Do you see people as people?

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I know it's technically called "background music", but for me it definitely becomes "foreground music".
Ha ha

I find myself listening to the song rather than the social conversation I'm "supposed" to be having.

I find myself analysing the time signature and rhythm in the music.
I analyse the emotional meanings of the chords and lyrics.
One place kept playing exactly the same George Michael CD over and over again, so I could always predict which song was coming next and what all the lyrics were. I don't think that anyone noticed that apart from me.

I actually find it incredibly enjoyable to be "distracted" by music and interesting objects/scenery on holiday. I've spent some of the happiest moments of my life "distracted" and contemplating things alone this way.

I see the physical details and listen to the music.


I suppose a musician like yourself naturally focusses on the music in the situation (because that's your interest).

People focus on what they're interested in.
Hardly that surprising really.

I think this is why I hate smooth jazz.


I would've. I went to a Mediterranean restaurant one time. They had some ethnically-related music going. Within 15 minutes I realized that it kept playing the exact same track, over and over and over again... I was the only one to notice this and pointed it out to others, who then subsequently noticed it. I even told our server, who denied that this was the case, yet within 5 minutes of my telling him, the CD finally went onto the next track.


Yup.

Honestly, not often. For some reason it's almost as though, directly behind my eyes, is a censor, making it so I can't perceive cognitively that there is even a tangible world right in front of me. I pretty much exist completely in a perpetual daydream.

I see people as PATHETIC MAGGOTS THAT I MUST CRUSH MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Nah actually, I see people as people

People used to say to me:
"You're not paying attention. You're daydreaming."

But I think I was paying attention, but just not to the things that were socially acceptable to pay attention to!

In the early years, we had to throw bean bags to each other in pairs and groups. We had to work together socially. I didn't get this at first. I thought (mistakenly) that I had to pay attention to the brightly coloured beanbag. I thought it was fascinating. I wondered how all the little peas had got inside the bag. Then I discovered the zip. I played with the zip and the little peas went all over the floor. I felt happy because I'd freed all the little peas from their bright sack prison. They were like little marbles or ball bearings rolling all over the floor. Then I was told off for not participating.

I thought I was participating!
I honestly thought that the aim of the exercise was to investigate the beanbag.
Nobody had told me explicitly that I had to pass it to anyone!

To tell the honest truth, I'd have been far happier stuffing beanbags with peas; collecting different coloured beanbags; lining them up; playing with the zip and studying the peas than I would have been actually passing the beanbag to anyone. I'd have been far more interested in just trying to reconstruct and deconstruct the beanbag.

I was looking at the beanbag from the point of view of the man who constructed it. I didn't seem to view the beanbag as a social interaction toy at first.

I think that if I had purely viewed beanbags and other things as just something to chuck to the other person, I'd have missed out on so much detail.

If I'd just been a so called "normal" person chatting to people in the themed bars, I'd probably have been completely oblivious to all the fantastic detail. I'd be too busy worrying about who's going out with who and who's keeping secrets from whom to even care.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't talk about these things or be social, because these subjects do have a place sometimes. It's just they do seem to miss out on their physical surroundings by talking like this excessively.

So I'm missing out on the social side, while they miss out on the physical detail side.

Sometimes it's not always obvious what you should pay attention to.
Most people just accept, unquestioningly, social activities as a default.

Also, sometimes it is socially acceptable to pay attention to details of physical objects, but only in a few environments.

I view people as people who like to talk amoungst themselves.

I find that I'm much more comfortable if the interaction is centered around an object or objects. If someone says:

"Look what I brought in today!"

I find it easy to ask questions about how the item works, it's history and what it was used for.

There's a physical focus to the discussion and I feel more comfortable talking about things I can touch and see.


Perhaps objects could be used as tools to help facilitate social interaction?


When there isn't an object and there are just people chatting causally in a group, even on a work based activity, I struggle to follow along.

To me it's just a ring of people.
Where's the focus?

An object would provide that focus.


Edit:

Many of you have probably been told to sit in a circle and a pass an object around. In this game, everyone gets a chance to hold the object. If you're holding the object, you have to talk about yourself and what you think of the people around you. You have to say things like what your favourite colour is, who your best friend is and what brought you to the social group. When you're finished, you pass the object onto the next person so it's his/her turn.

Once, when I was "forced" to play one of these games, we were passing around a beautiful giant seashell. It was a giant whelk shell. I think I'd have much rather spent all my time talking about the wonderful details on the shell itself, rather than what I was "meant" to talk about.

It was one of those giant shells that you could put to your ear to and "hear the sea" [auditory illusion].

I could have spent hours drawing the shell, feeling it's rough texture, admiring the colours, counting the whorls and thinking about the life of the mollusc that once inhabited it.

Last edited by AmberEyes on 30 May 2009, 11:47 am, edited 1 time in total.

^^
What she said!

I am sorry to resurrect this thread but I found it through reading a series of blog posts and it intrigued me, because of the relation, and lack of relation, to my experiences.



