this post was submitted on 28 May 2024
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Autism
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I've been diagnosed with Asperger's.
I'm constantly astounded that people on the spectrum assume that they're absolutely, 100% right, and that the problem is always everyone else. If I'm saying something, and no one around me is understanding what I'm saying, then the problem is clearly not everyone else. The very clear, and obvious problem is that I'm not communicating clearly -or- effectively.
More often than not, I find that I've omitted something that seems blindingly, patently obvious to me, but no one else was aware of because I entirely failed to communicate it.
This is a hallmark of being on the spectrum; people think that because they see things one way, everyone else must be able to see the same thing.
I think probably all people dismiss what is obvious to them as not needing to be said, and for good reason: why overburden a conversation with obvious truths. Though given that we're all just apes with a superiority complex, we're probably entirely wrong about what's obvious or true ๐
It's a little more complicated with autism though, because one of the hallmarks of autism is blunted empathy (and no, I'm not saying that we're all sociopaths-lite).
An example I heard from a psychologist--and I'm going to try not to butcher this--is that if you show an autistic child a cookie tin and ask them what they think is in the tin, they'll say cookies. Then you show them what's in the tin, and it's actually toy cars. But if, after showing them toy cars in a cookie tin, you ask them what another person is going to think is in the cookie tin, the autistic child is likely to say "toy cars".
Obvs. most people on the spectrum get better about this as they get older and learn from experience, but I strongly suspect that this sort of thing is what's going on when autistic people 'explain' things. My guess is that this difficulty with affective and cognitive empathy is also what leads to people on the spectrum over-explaining things; since they're not able to make an accurate guess about what other people know or can infer, they give too much information about a thing.
Reminds me of that xkcd comic with two experts talking about how people not in their field would only know what they consider basic but people usually don't know that either