do people think you're "stupid"?

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This is such a dangerously simplistic statement, and I believe that it is actually not at all accurate. Developmental delays in how we socialize does not translate into being stuck at a particular very early stage of development. I do not socialize the same way I did at 21 now that I am 41, and at 21 I actually socialized differently than when I was 11.

There is so much junk science about autism that studies children and then generalizes to autistic people of all ages - and the science itself often uses poor methodology with assumptions baked right into the interpretations of the data.

I am never called stupid, people who meet me think I'm intelligent, which bothers me since they don't know me, I like to think I'm bright, but that NT's can just tell instinctivly based on my prosody, vocabulary, interests (whenever I mention I like classical and play piano people immidiately assume I'm smart), I don't like it, maybe because I can't do it and I feel like they're reading my mind

i have also improved a lot. Aspies in general do improve but that is due to drill. I have been called kid, child, toddler, "newly arrived" etc. Please try to understand what I am saying- The difference in basic cognition remains the same. I will explain it when I will work on my theory of asperger's/autism. Let me give you an example and i.e. about mirror neurons thing. It says that NTs learn by mimicking others action in their mind, now let say that is true. Which means that we lack something and perhaps will never develop, since it requires brain remodeling(I know it is a circular logic but surely there will be some structural/wiring difference between the two types of brains). Therefore, at the core level we remain newborns although we have learned how to cope with various social situation. I have got very advance with understanding social interaction so much so that no one can know that I have asperger's, at worse they will think of me as shy and a bit nerdy NT. I do not know whether my brain has undergone remodeling or what is the basis of this new understanding. A two year old can understand pretense which we don't. We take everything to be true and it takes us time to understand lies. It means that we are not using the same mechanism to catch lies as what NTs do.
The crux of this post is that although we come to understand social interaction better with age but the mechanism that we employ to understand social mechanism might be different, and many research do suggest that in at least few cases, from what NTs do. Therefore, when it comes to using those mechanism/faculty which NTs do we are kid. Now you may say that by the same logic NTs can be called kid. I think the answer is no since they are using those mechanism/faculty for understanding social interaction which is made for it,hence they are NT, and we are using those mechanism/faculty for understanding social interaction which are not made for that purpose, hence we are aspies.

A coworker at Taco Bell, who was self-admittedly a special ed student, pulled me aside at one time and asked me if I was... *pauses*... "special" when I was younger. So the implication was that apparently he and my co-workers thought I was stupid, previously unbeknownst to me.

Periodically, I tend to anger people (Most of the time unintentionally, though intentionally sometimes.) and then they tend to call me stupid. Some people have refined the distinction between intellectual stupidity and situational stupidity and give it the moniker of "stOOpid.". In a sense, they might be right, if Daniel Goleman is to be believed and there is such a thing as "Emotional Intelligence". So, you could be intellectually bright but emotionally ret*d at the same time. Or vice versa.

So from these angles, I'm thinking I'm probably considered "emotionally stupid" and intellectual stupidity is unknown to me -- For those who make the distinction, maybe I'm considered average or bright in that department? I don't really know.

Last edited by swbluto on 07 Apr 2011, 8:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Okay, I do not particularly accept this model as valid or even universally supported by existing research, but if it were the correct model:

We do not have the social age of a newborn, because we have greater social understanding over time, no matter what mechanism is used.

If someone relearns skills after a brain injury - say relearns how to talk after losing the part of the brain that primarily governs speech - are you going to argue they're not really using speech because they have developed an alternate means to do so? At what point are you making a meaningful distinction and at what point are you simply splitting hairs that cultivate misunderstanding?

Also, I should add that an inability to understand pretense is not an accurate description for a lot of people on the spectrum. I mean, you and I are both aware that people lie, right? I am even able to deduce that someone is lying because what they say signals that they are lying. I may sometimes fail to realize someone is acting deceptively because I miss nuances and hints and nonverbal cues (online, I have a terrible time recognizing trolls), but I am still aware of the possibility of lies and trolling.

I also do not think this specifically has anything to do with lying. I misinterpret people who are telling the truth because I take their words literally. It's not related to detecting deception - and in fact your example of being invited to tea had nothing to do with deception at all, but was simply one of those misinterpretations. In my opinion, a reasonable person would have simply clarified "the meal, not a cup of tea" and moved on, rather than pathologizing your reaction.

I do not believe that the tendency to take people literally or at face value is related to social age at all. I think it's related to the relative inability to read cues and nuance into social interactions. Saying "We have the social understanding of a two year old" is completely useless, because we have a significant amount of social understanding that a two year old will never have (at least until they're no longer two years old). We may come to it later in some ways, but we're not frozen at that particular level of development.

As an example that happened earlier today:

My sister got angry about something that had nothing to do with myself or my mother, but she accused my mother of doing something that she had actually done (but my sister wasn't supposed to know about it, it didn't hurt my sister at all, and was none of her business). I told my mother she was bluffing, that she had said it to probe and find out if it had actually happened, and to just tell her it's not true.

And I was actually completely correct about this.

So: I am able to understand that someone is attempting to deceive. A two year old is not able to intellectualize this or instinctively know it. Does how I know this and apply it really make so much of a difference that my social age must be under two years because I do not do it in the same way that an NT does? Is a difference that makes no difference really a difference?

I also understand that since my sister was bluffing, that bluffing back calls her bluff and may make her even more uncertain about her accusation - that is to say, I know this will affect her thoughts on the matter.

Another example is that in most 2-3 person (counting me) interactions, I have coping mechanisms to keep up and participate. These mechanisms fall apart if I am ambushed with a surprising and upsetting topic. I do not lose the ability to think that people might be lying to me or deceive me, but I am not able to process the social situation quickly enough to analyze it in real time and work out what is actually happening. Once I have breathing room, I can definitely work out more information (possible motivations, possible deception, how to respond if it comes up again, whether to bring it up again, and so on). The problem is not what I can possibly know, but how readily I can use that information.

