作者：Doolwind

自闭症的特点是社交互动和交流受损。此症状会在儿童幼年显现（游戏邦注：通常在3岁以前），程度各不相同。很多程序员都出现类似社交互动和交流受阻现象，虽然程度不那么严重。我将发表一个有争议的观点：我觉得优秀程序员的这种社交互动和交流缺失现象有时会更为明显，因而在行为上呈现自闭倾向。

car mack working from doolwind.com

自闭空间

过去几个月来我发现，当我进入“自闭空间”，大家能同我完整交流，但当我完成编码任务后，就会忘记他们曾同我交谈过，更别说记得怎么回应。这种情况也出现在当我的大量编程工作被打断之时。我无法参与期间的正常社交互动，经常令他人感到沮丧，或让人觉得我似乎没有注意聆听。所以我的思维运作模式是：越是完全摆脱周围事物，就越深刻融入“自闭空间”。也许终止大脑行为区域能够更好集中于编程所需的分析区域。

网虫

这或许能够说明为何被视作“网虫”的我们如此擅长编程。若你尚未完全挖掘大脑的沟通区域，就越能轻松终止它们。对很多网虫来说，他们拥有的唯一社交互动是通过互联网。这意味着他们的整个沟通发展都是围绕电脑，这使得他们无需留心细微变化，（游戏邦注：例如由于沮丧而出现的语调变化）。

总结

这是我过去几个月一直思考的问题，我想知道大家是否也有同样的经历。我知道自闭症是种严重的医学疾病，但我并没有看轻它的意思。

游戏邦注：原文发布于2007年4月29日，文章叙述以当时被背景。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Do Great Programmers Have Selective Autism?

By  Doolwind

Autism is characterised by the impairment of social interaction and communication. It manifests itself early in a child’s life (first 3 years) and is seen in varying degrees. Many programmers often show similar impairments to social interaction and communication albeit at a far less severe level. I’m going to be a little controversial and propose that great programmers sometimes have the ability to strengthen this lack of social interaction and communication making them exhibit autism like behaviour.

aka In the zone

Over the past few months I’ve noticed that when I get into the ‘zone’ people can have entire conversations with me and after finishing my coding stint I’ll be oblivious to the fact they were even talking to me, let alone what I said in response. This also extends to the state I’m in when disrupted from a heavy coding session. I’ll not pick up the regular social interaction queues and often either upset people or seem like I’m not listening properly. So my line of thinking goes that the better you are at tuning everything else around you out, the deeper you will be ‘in the zone’. Perhaps turning off the behavioural parts of the brain gives better focus to the more analytical areas required for programming.

Nerds

This may explain why those we see as ‘nerds’ are so good at programming. If you haven’t fully developed your communication parts of your brain, perhaps it’s then easier to shut them off. For a lot of nerds, the only social interactions they have are over the internet via their computer. This means their entire communication development has been built up around the computer, stopping them from needing to worry about subtle queues like the change in pitch of someone’s voice when they are becoming frustrated.

Conclusion

This is something that I’ve been thinking about over the past few months and wanted to get some feedback as to whether anyone else has experienced the same thing. I realise that autism is a serious medical problem and don’t mean to trivialise it in any way. The fact that many parts of autism itself are quite controversial may mean I’ll get a little flak, but I’ll just put this next to the hate mail from my programming personality test?（Source：doolwind）