Asperger and Kanner studied roughly identical cross-sections of autistic people. People who have made much of purported differences have not done a close enough reading of both of their works. By close enough, I mean separating out their observations of autistic people, from their often false conclusions about autistic people. Both of them saw autistic people who would today be stereotyped as high and low functioning, Kanner and Asperger. The only differences if any are the lenses they saw them through, and even that is dubious at times. Its entirely accidental that the names weren't reversed.

(I was diagnosed as autistic. I reject functioning labels but the only one I have seen in my official file was low. That says more about prejudice than it does about me.)

I believe I know an exact subtype of autistic people I belong to because my experiences strongly resonate with a number of people I have known, including the experiences I am about to describe. But there is no formal name for this subtype and the people in it span every single name that has been developed into formal subtypes. (So do the people outside it.). As far as I can tell we are not a majority of autistic people but not the smallest minority either.



Since I didn't give my original perceptions of the world, I'll describe that here as well.

Basically I have always perceived the world as a lot of shifting sensations. Neither exactly how that professional described things nor exactly how people here have described things. I made no distinction between living and unliving things. People's biases assume I mean treating people as objects but I mean more that the entire world seems alive, although by no means does alive mean "like me". I do perceive a lot of shifting shapes and stuff (same in all my senses, vision is just the easiest to describe). But there is something entirely missing from that professional's description and if it resembles my perceptions it is almost entirely an accident based on standard views of autism (imagine a model that manages to simulate an aspect of reality but uses assumptions that are entirely wrong to power it).

So all those shifting perceptions remain how I perceive the world. I did not leave it behind in childhood like most people seem to describe. But along with never leaving it behind, comes abilities to find patterns in it, to navigate those patterns, and to find ways of understanding and interacting with the world that those who leave it behind (or who only dip into it occasionally) will never develop. And within those abilities (few of which have words for them, owing to a phenomenon I tried to describe in the latest issue of Disability Studies Quarterly) are the ability to have respect for other beings, human or otherwise. The mere fact of how my raw perceptions of the world handle things does not mean I cannot respect, resonate, pick up on emotions, or find patterns in the world outside of me. But while it includes humans it does not stop with humans. And my perception of the world has never been the bare blank and lifeless description of many professionals in the field, it has always been full of life and emotion even in a totally and completely different manner than those of standard neurology.



Anyone using this board to answer these questions is interacting with others.

My preferred way of interacting is wordless but entirely different from standard nonautistic interaction. It involves picking up on each other without necessarily having the most direct contact. Like two people separated by a firm line but sharing awareness in certain ways, picking up on each other more peripherally than directly but not lacking in a deep level of connection.

It tires me out to use language, and blunts my awareness, but I can do it sometimes, and even do it well despite the strain and the foreignness. Understanding language is incredibly hard and drops out a lot though.



That's a hard question to answer because "think of ----- as objects" is a word-pattern that carries a specific meaning light-years away from my experience of the world. And totally different than even my experience of objects. Most people give objects a barrenness I would never give anything. Humans aren't that special but neither are they barren. They are worthy of respect, can be resonated with, and are not in the slightest bit how most people think of objects. But I don't relate to them or any other part of the world the same way most people do either. The trouble is the language people use around such things has all the wrong meanings and anything I say can be misinterpreted in ways far more offensive or inaccurate than the reality. (Even if I said I thought humans were special in a way the rest of the world wasn't. But equally misunderstandable if I say they're not.)

Oh, I get it now, you're supposed to see things as object or alive. I didn't know that. I see people and animals as living things, but I feel the same way about plants and familiar objects. What defines things for me is not living or not, but thinking or not. Also, the person who wrote that article should be stripped of all credibility.

1. What sort of Autism do you have? Asperger's? Kanner's? Etc.I have PDD-NOS

2. Do you recognize other people as human--like you in some ways, different in others, but alive and thinking? I recognize them as living things, but I cannot imagine them thinking.

3. How do you interact with others? Do you seek out human contact, even just to say hi or share a fact?I need to seek out human contact because the things I want cannot be done by computers, such as asking questions about specific things, although maybe I could communicate through computers which is much nicer to me,

4. Do you think of humans as objects or toys, or are they "special" or different in your mind?To me they are not objects because objects usually do not talk but they are not special.
I do not value them more than objects or other animals.

Sounds like it was written by Autism Speaks... No, I don't think like that at all.

On that note, though, are you sure it wasen't saying that Autism Speaks see US as objects that don't live and breathe?

if this is true then why is it that when I don't behave in proscribed ways NT are the ones that have a problem with it, think I'm crazy or weird or whatever?

Maybe they are trying to describe very severe autism but even then the accuracy would be questionable because how can you describe something you haven't experienced.

It's not an easy question to answer, I understand the part where humans are living but not thinking. I know how they work but not why they do things.

That's a short version.

Wow. That is terrible, horrible crap. Yet another reason for those not on the autism to vilify & look down on those who are on it.

No I see them as the starspawn of Cuthulhu

I see people as people, a to the extent that I can. I often feel like a ghost.