The numbers are true, but there might actually be a connection between the two, though the exact connection is still unclear and this is also just a hypothesis. It is slightly a hijack of a topic, so in case of questions I do suggest that we move to private messages. I will also put down some headers as it is long.
ASD and Sensory Problems
ASD often goes combined with sensory problems, which is to be interpreted as widely as possible. Some people with ASD need an aid for hearing or seeing for example, as the senses don’t work properly. Others have a hypersensivity of one of multiple senses. This can also be one of the other senses. My sense of feeling is incredibly oversensitive for just about everything, for example, a sunny and warm day can make me want to wear a thick jacket with every breeze that comes through. But back to the subject, it could be that the colorblindness is another one of my sensory problems.
ASD/Colorblindness in Genetics
I do want to take it a step further back however, to genetics. Genetics of course play a huge role, and it is rare because everything needs to end up just perfect, for the color blindness at women at least, autism not so much but I’ll come to that later.
My grandfather from my mother’s side of the family was fully color blind, achromatopsia. So seeminly some of those genes got to my mother. I never knew my father, but from stories I heard, he had similar problems with colors I have. So the right genes mixed up in me and so colorblind me was born, as colorblindness in women requires the colorblind-genes from both the parents rather than just from one. Besides that, my father was also described as very distant, not liking social happenings and often just inable to judge what is going on exactly, though he was highly intelligent (two PhDs by the age of 30). So that could be autism, genes that passed on to me.
Some ASD numbers
Now, the 0.12% of female ASD is in reference to the entire world population I guess. The statistics differ per source, but I always tend to go with the ones provided by the CDC (http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/data.html), although dutch statistics tend to be slightly different, mainly in the male:female ratio, might be just a difference in country or healthcare. The thing is, that ratio is not the amounts of people with autism, but the people diagnosed with autism, there are a lot of undiagnosed cases.
Difference in ASD in males and females
Looking at most psychological conditions, they are “maskable”. Especially the form I have, Asperger’s, tends to be. Asperger’s even has a characteristic that lets the person adapt to the surroundings, someone once called it a chameleon-effect, the behavior copies the percieved behaviors. This makes that Asperger’s can go unnoticed for years, even decades. In that period, we are different from other people, but no one calls someone autistic over just being quiet and distant. On top of that, women are often forced to become social, so we learn while we are still kids, as our social environment makes us. We might have our odd behaviors later in life, but in general we blend in and make a social network, which is a third key point here. When things go bad, men generally tend to turn inwards, hiding their emotions. Women generally turn outwards to their social connections. I call all those things “safety screens”, men usually break when their masking fails, women break when their masking and their social skills/connections fail, which is what also happened to me. My estimate is more like a 3:2 ratio, if not a 1:1. Percentages of diagnosed cases of autism already border 2% of the population in the Netherlands, though studies tend to differ in opinion there sometimes, but at least it is not too rare.
ASD ratio in certain places
Before going on a bit about the colors, I want to say one more thing about autism. I have a great interest in science, mainly psychology, and memory has always fascinated me. That also changes the numbers slightly: A lot of aspies love science. Walk into an engineering office, and you will see autism rates of maybe 20-30% (plus a lot of undiagnosed cases), as aspies are way more likely to be there. I once spoke about this with a computer science teacher on one of the universities around here, he said that autism rates there run up to 90% easily. Would this have been a forum for social tea parties rather than mnemonics, finding an aspie would be way harder.
Reading RGB
sidestep to love and psychopathy
Here you are completely right! Though ask yourself, how could a psychopath understand love. Most likely most of the understanding will start with what love actually is, a bunch of hormones messing up the balance in the internal chemistry of the brain, which might be simplefied slightly.
- Endorphines giving the "high", dreamy feeling, and causing the addiction to the person. -sidenote: love is basically just an addiction to the perception of an individual- (fun fact here: endorphines also get created in automutiltion, which is why people do that)
- Dopamine causing the happiness, plus adding a bit to the addiction. (Fun fact here: sniffing cocaine triggers the same response)
- Phenethylamine gives a happy feeling, causes blood to run to the face, hands (causing sweaty hands) and genitals. It also attributes to an increase in heartrate. (Fun fact here: XTC and Speed trigger the same response, this hormone actually also increases upon eye contact, which is why good eye contact -read: not staring- helps a lot in dating.)
- Adrenaline gives the "butterfly" feeling, makes you alert and increases your heartrate and breathing. (fun fact here: too much adrenaline can actually give heart problems, so don't fall in love too much. As Brian May wrote and both he and Freddie Mercury sung, too much love will kill you <3)
- Vasopressin is mainly present with men, makes them monogamous. So yea, judging from what I see in the current teenagers, this hormone is seemingly taking a generation off. (fun fact here: Vasopressin is the hormone that seeminly makes you men love rough... bed activities)
- Oxytocin causes a feeling of security and connection, you get it from cuddling. (fun fact here: you can get it in the form of a pill.... there literally are pills that put this hormone straight into your body.)
So basically... if you have a crush, cut her, let her sniff cocaine, spice her drink with XTC, speed and an oxytocin pill, then throw her off a cliff for some additional adrenaline. success not guaranteed.
Now each of the characteristics is linked to a hormone, making it understandable why someone is doing what they are doing. The thing I described up here is actually my own little research of around ten years ago. Not to understand why others were doing what they were doing, but to understand why the hell I was doing all the idiotic things I was doing. Very romantic, I know. I think I might let my husband do “the talk” in a few years when my daughter is older…
end of sidestep
In reading colors through RGB, it goes similarly to the love I described earlier. I don’t need it for all colors, red, blue, green, black white and grey usually go fine, with some other additional colors. Though when presented with lime, fuchsia, crimson, amaranth, etc. I can get confused if it is a red, a purple, or a whatever. When presented with a color, I scan the RGB using a computer, then I see the values and based on those values I go to look in my mental database of RGB values to see what is the closest. Did you know oranges have a similar construction in RGB as browns? Basically orange and brown are in the same line of colors, making orange a brown… or brown an orange, one of the two. Who knew ^^
P.S. are you familiar with an attribute that occurs to 20% of the people so I can officially say that you calculated that I am one in a million?