Why do people think we're all logical?

Post Reply New Topic

Logical does not mean unemotional or unimaginative, it's the illogical people who come to that conclusion.

Logical: I think some (not all) of us get a kind of ... not sure how to describe it. Maybe frisson? from logic and order.

For example, this tumblr ( thingsorganizedneatly.tumblr.com ) is pretty appealing to me. And I liked having board games with a lot of pieces of different colors and shapes (like Risk) or different colors and designs (like many boardgames with counters/chits) that I could organize neatly and logically, and which I usually did more than playing those games.

However, when we don't engage in social play or don't engage in typical ways, that is seen as a lack of imagination. Playing pretend, for example, is seen as a sign of imagination and not playing pretend is seen as the lack of it. Even if the child who doesn't play pretend spends much of her time imagining her own worlds, characters, stories, etc.

As for being emotional or unemotional, a common comorbid for autistic people is alexithymia, which is an inability to read/describe one's own emotions. This isn't always 100%, but it does complicate things - I can identify a few of my own emotions, and the rest I don't really notice or think about, except maybe as physical sensations. This made it very difficult for me to identify my own depression and anxiety issues before they were pointed out to me. I also show very little emotion in typical ways (behavior, facial expression, etc), but this certainly doesn't mean I don't have emotions.

The problem here, as with most things involving NTs describing autistic people, is looking no further than surface experiences and extrapolating that the surface reflects the entire person, a very shallow assessment, especially given that to my perception, autistic people are anything but shallow. I'm not trying to ascribe any kind of superhuman capacity for depth or what-have-you to autistic people, but rather noting that what is visible on the surface doesn't seem to reflect the entirety of any given autistic person. I read descriptions of autistic people as flat, unemotional, uncreative, and I look at my own experience of the world as vivid, full of details, full of texture. And even my own mind. When my brain is otherwise idle, it's off into the various worlds I've imagined and populated over the years, some of which I hope to translate into sellable fiction.

And I see these same things from so many other autistic people - vividness, texture, imagination. Maybe I filter out for the stuff I can identify with, but I think we're still so severely misunderstood and in dehumanizing ways that cut off or invalidate anything that doesn't fit into the narrow theories.

Like the research that says we don't daydream.

Research says we don't daydream? WTF!? Someone should fire all those ignorant researchers before they ruin everything with their ignorance.

Not eaxactly. There is a research paper saying "autistic people don't daydream like other people", with the intention of saying "autistic people don't daydream like other people" (with the sense of "autistic people daydream in a way different from other people"); however, many people only read the title of the article and interpreted as "autistic people don't daydream like other people" (in the sense of "unlike other people, autistic people don't daydream"). It was a problem of "semantic-pragmatic disorder" applied to the title of the article.

Not eaxactly. There is a research paper saying "autistic people don't daydream like other people", with the intention of saying "autistic people don't daydream like other people" (with the sense of "autistic people daydream in a way different from other people"); however, many people only read the title of the article and interpreted as "autistic people don't daydream like other people" (in the sense of "unlike other people, autistic people don't daydream"). It was a problem of "semantic-pragmatic disorder" applied to the title of the article.

Research says we don't daydream? WTF!? Someone should fire all those ignorant researchers before they ruin everything with their ignorance.

Thank you so much for writing this, it's so true, and everything makes sense now. The researchers try to make conclusions based on behaviors, which may work for extroverted people, but not so much for introverts and Autistics. Trying to gauge internal behaviors through outward observation is really illogical, as internal things are internal. Since Autistics show less outward signs, the ignorant researchers conclude that nothing is going on. However, I'd conclude it actually means more is going on, as it means the internal processes are more internal, implying depth, which means they may actually be more intense. Really, Autism should not be dealt with through this type of research as the researchers always come to outrageous conclusions that just degrade Autists. Instead they should actually try letting the Autistics describe what they are capable of or something for once, maybe?

So, what are autistic people thinking about when not engaged in specific tasks? Kennedy said that, so far, researchers have found it tough to get good answers to that question from severely impaired autistic individuals. "We do know, though, that they tend to have repetitive, stereotyped thoughts -- their attention is drawn to things like calendars, schedules, maps, computers -- rigid, concrete things," he said.

The research says that when autistic brains are idle, a part of the brain that lights up with activity in NTs does not light up with activity. So the conclusion - which is not actually stated in the research in question - that got spread all over the media was that this was daydreaming, and since autistic brains don't do this, autistic brains don't daydream. BBC and Reuters reported the story this way, and it was not a "semantic-pragmatic error" on my part when I was trying to find out what the story was all about.



One of the issues with this is that the most severely affected autistic people often cannot describe, or at least clearly describe their experiences. The problem is that researchers, reporters, etc. draw erroneous conclusions on the basis of that lack of description.

For example, in one of the articles I linked, you have this paragraph:



Of course, what matters is how the question was phrased. If I'm daydreaming and someone asks me what I'm looking at, I might say "nothing" or I might say "that clock" depending on how they ask, but that doesn't mean the clock was relevant to my thoughts - I just like to look at clocks. A literal answer may not properly reflect the information they want to receive by asking the question.

First, I understand the problem with communicating with those suffering severely, but there is a few with severe LFA who can communicate well enough through means such as typing, and couldn't they at least ask higher functioning individuals to at least get ideas about how the more severely affected think? Also, they should know better than to ask Autists literal questions, and doing such is deliberately tampering with the facts. I say I daydream more than NTs, unless daydreaming means something entirely different for them.

Why do people think we're all logical?

I seem to have gotten MUCH more calculated and logical as I got older and went through life experiences, but I have also always had a big imagination. It's kind of a weird combination.