How are autistic people fundamentally different than NTs?

Page 4 of 4 [ 56 posts ]  Go to page Previous  1, 2, 3, 4

ToughDiamond
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 15 Sep 2008
Age: 72
Gender: Male
Posts: 12,206

10 Dec 2024, 11:50 am

Jakki wrote:
rdos wrote:
Jakki wrote:
best settle for less..that way anything that appears better can make you feel better....?


I find the term "less" a bit imprecise. In dating jargon, this typically means somebody that doesn't meet your requirement list or that is not an optimal person for your (NT) social life. Since dating is a horrible way to find a partner for NDs, this kind of "less" has no meaning.


Well ,, it might boil down to : there is NO perfect mate for anyone...good relationships seem to have the ability to make compromises .but hec, what do I know?..but I hope you find that perfect someone...It would inspire everybody very possibly .?

I'm doing quite well at the moment.



Grammar Geek
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 22 Oct 2015
Age: 29
Posts: 889
Location: Missouri

18 Dec 2024, 9:14 pm

Gentleman Argentum wrote:
I think it is 100% genetic and 100% biological and has to do with brain development and how the brain is wired. I also wonder whether it is something like vestigial Neanderthal genes. Maybe one day we will know.


This post from October is bothering me because it's not true. I am one of the people whose autism was almost certainly caused by environmental factors, which do play a role in autism. I do not have any autistic family members, but I experienced a head injury at birth, which led to oversight in the ICU for a few nights. When I was 11, I started having seizures that were eventually discovered to come from a lesion on my left temporal lobe. That lesion led my left hippocampus to fail to develop, causing me to struggle in school and be diagnosed with Nonverbal Learning Disability five years after an Asperger's diagnosis, and NVLD is similar to autism in many ways.

Given the connection between autism and prenatal and perinatal complications, the damage from birth that caused my seizures, and the link between seizures and autism, the belief that it's 100% genetic and biological is a spurious one.



Jakki
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 21 Sep 2019
Gender: Female
Posts: 12,520
Location: Outter Quadrant

18 Dec 2024, 10:43 pm

Grammar Geek wrote:
Gentleman Argentum wrote:
I think it is 100% genetic and 100% biological and has to do with brain development and how the brain is wired. I also wonder whether it is something like vestigial Neanderthal genes. Maybe one day we will know.


This post from October is bothering me because it's not true. I am one of the people whose autism was almost certainly caused by environmental factors, which do play a role in autism. I do not have any autistic family members, but I experienced a head injury at birth, which led to oversight in the ICU for a few nights. When I was 11, I started having seizures that were eventually discovered to come from a lesion on my left temporal lobe. That lesion led my left hippocampus to fail to develop, causing me to struggle in school and be diagnosed with Nonverbal Learning Disability five years after an Asperger's diagnosis, and NVLD is similar to autism in many ways.

Given the connection between autism and prenatal and perinatal complications, the damage from birth that caused my seizures, and the link between seizures and autism, the belief that it's 100% genetic and biological is a spurious one.



Very interesting , form versus function....brain damage or the genetic type.....So with a understanding that not all genes are the same in everyones brain ..etc..Some people have just the right genes ....that may or maynot be turned on .
But under certain circumstances may just trigger the right ones, light up for Autism/ Asperger's .And perhaps the "right environmental" factors pop up , triggering just the right ones to interact with more or less aspie genes.?


_________________
Diagnosed hfa
Loves velcro,
Quote:
where ever you go ,there you are


twinklelight
Tufted Titmouse
Tufted Titmouse

User avatar

Joined: 13 Oct 2024
Age: 22
Gender: Male
Posts: 36
Location: Turkey

20 Dec 2024, 8:19 am

This topic is often unclear, and many struggle to differentiate between the terms. Everyone has unique and complex minds, making it challenging to describe and categorize experiences. Personally, I often feel confused when trying to pinpoint the reasons behind certain feelings or behaviours. Is it autism, depression, social anxiety, or something else?

In the past, I was more certain of my opinions. But things are not white and black, which is hard for me to accept, especially in social life. I could have believed it was 100% genetics in the past, but it is unrealistic. Both nature and nurture must have an impact on developing autism.

To make sense of my thoughts, I often use AI tools. My thinking is deeply complex, and without external tools, it can overwhelm me. AI helps me analyze and simplify ideas. Ironically, while I handle complex topics like psychology, mathematics, or philosophy with ease, I struggle with the "simple" aspects of life. Daily conversations or writing basic examples in an essay often leave me feeling abstracted and detached. This contrast also impacts my creative work while I excel in big-picture thinking, I find it challenging to write dialogue or describe mundane settings.

