Nonverbal cues in autistics-- a question

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Both of you, thanks!! I'm sorry it took so long to respond; I didn't see the last few posts.

anbuend, that link is great. A little while ago, after I posted what I did, it clicked for me that I did get a reading; you look tired. I have no other idea at all when I look at your body language in the videos. At least, not about your emotions.

That said, the videos that include you stimming or doing little things (that thing with the binder, that thing with the screws, the entirety of In My Language) seem... I haven't got the word for it. Not meaningful, in the sense that language is meaningful. Not my same stims or the same things I focus on, but this is closer; the things share a way of being with... I don't want to call them stims for some reason. But with the whatevers that I... not precisely do, because that would require that they be generated by me. Some of them bug me, in rather the same way the Uncanny Valley seems to be annoying to some people. (That last bit is basically a guess. Maybe they bug me for another reason. But when I'm screaming inside my head that you're doing that stim wrong, I think that has to be because it's similar.)

I have to say, and it's not that I'm calling you a liar or anything, but... I don't know if I believe what you said in the linked post. The way you're moving your hands differs drastically from the way I move mine (which makes sense, as it's serving a different purpose), but not in any way I've ever known an NT to notice. Then again, I suspect it's the same thing as happened with the experiment where they went and got themselves committed to see how long it took people to realize they were sane and the doctors just never realized. Specifically, it's like the part where one doctor's notes pointed out the pseudopatient's "compulsive note-taking behavior." I don't think anyone would see anything wrong with it if they didn't see it in a context where they were expecting to see pathological, strange and disgusting mannerisms. (One would assume they expect that because they're stupid.) As opposed to the context I provide, that of a shy, geeky, intelligent woman.

...That's actually really interesting, now that I think about it. I wonder if people would notice what I do with my hands and be more upset if I did other things that made me look atypical. I don't think I want to try that.

I admit, I would not have realized you two were that similar, though I placed you both in the mental category of "intelligent, long-winded autistic bloggers I often agree with and want to see more from, who have YouTube accounts, like cats and delight in existence." (You are the only two people in this category that I know of, unless Callista has a YouTube account. I hope she doesn't. YouTube is bad.)

I don't notice similarities between paradigms of body language. All I can do is run something through multiple paradigms and see if it makes sense. Like, mine gives an answer for AnneC's video that fits her description. The NT paradigm does not, and it fails to do so in the same way it fails to understand my body language.

If you two have the same body language, it's likely the two of us do as well, but I get no reading. I don't read differences, I don't read similarities. I didn't notice that you two were similar or different (actually, I notice she moves more; a lot of your videos have you sitting completely still for long stretches, which I don't notice with her even when she sits "still"). I could have guessed that your happy dance was happy, but it doesn't give me a "happy" reading like I can read emotions off of a certain friend, nor does it fit with what I know of NT shows of happiness. That's what I mean when I say I don't get a reading. I could probably learn (with the caveat that in many of your videos you seem to me to be showing the same emotion).

If it weren't for my hatred of YouTube and fear of letting you all see my face and body and lack of suitable camera, I'd want to test it the other way-- whether or not you could get a reading from me. You've spent more time around people, and more of them neurodiverse, than I have. And I think I move kind of like Anne. It would be awesome if we could do it.

Weird I could have sworn I wrote a reply to this. Maybe it got lost somewhere on my computer.

Anyway, a couple things:

About my comparative stillness. I have a much more severe movement disorder than Anne does. (Anne has difficulties in the same realm, but while she can get more trouble moving than it looks like, it's just not as extreme for her.) And one of the ways this movement disorder works is that unless a body part is somehow being used (on purpose or not), it's still. That sounds almost normal, until you realize that most people are always (unconsciously, I imagine, or it would be too cognitively taxing) moving around and holding themselves in various positions. I do that far less than the average person and it shows. One person once described me as like... the way a cat can seem totally still and then is suddenly moving without any intermediate state, that that's how I move sometimes. But basically I have a "default mode" that is (these days) usually nonmoving (sometimes moving, though), and anything that isn't actively being used, reverts to the default (or else hangs suspended in an equally unnatural-looking position). There's a chance the severity could be because of a difference in the amount of certain medications we were both given, or it could just be a natural difference between us. But this sort of thing is why I said you have to take into account my movement disorder in order to get meaning out of the way I move.

