Autism in development
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00:00
Finitary relationCharacteristic polynomialoutputLatent heatCircleSound effectLevel (video gaming)BitFunctional (mathematics)Visualization (computer graphics)Engineering physicsMultiplication signSlide ruleScaling (geometry)QuicksortWeb 2.0Interactive televisionInformationGame controllerMixed realityFormal languageComplete metric spaceVideo gameFormal grammarSingle-precision floating-point formatClassical physicsMereologyDenial-of-service attackIntegrated development environmentCondition numberContext awarenessMoment (mathematics)Decision theoryCross-correlationSpectrum (functional analysis)Term (mathematics)Disk read-and-write headShared memoryPerspective (visual)Twitter
07:37
Finitary relationBlock (periodic table)Centralizer and normalizerPoint (geometry)FeedbackDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Extension (kinesiology)QuicksortAverageRoutingComputer configurationCondition numberPhysical systemConnected spaceSound effectStructural loadOrder (biology)Branch (computer science)Auditory maskingMultiplication signGoodness of fitInteractive televisionPosition operatorMoment (mathematics)Pattern languageVideo gameNumberFocus (optics)Group actionRadical (chemistry)Cross-correlationLevel (video gaming)Duality (mathematics)Type theoryoutputPhysicalismMereologyNegative numberView (database)Pattern recognitionBuildingEntropie <Informationstheorie>BitRoot1 (number)Context awarenessComputer animation
15:14
Evolutionarily stable strategyMathematicsMultiplication signQuicksortMereologyGroup actionOffice suiteData conversionDenial-of-service attackBijectionArtificial neural networkDefault (computer science)PlanningVideo gameDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Forcing (mathematics)Right angleBasis <Mathematik>Noise (electronics)Type theoryOpen setBlock (periodic table)Computer programmingParameter (computer programming)Asynchronous Transfer ModeDegree (graph theory)Dependent and independent variablesBitMusical ensembleSlide ruleDisk read-and-write headExpressionSound effectComputer animation
22:59
Pattern languageFormal languageLattice (order)SkewnessSpectrum (functional analysis)Data managementComputer programmingMathematicsGoodness of fitInformationQuicksortInterior (topology)Integrated development environmentView (database)Game controllerReal numberOnline helpFeedbackNoise (electronics)Library (computing)Electronic mailing listDataflowEngineering physicsFigurate numberSeries (mathematics)CASE <Informatik>Multiplication signSet (mathematics)Office suitePoint (geometry)CodeComputer animation
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:04
Hi. So this is autism in the workplace. I'm Ed Singleton. There probably won't be questions at the end. My timings are awful. But if you do have questions, tweet me. I love being tweeted. Positive, negative feedback. I like it. Feel free to email me and the slides
00:23
are on the web at singletones.com slash talks slash autism in the workplace. There's this talk. You can follow along at the moment. It should be up at the moment. But I'm hoping there will be in the future because I want to talk about this and share information
00:43
about this topic a lot more. I'm hoping to be a bit more proactive. Me, I'm autistic. Particularly, specifically, Asperger's. I'm high functioning. I actually realised about
01:03
a year ago at PyCon UK. Then I got a formal diagnosis. I would say I'm 80-20. I'm 80% high functioning. Completely normal. Get on okay in social interactions. And I'm 20%
01:20
completely dysfunctional. So rather than being an even mix, some things I'm perfectly fine and some things I'm terrible at. As an example of that, I've been trying to work out ways of putting this in context. I've only been thinking about myself as an autistic person for a year. But I have never decided where to live. I'm 39 years old and I've never
01:45
made that decision. I've only made it for the first time in my life this year as part of realising that I need to change and grow up and take more control of specific parts of my life that I've been allowing to go unthought about. Autism in general and Asperger's.
