An Atypical Stumbling Block

[Darkkin]

Communication of any type can be tough, doubly so for autistics because of our neurotype. We deal with alexithymia, the double empathy paradox, RSD, and an entire spectrum of other combinations that complicate this seemingly simple task. Kids can do it, so why as reasonably functioning adults, do we struggle?

There are going to be a couple of segues with this topic, the first being that kids tend to be more open minded and adaptable in their thinking. They are more willing to compromise, listen, and try to intersect with one's conversation. Pause for a minute and consider who you find easier to talk to? Kids or adults? Thought about why?

Segue way two has all the elegance of a brick, but there really isn't a way to explain it concisely without sounding like a beleaguered know-it-all. If you are an infodump speaker, either spoken or written mediums, you know of what I speak.

Chronic overexplaining for fear of being misunderstood...and surprise, 92.7% of everybody completely missed the point of the carefully outlined linear explanation.

Basically, we stumble over our own wealth of knowledge and its tangential correlations to grounding examples that illustrate the concept or topic we are trying to talk about. We are the arrogant know-it-all without trying to be and it can rub a lot of people the wrong way. Much of the time it is a trigger point incident for an NT peer to lash out at the individual they preceive as 'weird'.

How many of us apologize for having a cohesive reply for a question, or downplay abilities? How many of us hide our intellect entirely?

The way you think and communicate, written or verbal, is tangential and linear at the same time. In essence, it is an illusion obscuring a three dimensional double helix of a thought process. Both left and right brain participation, but neither side dominant. It makes grasping complex concepts seem easy, but when you try to explain through allegories, no one understands.

I don't know if I'm making sense at this point, but one of my biggest struggles with communication is bring my vocabulary and tangent weaves down to a level a majority of people can understand. Explain a topic nine different ways and people are still scratching their heads. I've found silence or scripted answers to be the more neutral alternative.

The topic itself can be problematic because it looks at a hyperspecific perspective.

What are your thoughts or observations?

- D.

 

[Knower of nothing]

Knowledge is indeed three dimensional. I believe our mistake in infodumping is our inability to read the other person's experience, often as result from not having a clear view of what the common experience is. I will frequently rephrase, reframe and compress ideas that I wish to convey until they can be expressed clearly but still concisely. I have gotten mediocre results despite my efforts. The ways I compress are still relying on MY experience, using MY logic. It is now something to be untangled by someone else. Conversely, the longer I ramble, the less familiar I likely am with the idea at hand, like for this post, this is my first time really conciously thinking about this topic of conveyance failure. So right now in real time I am putting my understanding into words without much consideration for refining or flow. Language is a subjective nightmare. Context is a subjective nightmare. I will stop it here and suggest this excellent video which is surprisingly relevant.

 

[Neonatal RRT]

Communication of any type can be tough, doubly so for autistics because of our neurotype. We deal with alexithymia, the double empathy paradox, RSD, and an entire spectrum of other combinations that complicate this seemingly simple task. Kids can do it, so why as reasonably functioning adults, do we struggle?

There are going to be a couple of segues with this topic, the first being that kids tend to be more open minded and adaptable in their thinking. They are more willing to compromise, listen, and try to intersect with one's conversation. Pause for a minute and consider who you find easier to talk to? Kids or adults? Thought about why?

Segue way two has all the elegance of a brick, but there really isn't a way to explain it concisely without sounding like a beleaguered know-it-all. If you are an infodump speaker, either spoken or written mediums, you know of what I speak.

Chronic overexplaining for fear of being misunderstood...and surprise, 92.7% of everybody completely missed the point of the carefully outlined linear explanation.

Basically, we stumble over our own wealth of knowledge and its tangential correlations to grounding examples that illustrate the concept or topic we are trying to talk about. We are the arrogant know-it-all without trying to be and it can rub a lot of people the wrong way. Much of the time it is a trigger point incident for an NT peer to lash out at the individual they preceive as 'weird'.

How many of us apologize for having a cohesive reply for a question, or downplay abilities? How many of us hide our intellect entirely?

The way you think and communicate, written or verbal, is tangential and linear at the same time. In essence, it is an illusion obscuring a three dimensional double helix of a thought process. Both left and right brain participation, but neither side dominant. It makes grasping complex concepts seem easy, but when you try to explain through allergies, no one understands.