Additionally, there's another possibility. Anne and I have frequently found that the areas we notice and care about most often go totally unnoticed by other people, and the areas we notice and care about the least are given great import by other people. It's possible that whatever movement patterns we have in common are not the same ones you would generally notice.

As far as the meaningfulness of the way I move... some people see it and some don't, and I don't know what the difference is. But it's there, and it does have meaning, even when it doesn't have intentional meaning. It's part of how I understand and interact with things around me. And if you do know what to look for you can pick up on what in my environment I'm reacting to. Unfortunately there's no easy way of pointing out what to look for, or I'd have done it.

About what I said on the page where that one video was from:

I don't blame you for being skeptical of that whole idea. I personally have a very difficult time picking up on the characteristics in me or others that most people use to distinguish certain things. High functioning from low functioning, "ret*d" from non-"ret*d", pretty from ugly, etc. This made me go through a lot of my life unaware of how others perceived me. I mean, I saw their reactions to me, but I somehow never connected the dots. But once I connected the dots, and made a study of the matter, I saw something like the following:

Ever since I have been a teenager (this is true of Anne as well, by the way) people have actively called the police when they saw me walking around outside. When the police have come, they have often been surprised I could communicate at all. They talk to me as if I am a very small child. They frequently have assumed that I escaped from somewhere: When I was younger, a special school in my neighborhood (that ironically I later went to the other branch of, while the branch in my neighborhood was bought out by the non-special school that I went to for late elementary school and middle school because they'd decided that they wanted to be a high school instead of just K-8). When I was older, group homes and other institutions. While a few times they have been called because I was doing something like trespassing or having a meltdown, the majority of the time they have come after me because I was walking around or sitting down, not doing anything particularly weird or threatening. The last time this happened was sitting down outside my apartment complex at the age of 24. I have rarely left home without someone with me since then, although it's gotten better since I've been in a powerchair, it seems to create a connotation of physical impairment rather than other impairments, for some people.

In addition to remarks from police, I have dealt with remarks about me that presented me in many different respects as empty (they used other words, but empty is the idea they were trying to get across). I've had a medical professional say in front of me that I had the cognitive functioning of an infant. (I was maybe... 27? at the time. I can't remember my exact age but somewhere around there.) People frequently wave their hands in my face. In high school, people jumped up and down on me, explaining it to a teacher as "she doesn't mind, she doesn't even notice, look at her" (I usually had speech at the time, but when I didn't, I could count on people doing things like that). In my first (and very brief) stay in a mental institution, someone stuck his foot in my butt and wiggled it around while an entire room looked on and did nothing because (as I found out later) they didn't think I was capable of noticing it. People are often visibly startled when I type actual words to them, especially if they've spent awhile with me first when I wasn't saying anything much. (They often weren't saying much either, but nobody singled *them* out for surprise and astonishment when they started talking.) People frequently call me 'ret*d' to my face or in front of me. And that's just the examples that come to mind most easily, I know there were more in my last attempt at writing this.

I really woke up about this after a conference where, as described above, I went around not saying anything much, while others were not saying anything much either. When they spoke, nobody cared. When I typed, I could hear people whispering things like "Amazing" to each other. In fact they acted like a potted plant had walked up to them and said hello. After I got home and had time to muse about that, I realized there was a pattern and that something about me triggered these people's stereotype-switches.

Another telling thing for me that came a bit later was watching autistic people react to photos of me without knowing they were of me. (Long story, but the photos were not unrepresentative of my appearance or behavior, whatever else they were.) It shocked me because some of them were people I knew and, if not close to them, we enjoyed each other on message boards like this one. Many of them reacted negatively, saying how upset they were that someone who "looked like THAT" would possibly be held as representative of autistic person. They used a whole lot of terms that amounted to having severe or profound cognitive impairments (whether autism, intellectual disability, or something else). Apparently such a person was not someone they wanted to be associated with.

