somehow coincides with what is optimal.

But what is optimal, anyways?
What is this optimal point everyone is talking about?
Everyone says “that’s too much” or “that’s too little”. But too much or too little in relation to what?

My approach is basically in relation to self.
What is too much or too little is in relation to what is within one’s nervous system at a given point in time.
When nervous system is overexcited then that indicates that there is too much of something and too little of something else.
What that is depends on the content of one’s nervous system at that specific point in time.

So yeah, the optimal point everyone is talking about is not absolute but guess what – relative.
It is relative.

What’s too much for me might be too little or the right amount for someone else.
And to think that what is average is what is optimal is thereby dangerous.
Because you might not be average.

As for autists and Aspergers, I don’t know what’s going in their nervous systems, but it does seem reasonable to say that they are paying way too much attention to certain details (too much convergence.)
Whereas their cousins, whatever you call them, are not paying enough attention to certain details (too much divergence.)
The effect is ultimately the same: overexcited nervous system.

The main thing with bipolar is the mood swings thou, the cognitive deficits seem mild, and scattered all over the place, a little here and there, not all in one or two places like Asperger’s.
Yea there’s probably different brain types, and maybe bipolar is one of them, or maybe the problem with bipolar people is too specific for the disorder to be considered a brain type, and whatever cognitive and other deficits they have, are mild and more consequences of the mood swings, than things on their own.

Three distinct types of deficits (tested and recorded) seems to be all over the place? No, the problem with the research is that the scientists are not testing the patient’s baseline, their normal, and they are not even asking what stage of the illness the patients are in when tested.

I’m afraid it’s more than a little here and there, serious enough to require multiple meds, hospitalizations, and the loss of autonomy/independence.

Does Asperger’s develop, worsen, over time?

Interesting, what are the 3 areas?
I didn’t read the entire report you linked us.
Yea it’ll be interesting to see what conclusions scientists will reach regarding bipolar, once more research is conducted, perhaps it is a ‘brain type’.
Nobodies mind is perfect, I never had a problem with understanding other peoples thoughts, feelings or points of view, as far as I know, nor with mood swings or disorderly thinking, speech, hallucinations.
My problem has been with OCD, but more with what’s known as pure O, or obsessions without compulsions, intrusive thoughts.
Perhaps OCD is something broader than just the illness itself, maybe it tends to correlate with a whole bunch of positive, neutral and negative traits, perhaps many of these disorders are part of brain types.

Are blacks known for having a wide array of hobbies and interests?
Probably not.
Aspies have quirky interests, like for years or decades they’ll preoccupy themselves with one or two little, insignificant things, like bug or stamp collecting, where as blacks seem narrowly interested in physical, sensual things, like food, sex, music, sports and rims.
Are they known for being synthetic, global thinkers as opposed to analytic, local?
I would say they’re not known for being either.
Are they natural psychologists?
Are they adept at comprehending vastly different points of view than their own?
Probably not.
At gauging other peoples thoughts and feelings?
Nonverbally yea, but I’d say Europeans and Jews are better at verbally gauging other peoples thoughts and feelings, where as Aspies aren’t good at either at nonverbally or verbally gauging other peoples thoughts and feelings, often they’re not even good at gauging their own, they lack theory of mind, when they talk, it’s usually about some objective thing, they lack subjectivity.

Blacks are known for their athleticism, in contrast to Aspies.
They are known for being adept as nonverbal communication, like with music, song and dance, or expressing themselves, in contrast to Aspies.
They are known for improvising and intuiting, rather than being methodical or rational, in contrast to Aspies.

I would say blacks are known for being the opposite of Aspies in many ways, but not all.

I’ve read different things from different sources on this.
In a book I just read written by Simon Baron Cohen entitled the Science of Evil, that came out in 2011, Cohen equates evil with ‘empathy erosion’ and lack of ‘affective empathy’, or you might say, lack of sympathy.
Nothing that controversial or interesting, just standard stuff, but he talks about how both Asperger’s and Psychopaths lack empathy, but Aspies don’t seem to lack sympathy or compassion, or in other words, they’re not good at knowing whether you’re feeling good or bad, but they don’t want you to feel bad.

