Hey! love your content as usual! Mozart may have been on the spectrum because while he was a genius he had trouble often with social cues. As a child who survived Smallpox (we would never know because all portraits painted out his scars) that also may have effected his neurology. Either way love love love your channel!
Thanks for watching and commenting! I did read a bit about Mozart being quite a sickly child, and surviving smallpox. While it’s certainly plausible, I didn’t feel like there was enough evidence to include it as a possible effect on his neurology. Definitely an interesting idea though, and I hope it gets explored more!
As an autistic person myself, I do have trouble with conversation, especially starting it, I tend to be more of a listening person than a starter. And I do tend to hyperfocus on things, and learn things quickly. And when the conversation hits a topic that's a real interest of mine, I often have a hard time deciding when to stop. I could go on for hours about music theory for instance. When someone asks me what I want for dinner, I'll often just sit there for 5 to 10 minutes or even longer analyzing my choices. And I tend to do the same thing for more than an hour. I have a tendency to bite my nails to the quick, even when I'm not anxious. I'm a pianist, which reinforces that habit cause it feels strange when it's my nail that's pressing the key and not my flesh. I will sometimes listen to the same piece over and over on loop if I really love it, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony being an example of such a piece I loop. I get pieces stuck in my head and can pull it out and start humming it when I want to or often based on certain cues, like again, taking Beethoven's Fifth as an example, I'll often hum Beethoven's Fifth before watching a lecture or analysis video on the symphony. I improvise melodies on the spot all the time, and I mean all the time, doesn't matter if I'm at my instrument or not, I'll be humming melodies. I have a great memory and can remember details hours, days, even years after it happened. My body physically has trouble adjusting to a new schedule, like I'm more likely to sleep longer than I am to wake up earlier if I go to bed earlier kind of thing. I'm more of a night owl than a morning person, have been since I was a teenager. Alarms stop working to wake me up after a while, my brain just tunes out that the alarm is going off. My dreams are incredibly vivid sometimes. And interestingly enough, music has a strong effect on me beyond just "Oh how I love this music" or "This is just boring, it's the same music over and over without a hint of change". If I'm wanting stress relief, I listen to Mozart. If I'm wanting to focus, I put Beethoven on in the background. Podcasts also help me focus, and give me a sense of time when I am focused, cause time just whizzes by for me sometimes when I'm really focused on something. And I do get anxiety, like not just the emotional "I'm nervous" type anxiety, but panic attacks. I remember when I had my first panic attack, I was nervous, I was worried something was wrong with my heart. It felt like that classic anginal pain the medical textbooks talk about with heart attacks, it was crushing pain in the middle of my chest and it was radiating outwards. I told my mom about it, she told me to breathe deeply, and the pain subsided. When I told my doctor at a later appointment about what happened, they did a quick exam and said "Your heart's fine, you had a panic attack, that's what caused your radiating chest pain." I was relieved to hear that I was not having a heart attack in my 20s. But at the same time, I'm worried about what will happen later in life. Cause you see, my mom has had to leave for months at a time for the past few years to help her long distance family members. And when she's away from me for months, I start getting attack after attack of chest pain, even when I'm feeling alright otherwise. You can probably see where this is going. What am I going to do when she's no longer around, ever? Will the chest pain be worse? Will it last for months or even years? Will Mozart's music even do anything for it or will it just be too severe of a stress to be relieved by music?
Thank you for sharing your perspective and experience! Anxiety can be a really difficult thing - I also feel a similar anxiety about time marching on and what will happen to family. But the most important thing is to focus on the time you have right now and make lots of memories you can keep forever! I’m definitely not a psychologist or a therapist, so I definitely recommend reaching out to find someone that can help you on a professional level. I did work in the field for some time, so I know they have lots of exercises and coping skills that they can show you to help you deal with anxiety in the moment. Wishing you the best of luck! You got this!
This is a great video!! It gave me a lot to think about. Also, I would absolutely love to your analysis on the historicity of "Amadeus"! I love that movie!
