I can’t access the paper by Andersen that you discuss, do you know if schizotypy as Andersen understands it would include the “schizoid” personality type or if he’d consider that distinct? Nancy McWilliams, who wrote an interesting piece about her impressions of schizoid personalities as a psychotherapist, commented on p. 199 of her textbook Psychoanalytic Diagnosis that “Our taxonomic categories remain arbitrary and overlapping, and acting as if there are discrete present-versus-absent differences between labels is not usually wise clinically … Perhaps schizoid psychology, especially in its high-functioning versions, can be reasonably viewed as at the healthy end of the autistic spectrum.” There also seems to be some support for the idea of a schizoid/high-functioning autism spectrum in this study, with “spectrum” here meaning shared common features that would be atypical for neurotypicals, rather than opposite ends of a broader spectrum that includes neurotypicals in the middle as with Andersen’s proposal.
Personally I find that I relate to a lot of the features of schizoid personalities in descriptions like McWilliams’ and also that I relate to a lot of the features of HFA thinking that are distinct from difficulties with reading people’s intentions/meaning, as described for example by the autistic writer Temple Grandin in her book Thinking in Pictures, so this makes it seem plausible to me that at least some subset of schizoid personalities might have a lot of mental overlap with HFA but without the same degree of mind-reading deficits. And some of those shared cognitive features of autistic/schizoid minds are ones that Andersen puts in the “schizotypal” pole that he thinks is opposite to the “autistic” one, which for me raises doubts about his theory as described. For example when it comes to “associative thinking”, on p. 9 of Thinking in Pictures Grandin talks about the highly associative nature of her own thought, which is compatible with her highly “systematizing” nature rather than being opposite to it (maybe one could make an analogy to an animal building up a mental map of a landscape through continual impulsive curiosity-driven exploration):
“If I let my mind wander, the video jumps in a kind of free association from fence construction to a particular welding shop where I’ve seen posts being cut and Old John, the welder, making gates. If I continue thinking about Old John welding a gate, the video image changes to a series of short scenes of building gates on several projects I’ve worked on. Each video memory triggers another in this associative fashion, and my daydreams may wander far from the design problem. … This process of association is a good example of how my mind can wander off the subject. People with more severe autism have difficulty stopping endless associations. I am able to stop them and get my mind back on track. … Interviews with autistic adults who have good speech and are able to articulate their thought processes indicate that most of them also think in visual images. More severely impaired people, who can speak but are unable to explain how they think, have highly associational thought patterns.”
On the other listed characteristics of Andersen’s schizotypal pole which he thinks are opposite to the autistic one, I would guess people on a HFA/schizoid might be more likely then neurotypicals to enjoy a kind of “magical thinking” as a form of imaginative play, even if they are not as likely as “schizotypal” people to literally believe it. (As an example consider H. P. Lovecraft, who in his real life was a hardheaded materialist but had a great fascination with weird fiction that evoked nebulous feelings of transcending ordinary reality, as in his comment in one letter that ‘The true function of phantasy is to give the imagination a ground for limitless expansion, and to satisfy aesthetically the sincere and burning curiosity and sense of awe which a sensitive minority of mankind feel toward the alluring and provocative abysses of unplumbed space and unguessed entity which press in upon the known world from unknown infinities and in unknown relationships of time, space, matter, force, dimensionality, and consciousness.’) And the comment about “Decreased systematising and attention to detail, for instance with tedious matters like finances” may be misleading in treating these two as intrinsically connected, it’s possible to be highly systematizing about subjects that one finds interesting but bad with details of subjects that seem tedious (think of the absent-minded professor stereotype, which fits pretty well with real famous scientists like Einstein who might be part of such a spectrum/cluster). Ozy’s piece discussing intuitive observations of a cluster of mental traits dubbed “plasticbrains” (who are also said to be more likely to be trans) also fits this pattern of being highly systematizing in some areas and bad about keeping track of details in others, with the comment “Plasticbrains people typically have difficulties with executive function. However, their difficulties span a wide range. Some may have relatively ordinary problems, such as procrastination, difficulty planning how long tasks will take, constantly forgetting why they walked into this room, and never knowing where they left their cell phone.”
