AspieSingleDad wrote:
I definitely have some thoughts on this one. Here, let's get this out of the way, shall we? First of all, forget about hallucinations. Schizophrenics are not commonly going to literally see demons coming from the depths of hell, or any such thing. They are going to hear disembodied voices. Let's be clear, if you don't hear no disembodied voices, you ain't got no schizophrenia. If you do, there's a good chance you do. So if you don't hear disembodied voices, you don't have schizophrenia. By the way, you could also hear voices coming from objects or animals or people, but you'd really still hear disembodied voices as well.
Now that we got that out of that way, let's talk about autism. The autistic brain receives too much sensory information. This causes the parts of the brain that are supposed to interpret sensory information to do it poorly, and sometimes not at all. The autistic brain will than take that sensory information and interpret it through the analytical side of the brain, which is simnifically less efficient at interpreting sensory information, and is also supposed to be dedicated towards analytical tasks, not interpretation of speech, facial expressions, etc.
Also, since autistics use their analytical brain, they can have trouble taking bits of information and bringing it together to form a more holistic thought. So while the autistic would be able to answer questions bit by bit, they would have more difficulty seeing the relationship between those bits of information (sometimes autistics can see relationships in bits of information that NTs can't, by the way).
So, let's take this theoretical information and apply it. Your in Starbucks and a beautiful lady comes up to you and says, "Is that your dog?" Now you need to figure out if she's even talking to YOU, or somebody else. You look at her, and you see that her eyes are focused on you, which means you are fairly sure she IS talking to you, but you have some doubt because you are using the analytical portion of your brain which sucks at understanding this type of stuff.
So now you're freakin stressed because you don't want to embarrass yourself, but you need to respond because it would be weird not to do so. So you respond by saying, "Yes."
She looks at you expectantly, and while you may not recognize the facial expressions for that, you realize she isn't walking away or saying anything, so you realize she wants you to say something else. "Are you new to town?", you say, and you immediately think how lame that is.
She giggles and says, "Well, how old is your dog?" And you respond with all of this detail on how you adopted your dog and they told you the dog was three but he started growing larger so he'd have to have been much younger, etc.
So in that example you are not putting together relationships with the information you are giving the pretty lady, and you are stressed because you are uncertain regarding important social cues. Also, your brain is doing double duty for analytical tasks while also trying to get you through social situations which is something it's not designed for.
Basically, what you described can be totally related to autism. How do you fix this? You fail at the conversation with the young lady (perhaps), but than you think back to what you could have said differently. You think, well next time I am asked about my dog, I'm going to give the following information, 1) His age 2) The fact that he's a male etc. You have to compensate for your lock of access to the social part of your brain by developing a complicated database of responses.
About the last part, even my doctor told me that some aspies write down a "manual" on how to behave depending on circumstances. Basically, programming oneself to be as efficient as possible based on prior experiences as opposed to intuitively knowing what to do. Is this good to do?
08 Feb 2018, 5:41 am
