I've understood how Autism fundamentally affects you

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Hi Verdandi,

This is completely in line with the suggested theory.

Autistic people do experience the world "too much"! They are overwhelmed by the many impressions they get because they view the world in details instead of whole concepts. They experience it so much that they "forget" themselves. They forget/cannot manage to relate the world around them to their own life sufficiently because they are busy enough with sorting all the detailed information they get from the world.

You are entirely aware of the outside world as an autistic. The more you are in your own mind the "larger and more confusing" the world becomes. The more you are present in your immediate physical surroundings, the "smaller and more simple" the world becomes. Autistics are too much in their own minds instead of in the immediate physical surroundings...they are not entirely present in the world, so they cannot integrate with it in a proper way. That's why the physical world can seem alien when you are autistic.

The reason why I presented the theory the way I did is because it tells exactly how to think less autistic: by relating everything in the world to your own life. In that way you get the important information and can leave out all the unimportant details you would otherwise need to handle.

So the original question is how to view the world more in Whole concepts: you do this by relating all things in the world to your own life.

Ah sorry. Wasn't meant that way.

Ah I see what you mean. It's because you interpret the word "important" in a different way than it was intended.

What is subjective about the statement is whether it is important or not. People think water is important to them because it is required for them so survive. But their impression that their survival is important in the first place is subjective. Objectively human life is not important or meaningful - it just is.





Yes, the grief-response is exactly subjetive in that case. You cannot guarantee that people would grieve over it (unfortunately), because it is subjetive. And you are right, if someone dies, it is an objective fact. But how people respond to that objective fact is subjective.

I agree, this was badly formulated. I should have written: "To me, the sun is big, hot, yellow and shiny."

Yes you can make an objective statement that is relative, e.g. the sun is bigger than "some other star".






It definitely is not a realistic example because the two viewpoints are extremes. The example was mostly to give a clear explanation of the difference between subjective and objective.

We agree that subjective statements may not be true for everyone, otherwise it wouldn't be subjective in the first place.

This "objective/subjetive" is a spectrum. Noone are at the extremes. But NTs tend to be closer to the subjective viewpoint than aspies.

It is much harder for NTs to look past their own existence in their immediate physical surroundings. They constantly relate everything they experience in the world to themselves and their own lives. Aspies are more likely to view things without relating them to their own lives (i.e. viewing them "objectively"). This is a result of the difference between viewing the world in details vs. in whole concepts.

You experience the world very much, but your actual presence is more in your mind than in your immediate physical surroundings compared to the NTs. NTs are relatively more "outside their minds", whereas Aspies are relatively more "inside their minds."




Yes they do. They convert the objective truth ("My life is not important") to the subjetive truth ("My life is extremely important"),

In a survival perspective it is a really important thing to believe that your life is important, because in that case you are going to fight more for your survival. If it wasn't important, then why fight so hard for it?

I see my own life as pretty uninteresting - it's other people who make it more interesting, either through talking directly to them or reading about their lives (if I find them interesting)

I like people who've made important medical discoveries and I also like people who don't play by society's rules ie I like pioneers who challenge the status quo. The trouble is a lot of these people can often do bad things as well; they can have a different sense of morality to the average person; ie they take the self-importance thing too far and cross the boundaries of acceptable behaviour as they see their needs as paramount, regardless of how badly it means they treat others.

Relating everything back to me seems pointless as I don't consider myself an optimum specimen of a human being either in terms of how I look or what I've achieved ie not worthy of all the self-interest NTs give themselves

I can focus on myself but it's rarely in an 'I am fantastic and very important!' type way as it's plain to me that I'm nothing special! lol In another sense I do feel special though as I have found my own things that interest me and this means I don't have to be controlled by consumer society ie I have broken free from it and pride myself on not being conditioned by it. I don't need to have the latest gadget or branded product to feel good about myself, the trouble is, I don't have strong sense of self full stop, so often other peoples' definitions of me take over and I feel more defined by others than by myself.

The only solution I have found to this is to generally avoid society and NTs most of the time as they have too much of a negative effect on me. I will feel I'm being diluted and washed away after any amount of time spent around NTs - it's like my identity disappears and I just become what they think of me and as this is often negative or unrewarding it makes me feel bad.

