I would laugh if it wasn’t so painfully true.
Damn that’s a lot of people declaring that THEY’RE the ones who speak clearly and THE OTHERS only think they’re speaking clearly.
Brains are fairly unique to the individual. When you have an idea, this represents a unique neural activation pattern no one else has.
Being a social species, we often need to communicate these ideas to other people. This means we need to get that unique neural activation pattern into the other person’s brain. That’s where language comes in.
Language is a massive part of the brain that we work on our entire lives. The entire purpose of language is too make that part of our brain as close to identical as everyone else’s. This way we take our idea, convert it into a neural pattern in our language center, transfer that pattern using words and non-verbal communication, then the other person receives it hopefully without massive transmission loss. They’re now able to recreate the unique idea you have.
One of the defining features of autism is that the language part of the brain develops very differently in autistic people than neurotypicals. This means that neurotypicals can communicate well together. Autistic people can communicate well together. But communication between autists and NTs will be poor because of that difference.
Many people are arguing about who should change their communication to adapt to others. I don’t think this is a useful question because the answer is unique to the individual and is based entirely on need. If you’re an NT who needs to communicate to many people with autism, or have someone very close to you with autism, you will likely make an effort to build an autistic language map in your brain. If you’re autistic and need to communicate with NTs, you’ll likely build an NT language map in your brain. I can see these mapping strategies like using metaphors etc… in this very thread.
Unfortunately since autism is in the minority, there are more people in the latter group than the former. This means the pressure is felt by autistic people more than NTs. This is a natural consequence of the need to communicate in society, not an ethical dilemma. One natural consequence is that autistic people will prefer to have autistic friends to ease their communication burden.
Everyone accepts that there are people that they can’t communicate well with. People who speak a different language, people with a different culture, people who have a very different life experience, people whose brassica develop differently. All these groups will have a different language sector of the brain and communication will suffer. It’s not efficient for everyone to try to be able to communicate perfectly with everyone else. The goal is to be able to communicate very well with your friends and partners, communicate work concepts with colleagues, communicate basic concepts with most strangers, and avoid unintentionally making enemies with everyone else as best as you can. The onus is on each person to achieve theses goals for themselves.
There isn’t really a right or wrong in this situation.
This means that neurotypicals can communicate well together. Autistic people can communicate well together. But communication between autists and NTs will be poor because of that difference.
I’m just curious as to wonder why you say that? I am a sales/relations manager, I’m NT, and there’s a few autistic people I have work for me. Now I don’t have difficulties understanding them, if anything I run circles around them social-skills-wise as I know what they’re attempting to say easily. The other NTs that I know of also do pretty well at the social skills part of the job. The autistic people definitely struggle.
I’m definitely still learning how to train them more effectively, since I know they like things to be explained literally, but social stuff is so complex that they miss the bigger picture that is involved. I have never felt like I struggle to figure out what they’re thinking or saying though, mainly because I know them personally. But as for the customers understanding them, probably not.
If you read what he talks about further down, you’ve built out that communication mapping for autistic-nt communication due to your circumstances (manager of autistic people). You can easily understand them. As a husband of an autistic wife though, I would say that it seems like nt people have a dramatically easier time building out that autistic-nt map than autistic people have building it. She still regularly misunderstands me and other people (unless I’m talking to her directly) but I understand her very easily even when she’s talking to her autistic friends.
This is actually a well studied phenomenon in research as autistic people have been shown not to have worse social communication or empathy but differently structured kinds that are sometimes incompatible with neurotypical people (I’d go find some papers but im typically this from bed in the morning)
Also if you’re looking for resources on how to best support and work with neurodivergent people I highly suggest you pick up The Canary Code by Dr. Ludmila Praslova, it’s probably the best text on the subject to date: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/742858/the-canary-code-by-ludmila-n-praslova-phd/
I’m not about to read all of that but I agree I actually saw this in a teacher I had he refused to explain again, explain differently his mind couldn’t wrap around the fact that some persons couldn’t understand
TL;DR: effective communication requires that the language part of the brain of both people map VERY closely. It’s no surprise autistic people and NTs don’t communicate well together, but communicate very well within their own groups. How much you need to adjust your communication depends mostly on how important it is to get your message across, which if you’re a teacher should be a lot. It’s your job to communicate effectively lol. Your teacher was shitty!
Honestly I’m mostly replying to the “I’m not reading that but I agree”. That made me chuckle. Like I could have had “Aurora_TheFirstLight sucks” in the middle of that and you’re all “It’s cool I agree lol”
This means that neurotypicals can communicate well together. Autistic people can communicate well together.