This is a great video! I appreciate the time you took to research this topic and make this video, thank you for your time and effort! I, as an autistic person myself, find this very cool to consider😊 I would also like to let you know that the graphic and info at 2:18 isn't actually an accurate representation and the functioning type of labels are harmful to us autistics. We do range in how much we are able to do, but it's not "types" or "levels" or autism- many of us go through those "levels" daily. There are lots of days I wake up and I'm doing fine, but an hour later I'm nonverbal and four hours after that I'm in a gaming session with friends. There are also days I wake up already overstimulated (from dreams/nightmares or loud noises or bad smells waking me up) but two hours later I'm going about my day as I usually would without overstim. There's yet other days where I deal with burnout and am in shutdown or nonverbal mode all day, maybe multiple days, and still other days where I don't struggle with being overstimulated and go about my day without a hitch The problem with classifying autism into levels and assigning functioning labels onto said levels is that one day I could be seen as needing less support due to being "high-functioning" and denied the support I do actually need, and other days I could be denied autonomy and perceived as being unable to make decisions for myself and care for myself and do much of anything due to a "low-functioning" label. Neither are accurate to autism as a whole and actually does harm instead of good- it's ableist no matter how you slice it, not to mention those labels were created by neurotypicals to benefit neurotypicals, not us with autism. Neurotypicals do not understand autism and that graphic and label type is their uneducated and harmful, even if not intentionally so, way of perceiving us without any attempt to learn. It only benefits them in the way of categorizing us so they "know" how to "deal with" us Then there's masking (us faking being okay to seem "normal" and pushing through things when we need support and not stimming when we need/want to, also talking when it's physically hard to, etc) and how us doing so makes us seem "high-functioning" while actively needing some level of support that would deem us having "mild/level 2" or "low-functioning/level 3" autism... there's so much to unpack with functioning labels but the bottom line is: please don't use them, they're harmful I do apologize if I came off harsh- not my intention, but I am passionate about this ofc and I personally struggle with my passion coming off too intense (again, autistic person here😅) so I wanted to clarify just in case. I hope my explanation made sense, but if it didn't don't pay it any mind- I struggle with wording things correctly, not that that's gonna be a surprise to anyone reading this lol
Hi! Thank you so much for commenting and sharing your experience with me. I appreciate your input and your perspective. My full time job is in a school with people of various ages and on different waves of the spectrum. I also grew up with a brothers who is autistic, and happens to be completely nonverbal, as in, he doesn’t have the ability to communicate through words. Of course, this doesn’t mean that I understand autism in the same way that autistics do because I am not autistic. It also doesn’t mean that I won’t make mistakes or use harmful language myself. In my many years of watching NTs trying to understand autism, I’ve realized there’s a large population of people who have quite literally no idea what autism is. It’s certainly difficult to explain the nuances of the entire autism spectrum to someone like this. So it seems like situations like this are where we come across language that is sort of too basic, or outdated, in an effort to get NTs to understand on a base level and work from there. That’s not to say that the language is not harmful - to me it just seems like many haven’t entirely caught up or possibly haven’t been presented with various ways to explain the autism spectrum. In making this video I really did keep this perspective in mind and had a lot of trouble finding resources that didn’t include language that people today are finding to be harmful. If you could direct me to a more reliable resource, that would be incredibly helpful. Again, I totally appreciate you taking the time to watch and share your perspective with me!