I can’t access the paper by Andersen that you discuss, do you know if schizotypy as Andersen understands it would include the “schizoid” personality type or if he’d consider that distinct? Nancy McWilliams, who wrote an interesting piece about her impressions of schizoid personalities as a psychotherapist, commented on p. 199 of her textbook Psychoanalytic Diagnosis that “Our taxonomic categories remain arbitrary and overlapping, and acting as if there are discrete present-versus-absent differences between labels is not usually wise clinically … Perhaps schizoid psychology, especially in its high-functioning versions, can be reasonably viewed as at the healthy end of the autistic spectrum.” There also seems to be some support for the idea of a schizoid/high-functioning autism spectrum in this study, with “spectrum” here meaning shared common features that would be atypical for neurotypicals, rather than opposite ends of a broader spectrum that includes neurotypicals in the middle as with Andersen’s proposal.
Personally I find that I relate to a lot of the features of schizoid personalities in descriptions like McWilliams’ and also that I relate to a lot of the features of HFA thinking that are distinct from difficulties with reading people’s intentions/meaning, as described for example by the autistic writer Temple Grandin in her book Thinking in Pictures, so this makes it seem plausible to me that at least some subset of schizoid personalities might have a lot of mental overlap with HFA but without the same degree of mind-reading deficits. And some of those shared cognitive features of autistic/schizoid minds are ones that Andersen puts in the “schizotypal” pole that he thinks is opposite to the “autistic” one, which for me raises doubts about his theory as described. For example when it comes to “associative thinking”, on p. 9 of Thinking in Pictures Grandin talks about the highly associative nature of her own thought, which is compatible with her highly “systematizing” nature rather than being opposite to it (maybe one could make an analogy to an animal building up a mental map of a landscape through continual impulsive curiosity-driven exploration):
“If I let my mind wander, the video jumps in a kind of free association from fence construction to a particular welding shop where I’ve seen posts being cut and Old John, the welder, making gates. If I continue thinking about Old John welding a gate, the video image changes to a series of short scenes of building gates on several projects I’ve worked on. Each video memory triggers another in this associative fashion, and my daydreams may wander far from the design problem. … This process of association is a good example of how my mind can wander off the subject. People with more severe autism have difficulty stopping endless associations. I am able to stop them and get my mind back on track. … Interviews with autistic adults who have good speech and are able to articulate their thought processes indicate that most of them also think in visual images. More severely impaired people, who can speak but are unable to explain how they think, have highly associational thought patterns.”
On the other listed characteristics of Andersen’s schizotypal pole which he thinks are opposite to the autistic one, I would guess people on a HFA/schizoid might be more likely then neurotypicals to enjoy a kind of “magical thinking” as a form of imaginative play, even if they are not as likely as “schizotypal” people to literally believe it. (As an example consider H. P. Lovecraft, who in his real life was a hardheaded materialist but had a great fascination with weird fiction that evoked nebulous feelings of transcending ordinary reality, as in his comment in one letter that ‘The true function of phantasy is to give the imagination a ground for limitless expansion, and to satisfy aesthetically the sincere and burning curiosity and sense of awe which a sensitive minority of mankind feel toward the alluring and provocative abysses of unplumbed space and unguessed entity which press in upon the known world from unknown infinities and in unknown relationships of time, space, matter, force, dimensionality, and consciousness.’) And the comment about “Decreased systematising and attention to detail, for instance with tedious matters like finances” may be misleading in treating these two as intrinsically connected, it’s possible to be highly systematizing about subjects that one finds interesting but bad with details of subjects that seem tedious (think of the absent-minded professor stereotype, which fits pretty well with real famous scientists like Einstein who might be part of such a spectrum/cluster). Ozy’s piece discussing intuitive observations of a cluster of mental traits dubbed “plasticbrains” (who are also said to be more likely to be trans) also fits this pattern of being highly systematizing in some areas and bad about keeping track of details in others, with the comment “Plasticbrains people typically have difficulties with executive function. However, their difficulties span a wide range. Some may have relatively ordinary problems, such as procrastination, difficulty planning how long tasks will take, constantly forgetting why they walked into this room, and never knowing where they left their cell phone.”
There’s a preprint of the paper available here.