#autistic pattern recognition

[anexperimentallife]

Imagine you and a friend both watch someone toss a ball into the air. You're like, "Oh, it's going to come down here, so we'd better move," and your friend says, "Tch, clearly it's not coming down AT ALL," and just stands there.

Then, when the ball hits them, they're either mystified at how you figured it out, or they chalk it up to luck.

Either way, the NEXT time someone tosses a ball in the air and you tell them where it's going to fall, they're absolutely CERTAIN you're wrong THIS time, and assure you that THIS time the ball is going to stay in the air. So you get out of the way while your friend gets beaned again.

This is what it's like having autistic pattern recognition and not being taken seriously.

[abnormalpsychology]

Hear me out. Brad and Janet, and Tom and Shiv— two failmarriages who may have more in common than you’d think:

inversion / parody of gender roles hetero romance

they are trying SOOOOOOO hard to be a normal married couple and it is just Not Working Out

very very hot sex symbol girlboss woman obsessed with another more powerful guy (Logan, Frank) and extremely unreliable but sometimes present sense of self-awareness and craves independence

dorky asshole malewife bottom trying desperately not to be a malewife as hard as he can for the entire media but yet the malewife genes overcome his efforts valiantly again and again and aGAIN

they cheat on each other a bunch of times (but they don't mean it guyssss 😩)

YES. they cheat on each other. BUT it's made known to the audience that they feel really bad abt it Imao

a premature WEIRD proposal done in a close-proximity-to-death situation yet they’re still like “okay 😊!” like would you rather I propose to you in the hospital while your dad is in intensive care from his brain hemorrhage OR in a graveyard after another person’s wedding while a funeral goes on right next to us featuring a suspiciously child-sized casket? romance central am I right

dedicated loving relationship struggling to survive in a crazy environment that is directly corrosive to dedicated loving relationships

horrible communication where the lack of communication in their marriage is kind of essential to the plot in and of itself

a threesome kinda happens in canon (more an orgy. this is abt rhps obviously) vs they almost had a threesome and then didnt... basically a threesome could've fixed all of them

"yes I cheated on you. Yes I still love you and would protect you as best I can in a traumatizing situation where a key extremely complex and kinda shitty person we both kinda love dies in front of us. We exist."

protection motif is a huge thing for both of them and in the end it's pretty clear that delusion is really what's actually been protecting them

most importantly: getting into marriage and being like "wow bitch!!! you are not who I thought you were"

they both end up in this really subjective completely destroyed irrevocably changed and entirely mortifyingly known position in their relationship like "who knows if we even love each other anymore"

"lol we both betrayed the other's trust beyond repair. does the love matter anymore lol Imao"

way too many people rightfully think there's no way to work their issues out but I am so delusional I don't give a shit <3

married couple that gets pitted against each other and have all these reasons to hate each other but you can tell that all of the love can’t be gone and like the evolution somehow emphasizes the love that was there before = PEAK ROMANCE. TO ME

[vaguelyaperson]

autistic pattern recognition and gullibility be like “huh, this seems strange/wrong/out of the ordinary... but it’s being presented as fact so it must be so. don’t like it though.”

and then it turns out your first observation was right. gets me every time.

[0th3rw0rldl1n3ss]

Having enough Autistic Pattern Recognition to know that Spotify has changed their shuffle algorithm recently but not enough to be able to describe exactly how or what changed is driving me bananas

[seabeck]

Me, trying to explain how to can tell the difference between species of plants and fungi:

[jolynejay]

Which one is it, Malleus

Malleus & Yuu/MC: having a Gargoyle Research Club meeting (aka going on a stroll at night infodumping at each other)

Yuu/MC: That reminds me, there is something I wanted to ask you.

Malleus: What is weighing on your mind, child of man?

Yuu/MC: Do you like gargoyles because they remind you of yourself - a living relic from a bygone time whose purpose has become largely obsolete due to the advancement of technology and society, only able to watch eternally from afar as people go about their lives without ever truly belonging to that world and no perspective for the future of your own as those you call kin slowly fade away?

Yuu/MC: Or do you like them "just because"?

Malleus:

[my-autism-adhd-blog]

Predicting Film Plots and 4 Other Examples of Autistic Pattern Seeking

Neurodivergent_lou

[sylvianightshade]

Me after season 1: You know what? I kinda like Joyce and Hopper together. I wonder if they’re gonna do anything with that next season. Idk, feels like a crack ship so probably not.

Season 2:

Me after season 2: You know what? I think El and Max would be a good wlw ship. They like barely know each other but idk, I feel like they’d vibe really well as a couple. They probably won’t get much more interaction next season tho.

Season 3:

Me after season 3: You know what? Robin and Nancy. Conceptually? Could bounce really well off each other. But that’s such a crack pairing. They probably won’t—

Season 4:

istg the Duffers are in MY walls.

(Bonus:

Me after season 4: Damn, Mike and Will are literally perfect for each other but. I guess the requited stuff is never gonna be canon.

Season 5: ??? 👀👀👀)

[petrofagonicapocalypse]

Does anyone else do this watching gizz sets cuz I literally go full 🤓☝️erm according to my calculations, they pulled out the synth table and stu left the flute out so they’re going to play grim reaper soon! And then they Did.

[therebelcaptain]

i feel like i’m one of eight people who went into the acolyte convinced that master indara was not going to make it past episode one. like, everyone seemed so surprised she got killed off straight away. i mean, most of the shots of her in the trailer were clearly flashbacks, so based on that i figured that she was one of the murdered jedi they were talking about. so if anything, the thing that surprised me was simply that they opened with her getting killed rather than having it be the end of the first episode or something. hopefully we get to see a lot more of her in flashbacks, but yeah. i didn’t think so many people would be surprised haha.