@@MusicTheoriesChannel The most credible sources will always be autistics themselves. Autism is one of those things that the medical/psych community professionals don't widely understand and it comes down to us autistics to talk with each other and gather what little knowledge there is to piece things together. Even now autism is very commonly missed in anyone that isn't a young white boy, and even in young white boys that don't display the "classic" signs/behaviors. As a whole, autism is very misunderstood and humanity in general is very behind in learning about it. Sadly there aren't very many sources for autism in general that are very easily accessible, especially when it comes to research and studies on ppl who were not young white males. One of the best sources that's helped me so much is actually ASD TikTok- I know that may have gotten an eyeroll or laugh, but that's by far one of the easiest and best places to see autistics sharing their experiences firsthand. I've seen many a case where an autistic person shared a story about how when they asked for specific care or help that they would benefit from they were denied said care because the /medical professional/ deemed them "high-functioning" and therefore not worthy of the specialized help... and the very same autistics also sharing that the moment they're overstimulated and unable to process things and nonverbal they come close to losing their rights to themselves, to autonomy, because then they're only seen as "low-functioning" and unable to take care of themselves. A bad moment doesn't define anyone's autism, nor does a good moment- it's not possible to claim someone to be a certain way without looking at the entire picture. Even autistics who are always nonverbal can be autonomous and care for themselves with the help of communication apps (which I've also seen on TikTok) and ppl being willing to not judge them and label them- not all nonverbals ofc, but it just goes to show that even in the nonverbal aspect there's still a range. So yeah, first and foremost I recommend ASD TikTok (accounts such as soundoftheforest, moonshot4589, agiftedguide (autistic person who is also a licensed therapist), williamshapingautism. There's sooo many more but here's a starting place), but wide google searching leads to more current information, a lot of which is also written by autistics firsthand or is one of the rare studies that was done on a range of ppl. Here's a few articles I stumbled on when googling "why high-functioning is offensive" and "why functioning labels are bad": planningacrossthespectrum.com/blog/why-stop-using-functioning-labels/ www.google.com/amp/s/www.spectrumnews.org/news/large-study-supports-discarding-term-high-functioning-autism/amp www.autismawareness.com.au/aupdate/why-we-should-stop-using-the-term-high-functioning-autism Though not widespread or mainstream/popular, there are information and studies that do throw old... "data" (it was never data, just neurotypicals labeling autistics in ways that fit into their ableism) out the window to favor newer and far more accurate findings. Not the easiest to find since you kinda have to know that functioning labels are bad to begin with to then search for why, but there is a bit out there! I can also recommend RUclips, there's absolutely some great ASD channels such as Purple Ella, Yo Samdy Sam, Olivia Hops, paige layle (also on TikTok). There's also Ted Talks (though you gotta be sure they're more recent ones- the older ones don't have the updated info), such a this one ruclips.net/video/A1AUdaH-EPM/видео.html and this one ruclips.net/video/Tbes1mm2VgM/видео.html Hopefully that's enough to point you in the right direction. The main takeaway is really just to listen to autistic ppl- we will tell you as much as we understand about ourselves (which is more than the majority of professionals) and our experiences, we want ppl to understand so we can all help each other☺️
Hi there fabulous video!! I was about to rent Amadeus literally analyze how the movie interpreted Mozart and any possible autistic symptoms I can see but then I was wondering about the historical accuracy and I decided to watch this vid instead- I’d love to hear your perspective thx again!
This is a great question! Sorry for the delayed reply. In a nutshell, it doesn't follow the proper procedure to diagnose someone, and thus is harmful to modern medical practices. There's a lot of historical but also personal context missing when it comes to making conclusions about a person from the past, which leads to a series of speculations and assumptions that are more or less bad practice. In addition, symptoms change and evolve over time and it's not always possible to know how a disease or illness could have mutated in the centuries between. Some even go so far as to call these conspiracy theories, more than anything else. That said, I personally think there's something to be said about acknowledging neurodiversity throughout history. There tends to be a rhetoric around the idea that certain disabilities are "emerging" when in reality, they've been around for quite some time and just didn't have a name. Many of these people were outcast or deemed eccentric, at best. I hope that answers your question! There's tons of more in depth info on Google if you search "retrospective diagnosis of historical figures." I'd love to know your thoughts too, if you have any on the matter!
In my opinion, there are some legit ones but others that are just people slapping the label onto random people. If you want to learn more about it specifically in the case of autism, PLEASE avoid Michael Fitzgerald. He has no clue of what he is talking about. He slaps the autism label onto random people and has even made harmful claims such as Hitler being autistic or that autism has a link to school shootings.
Great research. Unfortunately I won’t be able to show this to my middle school class today because of the reference to Mozart’s more vulgar content. Guess I’ll stick with Bach.
Hey! love your content as usual! Mozart may have been on the spectrum because while he was a genius he had trouble often with social cues. As a child who survived Smallpox (we would never know because all portraits painted out his scars) that also may have effected his neurology. Either way love love love your channel!
Thanks for watching and commenting! I did read a bit about Mozart being quite a sickly child, and surviving smallpox. While it’s certainly plausible, I didn’t feel like there was enough evidence to include it as a possible effect on his neurology. Definitely an interesting idea though, and I hope it gets explored more!