I have a question. I don’t know much about this subject, so that is why I’m asking. Doesn’t this statement imply that the differences between brains from neurotypical and neurodivergent people are overall consistent? As afaik that’s not true, because autism is a spectrum, right?
The answer is they are not but it’s more about proximity and shared experience. No two neurodivergent people are the same and those with different divergences sometimes horribly clash in terms of communication styles. However two autistic people may have more in common in terms of communication styles and shared experience to communicate far more easily than with a neurotypical person.
Thanks for answering
I study linguistics and a lot of different languages, and what you said made me think of how the difficulty in learning a second language depends on how different it is to our native tongue, or how accents within our own language are difficult to understand depending on how different and unfamiliar they are to us. Yet people tend to insist that certain languages are ‘simply’ hard, and insist that unfamiliar grammar or pronunciation ‘make no sense’, no matter how many millions of people use them naturally since childhood. I think it’s very difficult to imagine things which are instinctive to us being anything other than immanent truths about the universe, and anything contradicting those instincts feels wrong. What is familiar feels simple and obvious, difference feels complicated and somehow malicious; it’s ‘unnatural’. What is natural is ourself, everything else is crazy.
This post is satire
This post is my lived experience.
God I feel this, especially felt it when I was a kid, where I would say the most innocent things and it was somehow interpreted as the most horrific insult. I was considered a “Demon Child” and I never understand why
Being autistic is taking a normal interaction every human experiences and pretending it is unique to you and your autistic peers.
Trivializing is taking very real and major struggles that certain humans experience to much greater degree than others and pretending it has the same gravity as minor annoyances that a wide range of people experience.
If your comment is a joke or otherwise intended to be lighthearted, I apologize, but people saying in earnest what you said is a pretty major pet peeve of mine.
Real “Chronic depression doesn’t exist because everyone feels sad sometimes” energy.
Is getting bullied for walking a certain way and talking in a “funny way” for their whole lifetime every human experience? Cause I didn’t experience any of those yet I’ve seen my friends go through it. Are you suggesting autism is not real? You must be living in a whole new world.
No, he is obviously suggesting that this horribly generalistic shit take in the pic has nothing to do about autism
Charitably I am fairly certain they are making fun of this particular meme and not in general. This meme is certainly something many people experience autism or not, though there are reasons toys experience might stick out for those with autism.
I was, yeah. Thanks for not instantly assuming the worst of me. People like yourself make social media a better environment than it otherwise would be.
Some people experience some things more than others. I believe that’s how they place you on the spectrum
I mean it kind of is, in the sense that interactions are determined by your perception of things, and autistic people have a very different social perspective. So by that, they are in different interactions that others would have or that others could easily get out of.
Everyone has a different social perspective. Misunderstandings are very common in human discourse and they are often repeated. When this happens it is not solely because the speaker is autistic; there are many things that can contribute to our struggle to communicate with one another.
I know but regular people have more of a similar perspective than autistic people do. That’s why they’ll get teased like in this meme example, since there’s likely a social cue they’re not picking up on so they’re getting mocked. Everyone has different perspectives, but autism is definitely a big factor in creating these situations.
This is why learning how to write/speak for your audience is so helpful. People literally perceive what they expect rather than what exists. If the ideas aren’t presented in the way they expect or are beyond the sort of ideas they’re used to dealing with, they’ll apply their preconceived notions of what they think you would say.
Even if you do make sense to someone with the right expertise or experience, people will apply their worldview to everything. Neurotypical people intuitively pick up on cultural ways of thinking and communicating, while autistic people have to consciously think about it more.
The most useful fixation of mine has been understanding how people think so I can speak to be understood. I’m probably better than average at talking to people with different worldviews as a result.
OK but you’ll have to forgive me if the idea of playing the douchebag genie game every time I say something on the Internet doesn’t really appeal
Not just every time you talk on the internet, but every time you communicate in general. It becomes more intuitive over time, but it is something I always need to do. I often understand what I’m trying to describe better as a result of trying to translate it. There’s satisfaction in challenging myself as well as finally being understood.
However, I sometimes start typing a comment only to give up on the original idea in favor of something short and easy. Sometimes I give up on the comment entirely if it seems like too much effort. Having to explain a second time is more work than trying to get it right the first time. I rarely see info dumping as an option. If I don’t care enough to put in effort, then it can’t be that important in the first place.
