> The author seemed to be saying that not only do they need to operate off a "playbook" (which is normal for everyone), but that if the playbook goes wrong, the

> The author seemed to be saying that not only do they need to operate off a "playbook" (which is normal for everyone), but that if the playbook goes wrong, they both can't detect it and don't have a backup plan. I'd add that 'normal' people don't necessarily have a backup plan, but are able to improvise. So if their playbook doesn't have an answer for a particular situation, they can use a similar solution from another page in the book, or cobble something together. Autistic people, on the other hand, can completely freeze up if the situation in question isn't exactly like the one in their playbook. This, by the way, doesn't just apply to social situations. The inability to improvise as well as intuit things can also exhibit itself as OCD ('I do it like this because I always do it like this'), ADD ('I need to fix this small, insignificant thing because it's just not right'), eating disorders ('without a system in place, hunger is not felt'), or even narcissism ('I need to talk this thing that I've been obsessing about for weeks and I forget that a conversation is a two-way street'). What I find utterly fascinating is that with most of the above, the internal mechanism for the 'disorder' is often quite different from 'regular' sufferers. So for example when it comes to 'normal' OCD, as I understand it, the compulsion stems from a strong fear of bad consequences or some kind of reasoning, however unreasonable it might seem. But for many autistic people, there's no sense of things going horribly wrong if they don't feed the compulsion. They just feel that they have to do it because they always do it and there's often no reasoning behind it (to the point of not even being aware of the compulsion). Then again it's all very murky when we talk about 'internal' stuff, so I might be wrong about this.