How do NTs learn non-verbal communication?

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And why doesnt however they learn non-verbal communication work for AS?

I would assume for them it's partly instinctual and also learnt just like everyone learns a language. You learn english by listening to people use it and you learn non-verbal communication by watching people use it.

I don't know why we don't learn it, I'm sure there's a very scientific way someone will explain it that's more accurate. But I just like to think it's because we have better things to do then stare at people all day.

Because thought isn't conscious, much human thinking is done for us beyond our awareness. See here:

http://bit.ly/dYaWUc

It would then follow that unconscious thought in people who have trouble understanding body language works differently.

That was interesting, it makes sense that NV communication could be unconscously conditioned, however why doesnt this happen with most AS?

Well, one idea would be that it's because the aspie brain is wired differently. The nt brain is conditioned from babyhood to pay attention to people and faces, whereas the aspie brain isn't. So a nt baby is conditioned to focus on other people and therefore learn nonverbal communication, wheres an aspie baby pays attention to other things than people and therefore doesn't learn nv communication. This is just my guess, though.

I've learnt non-verbal language, by intuition.

Although it's supposed to be possible to learn, I simply lack the ability to do so, beyond obvious stuff. It comes pretty much naturally to NTs, basically.

That's interesting. A few years ago I saw another intuitive body language reader post, and he/she (?) was HFA. It was posted that firstline communication was never a problem, but it was completely passive in nature-- a lack of interest.

If memory serves me Joe, you have the special interests that dominate, and do you believe then, that "theory of mind " was sacrificed in the place of these?

Or can I ask you, how do you rate your theory of mind performance or social intuition in a real time conversation; say, if you subtract your social anxiety component from this?

This is essentially what I think too. By the time a person with AS desires to be able to interpret non-verbal communication the NT people of this world have had a long head start beginning as infants.

You should see this talk here:

Michael Merzenich on re-wiring the brain

http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_merzen ... ml?c=64130

The brain adapts itself to input when it is forming and things can go wrong, the speaker isn't the most articulate but there are enough good ideas that should get through about how our brain develops.

In order to learn non-verbal communication, the brain has to take a bunch of incoming sensories and package them all together into a social-emotional meaning, such that future occurrences of those sensories are matched to the learned pattern of sensories to quickly get the social-emotional meaning, and the details of the incoming sensories are no longer individually perceived, but rather as the holistic social-emotional meaning. Then, details of incoming sensories that don't fit the learned pattern of sensories are filtered out and not perceived at all, such as non-native speech sounds being filtered out, while native speech sounds are locked in. So NT children become more and more synchronized with each other as these patterns are established, until NTs all share a set of non-verbal cues meaning a set of states of mind by adulthood.

The brains of autistic children are probably not packaging the sensories into the social-emotional meanings inherently critical to the NT brain, so the sensories remain sensories, and the physical details continue to be perceived individually, without being converted into a holistic social-emotional meaning that pops up quickly in your mind for you to sustain a flowing real-time interaction using non-verbal communication. Perhaps this lack of filtering out and locking in eggsplains why autistic adults have been measured to have greater discrimination of sensory details, such as for pitches and contours of sounds in music. Too much discrimination of eberry single sound eberrywhere is probably not good for perceptions of connected speech with its very limited set of sounds, as eberryone with auditory processing problems knows. By a certain age, autistic children who have not learned non-verbal communication the NT way can still learn the non-verbal communication and states of mind of NTs by observation like watching TV and reading fiction which is like watching TV for many, and formulate a facsimile of NT ToM that they can apply for socialization, but missing many of the subtleties of NT states of mind, I think based on my own eggsperience. Certainly I can socialize with others and even successfully as long as I am behaving naturally like myself, but I am operating using a simpler ToM based on the one that NTs and autistics share, the one that involves basic strong hoooman emotions like happiness/sadness/anger/fear, rather than the ones that NTs share with each other and not with me, involving more complex social-emotional meanings like social hierarchies or power play or external validation and invalidation of each other or subtle emotional eggschanges.

I know one possibly autistic person, and we don't use non-verbal communication with each other. We talk while walking down the street without looking at each other, and we also sit on the same side of all tables. There is no need for non-verbal communication when whatever comes to mind can be freely spoken in the absence of the NT social-emotional context that disallows some thoughts from being spoken and therefore admitted.

Btw, I just made these idears up based on own eggsperience and the literature I read.

NTz learn non-verbal communication the same way all humans learn to breath - it's instinctive and they just do it.

They probably find our difficulty in this area as astonishing and frustrating as a Math professor in a class of High School kids who are struggling with linear algebra.

It would be hard to imagine living in a world in which you couldn’t use language to communicate basic wants and desires to others. And yet, babies very much find themselves in that position prior to acquiring verbal skills. For more info about haptic communication please visit motherhow.com/haptic-communication-and-its-vital-meaning-in-a-family/