02:10
Autism and Asperger's have been merged together in the latest DSM. Which is the dictionary that defines particular psychological disorders. So Asperger's doesn't exist anymore. There's
02:25
just autistic spectrum condition. Now I don't think that's a particularly useful combination because for some people with autism it's an utterly crippling disability. And for
02:45
something that you can live a normal life. To put that in perspective, 16% of autistic people are in full-time employment. For disabled people in general, it's 48%. And actually in this country we're doing fairly well. I know in other European countries like
03:03
Switzerland it's only 8% of autistic people are in full-time employment. And that includes the Asperger's people. So a lot of that 16% are the high-functioning people. High-functioning is defined as an IQ of over 70. Which is quite a low IQ. I'm sure most of the people
03:27
in this room are past that anyway. And Asperger's is defined as not having any language difficulty whereas classic autism includes language problems as well as an IQ of below
03:43
70 if you're not high-functioning. Clearly I'm at the very high-functioning level in terms of autistic people. When I go and spend time with them I realise that actually most of them wouldn't even put themselves in the situation of standing up here and
04:01
talking and also wouldn't be able to cope with it. I don't want to spend too much time looking at a formal definition of autism. You can go on Wikipedia anywhere like that and just read up on it. I would like to talk about some of it from the inside out.
04:23
Just give my picture of it which I think is particularly interesting in a STEM environment because it definitely seems to occur a lot more in these environments. And also I think a lot of people in an engineering, science background are partially autistic or just
04:43
somewhere up the scale. Repetition and obsession is one of the most notable, famous characteristics of autism and so is social awkwardness. Overstimulation is one of the things that's
05:00
less talked about outside of autistic circles but it's one of the things that most affects high-functioning people. That you feel as if there's this flood of sensory information coming in all the time. There's no filter. There's no sort of... It feels like there
05:20
should be a layer between you and everything else that sort of thins this out. You've just got this flood of visual information, of audio information, of smells, things like that sensation and it's absolutely overwhelming just this sort of influx into your brain. This leads to meltdowns which can be from too much social problems when you've been
05:49
socializing a lot and you can't cope with it. Or sensory input. If there's an
06:01
I'm at the level that when I completely lose it, I'm often quite good at hiding the fact that I'm having a meltdown or of stopping myself, seeing that this is coming, predicting it and going, okay, just pull myself out of those environments, go for a walk and just wander off. That's fine. When people at the lower end, this can be a complete
06:25
breakdown for hours and hours and hours. And it ties in with, this is not a medical term, but fizzy mind. This is my term for what's kind of going on in your head of this
06:40
with this sort of sensory input flowing in constantly and it's just bubbling and bubbling and bubbling and you can't control it, you can't rest, you can't manage it or deal with it. And also, this isn't something that's in the official definition of autism,
07:01
but it's something I have massively noticed in my dealing with fellow autistic people that I've started to meet, is stubbornness and a willingness to sort of be completely unreasonable about things because arbitrary reasons, you know, it's whatever it is that
07:22
you've decided is your way of doing something, you will stick and fight to that. It also has lots of correlations and what they call comorbidities. There seems to be a cluster around ADD and ADHD, to the extent that these may even be different aspects
07:48
of the same condition. Not a lot is known about sort of where autism comes from. It is defined from a symptomatic point of view, so it could even be that there are multiple
08:00
conditions which all cause the same symptoms, but around dyslexia, dyscalculia, dyspraxia, ADD, ADHD, autism, there seems to be a clustering around them. If you have one, you're much more likely to have another. I have dyslexia as well, it happens. Insomnia is really
08:22
common in autism and one of the greatest benefits of being diagnosed as autistic is oh, okay, my insomnia that I've had for so many years, turns out actually there's things I can do with it. Simply just sleeping with a blindfold on. You have an eye mask, something like that, block out all sensory, all visual sensory input, has
08:45
a massive effect. My sleep has gone from, I pretty much get good seven to eight hours every night. The other thing that works really well about putting an eye mask on is it's a signal to yourself. You know, you can't do anything else, you can't sort of oh actually I'll just read, I'll play with my phone or anything because you're
09:01
blind for the moment. That's been wonderful. Low muscle tone affects 40% of autistic people. This isn't just a neurological condition, there are issues outside of that. Now these may be secondary that are caused by, I don't know, not exercising or something like that,
09:21
but low muscle tone and clumsiness are heavily associated. Alcoholism correlates very highly with autism. I myself drank very heavily, consistently for about 15 years and again one of the benefits of realising that that was a way of coping with fizzy
09:41
mind, insomnia, stuff like that, was, you know, alcohol. It also makes social interactions a lot easier when you have awkwardness. You A, you're with a group of other people who are all drunk and you care less about getting things wrong and they care less.
