your Gerüchteverbreitungskommentare will sooner or later bite you in the ass
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Thank you, and I’m sorry for my typical oversharing. 
TBH, I’ve had times in my life when I’ve been very private about who I am, and other times (like recently) when it’s been the opposite. I think this has a lot to do with emotions and psychology being a “special interest” - I don’t really care too much how I feel at a particular point unless it’s relevant to the general principles of how I function. Similarly, I don’t want to talk about my feelings unless I want to understand them better in principle.
One of the things that shocked me a couple of months ago was reading about alexithymia. It’s not something that all autistic people have (and not everyone who has it has autism), but it overlaps quite a bit. It’s not that you don’t have emotions or that you aren’t influenced by them, but it’s difficult to identify what they are or be aware of how they are affecting you. Somebody asks you how you are, and you say fine or I don’t know, or you can feel some kind of emotional energy and aren’t really sure what it is and where it comes from. You might feel physical sensations instead of emotions, or act emotionally based on physical sensations (I don’t think this is so rare though - aren’t a lot of people easily irritated when they’re hungry?) It can also be a problem to identify emotions that other people are expressing, or you might feel that frustration or anger is directed at you when it isn’t.
Sometimes I’ll have a certain reaction or feel a strong emotion to a certain trigger, and have to analyse what that emotion is exactly, then why I feel it, what the principles are behind that being a trigger for me and whether that is an appropriate response to that event. This can also play into the stereotype that aspies feel no emotion or have no empathy for others - if emotions are confusing for you and you are used to showing the wrong one, muting your response can be a defence mechanism. If you can’t read someone’s emotions accurately, how can you empathise with how they feel? Sometimes empathy can be more of a conscious process, trying to put yourself in that situation and recognising why they might have a particular response. This is aside from the fact that it’s difficult to empathise with someone’s emotions when their experience of the world can be quite different from your own, and the effects of privilege on empathy is one example of this effect on a large scale with NTs. Another is a common failure to correctly identify emotions and motivations in autistic people - the “mindblindness” can go both ways.
A number of Star Trek characters seem to be modelled on aspie traits - Data’s an obvious one:
I’ve never understood why people claim that Data has no emotions without the emotion chip. If he’s just analytical, what is it about him that is so interested in understanding human emotion and behaviour, despite the fact that he has so much more information about it than any human? Why do you see the awkward realisation that he’s not on the same level as others, and the tendency to offend people or make them uncomfortable by the very attempt to connect with them? Here he’s trying to understand the boy and support him, but the connections aren’t quite right and it’s not automatic. He doesn’t understand that he didn’t want full honesty, or perhaps that he didn’t want Data to complete the model - rather support in gaining confidence to achieve it himself. However, there are clear points (0:02, 1:21) where he second guesses his natural response and tries to modulate it to be more understanding of the boy’s emotional needs:
Here he tries to form bridges of understanding between his own experience and that of human behaviour that he doesn’t understand. In 0:40, he attempts to mirror Geordie’s body language - but it’s not subconscious at all. He talks about himself because he doesn’t get the other person’s psychology and he’s trying to find a connection that they’ll both identify with:
An awkward attempt at small talk:
Explaining distinctions between how he feels and how emotions work - except that he is totally describing an emotional response and a different perspective on relationships:
Sulking while pretending to be objective and rational:
Data demonstrating alexithymia - having intense feelings but not understanding why or what they mean, having to ask others for clarification and obsessively studying in a search for understanding of this:
Lieutenant Barclay:
He knows that he’s anxious and awkward, and that there’s nothing natural about interacting with groups. He also knows that people find him odd and joke about him. In the second scene, his posture and response to attention on him shows how out of place he feels:
I think the holodeck scenes have some insight about Barclay’s poor understanding of social dynamics and his unrealistic ideas of the success conditions for social interaction. There’s something uncomfortably like Elliot Rodger about his fantasies and attitudes toward others:
Seven of nine:
She is human, but has no social ability. Her stand-offishness in a social setting doesn’t mean that she has no interest in conversation or feel the need for human interaction, but she doesn’t understand normal people. This may be made more difficult by the fact that she is a woman and is expected to do better at this. She needs a simple rule system for interaction, but her attempts to connect with people fail because her experiences don’t match theirs and many people are not looking for a lecture or deep discussion in a relaxed social setting. Many aspies can have trouble mirroring other people’s expressions and emotions - NTs may expect to see an expression matching their own when they speak to someone, and if they don’t they may think that the “mirror” is broken. As many aspies grow older, they get better at “faking” expressions to make social interaction smoother. Others never achieve this and can get more isolated.