Oh, I was merely taking the perspective of an aspie viewing the actions of some NT people. What I'm saying is that NTs aren't very mysterious. Their actions are simply meant to improve their own lives (which includes the lives of those they care about, perhaps also society in general, because they are a part of society etc.)

The reason why you are looked at as weird for doing/thinking something in a way most others wouldn't is because those actions/thoughts are rooted considerably less in your own life. Otherwise, they wouldn't be considered weird by NTs. But aspies don't think exclusively about things in relation to their own lives. That's why we are considered weird.



These two things are really the same. The disconnect from the NT social structure is due to the aspie not relating the world around him (enough) to his own life/existence. Aspies don't have their existence in their immediate physical surroundings enough in focus to truly connect to the social structure of the NT-world.




I agree. I have felt like being this wild card at times. It's like they don't feel like they know what I'll do. I'll be seen as unpredictive to them.



You are right. This is the effect of the aspie not relating the world around him enough to his own life. Why be concerned with group dynamics when you don't truly feel it concerns your own life?

Aspies can in some sense be too good at looking beyond their own existence to integrate properly in the common group dynamics.

OP, I'm wondering why when you have chapter and verse answers for other respondents, you did not respond at all to my post?

My theory is that it is a spectrum. It's not like you cannot think subjectively when you are aspie. Noone is at the extremes of the spectrum. But when you are aspie you are further away from the subjective outlook on life than most NTs are. E.g. you are more inclined to believe that "in the big scheme of things my life isn't that important" compared to many NTs. It's all relative, it's not like aspies aren't subjective at all.

The more you think "in the big scheme of things my life isn't that important" the more is that going to become a self fulfilling prophecy because you don't fight as hard to make it important. It's not unlikely you as aspie soon will end up thinking, "my life is bad" (which might be true currently), "but my life isn't important anyway" (which is only true from an objective viewpoint; it's completely false from a subjective). But aspies tend to believe the objective viewpoint relatively much because they perceive details more than whole concepts.



I'm not trying to say aspies are inhuman. In fact, aspies feel the world so much that they often get overwhelmed by it. I'm saying aspies are not as inclined to relate the things in the world to their own lives as NTs are. The world is so overwhelming that they "forget" themselves in the huge chaos of information - they end up not always focusing on what is important, i.e. their own lives. This prevents them from being "subjective" in the sense of relating things in the world to their own lives. As an aspie you might be too busy trying to make sense of all the detailed input you get from the world.

The point of the presented theory is that it explains how you should sort those extreme amounts of details: by relating them to your own life. If a detail is irrelevant to your own life (which includes those you care for, society in general etc.), then you can discard it. NTs sort details from the world this way by instinct, i.e. leave out all the irrelevant information. That's why they don't get overwhelmed the same way autistics do. Also, autistics have to sort the information more consciously or "put the details together to a whole concept" manually.

A more subtle example is your view on other people. If you've once met someone who said something bothersome to you, I've experienced aspies (myself included) can be bothered about that for a long time afterwards. But if that incident doesn't affect your future, you shouldn't be bothered by it. It's a "detail" you can discard. Aspies can become depressed because they don't discard such irrelevant information.

Anxiety, depression and social phobia are unfortunately consequences of the above.



So the essential point in my theory is:

Autistics perceive details more than whole concepts. This is unfortunate in a world where it is most often a clear advantage to perceive whole concepts.

To convert details into whole concepts you have to convert an objective reality into a subjetive reality. This means relating all details from the world to your own life and discard all details that are irrelevant to your own life. You then take action on the remaining details that are relevant to your own life. You have then succesfully converted the many details into a whole concept.

And there you go again, off into a worldview that I can't relate to. You're universalizing something or interpreting things to reach your preferred conclusion, so that even contradictory data is rationalized into your model. I don't see why this is necessary or even something anyone would spend energy trying to do.



The only time the physical world seems alien to me is when something changes that I did not expect and did not know to look for. If the living room is rearranged, I have to take a moment to work out the new arrangement before I perceive it as "the living room" again, but most of the time it is "the living room" and familiar to me. Not alien. This is not restricted to my home.