I don't know if I'm making sense at this point, but one of my biggest struggles with communication is bring my vocabulary and tangent weaves down to a level a majority of people can understand. Explain a topic nine different ways and people are still scratching their heads. I've found silence or scripted answers to be the more neutral alternative.

The topic itself can be problematic because it looks at a hyperspecific perspective.

What are your thoughts or observations?

- D.

Agree 100%. Story of my life. The strangest thing is that I often can explain complicated concepts to my respiratory therapy students,...a little more trouble explaining these things to new nurses,...and physicians,...good Lord,...it's like I might as well be speaking in tongues. I have had physicians just look at me with that far away stare like I am not even speaking their language. At some level I get it,...they have NO training in what I do, let alone trying to explain how the waveform graphics have anything to do with how and why their patients are breathing the way that they do, and why it is important,...and why their care plan probably isn't going to work, etc.

I've had a physician angry and yelling at me in front of the team because I warned him and warned him and warned him,...and when I was right and the patient nearly died, "It must be nice to be right all the time!!!" I just looked at him like the fool that he was,..."We're not going to do this right now." I said in a very calm voice. Pissed him off even more.

It's become VERY clear I see things they just don't. Even the pulmonologists, lung specialists,...physicians who SHOULD know these things,...don't get it. It's like, "Am I the only intelligent person in this room?" "What the heck is going on here?" I've almost quit my job a few times,..."The patient needs to be on these ventilator settings." Explain to a team physicians for 9 months,...every day, pushback,...9 months,...10's of thousands of dollars a day,...the child and the family disrupted. We sent the kid home on the settings I picked after meeting the child for the first 15 seconds. I was SO pissed. "Are you kidding me?!!!!"

Just a few examples. Communication is one thing,...education is another,...and openness to the information you are presenting is yet another. 5-7 more years,...I keep telling myself,...then I am retired and can get on with my life.

 

[Darkkin]

Facets of the helix. In an ironic twist, I've noticed the some of those most prone to missing a point can be fellow autistics. Some of it is rooted in the very linear (logic) based approaches we have to things.

We have on process that works, why mess with. And if a concept is not explained exactly the way they understand in terms that exactly align with their interests, they will not understand the topic.

Atypical learners as an example.

 

[Atrapa Almas]

Facets of the helix. In an ironic twist, I've noticed the some of those most prone to missing a point can be fellow autistics. Some of it is rooted in the very linear (logic) based approaches we have to things.

We have on process that works, why mess with. And if a concept is not explained exactly the way they understand in terms that exactly align with their interests, they will not understand the topic.

Atypical learners as an example.

In my experience NT miss points because they are not interested in learning non in deep understanding. The way autists miss points is different.

 

[Atrapa Almas]

Communication of any type can be tough, doubly so for autistics because of our neurotype. We deal with alexithymia, the double empathy paradox, RSD, and an entire spectrum of other combinations that complicate this seemingly simple task. Kids can do it, so why as reasonably functioning adults, do we struggle?

Because we are wired diferently so we have different capabilities.

There are going to be a couple of segues with this topic, the first being that kids tend to be more open minded and adaptable in their thinking. They are more willing to compromise, listen, and try to intersect with one's conversation. Pause for a minute and consider who you find easier to talk to? Kids or adults? Thought about why?

I find easier talking with kids, and I think its because my brain, emotional awarenes, and many other things are closest to kids than to adults. Autism, or I should say, some kind of autisms are divergences in the development process so it makes sense that we are more like kids in many things. Like being more sincere, more inocent, understanding less body language and many other things.

Chronic overexplaining for fear of being misunderstood...and surprise, 92.7% of everybody completely missed the point of the carefully outlined linear explanation.

In the same way we have an overloading problem when many sensory chanels are flodded at the same time, NTs have problem when they go deep enought in a topic. They need concide, easy to understand, not thinking heavy information. That is because they process in parallel. Lets put an easy example:

Calculate the square root of 1239. An autist person will try to solve the root, trying to ignore sounds, images, smells, and any other invasive source so they can go deep and solve that thing. An NT person will take into account the body language of the people arround, will wonder if it is a joke, will think about social interactions, will try to make other person help him, will think in ways of avoiding doing the math, will think in the consecuences and probably will start thinking a excuse or a lie to avoid the situation. So that NT person is not going deep because their brain is wired to process many parallel sub-processes. So they cant follow your carefully outlined linear explanation like you cant conversate in a pub full of people speaking at the same time.

