social interaction and autism: what's the problem?

I keep reading about this sort of situation: the person showed no sign of any difficulty in conversation in a half hour interview - that could be a GP barring access to diagnosis, an employer assessing a job candidate, the PIP assessors etc etc.

The assumption seems to be that autism is a disability in speaking, or that people on the spectrum cannot converse with others.

It is frustrating that this difficulty amongst health professionals, social workers, educators, employers (and DWP staff!!) runs on and on, without any improvement in understanding.

Part of the problem seems to be whether people on the spectrum engage in collective human behaviour, in part what I think the Sheffield academic Digby Tantam means by the "interbrain". There seem to be two things happening. People on the spectrum cannot pick up on collective responses, and cannot distinguish spoken information for the benefit of assembled persons of which assembly they are one. 

Collective responses depend on non-verbal communication (I've heard supposedly scientifically educated professionals assert they don't believe in all that body language nonsense). No-one seems to think facial expression and body language are that important, but I think it is significant that people on the autistic spectrum have trouble registering it. They cannot read such information properly, and they cannot generate it properly.

When texting in any medium where communication is the written word seen rather than the spoken word heard, people use emoticons (smilies) to qualify whether what they are saying is serious or funny, happy or sad. That implies to me that this information is conveyed in spoken socialisation by means other than just words. People on the spectrum seem to have difficulty with these "real world" emoticons.

Many people on the spectrum cannot filter out background noise properly. Therefore they have difficulty distinguishing spoken messages meant for everyone around them to hear. They often need someone to speak to them directly. This is often reported about schoolchildren in classrooms, the autistic child doesn't pick up on an instruction to the whole class.

It isn't just about how the teacher enunciates this, or calls attention, by raising his/her voice, or a hand gesture. It is about how the class collectively responds. They all recognise the instant need to pay attention. If someone isn't paying attention they get nudged or shhhh'd at. The person on the autistic spectrum often misses this completely. That might be because they are too pre-occupied with their own thoughts. I think it is more likely they are having to work much harder to follow what is going on around them to sift out relevant sounds, or observe any relevant actions, that they are not relaxed enough to be receptive to the "interbrain" - or they just aren't connected to the interbrain to start with.

Something that often happens to me in a social situation might represent this - I often find myself suddenly aware that everyone around me is having a drink, I haven't got one. If I ask I invariably get told I was asked if I wanted a drink and I didn't respond.

When I look into this further I find that usually this amounted to raised imaginary glass, or raised imaginary tilted bottle gestures. I can understand what the gestures mean. I could conciously look out for them if I wasn't overwhelmed with other things already. But it is clear that everyone else picks up on these signals with great ease, even instinctively. I don't. I haven't any awareness of them at all.

As I understand it, according to recent figures, 90% of research funding goes on finding the cause of autism or cures, 6% goes on improving diagnosis, and some miniscule fraction of the remaining 4 percent goes on trying to improve the lives of those living with autism. So it is hardly surprising there has been zero progress in understanding social interaction.

The sad reality is that those professionals with all their preciousness, pomp and hippocratic oaths really don't care a button for people with autism. Otherwise they might show greater endeavour to understand what it is makes social interaction difficult for people on the spectrum.

In the meantime we are stuck with platitudes - <well he seemed to carry on a perfectly normal conversation in a half hour interview, so I cannot really be bothered to try to find out what else is causing this autistic person to experience difficulty>.

  • Re your first post, I agree with the part about background noise. I find my attention pulled from one conversation to another and back again, meaning that , in effect, I hear nothing. I remember meetings at work, where someone would start whispering to their neighbour and thereby prevent me from hearing the main thread of the meeting. In some situations, I just screen out sound altogether, and go into my own thoughts. This annoys those around me who try to speak to me, or claim they have spoken to me, and I have no knowledge of it. This is one problem that has not improved with age.

    I had an early school experience of corporal punishment for failing to see the relevance of an instruction, for me. During the playground line up, I chatted to the girl next to me. I vaguely became aware of quiet, but continued chatting. I vaguely heard someone tell Ann Smith to be quiet, but I am Jill Smith, so I chatted on. I recieved the harded slap of my short life, and cried most of the morning, because I did not understand why. I only understood many years later. I did learn not to speak when everyone else was quiet though, but I would not advocate this as a method of education.

    Re body language and facial expressions, there is a school of thought, that autistic people do not look at other peoples faces as often as nt people, and also look at the wrong parts of the face. This could explain why we miss things too. I took part in some research, early last year, which involved looking at faces on a computer, and answering some basic questions about identity and emotions. I was progressing easily through this, until I became aware that I had been focusing on the mouth, rather than examining the whole face, in making my judgements. I became aware that I had probably misread many faces along the way by ignoring the eyes. Many facial expressions are fleeting, and if we are looking elsewhere, as we often do when concentrating, then we miss them.

  • I remain particularly puzzled by the Triad of Impairments. Some versions talk about social communication and social interaction.

    NAS currently uses a diagram made up of three components - the usual flexibility one and - Social and Emotional - including friendships and working cooperatively, and Language and Communication - comprising "difficulty processing and retaining verbal information", and "difficulty understanding jokes and sarcasm, social use of language, literal interpretation, body language facial expression and gesture"

    Well they've got my concerns above into the last bit - "body language, facial expression and gesture", but is the rest to some extent dependent on body language etc.?  And there's nothing here about what is heard in relation to background (which of course the triad, as a diagnostic tool, excludes because that could be schizophrenia).

    Friendships - if you are not picking up on or generating the right non-verbal information friendships will be difficult. Friendships don't develop on purely verbal exchange, but place a greater reliance on non-verbal and collective understanding.

    Working cooperatively - again if you cannot connect to the "interbrain" you will be less aware of collective understanding, and only able to explain things verbally

    "difficulty processing and retaining verbal information" - What is the evidence for this deficiency? People on the spectrum, unless it impinges on learning difficulty or speech, mostly people can speak and have good retentive memories. 

    difficulty understanding jokes and sarcasm - to understand the variations iof meaning in speech you need to be able to read the associated real world emoticons in gesture, inflexion, facial expression and body language

    difficulty with social use of language - but is that the spoken language or the non-verbal component that causes that difficulty?

    literal interpretation - well if you don't have the non-verbal component you have to rely on the literal interpretation of the spoken word.

    body language, facial expression and gesture - precisely, that's my point.......

    Of course I'm wasting my time on here. The professionals never read this stuff (they've got their own forum which we cannot watch, but they certainly don't come in to look at what we are saying). How much does NAS read this stuff. And let's face it, how much of available funds are devoted to better understanding? All we get are platitudes....

  • Another aspect of this is common sense. This can be just practical knowledge but one interpretation is that it is knowledge held in common.

    I often hear health professionals saying things like it is just down to commonsense, or it ought to be obvious,or a person with autism ought to be able to work things out for themselves. How?

    Part of the problem of course is having a diagnosis in the first place, but there are so many barriers to accessing that basic right. Another part of the problem is having access to good advice on living with autism, - not easy to find amongst the hundreds of books published.

    But in terms of health and social work professionals understanding autism, a fundamental misconception is to do with timescale. They see someone with a current social communication/social interaction difficulty. They seem to have trouble relating it to being a problem from birth. They think somewhere recently there was a time when people didn't have a problem when they should have made up the deficit.

    Autism is for life. If you've got it and you cannot interact effectively with others, that's a difficulty you have always had.

    When was the opportunity to learn COMMON sense?