Regarding the previous conversation...
I experience vivid colour-grapheme synethesia that's very similar to what Bench Brawl describes, and numerical-spatial as well (5-9 are steeper than 0-4, meaning the last Habs dynasty took place on a slope while the Islanders dynasty did not. If that makes no sense to you at all, then you probably do not experience synesthesia of any kind). To my knowledge, I'm not anywhere on the autism spectrum and almost nothing about my life suggests to me that I should get tested for it. But there's a particular conversation I had many years ago that I keep coming back to that makes me think a lot about the nature of spectrum disorders.
One of my best friends, we'll call him Jim, is 7 years older than me and produced an album for my band when he was 24 and I was 17. He let slip at one point that someone he knew had heard he was working on the album with me and said "Johnny Engine, doesn't he have autism?" Weird thing to let slip, completely insensitive thing to just bring up to Jim (with the implication that maybe I'm someone to be avoided? I dunno), and I have no idea where that person got the idea. Jim said that he knew it wasn't true because his girlfriend at the time knew me from an elementary school thing where the grade 6 kids would read to kintergarteners and vice versa, and I had been paired with her - she didn't think anything about the way I talked, interacted, or made eye contact threw up any flags. And of course, years later, Jim was finding me to come off as a pretty ordinary guy, albeit some very quirky ideas and work habits about making music. Which the two of us shared.
Jim studied psychology in university, and years after he had left school and I was in freshman year, I learned what synesthesia was and immediately told him. Jim told me that no, what I described was not synethesia, which he understood to be a fairly debilitating condition that confuses and stresses sensory inputs. What I experienced, he said, was just a normal thing everyone did, including him. In the intervening years, I've talked to lots of people who would confirm that, no, not everyone experiences this at all, and most of whom regarded my experiences as quite alien and fascinating. Up until this thread, I think I had come across two other people in person besides Jim who said they strongly associated colours with graphemes, a countless others who couldn't understand how such a thing would even work. (I lived with a friend at a house at 17 Union Street once, and we disagreed on whether 17 was bronze-coloured or light blue. The house was dark grey with white street numbers).
I expect a lot of you reading have figured out where this is going. We found out that Jim has asperger's syndrome. Certain tendencies of his now make a lot more sense, and his life has made some very positive changes since he's been diagnosed. While I don't know that I ever thought negatively about neurodiverse people, this news certainly recalibrated the degree of "normal" a person can be and still receive such a diagnosis. So what does that say about me? I'm fairly sure that if I were examined by the same standards as Jim, I would come out looking pretty solidly neurotypical. But do the standards by which we describe medical conditions, accurately describe the inner workings of one's brain? Is "autism" something that only some people have, or is it just like "height", where the second-least-autistic person in the world is still more autistic than the least autistic? This is probably a very ignorant question, but I'm sure there's a decent way to reframe it that would make me come off as less of a rube.
