Theory of mind

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Did you ever read about it? Seems to me one of the keys to understand behaviour of NTs better. To deal with others right you need an idea about how their brains works. To me it was new that NTs even have to learn to distinguish between reality and imagination and the emotions of others and their own.
Getting the emotions of others requires empathy which seems to develop first then.
For getting them right I still need to know the bunch of feelings they develop towards others and how strong those are.
Any ideas or knowledge that help to develop better models of their brains and for this their behaviour and reactions?

Why here? For many people here who struggle to get in a relationship is it very hard to realize feelings, emotions and especially emotional expectations of others. A better idea about how the brain of other people works can help in lots of situations if it comes to deal with other people and to get them right.

Ah yes! The good ol' ToM. I find it insulting the way they think about it. All it is is a cultural algorithm.

it has inputs and outputs

lets say an expected behavior has inputs of X, Y and Z (this is very oversimplified)

X = Smile, Y = Talking softly, Z = looking into the eyes

result of the algorithm (in the right context)... friendly feelings

and the algorithm goes the other way too... Outputs of the same X, Y and Z communicate the same thing outwardly to another person.

It is EXTREMELY complex. We never learned it. It is one reason many aspies have very high intelligence. The ToM takes a lot of brainpower to run.

Here is an aspie, NT interaction:

NT: X,Y,Z
Aspie: D,F,W (no real meanings... but inputs just the same to the NT)

NT: D?! !! !, F?! !! !, W????? WTF?

Sometimes we can get part of the algorithm correct but miss other bits. The NT uses their outputs but they have no meaning for the aspie.

That is the ToM, only there can be 10s or hundreds of specific outputs and inputs AND they friggen change based on context! Don't get me even started on micro-expressions!

X,Y,Z might mean "let's sex!" in the right context. So, I give up, lol.

So what we have is GIGO for the NT coming from the aspie, lol.

ROTFL! Just hope there is a way to get them better as soon as you understand the mechanic a bit more.
The other thing is that we are even in case of an right input unable to decode the next output. To me it seems to be a good choice to start with the master keys for the initial input that makes that causes the machine crash and causes NTs to become just humans afterwards. E.g. -> unexpectedly confused -> crush on you.

Was in the city. Corona restrictions made it strange. But only one guy did want a selfie with me even that about five guys I didn't know at all did recognize me. That's normal for the aspie me. One sayd to his friends about me after greeting me - "He is the coolest of all". Seems that some guys still know me because of my social experiments.
I imagined myself being twice as broad then I really am at all. Nearly All NT guys - exept one - didn't dare to hit the imaginated virtual me. That was not just a bit strange but really totally strange. Why did they even know what I did imagine at all and why did the guys try to get out of the way of the imaginated very big me?
The theory of mind is the only answer I know. Once I'm thinking that I'm as big then NTs do read me that way and assume I'm right. That was not just a little bit scary. Nearly all guys on the street did try to get very fast out of the way of the huge virtual me.

I just ask them if they want me to hump their leg. Woof!

The good thing about having a relationship with another enlightened Aspie is that you can be verbally direct without all the hokus pokus.

Attitudinal posturing?

Rather incredibly huge ego. Guess the one guy was an aspie who did use his eyes instead his feelings. There were lots of people but all did care the size of my huge ego even the biggest ones. They did care my huge size even if they came from behind. People do sense your feelings about yourself in an incredibly way and are very likely to trust them being right. For this feel bad about yourself and whether a girl should like you and she is likely to sense your feelings about yourself and to trust you being right with them and to reject you. Could be a big problem of many aspies.

are young males swooning over you relevant to your love and dating life?


Do you usually spend your weekends getting hit by NT men? Why?

Virtual? A "virtual" you twice your size? You created a computer simulation of yourself, maybe simulating a sumo fighter character? That is indeed really totally strange.



Virtual reality, simulation of a giant man walking down the streets. I didn't know vr was that advanced yet. But I would run too if I saw such a thing. The one NT who tried to fight that gigantic virtual being must have been very brave.

No but it was strange that they did remember me and my strange behaviour half a year ago. Once you are a man on the spectrum then you have to care other guys in clubs and discos very well for not getting into fights because not even few guys become aggressive once they are drunken and trying to impress the girls. I did drink often to much as well. The guys liked me because I was more into fun and less self-restricted than average people are. But clubbing is not a really good idea for a guy on the spectrum who is on his own. It's to much related to unwritten rules and nonverbal communication.


I was curious what's still going on in the city at night despite of Corona. Was the first time since months.


No computer involved except our reality is part of the matrix. Would explain a lot of things.

Thought about this and empathy again. Once you have deep empathy you are able to see (!) how others feel (!) by generating the same feelings they have in parts of your brain. For this it's kind of a connection of visual thinking with generating, knowing and feeling emotions. Same for language. It requires a connection of verbal thinking and puting emotions in language. People show emotions in body language and verbal language as well as they get the emotions of others from those.
For this have strong visual thinkers with poor language skills problems if it comes to verbal language. People who aren't visual thinkers have problems if it comes to see them in body language and people who don't generate typical emotions have problems. And the ones who don't lack the typical connection beween their feelings and their verbal or nonverbal language.
The visual and emotional thinking of people who have empathy may have cause them to realize me being a bigger size then I really was. Seems kind of the way hypnosis works and a nice playground for further experiments.

Your reasoning is illogical.
1. According to scientific studies only about 60 % of the population are visual thinkers. I don't know where you got your numbers from.
2. "visual cues lead to emotional feelings, it follows that emotional feelings and empathy must be linked to a visual thinking style" isn't a coherent conclusion.
3. Anything you think, say, believe must be the truth, right? So you won't take the above points into consideration anyway.