Spock is another character that many people see as autistic - I guess I find it easier than most to see a separation between the emotional and rational parts of me (although I’m not nearly as good at actually separating them). I often resonate with this conversation between the desire to suppress emotion and act more logically, and the desire to embrace emotion and “humanness” in an attempt to connect with people and have a more holistic identity.
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You might be interested in the work of Antonio Damasio. Layperson’s introduction here:
TLDR version: emotion is an essential part of reasoning. Truly emotionless people aren’t hyper-rational supercomputers, they’re seriously disabled. Accurate calculation is useless when you have no emotional drive to prefer one outcome over another.
I suspect that you’d also enjoy the work of Oliver Sacks. Start with The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; if you like that, there’s plenty more to go on with. But keep in mind that his specialty is creative speculation based upon small-sample case studies, so take everything with a grain of salt.
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BTW, I recently listened to the second series of Serial: https://serialpodcast.org/season-two
Brilliant as usual, but one thing jumped out at me: Bowe Bergdahl comes across as Aspie as all hell. Especially when you hear his friends describe what he was like before he joined the Army.
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From my own experience and reading that of others, this really isn’t the case with autistic people (although it might look similar from the outside). Often during a point where you can’t make a decision, your brain is actually working faster and you just can’t settle on one choice. In chess, you can follow a strategy and the strategic advantages and disadvantages of a move can be clarified by a more thorough knowledge of the many possible outcomes a few moves away. Real life is more nebulous and unpredictable, so it’s more difficult to make a decision on which restaurant to eat at using that technique. Lists can be helpful if you have many things to do, as you can clear your brain of the other items until you have finished the first on your list. Sometimes you can get stuck in a loop, either in your thought patterns or your actions, and never manage to move forward. Lack of emotion is generally not the problem - as with many issues of autism, it can relate to an excess of this and an inability to filter out the irrelevant elements or eliminate options.
Of course, not having a clear idea of your emotions could be a problem in these cases too.
Yes, but Aspies aren’t emotionless; we just tend to be poor at recognising/expressing/dealing with emotion.
The case I linked above wasn’t an Aspie, it was a brain injury patient.
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I realise that, and was trying to explore the distinction. It’s interesting how behaviours such as perseveration that seem similar in different people at first glance can have quite different causes - and it’s another reason why it’s important to have therapists who understand autism. The link I gave about alexithymia had a number of comments from people whose childhood therapists had assumed that they were being uncooperative by not giving a straight answer to questions about emotions. If you understand that the person may not actually understand what they are feeling, this shows the need for a different approach. Apparently a feelings wheel can be helpful if you can only articulate your feelings at the resolution of the centre wheel. Sometimes I can’t even do that without analysis.
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Recently I’ve been really down on the idea of classical conditioning - I think it basically doesn’t work (that is, it doesn’t work as a theory, obviously in practice it often produces certain results). I think about Pavlov’s dogs and wonder how the conclusion of that experiment wasn’t, “You can trick dogs.” Just another thing that economists are wrong about. People don’t “respond to incentives.” That is, they don’t respond in the simple way you’d like them to.
My daughter doesn’t do the reward/punishment thing. Any attempt at saying, “Clean that up and you get X” or “Clean that up or else Y” is just going to turn into a huge argument. On the other hand, “I wonder how fast you can clean that up?” produces results at least some of the time, and “I know you don’t want to clean up right now, we all have to do things we don’t want to do sometimes,” has had some success depending on her mood.
I’m not sure how related this is, but I’ve noticed my tendency to think about what could have happened instead of what did happen. In a condition like that one you describe, the reason I wouldn’t worry about getting sick isn’t because I know I ate before the spoon fell on the floor, but rather because I know that if the spoon falls on the floor I will get a new one, so my process keeps me safe from eating off a dirty spoon regardless of the sequencing of events (which I regard as arbitrary). Of course I don’t worry about eating off of spoons that fell on the floor as much as you imply that you do, but it works for all kinds of things.
The other day I had this experience where someone managed to slip into an elevator before the doors closed and it caused that whole slow-closing-warning-state thing that happens when the doors are open too long. They apologized and I felt like saying, “No need to be sorry, we’re all equally to blame” because we were all basically equally likely to be that person even if in fact we hadn’t been.
