zlacker

>>Anon84+(OP)
BTW, there's research that shows that schizotypy (schizotypal/schizophrenia) is sort of the opposite of autism. You have to squint your eyes a bit, for example both of these neurotypes involve social difficulties, like the subjective feeling of being alien in the world (known as Anderssein in German psychiatry). However if you peel off the social layer then the remaining autistic features become anti-correlated with the remaining schizotypal features on the scale of the population. There are also some decent theories that suggest this should be the case - for example in the predictive coding theory it is believed that autistic brains over-weigh sensory inputs over their model of the world, whereas schizotypal brains over-weigh their model of the world over the sensory inputs. Or the Big Five traits, openness to experience is usually low in autism and high in schizophrenia.

>>H8cril+ya
I don't think there's much underlying relationship. True they will both impact social relationships. But it's more like how being blind or being deaf will impact social relationships. The mechanics might be the same but the cause is very different.

IMHO schizophrenia is a breakdown in the barrier between imagination and processing of reality.

Autism and the like is an inability to process social cues like a blind person might have a damaged visual cortex.

>>treis+uW
Autism is more broad-spectrum than just related to social processing. It's most visible in social processing because that's the cognitive area that humans have highly specialized in as a species, where expectations of performance are very high, and thus where deficiencies processing complex information in real-time are most visible. If we were birds, we'd probably think autism had something to do with flying. Instead, we are talking tribal apes, so when someone has the cognitive differences that lead to autism, we notice most strongly that they are having trouble being a normal talking tribal ape.

But the effects of autism are visible outside of social interaction too, with repetitive behaviors, intense focused interests, trouble with adapting to change, rigidity in lifestyle, etc.