This is a hugely controversal topic, with a lot of bullshit, both on the theoretical side and on the side of a popular culture (they just label everything as “autistic”).
I, however, “learned it by doing”, so to speak, by using introspection as much as I could. Keep in mind that it is almost impossible to introspect (observe your own states of the mind and body) when one is grossly overwhelmed, swayed by emotions. Introspection requires calmness and a lack of distrurbing emotions.
There is my operational definition of what does it really mean to actually be autistic. It means to be easily overwhelmed by unnecessary, redundant unwanted emotions on every smallest, insignificant “trigger”. Literally everything is emotionally charged for us, while we absolutely do not want to and have almost no control over it.
Everything is “dramatic”, even when my cat refuses to do what I want it to. It is always an emotional “fight” because I feel overwhelming urge to end it and to end it right fucking now before I even have a chance to introspect.
This cat example illustrates the principle - we are being constantly overwhelmed by sudden unwanted emotions and we really hate ourselves for what we are – for the lack of self-control and for inability to prevent all this.
To compensate and to avoid it we develop a sets of habits which are based on social isolation and quiet solitude (everything social is the major source of constant unwanted overwhelming emotions). This is what other people would label as an “escapism”.
Everything being emotionally overloaded “naturally” result in the “fact” that everything is so difficult – even a simple task with added unnecessary emotional burden becomes difficult (when compared to others).
The famous “Rainman” (the movie) meme show this constant struggle with overwhelming unwanted emotions and it is this additional load is what makes even simple tasks difficult.
Of course, we learn and develop habits to cope with this, but there are a lot of “side-effects”. We learn to escape the difficulties too, while they are absolutely required for “learn by doing”. I personaly skip all the exercises in all the textbooks I read so I have very poor learning rates and thus waste most of my efforts (but I am good at understanding complex things).
Again, it is “natural” for us to migrate from “active”, “doing” (busybody) side to a withdrawn, distant observers who avoids “just doing it” (because almost everything is hard, including having other people around).
So, things like ADHD are also common, because we easily switch between activities halfway through (not surprisingly, this is the trait that the famous Phineas Gage “developed” due to the brain damage to the “executive areas”). I read tens of books at once, never from start to finish.
This partially due to the fact that there are so many connections (everything is interrelated in the Universe), so it is “natural” to switch, as if one just “jumps” onto another “trail”, only to backtrack later. Anyway.
This makes us poor learners by following the traditional “by doing” approach, and, again, we compensate by have visited a lot of seemingly unrelated “trails of thought”.
The typical example is that I could try to write a boring, not really necessary (life-changing) program in a 6 different languages in parallel, appreciating the universal principles which underlie all of programming, while enjoying the unique features of each of them. The program won’t be finished, but it is OK (for some of us).
Other people would say that once one sees “the solution” it is unmotivating to actually “go for it”. This is a meme. We just switch too often and eventually getting carried away with a new whatever it is.
So we learn something different by doing something irrational and “stupid”. I know almost all classic languages and most of classic books, while never “finished” one of them. This is just an implication of that “everything is difficult” feeling.
One more time – we become “lazy” withdrawn observers who never really motivated to finish anything, and this is another, additional level of suffering. Yes, I could write Bird-style Haskell or Paulson-level ML, Graham-level Common Lisp or terse and academic Ocaml of its stdlib, while most of you have no idea what the heck I am talking about.
I could watch Gregor Kiczales, Dan Grossman or Michael Clarkson as other people would watch Tic-tock, but, again, without doing any exercises, as one would watch a boxing match. And then it all will be useless, because the “doing pathways” were not get myelinated, and no “muscle memory” has been developed.
Now my cat is annoyingly meowing in hope of getting good food while not actually being hungry, and it is another small unnecessary tragedy that I must have to carefully manage to avoid. And there is no “intelligent” solution.