If all else fails, I tell them that they aren’t understanding me correctly, but make it clear that I don’t feel like talking about it anymore. If a conversation isn’t going anywhere, ending it is the best option.
If people are doing that, it’s probably not “very clearly”. There’s most likely social context you’re missing that is making it heavily miss its mark.
Both things can be true at the same time. E.g. people sometimes are worked up thinking about some strawman they are discussing against in their head. So when I don’t virtue signal enough that I’m on their team or at least not against entirely against every single thing they stand for, those people sometimes take a very clear and to the point thing I say or ask and misconstrue it into meaning some horrific, morally objectionable thing.
Like, when people say that burning kittens on BBQs is a huge problem that we need to band together against, and I reply that I doubt that this is a widespread enough or well enough organized phenomenon that banding together would be effective, they take it as me admitting that I’m pro kitten-burning.
Sure, I failed to coddle them and front my opinion with how abhorrent those kitten burners are, but also nothing I said implied that in the slightest. I just thought that didn’t need mentioning, why say something so obvious?
Explicit meaning gang.
All my homies hate the astral hidden meaning shenanigans gang.
This is, ironically, a very esoteric post.
I still have difficulty accepting this concept from time to time. It’s a real relationship issue, I’m talking in the bedroom. I’m trying to be a gentleman and my wife is telling me please just be straightforward and boring. Be literal. Do not be suggestive. Do not imply. I don’t want to imagine I don’t want creativity. Now, every relationship is different, but I can’t help but feel it unceremonious when she uses the example of ordering at a drive-through as her ideal vision for how the evening should go.
Makes me a bit paranoid but does genuinely seem to be what makes her happy in our case.
If just telling her what you want isn’t enough for you to feel like you’re communicating effectively, try asking her if you could add to it by telling her how you want it, and then maybe expand to how you’re desiring to feel about it.
E.g. not just “I would like oral” but instead, “I would like oral, and I’d love to hear that you’re enjoying it, however you want to express it.” <- This is a request that is direct and specific but doesn’t feel robotic or unceremonious IMHO.
I have ASD and my wife doesn’t, so we’ve established that it often makes the most sense when we just explicitly just ask one another, “what can I do for you tonight?” Which leads to very specific answers about what we’re wanting to get out of it and how we can best achieve that together. “I’ve been thinking about you in this way” or “I’d like to know what it looks/feels/tastes/sounds like when you …” Followed by describing whatever action would best fulfill the desire, followed by any specifics and how we’re feeling about it now. “Now that we’ve talked about it I’m definitely excited to see that” and such.
Dunno if that’s helpful but there might be ways to make it feel more special while still being explicit and direct! Just talk about the how and why and how you feel about it.
I imagine it could be she wants more of that not exclusively that but I am making a lot of leaps off a very small bit of context.
Verbose gang 😎
Concise gang is where it’s at, 100% best top #1 gang. Why use many words when one word does the trick‽ The concise gang is the best gang.
This is why I learned to use metaphors. People love hearing about something if it was similar to something else. And not some dumb simile shit, like actual comparative metaphors.
“Why yes, the Internet IS a series of tubes. And the water pressure is bandwidth, the ability to move a volume of data in a set time. And each sprinkler is a user who may have individual restrictions but ultimately gets the same water as everyone else. That’s what the Internet is Grandpa.”
Dude. A+
Exactly this. I hate metaphores because they easily corrupt a message, or make nonsense seem sensical. I only use it with NT’s because it helps getting something concise across…
all speech is metaphor.
and it’s abundantly clear from this thread that so many of you are acting like self-righteous, arrogant jerks who do not understand that. “so it must be wrong, if someone as smart as ME doesn’t understand it, with my perfectly accurate speech!”
Get off your high horse and tell me where I implied that.
What I stated was disliking the use of metaphores. That I use it because it helps fascillitate communication with NT people over what I personally prefer.
so apparently from this thread i’m figuring out that if i just repeat myself, i am communicating well and i can blame you for not understanding. let’s give it a go: All speech is metaphor.
And it’s like they try to get mad at you :(
*explains concept normally*
“Why are you being so vague?”
*explains concept thoroughly and precisely*
“Don’t talk to me like I’m an idiot!”Also the “I think A”
“Oh so you think B?”
…no?