10:01
Eating disorders, particularly anorexia and bulimia in women, correlate highly with autism. And digestive problems in general. Again, no one knows why, but there are physical symptoms of autism, not just neurological. There's lots of neurological differences. Two interesting ones,
10:26
autistic people on average have larger brains than neurotypical people. And even in brains of the same size, they have more neurons and more connections between neurons with less large branch connections throughout the brain.
10:45
So if you imagine if this was a street map, this is like a map of lots of tiny back streets. And the way I think of it is for thoughts to get from one place to another, it's a much finer journey of lots of tiny back streets. You haven't got this simple
11:02
straightforward, oh, I can take a highway from there to there. Everything's always going through these tiny sort of routes. And at any point it's subject to, oh, actually I'll go this way or I'll go that way or things happen like that. Benefits. There are benefits to being autistic. If I was given the option to sort of be
11:25
neurotypical and just be completely normal, I'd like to do it for a day, maybe two days, try it out. But no, I like who I am anyway, but also I like the benefits. A lot of my success
11:40
in my career has come through the benefits. Systemizing, thinking in systems, constantly thinking in systems and seeing the systems, pattern recognition, all these things are a common aspect of autism to the extent that actually you can go too far. A common thing I do is over systemize things, including the way I walk down
12:04
pavements that I'm looking for dualities of slabs, triples are bad and I mustn't step on them. You over systemize even things like that to the extent that in central London I'll just leap into a different vein of traffic in order to correctly touch those two slabs,
12:24
because otherwise I'll have to do a three over there, which is no good. And doesn't make you terribly popular. Repetition and obsession aren't definitely, they're positives and negatives, they're on both sides. If you're obsessed about something good or useful, that's really useful and tied in with
12:45
insomnia and things like that. I have in the past spent insane numbers of hours just focused on building things, creating things and the repetition is useful in learning. I'm happy to repeat things over and over again until I get them right. I enjoy trampolining
13:01
and unlike most of the other people there, I'll happily do the same jump over and over and over again for an hour, fine tuning it, perfecting it, whereas they need to keep changing and doing different things all the time. Radical honesty is something I value in other autistic people and autistic type people.
13:22
If you ask an autistic person for their opinion on, you know, their honest feedback on something you've done or something about you, you better be prepared because it will be genuinely honest and it will just, I value that and I enjoy talking to other autistic people about things like that because we're just completely open with each other.
13:44
In a work context, sometimes too open, don't always know which parts of my life I shouldn't be sharing with my colleagues. Originality of thinking, certainly you see in Asperger's a lot,
14:00
it might just come because of a low inability to learn what we should be thinking. We don't take feedback well from society because we're sort of slightly stepped out of it, we're not involving too much. We just haven't been railroaded into a particular route and therefore we can think of these stupid insane things without any checks. More spare time.
14:29
I read insane amounts of books and when I talk to people, how do you manage to reach so much? Well, if you don't go out and don't socialize, you get loads more time to do stuff, you know, this is actually a benefit. It's something I'm trying to work back on and spend more time
14:46
socializing and being that kind of person, actually it's been unhealthy for me to, but actually I've learned so much and I wouldn't have done if I had a social life. Attention to detail, focus on detail, partly we can see things, it seems like we can see
15:02
things that other people can't just because all that raw input is coming in and you can like, you can, oh look there's a thing over there and like there's temp and people haven't seen it, they haven't noticed it and also I think a literal mindedness, a caring, that's there to tell me I've spent too much time on that slide.