So, I believe this attachment to the complexity and specific interests is a fundamental difference for those of us on the autism spectrum, though autism is a wide spectrum, and I am only thinking from my side, as having Asperger.

Missing social cues is another big factor. We are more likely to develop attachment issues, the feeling of being misunderstood, difficulty maintaining relationships and friendships, etc. Nonverbal communication is crucial in early psychosocial development, and the lack of it related to autism makes things harder for us. Details that come naturally to others can be lost on me, as my brain tends to focus on broader patterns and sensory inputs.

I deeply admire people who can maintain simple, easy, but close friendships, talking about everyday things without deep thinking. What a conflict.


_________________
ASD Level 1 | RAADS–R: 112 | ASQ: 38 | CAT-Q: 110 | Aspie Quiz: 129/200 (96% probability of being atypical)


Jakki
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 21 Sep 2019
Gender: Female
Posts: 12,520
Location: Outter Quadrant

20 Dec 2024, 11:32 am

You hit the topic ,spot on ..! ^^^^^^ . It seems to be a conundrum .....not having had the benefit of AI to breakdown things ,interpersonal, & the whatnot ?( everything else)...You can end up feeling lost, and as the school of hardknocks
( experiences) makes itself known ...You end up trying to sort stuff, And not having enough of the right neural pathways developed .
The sense of alienstion can ,show up, depression, anxiety , etc. So found for myself was to push myself to learn, psyche books, a version of exposure therapy,( by pushing myself into unvomfortable but potentially rewarding long term benefits . To increase one snall talk abilities .Unfortunately , amongst the NT world thise skills can. be very important.
Mostly because of this NT dominated circumstances. And because of this am tending towards being pretty self sufficient
and much time on my own. And not always my choice,but in observing curcumstances,often ,Much better on the alone thing . Perhaps.

By the Way: often I have been able to improvise small talk ,by Observation,Using my pattern revognition skills .
I taught myself to observe sequences of body posture( dynamics) that people show, listen for intonation and some facial expression recognition. Patterns of speech can give some insights on intention by the speaker also.. Finally,
i watch other peoples reaction to the speaker ..Knowing my pattern recognition would be listening for their words.


_________________
Diagnosed hfa
Loves velcro,
Quote:
where ever you go ,there you are


TranscendentAardvark
Emu Egg
Emu Egg

Joined: 17 Jan 2025
Gender: Male
Posts: 1

17 Jan 2025, 11:19 pm

The way I see it, neurotypical individuals are born with part of their perceptual attention hardwired to focus on the human face and voice. As a result, during development they attend constantly to mom and internalize nonverbal communication cues at a foundational level beneath conscious verbal thought. As a result, in social situations they see the world like this: Sense, process, perceive, react. As another result, they have a smaller bandwidth for perception as some of it is subconsciously utilized at all times for that preprocessing.

Those of us on the “spectrum” (which I feel is a multitude of phenotypical variations of the same underlying problem expressed through a filter of our upbringing, neural hardware, and comorbidities) don’t have that hardwired focus on social analysis. The result of this is that we go directly from sense to perceive with less preprocessing, and have to either consciously work out our understanding and response or develop post processing algorithms over time. This explains the difficulty with intuitive socialization, the sensory overload from more unused perceptual bandwidth, and the ability to hyperfocus due to our attentional mechanism not being partially restricted. As Atwood has said, we’re folks who have found something more interesting than social interaction.

Thoughts?



Edna3362
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 29 Oct 2011
Gender: Female
Posts: 12,823
Location: ᜆᜄᜎᜓᜄ᜔

18 Jan 2025, 1:47 am

^ I definately resemble that remark than anything than had been mentioned.

Like completely resonate.

Really find something else, anything else, more interested than socializing.
That socializing itself is no different than any other activity, really.

It's more than just a wiring or a set of circumstances to me.

In my own case...

The lack of interest around socializing is not equal to nor would imply the lack of appropriate visual processing over expressions, faces, voices or everything around emotions.

And only due to the lack of constant attention over faces and voices primarily drawn from the lack of social interests.


What boggles me sometimes is loneliness.
Loneliness implies a fundamental need as a human to socialize with another.

Perhaps the inverse is true to most autistics (unlike me); the lack of appropriate visual processing (usually manifests as NVLD and dyspraxia to some extent), expressions (dyssemia), faces (prosopagnosia), voices (APD/NVLD), and emotions (alexithymia), and for any reason how they're "socially impaired" (ADHD, LD, intellectual disability, 'unique circumstances that most people won't experience like chronic health issues like seizures) -- yet still manifests interests around socializing and the emotional need to connect.