Other comments were just... weird, and accumulated over the years, but didn't say much to me and I often refused to believe them. I remember asking why people were concerned when another person shut down and couldn't do certain things, but seemed oblivious to any problem when the same happened to me. I was told, "Nobody expects you to be high-functioning like (name of other person)." Asking why someone had differentiated me from another person at the same event, I heard "Well from your interests people thought you were similar, but when we met you it became obvious just to look at you that you needed a lot more assistance than she did just to survive." People told me that other people were embarrassed to be around someone who looked like me. People trying to stop me from doing movements like that by saying "Stop, you look ret*d" or "People will think you're ret*d if you don't quit that" (often I didn't know what "that" was, or that I was doing anything particularly odd, or that I was doing anything at all even). All kinds of things that added up to "you're not being perceived as real, rather as empty". So there was a steady stream of comments along those lines that I just flat refused to believe until I started coming to terms with how other people regarded me.

At any rate, after a long time of trying to figure things out, including asking people I trusted but who I knew to be able to read standard interpretations of someone's behavior, I found that there were two main differences that caused a person to be regarded in this manner: Moving when (or in ways) you are "not supposed to", and failing to move when you were "supposed to". I happened to do both, given my body's default position of unusual stillness, as well as my body's propensity to either do movements in a weird-looking way, or do movements that are unusual to begin with. And unusual-to-begin-with movements turn out to be (from asking people, as well as from dealing with professionals in my life making demands of me) one of the big ways that people differentiate the "real people" from those of us they consider not so real. (Although failing to move when expected seems to have similar results.) So that's why I put on that particular video the notice about not failing to do things just because people judge me as weird from them. It's not that it's necessarily any single movement that does it with people, but it's that single movement added in to the picture of how I move in general, then yes people do in fact judge me on that. That particular movement is part of a larger picture, in which all unusual mannerism are signs of being unusually empty. (I use empty to describe it, they use other words that they equate with empty even though they sholdn't mean that.)

It sounds as weird to me as it sounds to you, but that's what I've found out from asking people and making observations about how people reacted to me. It's probably not how you react to me, because you probably don't use the usual set of signals from a person to determine their status in the world. But most people do seem to use those signals and do interpret them certain ways. That's one way that bullies always seem to pick us out from a crowd and single us out even when we ourselves are not aware of what we're doing that's unusual. Personally, I can often pick out neuro-atypical people from "typical" people, but I don't pick up these weird distinctions people make. When I see someone with "severe dementia", they're usually still making signals that to me signal awareness. But other people don't see those signals, only see lack of typical signals, and assume the people are not really there (or not all there) just as people have assumed for me. I don't see the signals for "high functioning" vs "low functioning" autism. I don't see a lot of things. But when I ask people, they see it, in me and in others. And atypical movements are one part of what they see. And the whole point of what I wrote is that I'm sick of this whole system of how to judge people and that I refuse to abide by the rules of it saying that it's better for me to hide, better to be ashamed, better to not let anyone know how I really look and behave in a quite natural way. It's a lot bigger than a single atypical movement.

It's not unconsciously. Right now I'm conscious of keeping one eye shut, jiggling one leg, typing, doing my little OCD ritual with the arrow keys and stimming. Oh, and sneezing. (Though I didn't immediately realize I was starting to spin.) But I'm definitely consciously working with both hands, my face (pretty subtly) and one leg. Unconsciously I'm stabilizing myself in this position as well (until I started thinking about it to write that, which makes it conscious by definition). And I was conscious of slouching, shifting my foot and not twisting anymore. And of a sort of odd movement I just did with part of my back and left leg. Movement is pretty effortless for me; I think of where and how to move and my body does it. I can also set it on a loop (keep doing this this way until I say stop), unless that's what you mean by "unconscious." Though there are unconscious movements, too. But I'd consider all of my body except my left leg currently in use (arguably not my arms, but I have to make small movements with them to keep my hands and body lined up correctly), and my left leg is curled up under me.