How many of us apologize for having a cohesive reply for a question, or downplay abilities? How many of us hide our intellect entirely?

I have never apologize for that, but when I am being praised I tend to make jokes about myself to "easy" others that migth (and will) feel bad because I am good at something they struggle.

The way you think and communicate, written or verbal, is tangential and linear at the same time. In essence, it is an illusion obscuring a three dimensional double helix of a thought process. Both left and right brain participation, but neither side dominant. It makes grasping complex concepts seem easy, but when you try to explain through allergies, no one understands.

I actually did not understand that.

I don't know if I'm making sense at this point, but one of my biggest struggles with communication is bring my vocabulary and tangent weaves down to a level a majority of people can understand. Explain a topic nine different ways and people are still scratching their heads. I've found silence or scripted answers to be the more neutral alternative.

The topic itself can be problematic because it looks at a hyperspecific perspective.

What are your thoughts or observations?

- D.

I am good at explaining myself, so my problem is overexplaining to show too many angles from something can be understood. But most of the times I get understood in their way, which tend to be that they understand how to solve something that is exactly like the study case. Im used that people cant see things the way I see them, much like @Neonatal RRT explained. I actually have the very same issue in my working field. And get said the same thing: "It must be nice to be right all the time!!!" which I tend to respond: It would be even nicer if you had listened to me and not caused that havoc as you did.

Being equally hated and needed is quite a nice feeling too.

Nice thread.

 

[Gerald Wilgus]

I try to explain where people are at and use different methods. I have done presentations at schools about my interest in ancient life and geologic history. In elementary school, I once had the children explore deep time. To do that I used a 52 foot length of yarn (one million years to an inch) that I marked with different ages and made hangers with hand drawn appropriate pictures. As a child was unraveling it down a hallway, giving it to children to hold up, I had them put a hanger at 3 inches designating the first human-like animals and went from there to put hangers at; the last of the dinosaurs (65 inches), the great Pennsylvanian coal forests (300 inches), the age of fishes (400 inches), the great radiation of animals in the Cambrian (540 inches), and finally the first complex animals in the Ediacaran at the end of the yarn. I saw they were getting it as i explained we would need another 300 feet to get us back to the first life close to the formation of the earth. Once there was a "young earth" mom who started asking pointed questions about the dating. I do not argue with such, but I respectfully answered that the same physics that allows us to make working nuclear weapons allows us to date deep time especially when there are igneous rocks near the fossil layers. Then, especially for elementary school children, I bring out dinosaur bones that they can handle.

I have a great time doing this. One class chipped in to have an artist somebody knew do a T. rex sketch that they gave to me.

 

[Darkkin]

I try to explain where people are at and use different methods. I have done presentations at schools about my interest in ancient life and geologic history. In elementary school, I once had the children explore deep time. To do that I used a 52 foot length of yarn (one million years to an inch) that I marked with different ages and made hangers with hand drawn appropriate pictures. As a child was unraveling it down a hallway, giving it to children to hold up, I had them put a hanger at 3 inches designating the first human-like animals and went from there to put hangers at; the last of the dinosaurs (65 inches), the great Pennsylvanian coal forests (300 inches), the age of fishes (400 inches), the great radiation of animals in the Cambrian (540 inches), and finally the first complex animals in the Ediacaran at the end of the yarn. I saw they were getting it as i explained we would need another 300 feet to get us back to the first life close to the formation of the earth. Once there was a "young earth" mom who started asking pointed questions about the dating. I do not argue with such, but I respectfully answered that the same physics that allows us to make working nuclear weapons allows us to date deep time especially when there are igneous rocks near the fossil layers. Then, especially for elementary school children, I bring out dinosaur bones that they can handle.

I have a great time doing this. One class chipped in to have an artist somebody knew do a T. rex sketch that they gave to me.

This is just smart teaching. Roughly 40% of people are visual learners. Making it multidimensional and tangible get the learners involved, which initiates the active thought processes instead of just latent retention. This is what good teachers do. And these are the types of lessons people remember.

Edit: Allergies in the OP should be allegories. (facepalm). No wonder people get lost.