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So does being autistic mean you have amazing memory
It can. But only for trains (or whatever is your thing), nothing else.
My son. It's tanks. He's 12 and can go on for hours about them, rattling off their armor thickness (in mm), caliber of their guns, horsepower of their engines, declination and traverse speeds of their turrets, etc. I took him to a tank museum one time, and no shit a quarter mile from the museum he sees the tank out front and he goes: "That's a Sherman M4A4!!" Ten minutes later we're parked and walking up to the museum, I look at the tiny info placard, M4A4, think to myself: "What the fuck."
He's 12 and can go on for hours about them, rattling off their armor thickness (in mm), caliber of their guns, horsepower of their engines, declination and traverse speeds of their turrets, etc.
On first skim of this comment I thought these were details about trains and I was very concerned about how weaponized trains had become.
I personally wouldn't lead an assault against modern trains. You would always know the direction they are headed, they know it as well, and you could sabotage it all you want but that train will still barrel right through your fortifications
Why did you build your fortifications on the train tracks, the ONE place the train can attack?
It's hard to stop a train!
Anyone who's ever seen Super 8 can attest. Even with a drastic change in momentum, direction, and drag coefficient, trains just keep crashing and don't stop for like an hour.
Does he play World of Tanks? Lol
(Note: it's a popular online free to play game)
He's always loved them, but I did let him start playing War Thunder a year ago with voice chat disabled.
I forget my own fucking birthday but let me wax poetically about extinct Australian megafauna for a few hours.
Though it's episodic memory, if you ask me to give you a fun fact, let alone name a species just off the cuff, my mind goes blank. I don't know anything about anything.
But give me a minute to set myself the mental stage and start rambling about how as a kid I was obsessed with this old faux taxidermy at the Melbourne museum because it was like a derpy wombat horse. One time my mum took me to a kids activity workshop where we got to pretend we were digging up fossils and analysing them... did you know Australias geologic layering contains every single rock type that exists in on earth. Lots of Australian fossils are found in soft limestone. Hang on, dippy don! That's what I named the derpy wombat at the museum. It was a Diprotodon, a herbivorous marsupial who died out about 40,000 years ago. The cave in NSW where they found a bunch of specimens was 400 million year old limestone but Dippy only entered the record ~2 million years ago, so it suggests they burrowed, which makes sense when you look at their closest living relative, the wombat, though Diprotodon and the family it belongs to is a dead end on the evolutionary tree.
But yeah, you can't always rely on where you find the bones to date the specimens which is why carbon and uranium dating really changed our understanding of Australian history.
Speaking of locations of fossils, diprotodon is one of the only known Australian marsupials to seasonally migrate, so their range was huge! So were they! 2m tall, 3m long and easily 2500kg heavy, and have two giant protruding teeth (hence their name Diprotodon, Greek for "two protruding teeth", Di=two, pro to/protrude, don/dontics like orthodontics ....I also like etymology) and lived in the marshlands. European archaeologists thought they were originally skeletons of some kind of hippopotamus, but several mobs of indigenous Australians had/have oral histories around diprotodon. the last living dipro's died out after the first Australian peoples inhabited the land. Which is why there is an association between dippy and bunyip (an Australian cryptid/aboriginal mythology) a giant melevolent monster who haunts billabongs.
They indigenous Australians are often blamed for the extinction of a lot of megafauna, there was a theory of overhunting for the many years, but to date no diprotodon fossils have been found with evidence of human butchery, but we do have evidence that people would move bones around for some reason.
Anyway....
It's like a trance, and it's really hard to stop once you start, but you can't just pick up into it, something has to trigger the memory to surface, like seeing a certain train go past to remember specific train facts, or in my case thinking about where you I was and who I was with when I first learned some of the best facts about my thing.
Though I have AuDHD so not sure if the episodic memory is my autism or my ADHD, it feels like ADHD because the thoughts are so bouncy when they come, but it also feels like like autism because it's anxiously obsessive in a fun way inside my brain once they journey starts.
Also maybe remembering cool megafauna facts is why I forget things I should remember like what house number I live at or what year I was born (genuinely forgot these things, had to go to the front of my house to check, and do maths because I could remember my mums birthday and how old she was when she had me, but not my own birthday or age .... Autism and memory is fucking weird)
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I forget my own fucking birthday but let me wax poetically about extinct Australian megafauna for a few hours.
Don't forget remembering your childhood gaffes in perfect detail.
But give me a minute to set myself the mental stage and start rambling about how as a kid I was obsessed with this old faux taxidermy at the Melbourne museum because it was like a derpy wombat horse
Have you stopped by recently? Although not mammalian megafauna, they've rather expanded on the saurian section.
It's like a trance, and it's really hard to stop once you start, but you can't just pick up into it, something has to trigger the memory to surface, like seeing a certain train go past to remember specific train facts, or in my case thinking about where you I was and who I was with when I first learned some of the best facts about my thing.
At least for me personally, it doesn't work so well if I'm quizzed on the spot about it, but I do have an ongoing portion of my brain that constantly cycles through the interest, to the point where it will start leaking into everything else, or I pick up on it like a gun to an MRI machine.
Though I have AuDHD so not sure if the episodic memory is my autism or my ADHD, it feels like ADHD because the thoughts are so bouncy when they come, but it also feels like like autism because it's anxiously obsessive in a fun way inside my brain once they journey starts.
Bit of both? But it doesn't help that things like depression and anxiety can also affect memory, both of which can be comorbid with either.
I liked reading this a lot.
Yep! My brain works similarly. I essentially set bookmarks in stories for specific information. Although it can backfire when I answer without considering where I am or who I'm talking to first, which is why I'll occasionally say horrifying, arrogant or otherwise tone-deaf stories without realizing it beforehand.
"Sorry that story involved a graphic injury and/or abusive situation, that was just the required-context paragraph for any story in that folder in my brain. It's worked in similar social settings before, like with my therapist or with the school guidance counselor right after it happened, so I didn't realize it wasnt appropriate in this job interview."
"For the third time, please leave."
"They all have similarly vague 'clinical' vibes though, right? You can see how I got confused."
Depends on the flavour of autism, I guess. My partner's autistic and can remember some things pretty well, but struggles a lot with others.
I have a friend on the spectrum and he knows almost every single '80s B and C grade horror flick ever released on VHS by heart.
He has turned me on to some really interesting and freaky movies.
I think I remember savantism syndrome being somewhat related to ASD