mindblindness paradox

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if you recognize that you are mindblind, or someone makes you aware of it, and from that point on you take that into consideration, then are you no longer technically mindblind?

i think this is an intellectual workaround, and doesn't mean it has changed, but it is just a compensation mechanism.

but i'm curious what other people think.

I'm aware of it and I am still mind blind.

I am, in fact, MORE mind blind now that I am aware of it... and I am not being facetious.

This would apply to me as well. So yeah basically you still have it but you have some stuff intellectualized.

interesting responses.

lol .. i didn't realize you have to vote in your own poll in order to see the results, so now i have skewed the poll ..

I was never entirely "mind blind". It's not as if I ever didn't know that smiles indicated happiness and frowns indicated anger, and personally, I always thought mind blindness was over stated.
Rather, I just has more of a tendency to "miss things" in social interactions, and didn't know what things were expected of me in social interactions.

Now that I am aware of the situation, I try to watch people closer and take more time to consider what they are trying to communicate.

Chronos, incidentally i don't believe mindblindness is a black and white thing - you have a very good point.

Tony Atwood says people with Asperger's are not mindblind but "mind-myopic."

so if anyone wants to respond to this question as if i said "mind-myopic" instead of mindblind, that will work too. or "theory of mind impaired" ??

i welcome any thoughts on this.

I think it's possible to figure out some of it intellectually, but the subtleties still stump me. (I'm assuming you're referring to understanding why someone will do or say something that to us seems incomprehensible.)

I think part of the problem is that the best way to figure out what someone is thinking or feeling is to identify situations in which we ourselves felt the same way, but there are things that people do that I would never do or even know how to do if they occurred to me. For instance, I'm incapable of being manipulative, (except in a very clumsy way, and most of the time I wouldn't dream of doing even that) so it's hard for me to tell when someone is subtly trying to influence me, because it isn't something I have experience doing myself.

Sometimes people think that something I said or did has a hidden agenda, and they assume I know exactly what I did, because they think it was intentional, and in those cases I am even more stumped, because I can't understand a reaction to something the other person thought I did and thinks I know I did, but that I didn't do. (Whew, that was convoluted. )

I agree with you, there are many social skills, just as there are many sorts of empathy. Maybe how far one is along the spectrum depends on how many of these skills one has?

I've been told that during a conversation with friends I didn't know very well, I was "missing things." I was never told what, exactly, I was missing, so it didn't really help. To make matters even more confusing, others have told me that I'm very perceptive. So I know I have some social skills, but lack as yet undefined others, a knowledge I can't act on to improve. I guess my answer to your poll would be no...

I know exactly what you mean. There's a big difference between not knowing something and knowing that you don't know it, isn't there?

Chronos, I understand what you mean, too. I had a psychology professor once many, many moons ago, who made a comment to a lecture hall audience that no-one ever wore green to his lectures. Five hands went up in the audience, all people who were wearing some shade of green. He just didn't recognize the colors as green. He said he could see colors of tree leaves and grass and knew them as "green," but the other shades just didn't register. He later got tested and found that he was actually red-green color-blind. He said that ever since then, he had never been quite certain that the colors that he experienced as "red" and "green" were actually what other people experienced as "red" and "green." My misunderstanding or not registering expressions is like this: I get the big ones, it's the subtle shifts in between that I seem to miss, and for most people those carry a great deal of meaning that I never knew I was missing.

aha. thank you so much for the colorblind professor story.

ok, now i understand what dyingofpoetry meant by this.

that is exactly what i have experienced. before the recognition, i had no idea i was misinterpreting people. i was interpreting people (i.e. attributing incorrect interpretations, often negative ones, but with absolute certainty). therefore, i thought i could interpret people.

and now that i know that, i am more confused but also happier. it is like the professor: if i don't see something as green, it might still be green. translated into human interaction, that means that if i don't perceive someone as liking me or listening to me, that doesn't mean it's true. this knowledge immediately made me feel better. of course, i often have no idea what's actually going on, but i no longer form a negative conclusion about something - i recognize that the info. i'm taking in is inconclusive.

I often do the same thing. I have to remind myself when I see what I think is a negative expression on someone's face that I don't read expressions accurately, so that may not be what they're intending to project.

I am always surprised that other people don't know what I do, think like I think, etc.

I still feel like Jane will look where Sally hid the jelly bean, though I know that isn't the right answer.

I've got horrific theory of mind, I just do my best to compensate for it, takes a lot of processing power so I lock up sometimes when my models are completely wrong, and I can't figure out why.

Yep, that's it! Before I was diagnosed, I thought I was doing a good job of recognizing the feelings of others and guessing at their thoughts. Now, with the knowledge I have, I realize that the minds of others are quite foreign. All the insight into others that I thought I was having, was merely my projecting my own experiences and reactions.

So, now I actually bother trying a bit less.

Errr no. Wouldn't the problem itself have to be purely intellectual for that to be the case?

Although it's certainly the first step in getting over it. If it can be gotten over, which I'm not sure it can be completely.

I think being aware of it helps you compensate.

If I understood correctly:

If you feel bad and doctor tells you You're sick, you're still sick, but you know what, why and what to do. You can help yourself and become healthy or at least feel better.

If you're mindblind and you realise you are, you're still mindblind, but you know about it and you can try to change it, to learn some skills.