He also talks about how Aspies are good at systematic thinking, though their systematic thinking is narrow, meaning their systems may be large and complex, but focused on just one, tiny little area of life, as opposed to philosophical thinking, say, which’s often about the whole of life, or abstract things like being, time, morals values, meaning and purpose, and so on.
So I really don’t know, I’m getting mixed messages on this, maybe their iQs are just average, on average, but their thinking is is still very linear, organized, sequential, systematic, very left brained.
Now being left brained doesn’t make you intelligent, you can be good or bad at being left brained (I know the whole left/right brain thing as fallen out of favor among neuropsychologists recently, but indulge me a little), but they do use it a lot, and so their thinking is very organized, but not necessarily quick or agile.

Sometimes averages are optimal, sometimes they’re not, it depends.
Average intelligence is not optimal, at least when it comes to things like longevity, education and affluence, which’re usually taken to be good things, where as average weight…well, used to be optimal, in like the 60s or 70s, now the average is a bit too high at 195 in the states, which’s overweight but not obese.
Average for adult males.
Yes it’s somewhat relative, on average, being obese is not a good thing, at least in terms of health, depends on what your values are, but in some circumstances, like if you’re a sumo wrestler, it can be beneficial.

If we were to use myers briggs, I think Aspies would be like high istjs, so their opposite would be high enfps, though myers briggs is more about personality and preference and less about ability, one can see how the two can correlate.

The red highlighted material is interesting too, that’s when BD folks are stable…sucks! Any way, I’m not all that familiar with Aspergers and asked the question about it’s progression. Any answers?

Hm, I thought bipolars would be good with memory, cause their strong emotions would burn events into their brain, but maybe their bad at remembering impersonal stuff, like facts and figures that have little relation to them, the kinds of things that would be used by cognitive psychologists to test their memories.
I have no idea why people with wild mood swings would also have deficits in those areas, but not other areas, maybe it’s coincidence, or maybe it’s part of some broader impairment.

Aspies impairment could come down to one thing, poor holistic, right brain thinking, the kind of thinking you need to be an artist, athlete, philosopher or psychologist, cause good art, coordination, good philosophy and people aren’t linear.
Aspies think in like two dimensions but life and especially people are three or four dimensional, so they might be good with technical language and computers and math, not cause their necessarily more intelligence, but cause this is where their interests lie, and anything you do over and over again you get good at.

Aspies want a linear life too, they want to specialize in just a few things, they want routine, predictability, stable, simple progression from a to z.
So is extreme right brainism a disorder recognized by psychologists, or is it in need of recognition?
Are some races more right brained and some left?
Are blacks more right brained?
Does being right brained make you more primitive, or just equally advanced in a different way?
Does living in the wild make your culture/race dumb, or are huntergatherers and gypsies equally smart in different ways?
I’m inclined to think the latter actually, I don’t think civilization, or left brain thinking is so smart, althou Asian and white brains are a little bigger than black brains, and score higher in iQ tests, which’re very left brain biased, perhaps blacks are more intelligent in right brained ways, or perhaps they’re less intelligent overall, difficult to say, unfortunately insufficient resources have been devoted to testing such things.
I think humans might have a more sophisticated left brain and right brain than many animals, and are both better at adapting nature to suit ourselves (left brain), and adapting ourselves to suit nature (right brain) than animals, but we have chosen the right hand path, which’s left brain.
Many animals are more instinctual, but instinct isn’t necessarily synonymous with intuition, or the right brain, holistic thinking thinking is something else.

Anyway, getting back to what you were saying, I think Asperger’s could be both genetic, influenced by prenatal factors, and environmental.
This is just my opinion thou based on limited research.
It’s simple really, a life kept isolated in your room, away from change, people, plants, animals, color, vibrancy, and among technical things like, gadgets, gizmos, books, computers, could contribute to someone developing their brains in a more Aspie friendly direction, especially during a child’s early development.

ACDC, I mean, ADHD.
Isn’t that what you’re looking for? Being easily distracted? Any kind of impulse disorder would work too. Mongoose already mentioned mania.

I think Jakob of VO fame is a good example of a man who could be said to suffer from some mild form of what we dubbed here Nigger’s syndrome. Easily distracted, lots of ideas, lots of them unrealistic, starts a lot of things never finishes anything, etc. Erik too. Mongoose too. And yes, to an extent, me too.

In MBTI, these are P as opposed to J types.
Perceptive, explorative, divergent, open-minded . . .

Yea I think that’s it, ADHD probably comes closet to being the opposite of Asperger’s of all the recognized mental disorders.

I’m somewhere in the middle when it comes to j and p.
I’m somewhere in the middle when it comes to t and f too.
I’m a strong i and n thou, but I can be e and s when I want to be.
I tend to score intj, but my t and j are weak.