Understanding the symptoms of Aspergers' makes it easier to get to grips with daily life from the perspective of a person with the syndrome.

Common symptoms of Asperger's Syndrome

• ability to focus on tasks for very long periods
  
• excellent at picking up details and remembering facts
  
• inflexible and obsessively repetitive
  
• unusually strong, narrow interests
  
• confused by social situations
  
• difficulty making friends
  
• often unintentionally rude or offensive
  
• problems making small talk (and understanding why people bother)
  
• difficulty with seeing things from someone else's viewpoint
  
• dislike creative writing, make-believe or imaginative play
  
• thinking is very literal

How the world appears to a person with Asperger's
Why are people bored by a list of London bus number-plates? Why are people interested in other people's love lives? Why do people waste so much time on meaningless comments? Why bother with niceties, sarcasm, white lies or tact when they should tell the truth? What's the point of jokes when the stories are obviously untrue? Why do people like background music?

Society is illogical and confusing. Imagine being dropped into the court of Louis XVI without warning and having to negotiate the etiquette and hierarchy. Alternatively, picture your confusion if you suddenly found yourself at a middle-class Victorian dinner party without an instruction manual. You'd be ostracised if you introduced an Archbishop to a duchess (rather than vice versa), ate a banana without cutlery or praised the carving on the piano legs.

With a combination of instinct, instruction and experience, you'd probably learn to negotiate your way relatively quickly. For a person with AS, every day is just as confusing, although suffers gradually become more adept at disguising their difficulties. By their 30s, many AS suffers are highly skilled at 'social camouflage'.

• Asperger's Sufferers In Society
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