15:23
This is why my timings are terrible because another common thing you see in autistic people is just when they start talking, it just pours out, there's just sort of splurging this torrent of kind of all the thoughts coming out and I have trouble actually pulling back and only saying
15:40
smaller things. There's an archetype of an Asperger's person, I think this, you see this, it ties in well with Eiffel, Daniel Preceder's talk earlier, he was talking about the naive program of the naive artist, I think that's actually an Asperger's artist, the people who
16:02
can stay naive for their entire career and you see this sort of archetype of the mad scientist, the mad artist, sort of, in fact Hans Asperger himself said it seems that for success in science or art a dash of autism is essential. I think there's some degree of truth to that and I think
16:24
that's possibly why autism exists, we have evolved to have autism in society, it's there for a reason, I suspect that might be the reason that one or two people, it's crippling to the vast majority of people who have it but one or two people benefit greatly from it and quite a few
16:45
self-made billionaires have Asperger's, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett probably does, if you read any biographies of him he comes across as Asperger's, Ray Dalio as well. So the workplace bit, how does this affect the workplace? Overstimulation,
17:04
this is really common in open plan offices and as we're moving more and we seem to be moving more and more towards open plan offices and no personal offices, the flood of lights, the movement if you've got one of those a desk where you're facing onto the open plan office,
17:23
this constant shifting movement is awful. Noise as well, conversations constantly sort of trying to tune out other people's conversations and only focus on the conversations in your head, I find particularly difficult, I find myself listening to
17:43
everything everyone says in the office and actually what I've just done is got quite good at listening to other people's conversations while still working and then just interrupting when I've noticed that they're wrong about things. Smell is one that people kind of forget about but if you wear strong perfume or strong deodorant
18:11
that's actually really affects us, one of the changes I've made that's been beneficial is unscented washing powder, unscented shampoo, unscented
18:23
shower gel, things like that and just get rid of as much of that sort of artificial sense for my life and it's had a huge benefit for me, unfortunately it means I'm now even more sensitive to the smells of other people and if you ever spray deodorant
18:42
in the office place because you're off to the meeting, I hate you, and there seem to be people who can't quite tell the difference between particularly in gym changing rooms, you can't tell the difference between deodorant and air freshener, you don't need to spray it in a big thing around you. Oh and I think we all know headphones are a huge benefit, you don't have to
19:12
wear big headphones or just big headphones A signal that you're doing something and B block out lots of annoying noise. Oh gosh, resting whatever face, so my default
19:28
face turned fairly austere, slightly sort of not welcoming, I didn't know that when you make eye contact with someone and if you don't smile or respond, that's actually quite aggressive.
19:45
So for 39 years whenever I made eye contact with someone, I just kept my default slightly austere face, turns out people thought I was deeply arrogant, aggressive, you know, had its benefits, apparently I came across as quite a powerful person in the office because of this,
20:05
I've now got, oh okay right, so when I make eye contact with people, I need to smile or react in some way to the fact that we've made eye contact. I'm still learning, trying to turn that into a habit, I'm learning to do that and actually I have to constantly be in my conscious
20:23
mode of thinking about who am I making eye contact with, am I doing the right facial expression, I'm also trying to make it genuine because if I'm concentrating on too much on that, I can actually do really stupid smiles which makes people think I'm, makes people think I'm autistic.