The problem is not that the world seems "alien." That is a thing, but the problem is that it is often overloading.



I don't see how this could possibly work. This is one of the biggest problems I have with your theories - that you seem to propose that changing one's cognition on a fundamental level is something that would be easy to do. I do not even think your description of autistic cognition as described above is accurate, nor that such a shift - if it's even possible - would make someone less autistic. I suspect attempts to alter how one thinks is more likely to place considerable cognitive overhead on top of that demanded by sensory overload, processing one's environment, and assimilating information in general. It seems to me that effectively trying to "manually" sort information as it comes in would leave one unable to do many other things simply because of the work involved.

Ah, I think I get your perspective.

I haven't seen any evidence that this is true for autistic people in general. It seems to me that most autistic people anywhere on the spectrum I've interacted with are capable of assigning subjective importance to their lives and events in their lives. This doesn't mean they're not autistic or that they're thinking more like an NT. It means they're thinking like any person would think.

I think this has more to do with you than it does with autism, although I don't really want to guess in any kind of detail. Probably best to work that stuff out for yourself.

I still can't relate, Autism and AS are just don't have very much to do with how you consciously think. I mean, neither one is rooted in your thinking or caused by it. Sensory issues for instance are not caused by having the wrong mental model of the world and how it relates to you. You have sensory stuff whether you're consciously thinking about it or not.

I would describe AS not as messing with my thinking directly, but rather with some of my sensory input, and separately my perception of meanings in the social world. I have lots of subjective experiences and recognize lots of objective facts, and still I don't see any signs in my thinking of having an improper relationship between objective and subjective in my mind, or between myself and the outside world. My conscious mind is well-adjusted and works normally, and I eventually get the truth about everything I perceive strengthened out. It's just that I don't always process some of the input correctly initially. So in that sense, I think of AS not as a cognitive misunderstanding of the world, but as a distorting filter on the information I get from it which skews my reactions to that information.

I don't relate to what he's written. I don't agree with it at all. I just think I actually understand what he is trying to say, making it easier for me to explain why I do not think it is accurate.



I think what you write is largely consistent with my perceptions. I do think that autism impacts how I think and perceive, although I do not think that means my thinking is "messed up." Mostly, I am tired of hearing that if someone is autistic, there's a flaw in their thinking that must be corrected, that being themselves is just not good enough, not sufficient, and must be changed to be more like everyone else.

In other words, your model is that Aspies and Autists think too objectively. I think that's backwards; I would actually be more likely to think that the more autistic someone was, the more subjectively they would think, if anything. Because then you're having more and more problems interacting with the objective world outside of you.

Thanks, it helps me to know too that other Aspies would characterize the problem similarly. I'd been having doubts about the validity of my own AS off and on, and that helps settle me that the same thing is happening to me.

And that's true, I didn't think it would be quite this hard to be precise with my language on this subject. I guess that's most of what we're all haggling over in this thread. A skewed perception will result in skewed thinking about what you're perceiving, so it inevitably has to affect thinking, absolutely.

But it seems like the thinking is the result, not the cause. I've been able to work on what I know about my perceptions, but I had to do that by recognizing the pattern of how each individual kind of perception was incorrect, not with one change in thinking that was the key to the whole thing. The original cause of course is in the makeup and functioning of my brain physiology, not in how I decide to think about the sensory and social input. Changing that thinking can be a compensating mechanism, which is where qawer is more on track, but I can't make AS "go away" by thinking differently. I was trying to do that my whole life previously, and the fact that it wouldn't go away by thinking differently about it was how I knew something was a little off.

No, there's nothing unacceptable about us. I'm sorry you've been so fatigued by that. I think it's hard too when people are pointing the finger at your thinking as the source of the problem and something you must change, when you know from experience that it's your chief tool for adapting to the condition.

Ah okay I see, we simply just do not agree. That's just what it is.


But do you agree that the basic problem/difference of autistics is that they are "trapped in their own world" (meaning being too present in their own minds)?

At least that's what seems to be the "common" perception of autistics.

Last edited by qawer on 13 Apr 2013, 6:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.