Autism and Automatic Information Synthesis

Post Reply New Topic

One of the things that I have always noticed due to my unique brain is that many things that people take for granted as objective or inherent are actually learned. This got me to thinking about the nature of autism, particularly HFA/Asperger’s folks whose primary issues are social.

The human world is loaded with mutually understood social rules which mediate how we feel and express things like intimacy, care, acceptance, romantic interest, polite and impolite, well-intentioned and mal-intentioned, and even to a large extent things like right and wrong.

These things, especially to a NT, feel so inherent and objective. Yet it has always bothered me that a lot of these rules vary substantially from culture to culture (not what you would expect if they were objective!). I remember the shocked look on my Ethics professor’s face when I asked them why we should believe that it is objectively/inherently wrong to kill people? Obviously I share that belief, and can see how it is an important rule for social groups, yet is it fair to say that this is truly objective? Tons of cultures, especially historically, had a much more lax view of killing (especially of killing people outside of the tribe). If it is so objective, then why didn't ancient cultures seem to think so?

In less dramatic terms, we see this play out in romantic relationships, were we learn that we are supposed to share all of these gestures as proof that we love and care about each other, or when go through the formal greetings and small talk conversations with our peers at work/school to show that we are on the same team and in good standing with one another.

It seems to me that autistic people fail to automatically synthesize these rules from their experiences and observations, and need to be explicitly told/taught what the rules are. It seems to me that NT people so automatically synthesize this information that it is incomprehensible to them that they could be anything but the God-given, objective, inherent rules that we are all supposed to know. NT people are so unable to divorce the rules with the concepts, that they falsely assume that autistic people are deficient in the concepts as opposed to the rules. So autistic people are accused of lacking empathy, for example.

If the premise that one of the foundational issues with autistic people is their inability to perform this automatic information synthesis, I think we might be able to trace it back to other issues that autistic people seem to have. There are, for example, lots of issues with things like visual-pattern recognition, sensory processing, and executive function.

What do you all think?

You mention the ability to learn social rules... Well. NT's have to learn these from birth. They don't exactly come automatically. But with certain areas there is something lacking in some of these with autism/asperges at times depending on the individual. As far as I can make of it and understand the concept. It is like having a big computer and one severs a single connectoon. Now this con ection could prevent the whole computer to work, or it could just stop the printer from printing a specific colour. (This is just a theory). And as far as I understand it could be similar with our brains.
Now some on the spectrum are geniuses in certain subjects. Why? Well. If a connection is lacking soewhere, could it be that more brain growth then turns itself towards an area that already works fine and this area grows larger?

All I can say is that during my school days, it felt like with very rare exceptions (like severely disabled children) everyone spend the summer learning all these "rules" without my knowledge. As an adult, things haven't changed that much at all.

There's a hilarious old Firesign Theatre sketch in which an officer at a court-martial is unable to say the word "kill," and then breaks down when forced to. The USA is the world leader in killing, but loves to dismiss it as collateral damage, and is very touchy about requiring other euphemisms.

A girlfriend does not just expect you to call her pretty because it is on your to-do list. She hopes you will feel so infatuated that she really seems special to you, and will remark on the novelty. Similarly, other groups develop mutual trust by inference from social reactions, without premeditation except for fakers. Publishing the rules would just be surrendering to the cheaters.

Probably my biggest handicap in learning the rules was assuming that everyone else was also struggling so much that they would not make the study harder by lying. I thought we were all trying to use logic, not feelings.

I have to be taught explicitly artificial constructs like social rules, other people's expectations of how I should react to things, abstract ideas that most others agree on. I think it's because I think so strongly visually that I take in a lot of detail, and then the ideas are interpreted in my own head. My thoughts are not influenced by other people's norms, they are created in the moment based on what is actually happening.

i read in my psychology class something about mirroring, how autistic people have some malfunctioning in the brain part which is responsible for mirroring others, which makes reading expressions and body language possible. thus, autistic people struggle with those things. mirroring is also how children learn things... idk, i'm not very knowledgeable on this, but maybe the problems with small talk, unspoken rules etc stem from this difficulty with mirroring? something about the mirroring cells in the brain...
i'm saying this because it seems that autistic people struggle with learning social things more, rather than learning itself, or information synthesis or whatever. i'm pretty ignorant though, so don't take my word for it lol

There are interesting experiments done to animals regarding their sociability and so on.

Everyone is heard of alpha-male, patriarchy, matriarchy. Most individuals are not really individuals but as ants in a nest serving the leader automatically without questions (on alpha beta division they are so called betas) where they have their own disciplinary control. The interesting thing is that so called leaders and followers do not see beyond. There are studies and examples which support so called individualistic subgroups.

Hence we often arrive at false binary logic. We need more resolution. Outsiders are mostly labelled disordered, strong (such as independent artists) or slaves trying to them as meaningless and individuals to be corrected. Via these so called correctable ones we often get revolutions in thought and actions (which are needed for revitalization with expense of balance) not evolution that arrives later on when the hierarchy is re-established. Anyways these individualistic ones are not likely very neurotypical.