What I noticed with Anne, as I recall, was the way she moved her whole body around as if she wasn't sure where to put it (which definitely resonates with me in a way I can't totally adequately describe-- there should be a word for that, if there isn't already), and the position of her arms (which I would register as comfortable and casual even though I know it's "supposed" to mean something else). I also noticed her tone of voice, but I can't remember now what it sounded like.

What I noticed with you when you did move was that you were pointing the camera at things I've always tried to hide and would never have dreamed of letting people know I was looking at. (For example, Being an Unperson, from 1:05 to 1:39.) I would never admit anywhere but here among fellows that I get so engrossed in those sorts of things that it seems totally sensible to point a camera at them. But mostly that meant I saw your hands by themselves in a lot of videos.

Where I saw your whole body, or anything that wasn't your hand, and it was moving (Happy Dance, In My Language, How To Boil Water, Walking on a sidewalk, Autie woman types one-fingered without looking.), I didn't see anything. I mean, I did, but nothing that told me anything more than anyone could guess. That last one, for instance, because it's short (only 19 seconds), let's go over what I can see in that one. I see that you adjusted the camera, stepped back and sat down, looking up (more importantly, looking away from the keyboard). Part of the video your hands are in similar positions (are you a lefty?), but at the end your right hand becomes tighter as your left becomes looser. Then you get up. I don't see anything else to notice. It doesn't give me any information (well, it does-- it tells me your typing speed and the way your voice-thingy works). I see only the immediate use of each movement and how it furthers the goal of typing a sentence one-fingered without looking.

Regarding your appearance, I'm capable of registering two sets of cues-- the "normal" set, which says you look like a ret*d and are an unattractive person, and a different set of mine, which says nothing about your cognitive capabilities and considers you attractive. (Note that I say "unattractive person" but just "attractive." The other way of looking doesn't care whether you're a person or a sack of potatoes. Also note that I don't really mean attractive, at least not in the sense of pretty, or hot, or any English words I can think of. The Japanese word omoshiroi, meaning both interesting and funny, is the best fit.) The "normal" set isn't one I care to pay attention to. I register it more, but without the disgust or judgment, from Autie woman types one-fingered without looking. and none from the pictures on You Need A Cat. Probably related to those being stills.

I think the one that would call you a ret*d (why does part of me think that's in any way appropriate?! It's like the evil NT on my shoulder, and YES THAT'S A JOKE, I'm not trying to insult NTs) is judging based on the rules for how categories should be, versus the other one just judging. (Unattractive person versus just attractive.)

(And you've spent all that effort trying to make people accept that you're a real person. Irony is a cruel mistress.)

But when I look at closeups of your hands doing things, I don't see anything I'm used to calling meaning, but I see something I recognize. (And you're doing it wrong. And yes, I know that is nonsensical. I just feel the urge to do those things my way. And it HURTS. But more relevant here is that I would even have an opinion on the best way to do those things, let alone one that strong. They're REALLY important to me. And I have never before said anything about them or acknowledged them, so this is coming out clumsily and not how I wanted to say it.) Meaning, to me, would be if it were symbolic of things. Like if a particular way of messing around with a particular thing meant "meet me at your house tomorrow," I'd consider it meaningful. (Or even if it just meant "your house.")

So... have I noticed the things you notice? Or have I noticed something else?

Surely, the significant difference that separates the autistic from the "normal" is that a normals body (face) language changes in response to the other partners in the communication. The autistic's doesn't.

