Part 3 in My What Is Autism Series
Like many autistic people, I have what’s called a spiky skill set. And incase you were wondering, this unfortunately does not mean that I’m a hedgehog, I can understand your disappointment because it would be pretty cool if that were the case. No, what a spiky skill set means is that my abilities tend to be all or nothing, I’m not “only alright” at anything that I can think of, I’m good at things, or bad at things, with nothing in between.
This video from Autistamatic (incidentally watch all of Autistamatic’s videos as soon as possible!), gives an excellent analogy for what the spiky skill set is.
In games like Cyberpunk or Skyrim or Fallout (I’ve never had the chance to play Cyberpunk, I’ve only played Fallout a little, but played Skyrim quite a lot a few years ago), you only have a limited number of skill points. In Skyrim you could for example (I’ll only use four skills for simplicity), build your skills in the areas of magic,archery,sneak or lockpicking. So it’s a no brainer isn’t it, become an unstoppable wizard who’s archery skills put Hawkeye to shame and become so good at sneaking you’re practically invisible and become so good at lockpicking you can rob all of the sweetrolls in the game. I’ll have this game beat in an hour, right?
Not so fast, it’s not that simple. If you want to be equally good at magic, archery, sneak and invisibility, you will only be average at those skills. So, Merlin would be willing to say, “Yeah, your wizardry is alright I suppose,” and the Green Arrow might be willing to say, “Yeah, your bow and arrow skills are grand, they’ll do I suppose.” And, I can’t think of any sneaking and lockpicking characters but they’d probably be willing to say the same. So, how do you get good enough at archery to be able to take on the Green Arrow? Well, by being bad at magic, sneaking and lockpicking. You can be good enough to defeat Green Arrow or Hawkeye at archery, it is possible, but only by being so bad at sneaking that people hear you coming before they see you, be being so bad at lock picking that even the owner of the house you are trying to burgle feels sorry for you, and by being so bad at magic that your enemies aren’t even worried because they know you’ll accidentally turn yourself into a turkey.
So, you can either be alright at a lot of things, or excel at a small few things and bad at many others. And I think this is often one of the biggest differences between NT (neurotypical) people and autistic people. NTs are the people who are decent at archery, magic, sneaking, and locking picking, and autistic people are the ones who can become so good at sneaking that they’re pretty much invisible, but if they try archery they will figuratively and literally shoot themselves in the foot, or who are excellent at lockpicking but for the love of God don’t ask them to do anything else!
Here’s a counter intuitive example of how having a spiky skill set affects me. I’m recording an album at the moment, and I’m doing everything on it. Vocals, guitar, bass, drums, saz, keyboards, lyrics, mixing and mastering. And you might be thinking, that doesn’t sound like a spiky skill set, that’s the opposite of spiky, you are whatever animal is the opposite of a hedgehog! Yeah, and I’ll grant at first glance it looks like I’m able to be average at several things, but let me explain.
Guitar, bass and keyboards, and saz (a Turkish instrument) are at the end of the day melodic instruments. My strongest skill is guitar, but if you understand guitar you can understand the bass and the keyboard to a level that you can play them on a recording, I would not be good enough at either of these instruments to play live. Even the saz, which is an instrument that uses a different tuning system, I at first understood it just by saying, now put your finger on this part of the neck, and now on this part of the neck, so I was able to play it visually even though at first I found the Turkish scales hard to get my head around.
And the drums, I’m, for want of a better way of putting it, natually bad at the drums, what I mean is that while others who have never touched the instrument, but play another instrument, can often get a simple beat out of the kit from the word go, for me despite my years of guitar playing, the first months of playing the drums were a disaster, and it took a lot of practice to get to where I am now, where I can play drums on a recording but am still no live drummer. And I would say with mixing and mastering, I’m better at it then I was but I’m still far from the best. I’ve another blogpost that explains how I got to the point where I’m able to sing:
So you might be asking, why don’t I get in other musicians to do the drums, bass, keyboards, or the mixing and mastering? Well firstly I can’t afford it, but there’s other reasons. Because my skills at music are good, so this can somewhat compensate for difficulties I have with instruments like the bass, but my skills at complex social interaction are not good. Now, if I’m dead lucky with the person I got to do bass, or drums, there would be no problem. But what if I’m not lucky? How do I approach it if they are consistently late? Or if they consistently miss the recording session entirely? Or if they give vague answers when I need concrete answers? Or, if they don’t like the way I’m explaining things, or some aspect of the way I’m doing things, but they are too polite to say? Complex social interaction is not my thing, my ability at this is quite low, to the point where I would prefer to get semi-competent at several instruments then to try and get someone else to play them.
