The thing that throws me about objectively championing verbal encoding of meaning is that non-verbal properties can still be embedded in such encoding to convey additional information not semantically explicit.
Typographical alterations, for example, can be used to visually suggest intonation typical of sarcasm:
(1) Oh, I’m sure that dog is really smart.
(2) Oh, I’m sure that dog is really smart.
Deliberate omissions may be used to imply something or suggest doubt, or even both, as seen and heard in the ingenious lyrics of Fiona Apple’s crushing song ‘I Know’:
And I will pretend
That I don’t know of your sins
Until you are ready to confess
But all the time, all the time
I’ll know, I’ll know
[…]
And when the crowd becomes your burden
And you’ve early closed your curtains,
I’ll wait by the backstage door
While you try to find the lines to speak your mind
And pry it open, hoping for an encore
And if it gets too late, for me to wait
For you to find you love me, and tell me so
It’s ok, don’t need to say it
I was quite explicit that it is both. The distinction I make is not that the communication of emotions are of no value to others - but rather that emotions are not communicated, despite the popular insistence that they somehow are. Sure, there would be value in knowing how a person feels, but nobody does. Instead we seem to build a model based upon a guess. That would be fine, except that most people then make the leap of mistaking this for direct communication of internal states, which is illusory.
How I think this relates to autism is that autistic people are not so much lacking a real skill, but rather they are not as readily fooled into reflexively assuming intersubjectivity.
What happens is that the lack of communication becomes obvious, but even between NTs the problem exists, but is hidden. People simply do not know much about each others internal states. The entire NT experience seems to be based upon having a protocol for saying that we do know each other’s states because it is important to feel that we do - despite people generally being awful at it.
In short - most are deeply invested in the notion that they automatically know what each other think/feel because it helps them operate with a feeling of connection to others. So most violently resist questioning this process - even (especially) when it proves ineffective.
I think we’re thinking about this in different ways. My vantage point isn’t epistemological, but evolutionary. Facial expressions emerged because they’re useful in interpersonal communication. The key word here is ‘useful’. You can doubt your own knowledge of someone’s internal state while still feeling (and expressing) empathy and compassion for someone exhibiting any given emotional state. Unless the other person is a total psychopath, your prima facie impression of the other’s current emotional well-being is enough information to act and respond.
I have a good friend who is also faceblind, so whenever I get a hair cut, I send her a selfie so she’ll know what my hair shape/color looks like when I see her next…
Not to be flippant. Well, yes to be flippant but done so with love. I’m really not sure how to interpret this. Never thought of myself as ND, just weird. According to this I’m a bad communicator.
It’s a trait exhibited all over the neural spectrum, to discount a skill because you do not yourself have it. It is a real skill, for all that NTs can make mistakes deploying it. Skilled ≠ perfection.
I agree - people with ASD seem to favour a more precise and frank communication style with a real purpose (e.g. gaining information or performing a concrete function) while avoiding small talk and social games. There’s nothing wrong with those two things and they do have social value, but a more straightforward approach isn’t necessarily inferior either.
Aspies are often exact, practical and economical with their words. Social chitchat and talking just to talk, seems to most of us like an awful waste of energy and time. When we talk and socialise, we usually want to exchange relevant and useful information for it to feel meaningful and worth the effort.
Of the Levels of Communication (phatic, factual, evaluative, gut-level and peak communication) most Aspies seem to prefer factual and abhor phatic. Many go directly to gut-level even with strangers, without passing through the other stages – which is often appreciated with other Aspies but generally seen as inappropriate with non-autistics.
It mentions the idea of “refrigerator mothers” too – that people whose mothers (or to a lesser extent, fathers) were seen as cold or emotionless actually caused their children to have autism.
