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>Does it imply that you can't selectively focus on things? Yes - the ability to focus on one thing necessarily involves the ability to ignore lots of other thi
by jdietrich 7y ago
>Does it imply that you can't selectively focus on things?
Yes - the ability to focus on one thing necessarily involves the ability to ignore lots of other things. One of the key traits of autism spectrum disorder is an inability to filter out irrelevant information. Constant awareness of everything is often functionally equivalent to a lack of awareness, because it degrades the signal-to-noise ratio of your perception.
For example, the artist Stephen Wiltshire can draw extraordinarily accurate cityscapes from memory, but often struggles with basic tasks. Being aware of the precise number and arrangement of windows in every building you pass is an active impediment if you're just trying to get to the subway station.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/04/autism-artist-stephen-wiltshire-cities-genius/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/04/autism-artis...
- Erlich_Bachman 7y agoYou are talking about autism. Autism is very commonly described as a disease or disorder, disability, etc. How do you compare it to "being most aware", and especially in the context of the term "sane"? It seems that the two are very differnet things that have little to do with each other. "Constant awareness" as you described it is surely not the kind of awareness that they meant when talking about "sanity"? Any regular normal healthy person, if they were being "constantly aware" of everything they already know and can perceive, even though that set of things is much smaller than the set of things available to a highly functioning autist, would already be too much to be able to function. In such a case it is then more of a disorder in focusing, not the question of how less or more aware you are?