Rather than trying to "open up a new bank account" why not try to get in your car, drive to the bank, get out of your car, etc. [...] I think this experience of feeling completely unable to do an abstract task is virtually universal for humans.
What you described is a very normal response to reducing the difficulty of a task in order to reduce the anxiety response to said task to manageable levels. It is, however, unhelpful to autists who only know the global task. If you ever work with an autistic child, it would help you to be aware that such a strategy would be counter-productive. An example of what I mean is that to a profoundly autistic child, the knowledge of how to tie one's right shoe does not and cannot translate into how to tie one's left shoe. He would have to be re-taught each individual step in the process as a separate and independent task, and then he would have to be manually taught how to assemble them into both the right-shoe and the left-shoe before he might be able to begin to extrapolate from those into other situations.
It's not, you see, that I didn't know the basic steps to each of these tasks. It's not even that I couldn't conceive of ways of simplifying them. It was that I had no "algorithm" by which to assemble them into a whole. I lack the language to properly explain this difficulty to someone who has not experienced, except to say this: it is not that I was "overwhelmed". It was... like being given a road-map and shown images of every important point along the route you should take to get to the destination, and then being given a car in a disassembled state. If you don't have the tools to put the car together, no matter how well you know "how to get there", you simply lack the means to do so. Breaking down the route further isn't going to help make that happen. You have to have the ability to traverse it at all.
I am frustrated by my lack of ability to elocute this notion. I apologize for my lack of clarity and/or communicative skill.
I have been diagnosed with Asperger's but am very high functioning. There are definitely tasks I feel this way about; for example, sometimes I will feel completely unable to call people on the phone. Although I often have to plan my conversations in advance, I can usually accomplish such things by breaking them down into subtasks.
EDIT: Actually, on second thought I think I understand what you mean. If you asked me to "make a friend" or anything else that involved too complex a decision tree I would be unable to comply. END EDIT
...It's not even tha
Partially to help reduce the typical mind fallacy and partially because I'm curious, I'm thinking about writing either an essay or a book with plenty of examples about ways by which human minds differ. From commonly known and ordinary, like differences in sexual orientation, to the rare and seemingly impossible, like motion blindness.
To do this, I need to start collecting examples. In what ways does your mind differ from what you think is the norm for most people?
I'm particularly interested in differences - small or large - that you didn't realize for a long time, automatically assuming that everyone was like you in that regard. It can even be something as trivial as always having conceptualized the passing of years as a visual timeline, and then finding out that not everyone does so. I'm also interested in links to blog posts where people talk about their own mental peculiarities, even if you didn't write them yourself. Also books and academic articles that you might think could be relevant.
Some of the content that I'm thinking about including are cultural differences in various things as recounted in the WEIRD article, differences in sexual and romantic orientation (such as mono/poly), differences in the ability to recover from setbacks, extroversion vs. introversion in terms of gaining/losing energy from social activity, differences in visualization ability, various cognitive differences ranging from autism to synesthesia to an inability to hear music in particular, differences in moral intuitions, differences in the way people think (visual vs. verbal vs. conceptual vs. something that I'm not aware of yet), differences in thinking styles (social/rational, reflectivity vs. impulsiveness) and various odd brain damage cases.
If you find this project interesting, consider spreading the link to this post or resharing my Google Plus update about it. Also, if you don't want to reply in public, feel free to send me a private message.