Proof?

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What proof is there that NT's can read faces any better than aspies? I'm having a real problem believing this. It just seems like everybody learns to read faces and nobody is born with it. Many aspies avoid looking at faces and therefore would not learn as many intricacies as somebody that pays more attention to it. Other aspies may study NT's as they socialize with each other and get every bit as accurate a representation of their emotions as most NT's could. I do realize that general facial recognition (telling one person apart from another) is done in a seperate part of the brain as all other object recognition, but aspies don't seem to have trouble telling people apart. I do believe that aspies generally have trouble expressing their emotions in their own faces in a way that NT's can understand, but that is basically saying that aspies don't have an involuntary reaction to emotions (how is that a bad thing?). NT's appear to emulate each other and so they end up having an arbitrary standard to work from. Aspies seem to hate anything arbitrary.

My theory on how NT's actually do all their silly little socializing is that their brain just chooses something from a random list of socially acceptable replies. They are more willing to accept the fact that there is no such thing as a correct reply so they just choose from a set of acceptable replies. Our affliction is the inability to deal with situations that don't have answers that we can truly feel are "correct".

Another thing I've noticed is that aspies seem to have more stimulation from looking at faces, not less. That's why we hate eye contact. It's just too much. Why would eye contact bother us if it is LESS meaningful to us? (notice how I stress the word "less" so that you can get a better feeling of the tone of the sentence; or do you not understand that?).

I'm also starting to get this feeling that were talking about a few completely different conditions that are all labeled in the same category because they have a lot of the same observable traits. Why do some aspies have "gifts" and others not? Why are some extremely proud of what they are and wouldn't change for the world while others are praying for a "cure"? Just saying were a diverse group isn't good enough. The gifts seem to be far too exaggerated to be just diversity. I really think the aspies with "gifts" should be classified as something else. How about we call it Gifted Oddball Disorder. I'll tolerate calling it a disorder as long as we just use the abbreviation.

Trying to have a conversation with an NT is like trying to ride a bicycle next to somebody that is walking. It's hard to go that slow without falling off.

hi flying ants...what you said was true. i initially was going to cut you down and argue the point until you said...
our affliction is the inability to deal with situations that dont hav eanswers which we feel are the correct ones"
and i thought about his and i thought, that yip, this is true....
when someones asks me "nice day..."? i look around me and asses the day before i answer i cannot just naturally respond, yeah she's a beauty...i need to asses the criteria first ancd then answer,, but by the time i have done this..the sun has set!! !

yeah i think the rest of your post was venting and generalising but i liked to read it and it did strike a cord with me.......all aspies are different. i hate eye contact too, but i notice if i try and maintain it t's become uncomfortable.......and i think i look wierd..so i look at mouths.......with the odd glance to the eyes...this way i look normal dont feel as awkward and the other person doesnt feel creeped out by my gazing stare.

good luck

AS in itself isn't a problem so I don't see why it's made out to be a disorder. Making up even more useless diagnoses would be pointless.

I think the issue I'm really having is finding what exactly defines AS. What really defines it, not what some medical book says. I don't really want more diagnoses (I was kind of just trying to make it so the abbreviation for our "disorder" is GOD; silly me). I just kind of have the feeling that the people who want help so bad just have something else going on with them.

More or less. I'm just getting thoughts out there. I don't feel it's any more generalising (perhaps less) than most psychiatric descriptions of AS.

FlyingAnts, that was really thought provoking. I think you may be onto something. I want to read that post again and think on it some more.

I very much enjoyed your post, especially the bicycle analogy!

I think that much of the time NT's THINK they can read body language effectively, but it is a delusion. Except for obvious matters, they only think they read it accurately because they often do not receive any feedback to say whether their reading was correct, or the feedback is highly ambiguous, or they do not bother to ask any questions to verify the accuracy of their body language reading.

I think that frequently a person is thinking one thing and displaying some kind of body language, and then the other person observes it and interprets it inaccurately or even quite differently. But neither of them know it because they are not straight with each other.