As an autistic person myself, I do have trouble with conversation, especially starting it, I tend to be more of a listening person than a starter. And I do tend to hyperfocus on things, and learn things quickly. And when the conversation hits a topic that's a real interest of mine, I often have a hard time deciding when to stop. I could go on for hours about music theory for instance. When someone asks me what I want for dinner, I'll often just sit there for 5 to 10 minutes or even longer analyzing my choices. And I tend to do the same thing for more than an hour. I have a tendency to bite my nails to the quick, even when I'm not anxious. I'm a pianist, which reinforces that habit cause it feels strange when it's my nail that's pressing the key and not my flesh.
I will sometimes listen to the same piece over and over on loop if I really love it, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony being an example of such a piece I loop. I get pieces stuck in my head and can pull it out and start humming it when I want to or often based on certain cues, like again, taking Beethoven's Fifth as an example, I'll often hum Beethoven's Fifth before watching a lecture or analysis video on the symphony. I improvise melodies on the spot all the time, and I mean all the time, doesn't matter if I'm at my instrument or not, I'll be humming melodies.
I have a great memory and can remember details hours, days, even years after it happened. My body physically has trouble adjusting to a new schedule, like I'm more likely to sleep longer than I am to wake up earlier if I go to bed earlier kind of thing. I'm more of a night owl than a morning person, have been since I was a teenager. Alarms stop working to wake me up after a while, my brain just tunes out that the alarm is going off. My dreams are incredibly vivid sometimes.
And interestingly enough, music has a strong effect on me beyond just "Oh how I love this music" or "This is just boring, it's the same music over and over without a hint of change". If I'm wanting stress relief, I listen to Mozart. If I'm wanting to focus, I put Beethoven on in the background. Podcasts also help me focus, and give me a sense of time when I am focused, cause time just whizzes by for me sometimes when I'm really focused on something.
And I do get anxiety, like not just the emotional "I'm nervous" type anxiety, but panic attacks. I remember when I had my first panic attack, I was nervous, I was worried something was wrong with my heart. It felt like that classic anginal pain the medical textbooks talk about with heart attacks, it was crushing pain in the middle of my chest and it was radiating outwards. I told my mom about it, she told me to breathe deeply, and the pain subsided. When I told my doctor at a later appointment about what happened, they did a quick exam and said "Your heart's fine, you had a panic attack, that's what caused your radiating chest pain."
I was relieved to hear that I was not having a heart attack in my 20s. But at the same time, I'm worried about what will happen later in life. Cause you see, my mom has had to leave for months at a time for the past few years to help her long distance family members. And when she's away from me for months, I start getting attack after attack of chest pain, even when I'm feeling alright otherwise. You can probably see where this is going. What am I going to do when she's no longer around, ever? Will the chest pain be worse? Will it last for months or even years? Will Mozart's music even do anything for it or will it just be too severe of a stress to be relieved by music?
Thank you for sharing your perspective and experience! Anxiety can be a really difficult thing - I also feel a similar anxiety about time marching on and what will happen to family. But the most important thing is to focus on the time you have right now and make lots of memories you can keep forever!
I’m definitely not a psychologist or a therapist, so I definitely recommend reaching out to find someone that can help you on a professional level. I did work in the field for some time, so I know they have lots of exercises and coping skills that they can show you to help you deal with anxiety in the moment.
Wishing you the best of luck! You got this!
This is a great video!! It gave me a lot to think about.
Also, I would absolutely love to your analysis on the historicity of "Amadeus"! I love that movie!