I wouldn't get hung up solely on thinking style. For example, look into Spiegelneuronen instead. Maybe just properly look into neuroscience while you're at it. The brain and thought processing isn't just comprised of conscious verbal or visual thought.

Apropos poor language skills. In English you add the suffix "ly" to adverbs but not to adjectives. I know we don't do that in German but it's simple to wrap your brain around so I thought I can help you if you are willing to improve your language skills.

Back to your virtual experiment: When I walk the streets here in the German city I live in, and I see the average German middle aged person, they should really not double in size or want to increase their body mass to become even bigger. Would it not be more attractive if they loose like 10 or 20 kg? You can try that as your next experiment to study the teenage perception of the importance of fitness of a virtual man in a disco. An empirical experiment on the emotional impression that a virtual man with weight in the optimal BMI range v. a virtual sumo wrestler leaves on the immature teenage mind under the effects of alcohol intoxication.

If you pretend to be as big as possible you're practically doing what all animals incl. humans are doing now and then to for example impress opponents and signal dominance or power. This has been studied a lot, also in humans. It's a no brainer and shouldn't really require you to waste your free time on discovering. It is interesting that you're nonetheless doing so. If you want to meet a woman, maybe approach one and talk to her, not just waste time trying to impress some dudes half your age in the manner of a prehistoric animal.

Which numbers?

You are right. Could be that visual thinking isn't a real precondition. Even nonvisual thinking people generate pictures in their dreams that are mostly related to emotional stuff. For this their brains may be able to process the emotions of other people as well.

Totally wrong. But emotions are processed by the brain of NTs nearly like their own feelings and this happens unconsiously. It's something they don't even need to think about because it's processed by their 'mirror neurons'.


That's right. The unconscious part is the more interesting one.


You are right. I do really suck at this. Seems about the time to adjust the English language a little bit.


There are no discos open since Corona lockdown. For many NT girls counts the self-confidence and behaviour of a guy most. Once I was very young and nicer looking girls didn't care me the same as now.


Guess it's best to approach only women who have a crush if it comes to this because otherwise most won't care a guy much.
But that's not the biggest question. I want to understand why people are as they are and how their brains work.

It's actually a good question, and that was what I was indirectly asking. You are not backing up your claims with any scientific findings. You have stated on more than one occasion (I'm not going to scan this whole thread to check whether you said it in here too) that most people and most NTs and most autistic people (not Asperger people to you) and people who have empathy (that's something I'm sure you implied in here somewhere) are visual thinkers. So if you have not based those remarks on some kind of numbers or scientific findings you have based your statements on fantasy, but you enjoy expressing them as though they were facts, and you never feel interested in checking (as in googling) whether the statements you make hold true. There's research out there but you prefer to create some fantasies for yourself instead, that have even begun to take the form of virtual simulations.



I think the approach you're taking, which is imagining that your superficial observation translated through your own individual perception is a sound scientific experiment is wrong. Not only does that approach lend itself to confirmation bias but further, you are only "studying" a specific subtype of people such as people who hang out in discos.



They're still closed? Sorry for you to hear that


Humans have multiplied so much and positioned themselves at the top of the food chain thanks to the way they have evolved AMONG OTHER THINGS their communicative abilities (incl. gossiping), their imagination and their tendency to hold onto those fantasies (such as religion, nations (hierarchies), money, morals, laws, politics, companies, mating strategies such as monogamy, marriage, ...) to enable mass cooperation & checking mechanisms of who conforms to ensure everyone is working towards the same goal. You can read up on that stuff too. Creating virtual simulations in small and scewed samples under the influence of cognitive bias & seeking confirmation on this message board to strengthen your bias isn't going to help.
Also, think about the NTs you already know personally in your life. You can get a deeper insight into their way of thinking if you know them.

I am what is considered a visual thinker. I only have words in my brain when I am composing language. I should be pretty bad at verbalizing but people tell me that I am not. I think in colors, shapes, textures and connections.

I am more than just highly empathetic... you could actually consider me an empath. I just don't know what their ToM is expecting and over time I WILL mess up. It is horribly painful because I really don't want to mess it up and then I feel their emotions and anger so deeply...

Guess it depends on the people. There are age limits where people learn the basics of language easily. Guess that most HFAs are visual thinkers who start quite late to use verbal langage. My kids are both visual thinkers and NT. Both developed rather late their language skills.


As far as I know is ToM expecting that you learn to distinguish between your emotions and the ones of others as well as between the pictures of what you see and what you imagine at an age of just few years but still get get others emotional.
If it comes to me then I don't think in pictures at all and don't have any feelings caused by the feelings of others. I didn't ever have to learn to distinguish between my emotions and the feelings of others. I only see the feelings of others as they express in their faces. I enjoy happy people more and once I like people than I dislike if they are feeling bad but deep empathy is alien to me. I only get others rational regarding how they look and move. Only from direct eye contact I get a bit more. For this it's strange to me that others not only recognize my feelings but develop of the same feelings they recognize.

Thank you for explaining this I am not only HFA but extremely ADD. I can read deep emotions in people but cannot read very well when they are expressing irritation.

I think LC stated it very well, I get information from eyes. It is actually a lot of information. After I get that, I somehow synchronize in some way with them. I am very careful these days with eyes, especially with younger women.

I do feel emotions with people but they are so deep that lots of people have buried them. It is always a conundrum.

My ToM is almost non-existent but in a sense that works better than having a partially working ToM. I learned never to trust my sense of what people are trying to communicate to me.