The thing is, this kind of thinking is hugely better at coming to correct conclusions about the real world than typical outcome-based thinking. I have friends who think Casinos are fun, but I don’t get it. To me, if I placed a bet on something then whether I actually win or lose, I feel as though I achieve the expected outcome. I actually feel bad about winning a hand of blackjack because I know that by playing I am losing (never mind that you can win at black jack because it’s against the rules to play correctly). So while the rest of the world thinks its right to go all in on 7-2 off if you end up winning, and a few people condition themselves to understand why that’s not true, I think that way intuitively and it makes a lot of the problems that other people seem to think are hard very easy (while making things that people don’t even think are problems because they are so easy seem very hard).
Bear in mind this kind of test is extremely age sensitive. At 3 a difference in results might be attributable in part to neurodiversity. By 6 I expect those differences would dramatically close and you’d only find children with extreme disabilities not knowing that different people know different things.
I think you’ve posted about alexthymia before. I have a lot of trouble recognizing my emotions, but the descriptions provided in the article you aren’t much like me at all. One thing I found that I felt really described me was in this document about BDP: REMEDIATION FOR TREATMENT-RESISTANT BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER. On page 8 it gets into the “Neuroaffective Deficits” seen in BDP that feel like they relate to those described in the alexthymia piece, though they are clearly different.
In both cases you have a broken ability to identity your own emotions. In both cases you have difficulty determining whether emotions are directed at you or not. The alexthymia article describes a lack of control of emotional “volume” while the BDP manual refers to a lack of ability to assign cause-and-effect relationships regarding emotions (I got angry because of X). I imagine that lack of volume control is present in most people with BDP. I imagine that if the alexthymia document seems relatable then the lack of ability to determine cause-and-effect of emotions probably sounds about right.
But what jumped out at me was the difference in why a the described individuals weren’t able to tell whether, for example, anger was directed at them or not. In the alexthymia document it’s about not being able to tell the target of emotions. In the BDP document it’s about lacking a point of reference to determine the difference between the self and others. I don’t retreat from conflict that doesn’t involve me because I’m unable to tell who the anger is directed at. I retreat from it because I’m unable to tell which person I am. I wonder if that’s a real difference or a difference in imagery.
But the real point of disconnect was the last two points in the characterization given in the alexthymia article:
impoverished imagination and fantasy life
a stimulus-dependent, externally oriented cognitive style
My imagination and fantasy life are probably wildly more active than average, and my cognitive style is very internal and I’m about the least stimulus-driven person I know.
Sometimes I think my inability to feel my own emotions is actually part of why I am very good at reading other people’s emotions. If you asked me if I was feeling happy I might think about what tone of voice I had most recently been speaking in, whether I had a welcoming or distancing posture and whether the muscles at the sides of my eyes were drawn in or pulled out before answering. So I use the same queues to determine my own emotions as I do to determine yours. If I didn’t have to do that then I wouldn’t have so much practice interpreting signs of emotions.
Having been in that state - where I can see accurately the results of different actions but have no interest in one over the other - I can attest that it’s not really that useful. But I’d say the metaphor of being a “hyper-rational supercomputer” is a good one in several senses, as long as you think about what computers are actually good at and what they are terrible at.
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There are a number of claims made about autistic people that seem way off to me - imagination is one of those, from what I can tell. There may be differences in how imagination takes place, but I’ve heard very few autistic people agree that they have a limited imagination, and many claim to have a very rich imagination. I used to stare at the fire for hours on end, which was a form of visual stimming, but I’d also do things like imagine a race of sentient beings that lived in fire - we could never enter each other’s worlds, but we could observe each other and I’d be able to see their culture develop. I had many fantasies like this one in different contexts. I didn’t relate to the beings as individuals, more on a society level. I’ve heard other aspies say similar things - they might seem to be wandering around aimlessly or playing with sticks or something, but they’re actually navigating their own private world. Maybe it’s different for lower functioning autistic people.
I’d also point out that many issues like alexithymia, bipolar etc. can look quite different when comorbid with autism.
Incidentally, have you heard of the idea that BPD represents the extreme female mind (in contrast to Baron-Cohen’s idea that autism represents the extreme male mind)? One of the distinctions is that people with BPD are often better at tests like reading the mind in the eyes. There’s also a similar but opposite gender ratio with BPD and autism. ETA: on the other hand, I’m not sure whether either description is particularly accurate and there’s quite a bit of overlap in symptoms.
As for the Sally-Anne test, if both kids were typical they should have failed:
In the Baron-Cohen et al. (1985) study, 23 of the 27 clinically unimpaired children (85%) and 12 of the 14 Down’s syndrome children (86%) answered the Belief Question correctly. However, only four of the 20 autistic children (20%) answered correctly. Overall, children under the age of four, along with most autistic children (of older ages), answered the Belief Question with “Anne’s box”, seemingly unaware that Sally does not know her marble has been moved.