This is a great video! I appreciate the time you took to research this topic and make this video, thank you for your time and effort! I, as an autistic person myself, find this very cool to consider😊 I would also like to let you know that the graphic and info at 2:18 isn't actually an accurate representation and the functioning type of labels are harmful to us autistics. We do range in how much we are able to do, but it's not "types" or "levels" or autism- many of us go through those "levels" daily. There are lots of days I wake up and I'm doing fine, but an hour later I'm nonverbal and four hours after that I'm in a gaming session with friends. There are also days I wake up already overstimulated (from dreams/nightmares or loud noises or bad smells waking me up) but two hours later I'm going about my day as I usually would without overstim. There's yet other days where I deal with burnout and am in shutdown or nonverbal mode all day, maybe multiple days, and still other days where I don't struggle with being overstimulated and go about my day without a hitch
The problem with classifying autism into levels and assigning functioning labels onto said levels is that one day I could be seen as needing less support due to being "high-functioning" and denied the support I do actually need, and other days I could be denied autonomy and perceived as being unable to make decisions for myself and care for myself and do much of anything due to a "low-functioning" label. Neither are accurate to autism as a whole and actually does harm instead of good- it's ableist no matter how you slice it, not to mention those labels were created by neurotypicals to benefit neurotypicals, not us with autism. Neurotypicals do not understand autism and that graphic and label type is their uneducated and harmful, even if not intentionally so, way of perceiving us without any attempt to learn. It only benefits them in the way of categorizing us so they "know" how to "deal with" us
Then there's masking (us faking being okay to seem "normal" and pushing through things when we need support and not stimming when we need/want to, also talking when it's physically hard to, etc) and how us doing so makes us seem "high-functioning" while actively needing some level of support that would deem us having "mild/level 2" or "low-functioning/level 3" autism... there's so much to unpack with functioning labels but the bottom line is: please don't use them, they're harmful
I do apologize if I came off harsh- not my intention, but I am passionate about this ofc and I personally struggle with my passion coming off too intense (again, autistic person here😅) so I wanted to clarify just in case. I hope my explanation made sense, but if it didn't don't pay it any mind- I struggle with wording things correctly, not that that's gonna be a surprise to anyone reading this lol
Hi! Thank you so much for commenting and sharing your experience with me. I appreciate your input and your perspective.
My full time job is in a school with people of various ages and on different waves of the spectrum. I also grew up with a brothers who is autistic, and happens to be completely nonverbal, as in, he doesn’t have the ability to communicate through words. Of course, this doesn’t mean that I understand autism in the same way that autistics do because I am not autistic. It also doesn’t mean that I won’t make mistakes or use harmful language myself.
In my many years of watching NTs trying to understand autism, I’ve realized there’s a large population of people who have quite literally no idea what autism is. It’s certainly difficult to explain the nuances of the entire autism spectrum to someone like this. So it seems like situations like this are where we come across language that is sort of too basic, or outdated, in an effort to get NTs to understand on a base level and work from there. That’s not to say that the language is not harmful - to me it just seems like many haven’t entirely caught up or possibly haven’t been presented with various ways to explain the autism spectrum.
In making this video I really did keep this perspective in mind and had a lot of trouble finding resources that didn’t include language that people today are finding to be harmful. If you could direct me to a more reliable resource, that would be incredibly helpful.
Again, I totally appreciate you taking the time to watch and share your perspective with me!
@@MusicTheoriesChannel The most credible sources will always be autistics themselves. Autism is one of those things that the medical/psych community professionals don't widely understand and it comes down to us autistics to talk with each other and gather what little knowledge there is to piece things together. Even now autism is very commonly missed in anyone that isn't a young white boy, and even in young white boys that don't display the "classic" signs/behaviors. As a whole, autism is very misunderstood and humanity in general is very behind in learning about it. Sadly there aren't very many sources for autism in general that are very easily accessible, especially when it comes to research and studies on ppl who were not young white males.
One of the best sources that's helped me so much is actually ASD TikTok- I know that may have gotten an eyeroll or laugh, but that's by far one of the easiest and best places to see autistics sharing their experiences firsthand. I've seen many a case where an autistic person shared a story about how when they asked for specific care or help that they would benefit from they were denied said care because the /medical professional/ deemed them "high-functioning" and therefore not worthy of the specialized help... and the very same autistics also sharing that the moment they're overstimulated and unable to process things and nonverbal they come close to losing their rights to themselves, to autonomy, because then they're only seen as "low-functioning" and unable to take care of themselves. A bad moment doesn't define anyone's autism, nor does a good moment- it's not possible to claim someone to be a certain way without looking at the entire picture. Even autistics who are always nonverbal can be autonomous and care for themselves with the help of communication apps (which I've also seen on TikTok) and ppl being willing to not judge them and label them- not all nonverbals ofc, but it just goes to show that even in the nonverbal aspect there's still a range.
