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> NTs seem expert at knowing which of their emotional reactions are appropriate, so they can effortlessly express the appropriate emotions and suppress the inap

by dom0 10y ago

> NTs seem expert at knowing which of their emotional reactions are appropriate, so they can effortlessly express the appropriate emotions and suppress the inappropriate ones. Emotional reactions and empathy are not consciously regulated on a basic level (at least not for me). Conscious masking of emotions still produces micro-expressions, for example. By the way, emulating an emotional response is not uncommon for "regular" people, too, e.g. when attending a funeral where you don't care about the deceased or attending a wedding where you hate the bride or groom. I'd say it's an important skill for social survival. (I guess it could be argued that empathy is kind-of a low-level emulation of emotional responses... at least in some situations?)

Analemma_ 10y ago
> By the way, emulating an emotional response is not uncommon for "regular" people, too. I think that was the author's point. Everyone, autistic or not, finds themselves in situations where they need to fake emotions. The difference is that "regular people" can detect if the fakery is not working, know instinctually what the "right" response is, and can usually switch gears fast enough to satisfy the other person and save the interaction. The author seemed to be saying that not only do they need to operate off a "playbook" (which is normal for everyone), but that if the playbook goes wrong, they both can't detect it and don't have a backup plan. > I'd say it's an important skill for social survival. I mean, practically the defining characteristic of autism is the extreme difficulty, if not impossibility, of getting these skills. We get them for free "in hardware", but they're trying to do as best they can without them. Reminders like this are kind of redundant and unhelpful.
- make3 10y ago
  it's dumb, but in these situations I always think of the gpu vs software rendering in 3d graphics.. how much having dedicated hardware can do a crazy difference.. makes me wonder how much things would be different if we had dedicated brain hardware for other things
  - Analemma_ 10y ago
    It's not dumb at all IMO, this is actually my preferred metaphor for explaining autism, at least to people who are technically-minded. When your brain has "dedicated hardware" for some function, it's easy to miss just how difficult the underlying problem space actually is. Being social animals, we evolved a lot of autopilot functionality for processing social interactions, and if this isn't working, you have to do it "in software", and that's incredibly tricky.
- mercer 10y ago
  > The author seemed to be saying that not only do they need to operate off a "playbook" (which is normal for everyone), but that if the playbook goes wrong, they both can't detect it and don't have a backup plan. I'd add that 'normal' people don't necessarily have a backup plan, but are able to improvise. So if their playbook doesn't have an answer for a particular situation, they can use a similar solution from another page in the book, or cobble something together. Autistic people, on the other hand, can completely freeze up if the situation in question isn't exactly like the one in their playbook. This, by the way, doesn't just apply to social situations. The inability to improvise as well as intuit things can also exhibit itself as OCD ('I do it like this because I always do it like this'), ADD ('I need to fix this small, insignificant thing because it's just not right'), eating disorders ('without a system in place, hunger is not felt'), or even narcissism ('I need to talk this thing that I've been obsessing about for weeks and I forget that a conversation is a two-way street'). What I find utterly fascinating is that with most of the above, the internal mechanism for the 'disorder' is often quite different from 'regular' sufferers. So for example when it comes to 'normal' OCD, as I understand it, the compulsion stems from a strong fear of bad consequences or some kind of reasoning, however unreasonable it might seem. But for many autistic people, there's no sense of things going horribly wrong if they don't feed the compulsion. They just feel that they have to do it because they always do it and there's often no reasoning behind it (to the point of not even being aware of the compulsion). Then again it's all very murky when we talk about 'internal' stuff, so I might be wrong about this.

by dom0 10y ago

Analemma_ 10y ago

> By the way, emulating an emotional response is not uncommon for "regular" people, too. I think that was the author's point. Everyone, autistic or not, finds themselves in situations where they need to fake emotions. The difference is that "regular people" can detect if the fakery is not working, know instinctually what the "right" response is, and can usually switch gears fast enough to satisfy the other person and save the interaction. The author seemed to be saying that not only do they need to operate off a "playbook" (which is normal for everyone), but that if the playbook goes wrong, they both can't detect it and don't have a backup plan. > I'd say it's an important skill for social survival. I mean, practically the defining characteristic of autism is the extreme difficulty, if not impossibility, of getting these skills. We get them for free "in hardware", but they're trying to do as best they can without them. Reminders like this are kind of redundant and unhelpful.

make3 10y ago
it's dumb, but in these situations I always think of the gpu vs software rendering in 3d graphics.. how much having dedicated hardware can do a crazy difference.. makes me wonder how much things would be different if we had dedicated brain hardware for other things
- Analemma_ 10y ago
  It's not dumb at all IMO, this is actually my preferred metaphor for explaining autism, at least to people who are technically-minded. When your brain has "dedicated hardware" for some function, it's easy to miss just how difficult the underlying problem space actually is. Being social animals, we evolved a lot of autopilot functionality for processing social interactions, and if this isn't working, you have to do it "in software", and that's incredibly tricky.
mercer 10y ago
> The author seemed to be saying that not only do they need to operate off a "playbook" (which is normal for everyone), but that if the playbook goes wrong, they both can't detect it and don't have a backup plan. I'd add that 'normal' people don't necessarily have a backup plan, but are able to improvise. So if their playbook doesn't have an answer for a particular situation, they can use a similar solution from another page in the book, or cobble something together. Autistic people, on the other hand, can completely freeze up if the situation in question isn't exactly like the one in their playbook. This, by the way, doesn't just apply to social situations. The inability to improvise as well as intuit things can also exhibit itself as OCD ('I do it like this because I always do it like this'), ADD ('I need to fix this small, insignificant thing because it's just not right'), eating disorders ('without a system in place, hunger is not felt'), or even narcissism ('I need to talk this thing that I've been obsessing about for weeks and I forget that a conversation is a two-way street'). What I find utterly fascinating is that with most of the above, the internal mechanism for the 'disorder' is often quite different from 'regular' sufferers. So for example when it comes to 'normal' OCD, as I understand it, the compulsion stems from a strong fear of bad consequences or some kind of reasoning, however unreasonable it might seem. But for many autistic people, there's no sense of things going horribly wrong if they don't feed the compulsion. They just feel that they have to do it because they always do it and there's often no reasoning behind it (to the point of not even being aware of the compulsion). Then again it's all very murky when we talk about 'internal' stuff, so I might be wrong about this.