Hmm. What I mean by meaning is something totally different from symbolism. I mean that... sensory input goes into my body and that makes my body react in certain ways. A person aware enough of the connection between sensory input and my physical reactions to it, would be able to work out at least some of what I am reacting to by watching the way I move. There are people who can do that (and usually I can read them as well) but not a lot of them (I presume because my expression of autism is nonstandard. Oh and also they would be likely to be able to make out some part of my feelings, attention, and possibly motivation (or something like it). And if we were in the same room we would be able to interact to some degree entirely on that sensory level and emotionally. (I think in sensory input more than I think in ideas and so does Anne so we are fairly good at this even just in things like typing patterns.)

Oh and I type tenfingered usually. That video was just a response to the claim that it's impossible for anyone but somehow especially an autistic person to type one fingered without looking. That one was taken on a day when I had fewer physical responses to my environment than I sometimes do. On those days the only things to see are the absence of something expected rather than the presence of something unexpected.

As far as people moving unconsciously I meant nonautistic people. Autistic people often do that kind of thing manually.

You changed your avatar. And now I am disappointed in myself for spending so much time looking at it deeply affected by it but not consciously aware of why that would be. I should maybe go back to bed; that's, like, way stupid. (For me. I usually notice things like that quite quickly, which is why people changing their avatars bugs me so much. If that doesn't just jump out at you, then not noticing it isn't stupid. I just want to be clear on that.)

Is In My Language taken on a day when you were reacting more to your environment?

Honestly, though, I don't know what you're saying. That might be because I'm already perceiving it, but it might be because I'm not. I wish you could, like, sit inside my head and watch my reactions to your videos and tell me whether or not I'm seeing it.

Here. I'll go through In My Language (Untranslated Version).

The first part, with you facing away from the camera, moving your hands and rocking, I have no clue why you'd do that. I do think it looks pretty and I enjoy watching this part, your hands especially.

The second part, repeatedly doing something to a surface that's brown and white... I can't even figure out what you're doing, or why you're doing it, but I note that you're doing the same thing repeatedly and taking the same amount of time each time. I'd say I know why that is, but I don't have a better answer than "because that's the best way to do things, of course."

The third part, running your fingers over the keys, is probably because pushing them down feels good, and right on that part of your hand... I'm getting rather a vicarious thrill here. I'd never dare to do that myself, even though you make me want to. It also sounds nice.

The part with the metal beads-- no thoughts, but it reminds me of a cat. A clumsy cat. I can't see it in the video, but I'd hazard a guess that it has to do with the way they catch the light.

The slinky just seems odd. I guess I can sort of see that it's neat looking through it (what's making that noise?), but meh. There are better things to do with slinkies. Metal ones, anyway.

The part with the office supply (triple hole punch? Stapler?), I can just feel it as it's pushed down. Like, feel the way it feels itself, if it could actually do so. I wish you'd included more of that. Like, a whole video of just pushing it down. But I feel it with a sense I don't know if anyone in the entire world shares, sort of... as if I feel everything else. Not like touching it, but feel it the same way I feel my body, only it's not my body and it's not quite that. Though I also feel things in my body when they're close but not touching sometimes. But if you don't have this sense, I don't know why you'd do that. Wait, is that something else in your hand that's not an integral part of it? Then it definitely requires this sense, to feel the impact and...

The part with the loop and the door handle... I dunno. Pretty sure I perceive what's going on, but it doesn't do it for me.

The next bit, I can't see what you're doing, but it sounds nice. Also kind of reminds me of the keyboard, with the caveat that it's completely unlike the keyboard. That said, it seems like whatever it is would hurt your hand. I feel it hurting with the aforementioned sense-you-might-not-share.

The receipt you're fluttering (is it a receipt? It's a piece of paper) in front of the window-- Ah! I'm not totally sure, but I just noticed that there's a reflection. I now have a theory about the first part. Anyway, the receipt also doesn't do it for me, but I can see how it's neat, fluttering like that.

The knob on the drawer... I like the motion you're doing. I like the look of it; the other sense I mentioned is most displeased and has some modifications to suggest.

I almost didn't mention the part with the book because I was too caught up in watching it. That seems exactly like something I would do, if I weren't appalled by the thought of rubbing a book against my face, and if I weren't too shy to risk ever being seen. I don't have anything to say about it, but I have a lot of feelings about it, all of them good. Feels good.

