"I do doodle. You, too. You do doodle, too."*

Doodling Can Help Memory, a study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology found (popular science article on same).

This is kind of funny to me as I was often admonished in school for doodling, teachers insisting that I was not paying attention. I made more than one teacher extra irritated by echoing back enormous portions of the lecture they were giving in what I thought was honest proof of my actually paying attention. This admonishment about "not paying attention" also followed on the heels of me tapping, rocking, moving in any way or pretty much doing anything besides sitting completely still--ironically something that will cause me to become utterly unable to pay attention.

The doodle study reminds me of the eye contact study that included key findings such as:

* It is relatively easy to train five year olds to avert their gaze more when answering questions. This increases their ability to answer both verbal and arithmetical questions.

* Children develop the use of gaze aversion as a concentration tool during their fifth year.

* In the laboratory, children averted their gaze less when interviewed across a live video link than when interviewed face to face. However, question difficulty had an enormous impact on the amount that children averted their gaze from the interviewer in both situations. This suggests that children avert their gaze when answering difficult questions to avoid the extra mental effort of monitoring faces, rather than for social reasons, such as embarrassment.

I also have often been accused of not paying attention by teachers (and others) because of not making eye contact, when ironically staring at eyeballs is a sure way to white out any ability I have to understand anything at all. These days my accommodations sheet I give to my professors literally says, "it is important to note that repetitive 'fidgeting' motions and lack of eye contact are not an indication that I am disinterested or not paying attention."

If one believes these concentration and memory studies though, my "autistic behaviors" are not so wacky after all, since it seems these behaviors may be of general benefit to human beings in concentration and memory.

What is wacky to me is the difference in attitude about these behaviors depending on whether they are discussed in the context of autism or outside of the context of autism. For people who are not on the spectrum, doodling and gaze aversion are considered possibly valuable concentration aids. For people who are on the spectrum, these same behaviors are considered "mysterious" and pathological and to be trained out of a person.

Last year I was presenting at the AAIDD annual meeting, and my fellow autistic co-presenter said to the audience something to the effect of, "if you ever twitch or tap the end of your pencil to concentrate to relieve tension, then you understand some of the main reasons why many autistic people stim." There followed an "a-ha" moment rippling through the audience then, and comments afterwards regarding the importance of making that connection in understanding.

How many opportunities for understanding each other are lost because of constantly viewing autistic behavior as bizarre pathology instead of as being motivated by some of the same reasons it is for people who aren't labeled autistic? I may fidget more often and more unusually than non-autistics, but I also expect maintaing concentration in some situations is more difficult for me due to my autism.

*from Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 3, episode 11