Published on 12, July, 2020
I know this is pretty futile musing, although maybe some of the more neurologically typical people on here can help! (I shy away from using the term "NT's" because it feels a bit "them and us" to me).
I've found myself wondering, as I'm accepting, exploring and deepening my understanding of my own atypicalness & ASD diagnosis, about what it's like for others.
For every "aha!" moment I have about e.g. noisy restaurants, eye contact, lack of capability / impetus to maintain friendships, exhaustion in social situations, there is a corresponding "What's it like for others?" moment.
So for example, for typical people:
From my experience with ‘NT’s’ they seem much more able to ignore cognitive dissonance. Or maybe they don’t even feel it as much as I do, I don’t know.
For me, it’s a really painful stimuli for me. Trying to balance out ideas and facts, beliefs etc. I hate it. I really find it very painful. Yet I talk to people who seem to be able to hold two absolutely apposing views yet they don’t appear to get any cognitive dissonance from it. They seem able to chalk it up to, “well it’s my own personal belief” and be at peace with that despite their contradictory ideas and views.
I find it very painful for reasons I can’t fully describe when there is a fact that people still refuse to take as fact and continue to believe whatever they wish. Or when people misrepresent facts and people seem happy to use such flimsy language to explain these facts.
For example someone on a documentary will say, “since dinosaurs when extinct,” and then later on in the same documentary say, “birds are dinosaurs” don’t say “since dinosaurs went extinct” earlier on then! I know, always bring dinosaur facts up in posts like this but that’s because that’s stuff I know about and can use as an example.
But NT’s don’t seem as bothered about how facts get misrepresented, or at least they don’t seem to find it as painful as I do.
Flint. Thought of you today :) Was listened to a Radio 4 podcast called Crowd Source. This one was about an alt. reality if Dinosaurs never went extinct. Right near the start they wanted to make clear the distinction between Dinosaurs from millions of years ago and today's Dinosaurs- which they termed 'Avian Dinosaurs' through the programme
Not enough programmes radio or otherwise specify that clarification!