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How do you feel about learning?
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this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2026
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Autism
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Having a learning disability and having an advanced academic ability in one or more subjects are not mutually exclusive. There are lots of different types of learning disabilities, and most don't automatically make someone less capable, it just may mean you process information differently
Or as my girlfriend likes to describe it, we have "spiky skills." That is, very high in some areas, and very low in other areas.
I work with a six year old who's still learning the most basic skills (like following one-step directions, such as "put your backpack in your cubby"), but he can spell out the full Latin names of various obscure fruits and vegetables from memory in order to find pictures of them online. Although he still has a long way to go with communication skills (he doesn't speak and only recently acquired an AAC device), it's clear he knows a lot more than would be apparent from the outside. Classic "spiky skills."
I have described "spiky", as imagine a sound board, with those up and down sliding switches. Most people have all of their switches close to the middle of the scale, just some a bit higher, and some a bit lower. But autistic people tend to have many of those switches turned either fully up, or fully down, and of course completely randomly as well.
Interestingly, this can also describe our sensory experiences/sensory filters. Some of us have brains that filter out speech, to the point that we don’t hear our own names being called. Others (like myself) have so little filter for speech sounds that we can’t even hear our own thoughts if someone else is talking in the same room. Or we may not experience pain from something that would cause an NT pain, but things that NTs experience as pleasurable might be painful to us. (For me, that’s tickling. I can’t stand being tickled. Or ASMR, it makes me irrationally angry.)
Yes, it can apply to so many things! I too have some very random traits taken to the extreme as well, not only skills or sensory stuff. For example I severely lack in the basic ability to regulate myself just in general; I will either give 100% in everything I do (face-to-face interactions with others included), or I will do something only barely or not at all.