Had a whole argument once about capitalism v/s socialism only because I stated that, while neither is desireable, if I HAD to choose, I would rather live in the States than in Russia. Somehow that must have meant that I love the US and it is doing nothing wrong in my view but they are wrong because capitalism etc etc and I was just standing there like “…I literally did NOT say anything to do with that.” And then they had the gall to claim that I am the one blowing up arguments. Yeah right.
I had a lot of that interaction with my mother before I figured out her algorithm. She’d ask about her cooking, “do you prefer food-A or food-B?” and if I gave a straight answer, I wouldn’t see the other option for years. Then when someone brought it up later, she’d go “I thought you didn’t like it”.
Later on I learned to explain my preference as a ratio between A and B. I know she meant well, but bless her heart, she’s neurotypical.
“How dare you teach me things against my will.”
Oh my fucking god, this. Why are people like this?
“I have no idea what you’re talking about”
to
“Why are you mansplaining??” In 6 seconds…
People can, and will be dicks, who get embarrassed about not understanding shit and try to find blame elsewhere for their embarrassment.
Still, there is an important skill when teaching someone something, of understanding approximately how much they know, and telling them approximately the parts they don’t, leaving them to ask you questions to fill the gaps afterwards. Makes teaching really fast when done right.
Well now you tell me… ;)
Not to get meta, but I don’t understand the implied joke 🙃
I always try to ask people if they’re familiar with X. Then, if they lie to me, they can only come clean or nod along
Or if I really want to talk about the topic, I ask how much they know about X
I had something like this when I was working retail during the pandemic.
Customer: Why are you wearing a mask???
M: It’s policy. And I like having my face covered because I’m trans.
C: *visibly confused* …what? Nobody else is wearing one.
M: Right, but I’m trans, so I like having the masculine parts of my face obscured by a mask.
C: …wha- I don’t care!?
##then why did you ask 🙂
Yeah I am married to an autistic person and they think that they are being explicit and clear but are absolutely not. It harms their relationships all over the place and they are constantly thinking less of other people over it.
When you have this problem communicating with everyone, you’re the problem.
If non-autistic people are constantly misunderstanding autistic people maybe there should be some meeting in the middle instead of broadly declaring neurodivergent people to be the problem.
They did not in any way “declare neuro divergent people to be the problem.”
If you go around your day and are constantly being misheard, it’s more likely that you’re mumbling than it is that every other person just has bad hearing.
I don’t have a horse in this race, but this is untrue really, majority does not imply correctness, occam’s razor just does not apply to hundreds of individuals with their own possibly independent complex motivations and circumstances. There are plenty of things most people are just wrong about and a select few are correct about etc.
Their comments are making broad statements about autistic people and putting the onus of understanding solely on them, when communication is a two way street.
“Everyone” doesn’t have trouble understanding autistic people; other autistic people are more able to socialize with autistic people than neurotypical people are. Being a minority just means the people who are able to socialize well with autistic people are outnumbered by people who can’t/don’t/won’t.
putting the onus of understanding solely on them, when communication is a two way street.
I’m sorry but the exact wording of the post was “repeating the exact thing you mean over and over”.
if you say something and someone doesn’t understand, what do you do? do you repeat the exact same thing? over and over? if so, YOU’RE the problem.
I swear these tiktok diagnosed mfs are so damn self righteous
Wow thank you for sharing. That’s a great starting resource
Sounds like the person you’re married to is kind of a dick, honestly. Thinking less of other people for not understanding your own unclear language just shows a massive lack of introspection. As a local autism, though, I definitely disagree with the last point, as a significant difference between someone who has autism and someone who doesn’t is that language is understood differently (I would know), and that means you can both understand and be understood incorrectly very easily. This post is kind of deliberately divisive anyway, but I believe the point of saying something and being misunderstood, despite your best efforts (hopefully), still stands.
Isn’t that what the meme is saying but from the perspective of what it’s like to experience autism
When you have this problem communicating with everyone, you’re the problem.
Not really, when you’re in the minority of course you’re going to be outnumbered. But autistic people tend to have an easy time getting their point across to each other, compared to neurotypicals trying to have a mutual understanding. Neurotypicals tend to be very performative in conversation and don’t really say things they actually intend to contribute to the conversation half the time (small talk is a form of this that has gone way too far). They’re also usually evasive & implicitness-oriented, the cultural nuances/expectations/perceptions of the “right” and “wrong” way to convey something tend to get in the way of understanding very straightforward and mostly objective things. They’re generally pretty condescending when you don’t converse how they expect you to, and they judge a lot about your character, emotions, intentions, etc. based on how you speak, and will speak to you very differently based on outside factors. You can take 100 almost-strangers, and neurotypicals will speak in noticeably different ways with different amounts of honesty and indirection for each person in the otherwise same context.
