Why communication among humans is so difficult.

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I advance here a theory (rather amateurish). Communication is possible using tools, modules, organs that in non human animals are separated: a dog can threaten barking, showing teeth and through special postures of the body. These are all connected within a module or organ, or more largely in a part of the brain (in humans there are the left and the right emispheres, they are separated but they interfere, the one into the other). Human communication is made of a mixture of tools that can be used at the same time. Irony, for example, needs, to be understood in what it is, of some form of interpretative schemes. To understand the irony you need to draw both on the left and the right emispheres. The right for the emotional content, the left for the metacommunicative frames to interpret the tone and the real meaning. If someone says to a shabby person “how elegant you are”, this may be a clumsy compliment, or an ironic statement, or just a hypocrite attempt to please. These are threee very different things.
ASD people have problems to decipher the real meaning of ambiguous statements made by others about themselves. They are at odds particularly with irony: I think this fact is the consequence of the difficulty of tackling with different modules at the same time. This, in turn results from the lacking of the so called TOM (theoty of mind), of being uncertain about the intentionality of others. Friend or feud?

Incommunicado? topic

I agree. I screw up understanding humans in real time, in person.

My other half says that normal people have double or more meaning when they speak, and that when I speak, they look for double meaning in what I'm saying. I don't have any. And, unless I have a reason to distrust the person, I tend to believe what they're saying at face value.

^^ I'm with chamoisee on this one.

Interesting that humans are the only animal that bare their teeth in friendly greeting.

Last edited by Shadow50 on 22 Dec 2008, 1:11 am, edited 1 time in total.

I wish she'd told me a few decades ago...

Look. you've heard about the experimental observation that the point at which reflex becomes amenable to conscious intervention in humans runs on the end of a half-second delay line?

It's my theory that neurotypicals develop - before age two as far as I can make out - a feedback loop between perception and behaviour that runs faster than that. Aspies don't.

In compensation, aspies develop, later, the fastest couplings they can find between conscious intervention and behaviour; and they're often unreliable (stims, twitches, ...)

The upshot - neurotypicals form judgements about people that aren't accesible to reflective intervention. People who react right pass, people who don't don't. The semantic content of the dialogue is largely irrelevant, it's the behaviour that counts.

This is correct.

It appears as if your question is so based upon the number of responses.

I think this is why my conversation confuses people. They're trying to figure out what I 'really' mean when I say something, when the truth is that I simply meant what I said. Often the only answer they can come up with is that it must have been a joke, and so laugh when I was actually being serious.

I agree because if you ask NT's why they come to conclusions they generally can't explain it.
It's an unconscious emotional reaction and if you are lucky they may make up some excuse or reason after.