A question many people ask about Asperger Syndrome is: Why do Aspergians hate interacting with large groups of people? To answer this question, I think of a mathematical model of the number of different connections between computers in a network. In a social context, we treat each person involved in the interaction as a node in the network. Each of these connections is bidirectional. As one can clearly see in the table below, the number of connections increases in a combinatorial fashion as more people join the group. Therefore, it becomes increasingly difficult to pay full attention to what everyone is saying to one another.
# of People # of Communication Links
2 | 0 + 1 = 1 |
3 | 0 + 1 + 2 = 3 |
4 | 0 + 1 + 2 + 3 = 6 |
5 | 0 + 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10 |
6 | 0 + 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 = 15 |
… | … |
n | |
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