Could A Lot Of Symptoms Have Their Roots In Literal Thinking

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There's a lot of characteristics and symptoms they check for in diagnosing ASDs that they assume are independent of each other, but what if a lot of them are rooted in one symptom, "literal thinking".

I was reading about characteristics they look for in children to diagnose ASDs.

One was "no real fear of danger".

I remember when I was really young I didn't have a real fear of danger because I had heard the saying "you're too young to die" spoken by a tv character and took it literally thinking people were actually invincible until they were adults. At another time I remember only being fearful on my birthday because in the obituaries and the news it always said so-and-so died at a "whole number" years and didn't state months and days so I assumed everyone only died on their birthday.

I grew out of this as I would eventually run into news stories about children dying and my parents showed me the family's "geneology" which showed people clearly not dying on their birthdays. If anything once it dawned on me that I was not invincible I became overly cautious.

Had my parents sat me down and explained this "no real fear of danger" thing would've resolved right away.

So could it be that many of these symptoms are directly related to metaphors and short-hand descriptions commonly used in society and could easily be resolved simply by explaining it to the child? I.E. if the child exhibits a behavior and it is found that a behavior is usually tied to a "literal understanding" of some metaphor or short-hand statement the parent could sit the child down and discuss it to make it clear and resolve the symptom.

All behavior is tied to perception and thought. If thinking is incorrect, behavior will reflect that. But saying that it is all tied to literal thinking seems to be overstating it. How is eye contact related to literal thinking?

I had no fear of real danger either but had irrational phobias. My parents say I would run into the street and not look to see if any cars were coming. I also remember hearing about someone's pet mountian lion escaping and telling my mother that I was going to play with it if it came to our house. I figured it wouldn't because that would be too good to be true. My mother kept me indoors for weeks. I only said I was going to play with it to get a rise out of her.

It is all tied to that. All people with Asperger's have difficulty with social interaction, so everything else stems from that. Typically, a lack of social skills in a society based on deception will cause people to take things literally way too often. So as for eye contact, it's an attempt to fit in. People that don't fit in to society are going to have more trouble with eye contact than those that have no difficulty interacting with their peers. You could take all "symptoms" (symptoms are simply an extension of the original problem, whatever it may be in any situation) and somehow relate them back to difficulties with social interaction in this case, if that in fact is what all people with AS have in common. And if no two people with AS have one base thing in common, then the whole diagnosis loses all of its meaning.

For me, eye contact has nothing to do with literal thinking. Eye contact takes deliberate effort to maintain and doing so interrupts my thinking about the conversation. I can look you in the eye, or I can talk to you. But doing both isn't very workable. Literal thinking or not.

I'm saying it all has to do with a lack of social skills, not literal thinking. Literal thinking is a symptom itself.

Ah. I misunderstood.

No. Social stuff is one aspect. It's not all of it; it's not most of it. Special interests are n't caused by social awkwardness. Sensory issues.
I'm sorry to belaconic or have typos; I'm on my cell phone.

Yeah I tend to dislike the amount of time people emphasize social skills as the one and only important aspect of being autistic. Autistic people have differences in thinking and perception that can't all be caused by social skills.

As for literal thinking I know that literal thinking can't cause everything else because my language comprehension was so bad for awhile that I had no way to take things literally because I could not even understand the literal meaning of the words.

Oh and also. I was unafraid of many dangerous things starting from before I understood language. For me a lot of it stems from a combination of things:

* Often only getting sensory sensations without getting ideas. Meaning hard to remember ideas like, say, cars or danger, when you can't have even basic ideas at the time.

* Difficulty remembering things in context. So I didn't remember the thing about "don't get into cars with strangers who offer you toys" until hours after being approached by such people. And before anyone chalks that up to being a kid, I was about 23ish at the time.

* Odd sensory perceptions. Once, I barreled down a hill on my bicycle until I hit a fence and stopped. With my head. On a tiny (very short) rickety fence above a dropoff that would have killed me if I'd fallen down it. I did this because I couldn't perceive how steep the hill was.

* Trouble knowing things that aren't immediately present. Another reason for the previous incident was that since I wasn't immediately perceiving the dropoff I forgot it could be a threat.

And that's just a few. I suppose there were other things as well. I remember once a kid saw me climbing a tree taller than a two-story house. He kept asking "What happens if you fall?" I kept saying "I don't". I never found the idea of falling even conceivable. (Of course I never did fall from a tree of any height until I was 19, but still, I did things up trees that were very dangerous and never even believed falling was a possibility).

Literal thinking makes me do things all over again. Makes me stim. Makes me not want to be around people at times.

It all make sense now.

I wonder, in some cases when lack of eye contact is apparent, if it just became a conditioned response? Maybe it started during childhood and became a defense mechanism having something to do with lack of confidence. It might appear that some kids aren't paying attention or are focusing on something besides the caregiver, so the caregiver says "look at me" once, gets no response then says it again, louder. It might even cause frustration if all this is happening before diagnosis. How could the caretaker know the reason why the child isn't paying attention? Soon the child starts associating "look at me" with a cross caregiver and this can be even more intimidating. It becomes more difficult to maintain eye contact and soon the eyes are looking away on an involuntary basis.

Not really. Taking things literally is a result of social problems and impaired theory of mind.

When reading fictional books I understand language and themes fine. In simple social situations, however, that all goes away. In books I'm in the mind of at least one other person, often all of them. In real life I can not get into the mind of other people.

Huh? If anything the child would try to make more eye contact to avoid being yelled at. I always never made eye contact because it was something that never came naturally to me and it can physically hurt. Why should I put myself through that pain over and over again?
I've seen severe autistics that not only don't make eye contact but prefer looking to the side or looking up.

When people demanded I make eye contact, it intimidated me and made it harder for me to do it which is why I wonder if for some, the roots are in not feeling confident when looking people in the eye and negative associations.

I just thought it was an autistic thing. New research has found that when someone with autism looks at someone the emotional centres in the brain do not light up, opposed to the NT brain.