Another aspect of the spiky skill set that causes me problems is that, repairs are not something I’m good at. I’ve been cycling for eight years, and the only repair skills I have is that I can change an inner tube, and I can change the break pads (and they’re never properly aligned, and you’ll never need to change the break pads in the middle of a cycle anyway.) So the spiky skill set can cause problems in that you’re good at something, cycling in this example, but you’re bad at things that come with it, such as repair. With the exception of fixing the inner tubes, all of my cycling trips are done with the hope that nothing will break, because if it does, I can’t fix it. So there is good and bad to the NT skillset and the autistic one. If I wasn’t autistic, I don’t know if I would be as good at music, but perhaps I would have developed the skills to repair my bike.
Here’s another interesting one, I’m in many respects clumsy, don’t ask me to do anything that requires precision, all of humanity will suffer if you ask me to do this, but for some reason, I can type really fast. When I was doing a two year college course a few years ago where one of the classes was in text production, I was the fastest in the class at typing, despite the fact that I couldn’t touch type, and despite the fact that I can usually only get two of my fingers on each hand to type (the other four fingers don’t want to co-operate for some reason!) When we did speed tests in class for typing, I always came first, even though in many other respects I have poor dexterity! It took me a very long time to learn to write legibly, and I still have to do so very slowly, but typing just seems like such a natural activity, it just feels right when I’m typing while writing still feels like a bizarre almost alien activity, like my hand doesn’t want to do it and it rebels against me.
For quite some time I have been looking at theories about why autism evolved. There must be a reason why autism has stayed in the gene pool for such a long time, in times past when life was much harder and more dangerous autistic people survived to have children, who in turn had children and so on and so forth. And while I may encounter more plausible theories in the future, so far the most plausible theory I have encountered is that autism evolved because the spiky skill set is quite useful and helps humanity.
Imagine a stone age tribe where there is one member who doesn’t take part in many of the tribe’s daily tasks, because they are simply bad at them. They don’t participate in the hunting, they don’t help with fishing, they don’t participate in seeking out water sources or in looking after the children. But this member of the tribe is just as important as everyone else. Because nobody is better at building tools, such as spears, arrows, and axes, that the tribe needs to obtain food and survive. Without this tribe member, perhaps the tribe would have gone hungry, perhaps they wouldn’t have survived at all. So while this member of the tribe is allowed to stay away from many of the necessary tasks such as hunting, they provide a much needed service to the tribe, without which the tribe could be in serious trouble.
I believe our society suffers because it doesn’t value what those who excel at a small number of things but are bad at many others have to offer. Think of a job interview. You will probably get the job if you are average at the complex social interaction necessary for job interviews and average at the job itself, but if you are atrocious at job interviews and excel at the job itself, there is a good chance you are not getting the job! Imagine if the stone age person in the tribe who built all of the tools was expelled from the tribe because they were lacking in a variety of other skills. The tribe wouldn’t be able to hunt and they would starve, and that would be sad. Maybe humanity would have gone extinct if people with spiky skill sets were shunned throughout much of our history.
Our world needs many kinds of minds. We are in the middle of a climate change disaster, and as the last few years have shown us, it looks like this world of ours is going to throw us quite a lot of difficult to solve problems, that perhaps we wouldn’t have expected at all a few years ago. I remember when Covid and the invasion of Ukraine seemed to be so utterly unlikely, and look where we are.
If we are to get through whatever the next few decades have in store for us, there is no room for excluding those who excel at things simply because they are bad at many other things. The world needs both specialists and generalists, with the problems the world is facing, I think it is madness to exclude anyone for simply having a different type of skillset.
Ponderings Of An Autist 
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