Again moving in front of that window. Same window. Why? Is the tree important? There's still a reflection, but I like watching your hand. Why the window? Do you just like the window? Is it incidental? I notice you don't end up pointing to the same place each time. Still rhythmic, with a strong and simple beat, but your hand is making different shapes. Is the tree important? Why did I ask that twice? I really want to ask it a million more times.

Does any of that sound right? Or wrong? (Can those words even be used in this case?)

Aaahhh! Anbuend, you changed your avatar! I was going to post that you had written about this before, and was going to direct the OP to your blog (I hope that is okay), but I was first scrolling through the thread to see if you had responded yourself. And you changed your avatar! I think you have had the same avatar during the entire time I have been on this website. I do like the new one though. Very cute cat. Yours?

Re: Anne Corwin video. My impression is that she is enjoying having the opportunity to talk about something she is interested in. Mostly because she seems *exactly* like how I am when I am doing that. Most of the time I am on what I call my "best pragmatics behavior," but when the subject turns to one of my interests, I kind of let go a bit, and pretty much look and sound exactly like Anne. Seriously, the way I talk in particular is *exactly* like her (I know this because I have been forced to spend way too much time analyzing my speech patterns in order to change them when I need to). The rate, the pacing, the "shallow" depth of articulation (if you know what I mean- I think it is due to the tongue moving between articulators so rapidly), is all the same. Weird. Also, her last name is very similar to mine. They clearly share the same Latin root word.

I'm actually not familiar with Anne Corwin though. Does she have Asperger's? What name does she use to post on Wrongplanet?

I think she just stuck a cat's head in front of it, actually.

Yeah it's fine to point to my blog. Unfortunately I have a really hard time discussing this sort of thing. I know it's frustrating -- it's also frustrating for me to try to put things into language and have it just not happen. Some of what you describe in your post about what's in the video is probably at least a part of it, other parts of it are just... it's so hard to describe because the sensory input I get is a jumble, and then my body really unconsciously pipes that input through into movements that help me understand the input, and I don't know how to consciously describe a process that isn't conscious. I'm sure this is very irritating of me but I can't figure out how else to say it.

And yeah I just stuck a cat's head in front of it. That's not my cat, but is a cat that Anne Corwin actually told me she imagined I'd look like if I were a cat. And I thought that was cool, so I stuck the cat head on my avatar. I'd been meaning to add a cat to it somehow for a long time. Of course YMMV, someone else I know said she'd always imagined me as a black cat. At any rate, I still liked the old avatar so I kept it as background for the new one. The old one is a small piece of a large photo I took of an oak tree years ago. It's been my avatar here since... I think I got here in 2004. Wow. That's a long time ago.

Also, in response to the person who said that autistic people don't mirror the body language of people who talk to us, that's only partially true. Some of us do that mirroring thing with varying degrees of success (either consciously or unconsciously), and some of us have a trait known as echopraxia, which is the movement equivalent of echolalia: We (not deliberately at all) pick up the movements of other people. That kind of mirroring other people can be a way some of us acquire social masks. There are people who actually take it even further, and mirror whole personalities along with the mannerisms of the person. This is supposedly more common in autistic women than men. I have some echopraxia but nothing to that extreme. A friend told me (before we were friends, and before we even knew I was autistic) that if there were a hundred people in a room, I would be the one person whose body wasn't synced up to everyone else's. So apparently whatever I was doing as far as echopraxia wasn't too extreme back then or she'd have noticed something different from that.

I was going to say that means I have no clue about it, because I don't use movements to help me process information, until I got up to pace because I need to so I can think... and now I don't know what to say or think.

That cat is not what you would look like as a cat.

Then again, if you were a cat, the experiences that have shaped you would be different.

Thank you for all of the efforts you've made to explain these things. I really appreciate everything you've said on this thread. I can't usually claim to understand language difficulties, but here I'm pretty sure I get it.