So yeah, first and foremost I recommend ASD TikTok (accounts such as soundoftheforest, moonshot4589, agiftedguide (autistic person who is also a licensed therapist), williamshapingautism. There's sooo many more but here's a starting place), but wide google searching leads to more current information, a lot of which is also written by autistics firsthand or is one of the rare studies that was done on a range of ppl. Here's a few articles I stumbled on when googling "why high-functioning is offensive" and "why functioning labels are bad":
planningacrossthespectrum.com/blog/why-stop-using-functioning-labels/
www.google.com/amp/s/www.spectrumnews.org/news/large-study-supports-discarding-term-high-functioning-autism/amp
www.autismawareness.com.au/aupdate/why-we-should-stop-using-the-term-high-functioning-autism
Though not widespread or mainstream/popular, there are information and studies that do throw old... "data" (it was never data, just neurotypicals labeling autistics in ways that fit into their ableism) out the window to favor newer and far more accurate findings. Not the easiest to find since you kinda have to know that functioning labels are bad to begin with to then search for why, but there is a bit out there!
I can also recommend RUclips, there's absolutely some great ASD channels such as Purple Ella, Yo Samdy Sam, Olivia Hops, paige layle (also on TikTok). There's also Ted Talks (though you gotta be sure they're more recent ones- the older ones don't have the updated info), such a this one ruclips.net/video/A1AUdaH-EPM/видео.html and this one ruclips.net/video/Tbes1mm2VgM/видео.html
Hopefully that's enough to point you in the right direction. The main takeaway is really just to listen to autistic ppl- we will tell you as much as we understand about ourselves (which is more than the majority of professionals) and our experiences, we want ppl to understand so we can all help each other☺️
We never know but he is my fav composer
True! He was incredible!
Hi there fabulous video!! I was about to rent Amadeus literally analyze how the movie interpreted Mozart and any possible autistic symptoms I can see but then I was wondering about the historical accuracy and I decided to watch this vid instead- I’d love to hear your perspective thx again!
I love that movie! I would love to do an analysis of it in the future, to see just how accurate it actually is to Mozart’s life!
@@MusicTheoriesChannel thatd b sick!!!!!
@@teresagardiner153 I had that feeling!
What are the dangers of the retrospective diagnosis of historical figures?
This is a great question! Sorry for the delayed reply.
In a nutshell, it doesn't follow the proper procedure to diagnose someone, and thus is harmful to modern medical practices.
There's a lot of historical but also personal context missing when it comes to making conclusions about a person from the past, which leads to a series of speculations and assumptions that are more or less bad practice. In addition, symptoms change and evolve over time and it's not always possible to know how a disease or illness could have mutated in the centuries between. Some even go so far as to call these conspiracy theories, more than anything else.
That said, I personally think there's something to be said about acknowledging neurodiversity throughout history. There tends to be a rhetoric around the idea that certain disabilities are "emerging" when in reality, they've been around for quite some time and just didn't have a name. Many of these people were outcast or deemed eccentric, at best.
I hope that answers your question! There's tons of more in depth info on Google if you search "retrospective diagnosis of historical figures."
I'd love to know your thoughts too, if you have any on the matter!
In my opinion, there are some legit ones but others that are just people slapping the label onto random people. If you want to learn more about it specifically in the case of autism, PLEASE avoid Michael Fitzgerald. He has no clue of what he is talking about. He slaps the autism label onto random people and has even made harmful claims such as Hitler being autistic or that autism has a link to school shootings.
Great vid
10:39 Sounds like modern rap 😂😂😂
Ahead of his time 😂
Great research. Unfortunately I won’t be able to show this to my middle school class today because of the reference to Mozart’s more vulgar content. Guess I’ll stick with Bach.
My little brother has autism, does that mean he will be (like) Mozart?😂
Nope! But I know he’s special in his own way! (My little brother is also autistic!)
I'm also autistic mozart may have excelled in music maybe we will excel in sth else.
Fascinating topic and well done video, but the faux german accent is really annoying and offensive.
not really, one of my german friends has a strong german accent and it does sound like that. also it's just text to speech lol