Wrong Answers Cause Wrong Behavior in Neurotypicals

Social conflict makes me ill. Literally.

Asperger people often find themselves in the awkward position shown by this graphic. Two groups of socially typical people fight over control of The Answer and neither group has a clue that The Answer they are fighting over is no answer at all; each group merely wants control.

The unfortunate Aspie (2) may or may not have the correct answer, but he or she knows that The Answer being fought over is simply not correct: the fight isn't about facts, but about which group is Right.

Asperger individuals are obsessed with problem-solving and want to get everyone on track toward finding a solution. The result is that both groups will turn on the Asperger and attack, often viciously, the one person who might be able to help.

Asperger people need to learn that Neurotypicals aren't looking for solutions at all! They love to fight, and are addicted to negative emotions, aggression and above all Winning, and they will argue unsuccessfully over the same topics again and again.  

Man at the top of a garbage heap, but closer to God.

When I watch popular programs on brain science or read academic papers, I often become irritated. It is of course interesting and useful to understand our most important organ, the generator of all things we subjectively experience. But this fascinating excursion has taken on the dull drama of dismantling a Swiss watch. The need to perfect what is a natural organic object becomes a desire to tinker with and improve upon an organ that is not broken. Some human brains need repair, or medical support, or special understanding, but in the extreme focus on imperfect brains, all brains have become defective; the human brain is viewed as a malfunctioning electrical device and not the core of a unique living being. The result is an explosion of pathologic diagnosis and partitions of humans into normal, abnormal, treatable, sort of treatable and intolerable - a pile of rejects created in the search for a perfect supernatural Man.

Researchers have become Lords of the Brain, the prescribers and manipulators of human destiny. Who are these individuals who have taken it upon themselves to decide which human beings are normal and which ought to be “tweeked, changed or fixed,” whether with drugs or biomedical engineering? Some scientists have abandoned life in order to create perfect obedient robots to replace an imperfect creature of evolution. 

What a dangerous idea. Humans have been ‘perfecting’ the environment for thousands of years; perfecting domestic animals and plants, overriding natural processes and polluting the earth. Know-it-alls have brought us to the brink of self destruction and created a mess of social disharmony and physical suffering justified by an archaic idea: God gave the earth to man to disrupt, loot and rape. Man at the top of a garbage heap, but closer to God.   

Asperger's individuals show higher than normal Fluid Intelligence

Superior fluid intelligence (abstract reasoning ability) in children with Asperger’s disorder

• Mika Hayashi^a, Motoichiro Kato^a, Kazue Igarashi^b, Haruo Kashima^a

Abstract

Asperger’s disorder is one of autistic spectrum disorders; sharing clinical features with autism, but without developmental delay in language acquisition. There have been some studies of intellectual functioning in autism so far, but very few in Asperger’s disorder. In the present study, we investigated abstract reasoning ability, whose form of intelligence has been labeled fluid intelligence in the theory of Cattell [Cattell, R. B. (1963). Theory of fluid and crystallized intelligence: A critical experiment. Journal of Educational Psychology, 54, 1–22.], in children with Asperger’s disorder. A test of fluid intelligence, the Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices Test, was administered to 17 children with Asperger’s disorder and 17 age-, gender-, and FIQ-matched normal children. The results showed that children with Asperger’s disorder outperformed on the test of fluid reasoning than typically developing children. We suggest that individuals with Asperger’s disorder have higher fluid reasoning ability than normal individuals, highlighting superior fluid intelligence.

Pain, Empathy and Emotion: Scientific Version

I want to go ahead today and add a response I posted on an Asperger website after another poster quoted from "The Simpsons." The idea in the quote relates to the Asperger / Social Majority conflict over emotion and a possible explanation for the misunderstanding.  

Homer to Marge: "You don't appear to be in any kind of physical pain, the only type of pain a man understands".

I am female, but I am unable to tell the difference between physical and emotional pain. There are times I've gone to a medical doctor, because I really can't figure out if I'm sick or upset. This led me to read about how the brain processes pain and "feels" emotions. Guess what? There is only one circuit for both - emotional pain is physical. How could it be otherwise unless you believe that emotions are supernatural, which I'm sure many social people believe.  

Only three or four emotions exist: the flight or fight response of aggression and fear; disgust, and pleasure. From my own experience, I suspect that Asberger individuals experience a default "neutral" state. Social children learn to diffuse and differentiate their basic pain responses and to give those new states names - it's a fundamental task of social training. This is especially true for females. Inflating and dispersing pain via hundreds of descriptive words serves to keep females confused, distracted from anger and fear, and obsessed with subtle differences and changes in social emotions. This socialization of pain keeps women powerless. Society teaches females to imagine that real physical responses are thousands of subtle and entangled emotions that don't really exist!

What I am suggesting is that Aspies experience basic physiological pain, not the "emotions" social children learn. Also that we have a neutral setting, which is our default setting. This benign state produces our familiar "blank reaction" when people say something unimportant or baffling. We just don't feel emotion/pain unless something in the environment triggers the fight or flight response or pleasure or disgust. Social people interpret our neutral setting as offensive; after all, to them, everything they say or do, and the reaction they get from people, is vital to the continuing existence of the universe. Social people assume that we don't care about human beings because we're not in their frantic (to us) emotional mode 24/7. Emotion for us isn't this fantastical overwhelming supernatural state that colors and controls the fate of mankind. For us it is pain or the absence of pain - and our response is most often flight.