SILBERMAN: Yes, they were cold. They were super ambitious. You know, Kanner would say witheringly that several of these mothers have college degrees, you know, as if that alone was enough to indict them in their, you know, alleged role in triggering autism in their children. And so Kanner’s blaming of parents had catastrophic effects on families, as you might imagine, in that parents who were already dealing with the daily challenges of raising an autistic child - which can be very considerable - had the burden of shame and stigma piled on them on top of that. And, you know, parents would be subjected to psychoanalysis for 10 years with a psychoanalyst trying to get to the root of why they hate their child, et cetera. Meanwhile, the children would be put in institutions to remove them from the allegedly toxic parental environment.
It’s surprising that people noticed the similar symptoms in the parents without coming to the conclusion that autism was hereditary.
ETA: although given the climate at the time, being recognised as an autistic person who was flying under the radar probably wouldn’t have been a good thing either.
Yeah. It seems like a pretty enlightening book, especially for those of us who are neuro-typical. He firmly seems to fall into the understand autism and accept autistic people side of things rather than the “cure it” camp.
Well, it seems to be a skill in the same way that hearing voices in radio static is a skill. Just because a person can be trained to do it does not mean that any information was actually communicated. Like a shipwrecked person, most are so desperate to overcome their fundamental isolation that there is no way to convince them that it’s a conversation that they made up in their own mind.
No communication method is perfect, and interpreting body language may be worse than most. However, its lack of precision doesn’t negate its existence or usefulness in many contexts.
I was a fireman on a ship and had to use radios quite a bit. Hearing voices in radio static is an important skill, but to transmit an accurate message the person on the receiving end often has to repeat what they think they heard; the first person then confirms or corrects this. While it’s a fact that body language and facial expressions carry meaning, I do think that relying on them and assuming that you have a good picture of someone’s internal state based on them is a big mistake. Especially if you’re an “empath” (I don’t think there’s such a thing in the true sense), an over-reliance on this information can be a form of projection.
I could just as easily say that people need to stop confronting me about it without any evidence, it gets tiresome after 40+ years.
I was not kidding above when I conceded that making up data can be a skill. Like other forms of divination, such as palm reading or tarot, it is a real skill of getting to know your own subconscious mind. That is not nothing, there is value to that. But likewise I am skeptical that we are talking about actual unspoken communication of information from one person to another.
When I ask people about their “body language” they will often even insist that they really aren’t trying to communicate anything. So why should I doubt them? To me, communication is conscious and intentional, so if a person does not decide to do it, all that is happening is that a person observes them and makes their own inferences. And even if a person does consciously decide to communicate, what formal grammars do they employ? Consider how people beep a car horn and it can mean anything. Drivers would need to use some sort of actual code, such as Morse, to send a specific message which can be parsed and understood by the receiver. But I notice that drivers are never taught nor required to do that. Without anything formal I might as easily be “receiving messages” by watching the leaves blow on trees.
If people feel that they truly can and do communicate important information more or less by accident without even meaning to, I guess that might be better than nothing, but it scares me that people would believe and trust this, Rather than merely assume, it seems much safer to simply ask.
There are some things that I liked and didn’t like about the book. I do like that it was focused more on understanding autism than trying to cure it, and I like the historical background of autism research in 1930s Europe. Not sure how true that part is, but it definitely explains the pro-cure vs anti-cure camps even today.
I would rather have less emphasis on upper class white people who work in tech. I understand that Steve Silberman’s background is writing for Wired, but there are plenty of people on the spectrum who didn’t grow up among technology, come from poor or working class backgrounds, and/or are minorities. We’re not all upper middle class white guys who are socially awkward computer geniuses but otherwise okay. There’s a huge range of backgrounds and experiences.
A lot of people read this book and got pissed off at Lorna Wing. I just think she was being pragmatic. There were a lot of parents in the 80s who would be incredibly resistant to hearing their child had autism. They would either deny it outright, or else go the other way and be doom and gloom. None of this would make their kids less autistic. Hence, Asperger’s and PDD-NOS, diagnoses that mean autism but carry different social connotations.
This is a great point! Hopefully, someone can do some correctives on that and explore how autism impacts people of different backgrounds in a more comprehensive fashion. This seems critical to me.