This situation does not mean I believe everything I hear during that situation, I am just not able to readily respond to it.

Last edited by Verdandi on 08 Apr 2011, 5:14 am, edited 1 time in total.

Usually, it's mostly my close family who sometimes refer to me as such. Mostly my sister though, and sometimes my dad. Otherwise people have enough respect for me (or is it pity? =/ Heh) to not go to such lengths.

I am very good with figuring out if people are lying or not, actually much better than NTs at times. I suss people out so easily, and people think I'm dumb enough to believe anything, but I'm actually not - and that's where NTs get caught out.

Anyway, a 2 year old can't understand pretense. Why do you think children believe in Father Christmas, the tooth fairy, the bogey man, and ect.? You can tell a kid anything and they will believe you. People can tell me the moon is made from cheese and I won't believe them. I am very good at reading between the lines, even when I was a teenager. When I was about 13, I asked my cousin if she had gone swimming last night, and she said, ''no'', and I could tell in her voice that she was lying. A bit later that day I found out that she had gone swimming, and so I was right that I knew that she was lying.

And why do you think some criminals get away with murders, ect? It's usually all through lying, and the police - and the courts - believe them. And trust me, this has happened in my family before, so I do know a thing or two about liars and how they work, and why people believe them.

You have a greater ability to detect lies through intuitively understanding another's tonality than most NTs and you're autistic?

And this is from your another post

It may be that females are better in grasping social nuances and that is why they are better.

This is my point. NTs intuitively know in real time that whatever is said can potentially be a lie.

You misinterpret that because there truth was said in a concealed manner and one had to know pretense to understand the meaning. By pretense I meant the general act of meaning something else. The tea thing was not deception but pretense since she meant whole refreshment by "tea".

My answer to it is same as one of the above. In practice surely we might be having better understanding because of drill but when it comes to theory I still think we have a age of a toddler. When a toddler cries or screams it knows that its mother knows that it is crying. But we do not have that kind of understanding even as an adult.
Since I have been saying that we have an age of a toddler, few weeks ago I experimented with a kid. I asked his father about his(kid!) age and he told me that he was 3 years old which means he was between 3 and 4. He was holding a packet of biscuits in one of his hands which was not contiguous to me. I said to him"I want to eat biscuits, I want to eat biscuits". He moved his hand away from me in which he was, of course, holding the biscuits.
How did he know that I was mentioning his biscuits. Because he knew that if he can see the biscuits then other can also.
Richard Feynman whom I believe had aspergers wrote this in his nobel lecture.

Feynman could not realize this. Now you realize what I meant .
Here is the link to the full nobel lecture.

I think that Joe90 is perhaps confusing intellectual ability with social ability. Perhaps she is good at finding out an intellectual flaw but that has got nothing to do with finding our social one. Am I right Joe90:) ?

Well, not better than NTs but not worse than NTs either. Just because I have mild Aspergers doesn't mean I have this symptom. I have loads of other symptoms of AS.

I'm not sure. All I know is all Autistics and Aspies are different, and not all of us have all of the symptoms.
Although I have an ASD, I actually have more social knowledge than I do of scientific or other facts like that. I'm not dyslexic, but I read slower than most people, and although I'm a good speller, I can't use long words like most Aspies do in these forums. And I'm completely useless at maths, and at school I never got As or Bs in any of the subjects - even the ones I enjoyed. I done an online IQ test and my IQ is apparently 77 of something like that. (Not sure if it's accurate or not but it can't be much higher than that, since it was a rough estimate). Although I ain't the best at socialising, I still think I understand better of people than I do of things.

I went out with a man I fancied last year, but after just a week or so into our relationship I could tell he wanted to start to control my life - I could see the signs, especially when he got stroppy over the phone all because I said I was looking for jobs (he knew I was unemployed). I knew that he was going to be one of those men who didn't like you doing anything else with your life but live in his pocket, and that's not what I want my life to end up as. I gave him a chance, and he got worse, so I said, ''look, I don't feel quite ready for a sexual relationship with you, and so I just want to be friends.'' We did be friends after that, but I could tell that he was waiting for me to give in and get into his bed one night. I am not doing that because he's not the man for me. He's too demanding. So if I had the social mind of a 1 day old baby then I don't think I would have enough sense to come away from someone who showed signs of what I don't want out of a man.

Yeah, I suppose deception detection in her case might have been mostly logical deductions instead of "tonality"/"facial expressional"/"social cue" detectable ones.

I was zoning on this statement of hers:



With the "tell in her voice" part, it seems an inference was made on tone, but the very fact she asked her if she had gone swimming suggests she already possessed other evidence that she had, so maybe that particular lie detection wasn't as dependent on tonality inferences as one might infer.

But possessing "loads of other symptoms of AS" might definitely indicate AS. It also seems AS manifests differently in females such that, on average, they seem better able to detect tonal, language and body-language cues than guys. This is supported by the research finding that AS females scored no differently on a facial recognition test than NT females, but AS males scored significantly less on average than NT males.

(And, also, it seems that the few AS males who replied to my trolling post in the Love and Relationships forums didn't seem to catch the inflammatory "the superior race" language, whereas the AS females apparently had no problem picking it up.)

You're right. I was too busy pointing out that WP discourages people denying the diagnoses of others.

I was actually thinking of the first two posters. You might have caught it, but didn't respond to it because it wasn't that 'important' (As denying the diagnoses of others is a seriously grave sin to stop people from committing.). So, did you "catch it"?

(You might have, I don't know.)

Last edited by swbluto on 08 Apr 2011, 8:48 am, edited 1 time in total.