Need therefore interest and the social drive to fulfill that need.
Even so many of those who are even diagnosed within the schizoid spectrum, even those with attachment disorders.


And when I expressed this lack of experience of loneliness itself, everyone, including autistics, assumed that I coped with it well with asociality.
Likely assumed that I resigned to feelings of isolation or something like that...

But there's nothing to cope, else I'd feel it deeply and express whatever it is towards it like everything else I experienced so far.

Else I'd actually reach anyone out as a friend, commit and honor it to fill a void.
There's really nothing stopping me from making any friends if I feel like it, but there's no void for me to fill unlike so many accounts I've read for so many years in the internet.

So it's more like...
Most people cannot comprehend this lack of loneliness in a fundamental sense to a point of denial, that exceptions over the idea of what human "is" exists.

I find that most autistics are not an exception to that human need for connection and socialization.
Thus I don't find that autism itself is even a basis for a fundamental difference towards NTs, just the methods of socializing and the way they take the input during socialization.

But I am. I thought it was just me being autistic -- my utter lack of interest in anything socializing. This lack of inner void, even with the pretenders (deep down lonely soul sour grapes over any relationships, declaring themselves asocial but in reality, are just coping) I cannot relate.

More like, I have excess of it! And this excess is the reason why I write and express a LOT!!

And if I have any void to fill, it doesn't end up with socializing as an answer.

Turns out people doesn't understand, cannot even slice the need for expression from the need to interact apart -- just like with most allosexuals with sex, romance and love.



Therefore, in my perspective, most autistics are just as human as NTs in a fundamental sense around the desire, the want, the interest over another human being regardless of the way the neurology sways in completely different direction (neurodivergence).

In which some people do think that this lack of interest in socialization implies this dehumanizing lack of affection, egocentry, and one that gets in the way of attachments and intimacy or even emotions and humanity itself.
I'd say that's untrue.


_________________
Gained Number Post Count (1).
Lose Time (n).

Lose more time here - Updates at least once a week.


Stargazer99
Raven
Raven

Joined: 19 Jan 2025
Age: 54
Gender: Female
Posts: 118
Location: Earth

20 Jan 2025, 8:31 pm

SendInTheClowns wrote:
123autism wrote:
I'm just as human as anyone, whether 'NT' or autistic. Being autistic is - in my view - a subjective medical opinion".


Yes, it deeply bothers me that the DSM defines Autistic People ONLY and entirely by a list of deficits. It totally ignores the big picture - that NTs and AS people have different operating systems, both having positives and negatives.

Make an imaginative leap for a minute: that AS people are the dominant population which assumes the right to "diagnose" neurotypicals" as disordered - for example:

SYPTOMS OF NEUROTYPICAL DISORDER:
An obsession with hierarchy
A compulsive psychological need to repetitive engagement in gossip and small talk
A contempt for any other operating system but their own
A belief that their operating system is naturally superior to other neurotypes
A tendency to belittle neurodifferent people by sigmatising, otherising, patronising, bullying, and gate-keeping
A craving to exert their power by dehumanising attitudes toward those they deem "lesser" humans
A fanatically held belief that their numerical dominance equates with psychological superiority

All neurotypes are humans; humans ARE intensively diverse in many ways. My dominant special interest is music. I believe the human world owes a debt, or at least positive acknowledgement, to AS musicians, conductors, composers, performers over the centuries. For example, while perfect pitch does appear in both AS and NT populations, it is more dominant in AS musicians. Contributions to science and the arts by AS people over the centuries seem to be reguarly "neurotypical washed" and taught as if AS is irrelvant to it, and there is "spurious denial" in the form of belittling AS as too "impairing" to enable such extreme achievement. "Special interest" is rarely linked to exceptional talent, instead often used as a stigmatising terminology. Autistic savantism presents AS savants as freaks, rather than gifted. The same talents in NTs are more likely to be labelled as "exceptional".

Well, that's my rant for the day..... I dream of a world where AS people focus on their strengths and not harmful and demeaning stereotypes imposed by neurotypical distortions.


Your example of ‘Neurotypical Disorder’ makes a valid point. I have a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology and I can attest that many of the DSM descriptions are outdated and inaccurate. Many soft science assumptions provide evidence that neurodiverse individuals are misunderstood entirely.

False clinical explanations began long ago with government experiments and worldwide eugenics programs. History provides our greatest evidence.