20:43
So in the work plate, and one thing I found from this is, okay right, so I'm actively practicing, correctly smiling at people, making eye contact, I make eye contact with someone, smile at them, I get nothing in response, they've just got this stony face. Oh you, what a horrible, and then I went, oh no no, that was me six months ago, yeah,
21:03
maybe the person who isn't responding to you or who seems austere or who seems powerful but distant is actually just autistic and they don't know any better and they don't know how to come forward and come out of this. So in the workplace, one thing I'm
21:26
trying to do is also forgive other people who aren't correctly being as friendly to me as I feel they should. Don't force socializing in the workplace. It's great that it happens, I'm perfectly happy for you to go off and socialize as a group, I don't need to be part
21:42
of that, sometimes I might try and come along, sometimes I won't. I actually quite like socializing one-on-one, I will go out for lunches with my colleagues on a one-to-one basis and that's great. I don't like group situations and I don't like stupid socializing where you're
22:04
doing something pointless just for the sake of everyone kind of sharing meaningless conversation. I like to have serious conversations about a topic. Try to tolerate meltdowns,
22:20
not just autistic people have them, other people have them, we don't need to turn into a whole issue that like if someone has a genuine breakdown it doesn't have to be something that is then analyzed and everyone feels sorry about or awkward about. Equally if someone blows up in anger because that might just be because of sensory issues throughout the day, just let
22:45
it go and certainly if they are autistic or of that type it will just sort of go away an hour later, nothing, it's fine, you can have a massive argument blazing around with someone and then it goes away and it's fine. Autistic people are less likely to be mentored,
23:08
they're less likely to come forward and ask for help and this isn't just autistic, there are also shy people as well but I've never and again this was something Danielle was talking about earlier that you get these people who have been autodidactic for in
23:27
my case 12 years of programming with no real mentoring or guidance from anyone else so I've developed a very idiosyncratic style. By coincidence it's a very good style but it's my
23:42
own very idiosyncratic one. Work patterns, I'm running out of time but I won't go into this too deeply but the future is scary and the unknown is scary particularly when you know you're going to struggle adapting to it. Agile and Campan are wonderful, anything like that where
24:05
you can see the future, you can see this is what the next few weeks is going to be like, this is what I'm going to do, I just have to work through a list of things, someone is juggling that and thinking about that and I can just sit down and concentrate and do this ticket, this ticket, this ticket, this ticket. Prefiguring change, if you're moving offices,
24:22
if you're going to change the code base, if you're going to change libraries, change language, anything like that, just coming in one day and going right, everything has now changed, we're doing things differently, you will get people, you will certainly get autistic people fighting you just on principle. They may even want the change but they don't want sudden
24:41
change that they can't control, just prefigure it over a series of time leading up to it and it's all much easier. Meetings, don't expect people to speak up. I particularly noticed this in engineer business meetings where there's both sets of people there and the engineers would just
25:07
be silent or when we have retros, we had mixed retros, there was commercial people and engineers, the engineers had massive problems, there was such a culture clash and they were really upset
25:22
and they were angry and had all these issues but they wouldn't speak in retro and the commercial guys, it was just all them talking, they were very much at the not at all autistic end of that spectrum and they dominate that. You need to actively manage discussions. The other problem being when autistic people do get to speak in those meetings,
25:46
someone says what do you think, like me, they just spew out tons and tons of information and won't know when to stop and can just keep talking and talking and you need to actively manage that and shut people up sometimes. All meetings benefit from conscious, active
26:04
management of the discussion rather than just letting this amorphously flow because then you only get stuff from the confident people who are all agreeing with each other as opposed to people
26:21
with these new ideas, things like that. So in general, there's lots of things I can see we can change, we can improve. I think they will help everyone, I don't think less noise, less smell is going to be a problem for anyone, it will benefit everyone in the office. I'm
26:43
particularly interested in it from the point of view of autism but I think it's good for managing meetings is good for everyone in the workplace and I think the STEM environment, engineering, science skews towards autism so I think it can help this environment more.
27:06
That's it, please give me feedback. I love feedback, I prefer negative feedback to no feedback. Please ask me questions. I want to try and make more noise about this and do more talks. If you know of anywhere where I can try and talk, I would love to and
27:27
hopefully I will actually start blogging and talking more about autism within this sector. This is my first little foray into it. Thank you. Thank you very much.