[perplexingluciddreams]

I love reading fanfiction to better understand characters I watched in a TV show or film. I can get to know them so much better from the words on a page, than watching them and hearing them speak.

I see patterns in facial movements, I see gait patterns, I see patterns in the shapes made by limbs and bodies. I hear intonation changes in voices like music. I notice patterns everywhere - it is making sense of these patterns and connecting things with their meanings that I struggle with, greatly.

When it comes to real people, if I watch long enough, I start to pin the meaning to these repeated movements and expressions and sounds. With fictional characters, I can't do that, as I can't ask them what their own behaviour means. I am unable to "read between the lines" at all.

When I read, the words hand me the meaning at the same time as explaining the visual or auditory that goes along with it. There is less necessary "reading between the lines", as those gaps are filled by words much more than on a TV show, where there is only dialogue.

I can tell when dialogue is cleverly written, I can find links and patterns, I can recognise when there is a reference to something - either that happened earlier in the show or timeline, or to something external that I am not aware of. My difficulty is that I simply don't understand it. I can't get all of that information from reading, either, but I certainly have a lot less gaps to fill.

Afterwards, I can rewatch and have a much deeper understanding of the characters. I start to be able to see them as fully-formed people, rather than just the words they say from the script.

I like to read different people's interpretations, also. Whilst it can be confusing, not knowing which interpretation I agree with more (as I can't much interpret behaviour or figurative language at all, on my own), it is also useful in giving me different perspectives to consider.

I might read several different fanfictions on a specific character or pairing, then rewatch relevant scenes several times; each time with one of those fanfiction's interpretations in mind.

Some of my favourite characters ever only became so strongly favoured because I read a fantastic fanfiction revolving around them, and started to understand them beyond the lines of a script.

[forgotn1]

Advice about shooting your shot because you can't get what you want if you don't ask is all well and good for most people, but I can't just do that. I can't trust that what I am seeing and think is happening actually is happening because my brain will just make things up without me realizing that's what's happening. I think I'm piecing things together or picking up on hints, but what's often actually happening is that I want to be with someone and my brain finds ways to convince me there's something there. And so far, it has been wrong every time because it also ignores things that don't fit the narrative, so I don't have a real picture of what's going on, just the idealized version.

The reason I say "my brain" is doing it instead of me is because I actively do not want to be doing it. It's not healthy for anyone involved and I've spent a lot of time and therapy trying to stop it from happening. It has caused me nothing but distress over the years and while I haven't been able to fully stop it, I have learned how to recognize it's happening and try to shut it down. Unfortunately, it means constantly reminding myself that what I'm seeing isn't there and that they don't actually feel what my brain has decided they feel.

The practical effect of this is that I ignore any and all hints and will refuse to act unless there is clear signs that I cannot refute. Which largely comes down to having it outright stated before I'm willing to believe I'm not imagining things. That inherently puts me at an extreme disadvantage when it comes to potentially dating, which is tough when I was already struggling with it. But It's better than repeatedly getting myself hurt and putting everyone involved into very awkward and potentially toxic situations.

[fandsart]

@amoris-no-smut-allowed

Thinking about canon S3 Steve being pre-polyglot Steve. He’s always thought the idea of knowing other languages would be really cool and impressive, but he never tries, because with the perception that it’s impressive, he doesn’t think he’d be any good at it

So he never tries. But Robin drops sentences in other languages all the time. Little sayings, jokes, and asides. And he starts picking up on them, and how the sentence structures work in the different languages. I think he’s afraid to get his hopes up that he might actually be good at something he wants to be good at. He likes being good at basketball but it's the only thing he's found so far. That's why he puts so much weight on it, but none of his current friends are impressed by it so his sense of worth in that area isn't super high, but he's not ready to be disappointed yet

But he picks up on the languages really quickly, barely even trying (and he is a little bit, but just enough that he won’t let himself be disappointed when he misses things). Whenever he gets the general idea of a sentence, enough to understand what Robin means, he gets really excited about it, and Robin obviously notices

So she suggests actually delving into it, and while he’s nervous to try, they do, and he’s a fast learner when it’s something he can put into practice regularly

[solitarysnowflakes]

Why is it so hard for people to accept that I know how a conversation is going to go?

[maaaxx]

when i was a little undiagnosed autistic kid i used to get SO excited about patterns ™️and greatly overestimated how much everyone else cared. So like I had locker number 123 one year and i was positive that was going to make me the most loved person in my school, like i thought i was the chosen one ,this is the thing that was going to finally make people like me, this is what ive been missing my entire life etc etc. And i was extremely confused when people were not lining up at my locker to see.

my school identification number had the sequence '654'in it and i was certain that my grade was eventually going to hold interrogation sessions that would break the Geneva convention in order to find out who had my id number because it might be one of the best lunch numbers to exist, like not only were the numbers by eachother BUT ALSO there was a 5 in it and two other numbers and 5 + 2 obviously equals seven and that was SO COOL (obviously 7 is one of the best numbers everyone knows that)

SPEAKING OF 7 my great aunts license plate was one of my favorite things as a child, because the letter part of it had 3 numbers that were also in her last name AND they were in the right order AND they were evenly distributed (so like if her last name were smith it would be SIH) and not only that but the letters were 5337 which, again i liked 7's, so like if you took the amount of numbers there are in the sequence that aren't the 5 or 7 (the two 3's) and added it to the 5, you would get the last number in the sequence. But also if you added the 3's together you'd get 6 and if you add that with the amount of numbers left besides the 7 again (the one 5) you would also get 7. And I swore she got that plate custom made because what are the fucking odds that you would get a license plate like that BY CHANCE

[naofaun]

“memorizing someone's schedule is weird” boy what if im just autistic with high pattern recognition abilities and an intense fear of bothering people