I took this quiz a week or two ago and saved, but didn’t post, my results. Looking at yours though, I was reminded of mine.
A ton of these questions would have had very different answers a couple of years ago. I guess I’ve been going through a transitional time in my life.
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isn’t it interesting that we both spike on relationship in both neurotypical and neurodiverse? i wonder what that means? (DAMNIT JAPHROAIG, It Means You’re A Fish!!)
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Apparently I’m a mixed bag of traits.
Your neurodiverse (Aspie) score: 107 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 102 of 200
You seem to have both neurodiverse and neurotypical traits
I honestly don’t have a super clear picture of what’s going on in my head. Weeks can go by when everything seems basically okay, and then other times it just isn’t
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FWIW, these are my brother’s results:
I think he’s trolling me.
Alternative caption: well, now it’s official.
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I’m not sure I really understand all this, but my guess is that introversion and social anxiety are playing oversized roles here.
Your neurodiverse (Aspie) score: 124 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 93 of 200
You seem to have both neurodiverse and neurotypical traits
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Re: imagination - while autistic people are sometimes considered to have limited imagination, they can be very creative and good at nonlinear and divergent thinking. It’s linear thinking that I have problems with.
Autistic people are also known for having visual thinking, which I can relate to. How does this compare to your thinking though (particularly if you’re more on the NT side)?
In the linked article, Temple Grandin highlights the importance of childhood memories to her ideas of concepts. My parents recently sent me a photo of my first memory:
This isn’t actually exactly how I remember it. I remember what I was wearing, the tartan pattern and the texture of the fabric, but in my memory the trees are much closer, almost overhanging the picnic bench. I remember my family being there, and I think there were some other people with them (probably accurate - I don’t think this is near our home at the time). I mainly remember being insanely happy about being so high up and jumping up and down for a while while clapping my hands. I’m pretty sure it was that emotional intensity that makes it such a vivid memory (and also why there’s a photo of the event - I don’t have that many of my childhood). What are your first/early memories, and how do you visualise them?
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What if I phrased it like this: there is a spectrum that runs from BPD to Autism and that in contemporary western society we find that the mean for women on this spectrum is off center towards BPD while the mean for men is off-center towards Autism. That captures the same idea without trying to make BPD “woman brain” and Autism “man brain”.
It’s an interesting idea to me, and, in fact, I don’t think it would even be weird for two diagnoses at opposite ends of a spectrum to have similar behaviours. Both sides have to adapt to not conforming to the same set of expectations. How you make that adaptation is partly dependent on where you are starting from. But if you think of it that way - as adaptation to the inhospitable environment that is society, there’s something substantially similar between putting on a coat and putting on a cloak to keep the rain off.
But in both cases it points to the fact that the real problem is that society is hostile. One of the points of the article about BPD you linked is that people with BPD might be unusually good at something. Maybe if we made space for them then we’d all benefit from their talents. Same with autism. Same with schizophrenia, according to one article I read by a high functioning woman with schizophrenia who astounds her colleagues with her ability to identify patterns and correlations in data in between applying tests to see if the fireflies occupying the middle of the room are real or a hallucination (Step 1. Is this physically possible? Step 2. Is anyone else reacting? etc.)
My memories of childhood are very spotty, and I have trouble ordering them, but I think if I had to pick my actual earliest memory it would be a contest between these two (I just have no way of knowing which came first):
- Lying in bed hugging my favourite teddy bear thinking about how adults didn’t love teddy bears and so one day I wouldn’t love my teddy bear.
- Looking at the back window of my house from the kitchen at a blue jay that was hopping across the back yard and noticing that multiplication distributes over addition.
I don’t think I have a visual memory of either. When I try to picture it I actually picture the scene including myself, as if I was watching a movie of it rather than reliving it. Bits appear as I remember the details - at first my visual memory of my lying in bed is just a kid lying in bed, but then I remember that the wall of the room was blue and now the visual memory includes a blue wall. Basically I’m storing non-visual information.
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thaaaaaaaat’s a penis.
yep, he’s trolling you.
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An algorithmic troll.
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some people are exceptionally talented, and it looks like your brother is one of them 
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I don’t half wonder if people who say we don’t have imagination are just discounting autistic imagination because we imagine differently.
Yes on both. Sometimes I have trouble kicking into an imaginative gear but when I do it’s almost all visual.
My earliest memories (of those I’m sure are real … an unrelated topic) are from when I was about 6. Riding my bike in our big kitchen and playing with a stuffed animal I’d gotten for my birthday. I can tell you what the tile looked like and what the bike looked like.
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