Instead of just saying what they mean and listening to what you say, they throw in a bunch of random culture-dependent social cues and context irrelevant to the conversation that you’re supposed to subconsciously/naturally pick up on to interpret their speech in a different way. And you’re basically just supposed to guess whether something is socially significant indirection or not.
Neurotypicals basically just have the urge make simple conversation unnecessarily complex and care a lot about invisible or implied stuff affecting the conversation. It’s not their fault of course, they were just born that way.
I don’t have ASD but I can’t keep count of the amount of times I will say something very plainly and the other person will try to find some hidden meaning in it or make egregious misinterpretations/false dichotomies based on a statement (basically the “i like pancakes” “so you hate waffles”? tweet), so I can relate. Autistic people are usually far more direct in conversations in my experience, and don’t use nearly as much fluff/unnecessary performative conversation. Of course that’s not to say Autistic people are just flat out better socially than neurotypicals, there are many things I personally find difficult to understand about friends with ASD that can make conversation hard (mainly people who have both ASD and ADHD though, not a fun combo for having conversations, getting ultra-fixated on random irrelevant stuff and just flat out omitting important things frequently even worse than neurotypicals do), it’s just that they’re usually very straightforward.
You should look up the double empathy problem. Its been shown that autistic people don’t struggle to communicate or be understood by other autistic people. Its only between autistic and non autistic people where the issues arise but only one side gets all the blame when the failure is both ways.
Yeah it’s super easy (autistic or not) to think you’re being very clear when you have the full idea in your head, but you’re actually not. It’s like if you’re trying to describe a purple elephant and say “the thing that moves around and is purple and has a trunk”. Those words clearly describe a purple elephant if you already have the concept at the forefront of your mind, but for somebody without a purple elephant in mind, you could just as well be describing a purple car or a guy from the purple equivalent of the blue man group carrying around a big chest of clothes or a purple tree that can move around.
You’ve just described the entire language of Toki Pona. The same string of words can mean “bear” or “elephant”, and I copied a phrase someone used to mean “tiger trap” and it was read as “bamboo arch”.
I find it interesting that it with ASD, there is (apparently, from this discussion), a tendency to be concise to the point of meaning being potentially lost but explains as quickly as possible, while with ADHD (which I have), there is a tendency to over-explain and be too verbose. With ADHD, we tend to worry that our thoughts aren’t clear enough for others and go to great lengths to make sure our meaning is understood, which has its own problems (like people getting exhausted with us for our long windedness).
I get exhausted with my long-windedness while I am still talking. Still, a lot of my friends either don’t mind it, or use my explicitly given permission to just interrupt me if it’s an issue.
I have diagnosed ADHD and maybe a little spicy hint of ASD but who knows. I end up somewhere in the middle, I explain things very quickly in lots of words and communicate almost nothing.
Or maybe people have varying degrees of how they take interest in something and semantics are just semantics according to interest.
For example: I have three relatives who are obsessed with the things they are interested in. One is into hoses…like really into hoses. and they have a computer and a car they use but they don’t like these two things nearly as much as they like their hoses. The other, while they use hoses and computers are really into cars. And a third who is super into computers while they have a hose and a car, they just don’t find the same interest in these other two things as they do with their computer.
None of them like each other.
Guess why.
Cuz like Fine. Go be a ‘fanboy’ about your one thing but people aren’t just dumb because they aren’t as obsessed as you are about your one thing. And they aren’t the problem here when you feel you’ve expressed your obsession language to their ordinary language about it. Cuz They get it. You like the thing. They just aren’t wanting to go deep like you do about it. But it gets annoying and old real fast if you’re so obsessed you’re pushing it on them. Their time and energy is worthwhile too.
What exactly does this have to do with Autism? I might be misinterpreting what you mean, but Autism isn’t just having an interest or talking about an interest in great detail, and this Twitter post is DEFINITELY not about that situation. The way you say this definitely makes me think you’re seeing “Autism” as “hyperfixation with an object” since the OP didn’t even mention anything you just said…
…hoses? Like the kind you use outside with a water spigot?
I definitely read “horses” until I got to the part where all three of them have “horses” even though only one of them was interested in them, and that’s when I realized my brain had added in the “r” because horse people obviously exist, but hose people?
Hose guy named Hosea
… I will fuck myself off
