My 8 year old son used to do this when he was little. We’d be hanging out on the train or something and he’d suddenly turn to be and be like “what’s 4096 times 2?”

For me though, I had (still have) a thing about rhythms in spoken language. The last thing that was said to me would echo in my head, repeating, until it revealed its rhythm, and then the rhythm would get stuck in my head, like a song, and play over and over, the words themselves drifting out disappearing…

It’s weird, but I like it.

When driving, I sometimes tap my left or right foot on the rhythm of passing street lamps or trees on the side of the road. Been doing it since forever

Pretty common for autistic kiddos’ play to be pattern/organization based rather than imaginative play based.

Instead of “playing” marbles or toy cars I’d organize them by color, shade, size, etc. and ate m&ms/skittles the same way. I also did long division for fun on paper soon as I learned it. There’s tons of other examples but those are probably the ones that illustrate it the most clearly.

Yes. Literally the exact same thing. I would double numbers until I couldn't. 65,536 was my max mentally. The finger tapping too, which did not translate into talent as a percussionist, like I suspected it would.

I think it's called "stimming".

"4x2 = 16"

you can get to 2048 very quick this way

Absolutely, and I still do it at 52 years of age. Powers of two, three, five. I also convert letters to numbers, add them, and subtract 26 to figure out which letter is the total of the word, phrase, or license plate.

If I play boggle a lot, I will start to dream word patterns.

When I was a teenager, my Dad would point out a license plate and have me total them and convert to hexadecimal.

Have you ever played 2048? I think you’d really like it.

i make it a point to figure out price per unit at the store but that is more about practicing math and not something I did before I knew math. Also I do it a bit because the stores like to use different units in the price for seemingly intentionally.