I think this also may explain why Asperger individuals commonly suffer from anxiety. From the time we are young, social situations are fight or flight for us because we are rejected and treated badly. We are different, and social people react very negatively to that fact. Diversity is not really a social value.

If you whack a dog on the nose every time it gets up on the couch, and then force it to get up on the couch and whack it again for doing so, and repeat this cycle again and again, will that dog not soon be in a state of perpetual fear?

Empathy; the Religion of Psychology

                                                     

The ease with which the psychological concept of Empathy has been co-opted as a religious / moral value, and infantilized in the process, suggests that rather than having a real existence, Empathy is supernatural. 

The unexplained transfer of emotions, thoughts and experiences between 'normal' humans, without any objective or explicit communication between them, would seem to require a magical transcendence of physical law. The public can be forgiven for assuming that Empathy powers miracles.                                        

My Asperger Parent

Although undiagnosed, my father was a classic Asperger male who had a terrible time invoking his social rank as The Father. He made attempts to use his status to make me “do what I was told,” but this effort usually fell apart, because deep down he didn’t believe that this was a valid reason for a child to comply with a parent’s wishes. Our relationship wasn’t perfect, but it was thoroughly Asperger.

We developed a deep friendship precisely because he felt it necessary to explain that his requests and concerns had a rational basis such as safety or efficiency, or to quell worry on his part that I would make a mistake or a poor choice. His appeals to my practical good sense usually worked, but I never felt that I had to obey him just because he was my father. This encouraged me to make my own choices, good and bad, and to recover from my mistakes, a task that is infinitely difficult for a perfection-loving Asperger child. Honest exchange sometimes drove us apart, but I never doubted his affection or that he would be there when I needed help. He could and would set personal judgment aside. He wasn’t warm, emotional or full of praise. At times, overcome by frustration and anger at a social world he didn’t understand, he would vanish into the comforting order of nature and science. His knowledge base was phenomenal and he was never too busy to answer my limitless questions, sometimes imparting far more detail than I could possibly absorb. Best of all, he was like me and I was like him, but not exactly.

Each Aspergerger individual has his or her own personality and is affected differently by social constraints. Girls and women have traditionally been excluded from diagnosis and instead have been diagnosed with one or more mental illnesses, a situation that is improving. Females being overlooked as Aspergers can be partly explained by the traditional view that being female is in itself a disorder or defect in many religions and cultures, a social barrier that has been imposed as part of The Pyramid. Women are on the bottom by virtue of their 'crazy' gender.

 

Asperger's Love Physical Reality

Asperger types are described as incapable of being social or emotional, but this is a misunderstanding on the part of the social majority. Unlike standard social interaction, which is pro forma and fleeting, successful Asperger relationships are founded on intellectual give-and-take and may take long periods of time to develop. The focus is on shared interests rather than shared emotions. Honesty and trustworthiness are prime requirements and these personal characteristics are non negotiable, hence Aspersers people may have few friends. Being social for the sake of being social holds little to no appeal; an Asperger individual may put in an appearance at a gathering if necessary, but then vanish as quickly as possible. Constructing and maintaining a socially acceptable charade, especially in which one has no interest, is exhausting. Many of us don’t bother – which earns us the wrath of the socially addicted.

The Asperger ability to experience deep emotional attachments to animals, objects, equations, theories, and classes of things like transportation, machines, space exploration or numbers may seem improbable or impossible to neurotypicals, but it’s true. Some, like myself, feel that a specific landscape, or rock formation, or river, or mountain range – indeed the whole of nature’s manifestations, ‘speak to us’ emotionally or spiritually. This intense feeling of being embedded in the environment is possibly what animism was originally, before this intense identification became blurred with the magical fear that active spirits, which are capable of conscious acts of good and evil, interfere with human lives. The Asperger’s prime attachment is to physical reality and not to a manmade ‘supernatural’ dimension. 

It takes time for the Asperger ‘get to know you’ process to work and most social people just don’t have the time or interest to wait, or to participate in growing a relationship. Asperger individuals often don’t ‘get’ that the neurotypical person isn’t interested in getting to know them or anyone else for that matter. We do see that the social person wants immediate superficial attention. Status seeking neurotypicals are out to ‘score a hit’ and the less invested in time and sincerity the better. We instinctively don’t like this shallow treatment of human beings.

Surprisingly, what neurotypicals fail to understand is that permission to lie is apportioned according to one’s location on the pyramid, with those in power having almost unlimited sanction to lie without consequence. No one should be surprised therefore by rampant social and economic inequality, but amazingly, supposedly socially savvy neurotypicals don’t have a clue. It is a given that politicians lie to get elected and then promptly do whatever their funders have paid them to do. This has been happening election after election since politics (a social endeavor) appeared, and yet neurotypicals never catch on.

One way for an Asperger to cope with the social charade is to imagine that each and every neurotypical is running for an office – even if it’s a tiny niche somewhere in the vast social hierarchy, and that each exchange with another person is only a campaign stop. Unless you have (relative) wealth or power, you aren’t worth a second handshake.