I once spent a surprisingly enlightening five minutes at an office Christmas party trying to explain "the beat" to a work colleague. This mostly involved slapping the back of a chair in time to Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves and shouting "seriously, can you not hear that?" This was a completely alien concept to me. How can someone not hear the beat in a piece of music?
Since then I've taken up a number of musical and dance-related hobbies, and it's become apparent to me that some people simply can't hear the patterns in a piece of music. They don't know what a key change is because they can't distinguish between two different keys. They can't tell when a break is coming up, even when the piece is issuing a screaming telegraph that it's about to break. To them it's just nice noise.
I've found maths to be a bit similar. When demonstrating something mathematically, there are some people who just can't see how or why one thing is isomorphic to another, or why it's self-evident that if this is the case, that must also be the case. Others without any maths training at all can spot the same thing right away, and call it a good intuitive example.
This does make me worry a bit, because I'm not aware of anything I "just can't do" in this fashion. There are plenty of things I'm bad at, but I'm at least capable of recognising the criteria by which I'm bad at them. Is there anything out there my brain simply isn't wired to perceive properly, and how can I even tell if I find it?
Perfect pitch? Probably not the best example of something you "just can't do", but the video makes the point extremely clearly and made me think "She's right, is is weird that most people can easily identify different colours but not different tones"
The two phenomena are probably more analogous than you think.
Native speakers of languages in which tone conveys semantic content (Mandarin, for example) are more likely to have perfect pitch than speakers of tonally indifferent languages. Similarly, speakers of languages which make distinctions between two colours are more likely to be able to distinguish them than speakers of a language that doesn't. Turkish and Russian split what we call "blue" into two different colours, and as a result their native speakers find it easier distinguishing different shades of blue.
I have actually recently started learning to play the piano, and I told my tutor I could recognise Middle C by ear. She asked me if I had perfect pitch, which was a bit of an awkward question to answer. I'm extremely confident I could train myself to recognise all the tones over seven octaves. I just can't do it right now because I'm still trying to get the fingering right on Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
Actually, I've read somewhere that there's a difference between genetic perfect pitch and trained perfect pitch. Those with the first find it physically painful to hear off-key music and to transpose known music into different keys (because it jars so much with their memory of what it's supposed to sound like), while people with trained perfect pitch have more tolerance for those things because the association isn't as ingrained. Kind of like the difference between synaesthesia and learned colour-letter combinations I guess.
I used to teach Sunday school, and some of it involved having students do a little singing. I was shocked at the number of ten-year-old kids who could not sing back a pattern of pitches by ear. I'm not talking about singing beautifully, or in tune; I'm talking about distinguishing flat, rising, or falling tones. The scary part? These were kids who had taken music lessons. I still don't understand it; maybe it wasn't inability at all, just passive resistance because they didn't want to be there.
I've spent about eleven years of my life in various choirs, and I am still effectively music illiterate. I'm capable of singing perfectly well, but the terms "flat, rising and falling tones" mean nothing to me. I can't read sheet music, remember the names of notes, I'm not even sure I remember what a scale is...
It's not that I haven't tried to learn these things, but for some reason I've found myself completely unable to retain any of it, despite having plenty of opportunity to make use of the information. I can only speculate on what the reasons for this might be.
That is the coolest toy ever. I'm going to get one, and play with it all weekend while getting extremely drunk. Anyone who comes over and doesn't find it fascinating I will belittle and then threaten.
I'm not an aspie; I'm just a jerk.
Turns out that one of our programmers got this thingy as a birthday present, so I asked him to bring it to the office. Some recent results: a double-capped cylinder (made by me), and a BDSM rubber duck (made by our sexually-obsessed PHP programmer :)
Huh. I have multiple friends with this toy. At least one of them plays with them quite regularly and doesn't seem Aspieish is at all. They are quite fun to play with.
I have Asperger's and I love those things. I have issues making the solid tetrahedron and octahedron, but I can make large hollow ones.
Have you tried to make the second variety of cube I linked to - cut out from a tightly packed sphere lattice instead of a cubic lattice?
Since I posted that I've been able to make the tetrahedron and a (wonky, distorted) octahedron. I've been trying to make the tight-packed cube by stacking 5-by-5 squares and 6-by-6 squares alternately, but now that I look at the picture again I see I've been going at it all wrong. Off to try it again.
Update: Still can't get that cube, but here are some pictures of other polyhedra. The icosahedron is hollow; the others are not.
Wouldn't that lower your social status a bit by emphasising differences instead of in-group solidarity?
Anything which makes you appear as an Aspie instead of an ordinary person emphasises your differences from the group, thus making you seem more of an outsider. That was the possibility I was considering.
This post is going to sound like an ad. Sorry about that. I'm not affiliated, etc, etc.
Last Friday I bought a very simple toy: a set of 216 little magnetic metal balls, about the size of ball bearings. Since then I've been completely entranced by it and unable to put the thing down. Here's a Flickr group to show what I mean. The little balls seem to want to come together in symmetrical patterns: you can make square and hexagonal flat patches, curved patches with 3/4/5/6-fold symmetry, stable 3D cubic lattices, fcc and hcp lattices and many hollow and solid polyhedra. So far I've managed to make a tetrahedron, two varieties of cube (1, 2), an octahedron, an icosahedron, and other stuff (my current favorite shape is the solid truncated octahedron). It's like crack for the right type of person.
And there's the rub. Carrying this toy around and showing it to my friends has made me realize with forgotten clarity that I'm special. Practically no one reacts to it the same way as me. The word "aspie" has been uttered, half in jest, half seriously. Even though my intelligence may be pretty average (judging by online tests I have lower IQ than most LW regulars), I seem to have this rare natural ability to get deeply interested in things that "normal" people find boring.
This ability... this instinctive desire to tinker with symmetrical patterns... has shaped my entire life by now, because it's what first attracted me to math and then programming. But how could it ever be environmental, if I remember having it since my earliest childhood? Is it genetic? Is math success genetic, then? What do you think?