"It just doesn't FEEL like you GET how I'm feeling..."
Have you ever heard this from a loved one?
Adults with Asperger's in relationships often hear similar complaints from their partners. Yet highly intelligent Aspies often find ways around this effect in work and other settings. What is it about intimate relationships which magnifies this effect, and what can Aspies do about it?
Adults with Asperger Syndrome are well known to have challenges with social interaction. Often, even long after the obvious signs of these challenges are gone, the adult Aspie often continues to "feel different". But they may be missing their own successes by focusing on the differences, rather than the similarities, between theirs and the social interaction outcomes of NTs.
It's often thought that these typical "social deficit symptoms" stem from so-called "mind-blindness" -- an inability to express a "theory of mind", or to grasp what other people may be thinking, feeling and intending. Yet did you know that adults with Asperger's, who are often highly intelligent, routinely pass tests designed to evaluate theory of mind?
In 2009 a team led by Uta Frith, of University College, London, and Atsushi Senju, of Birkbeck College, London, tracked the eyes of people with Asperger's while they took part in a standard test of theory of mind. The results were surprising.
The test, known as the Sally-Anne False Belief Task, works like this:
One character, Sally, places a marble in a basket and leaves the room. In her absence, another character, Anne, moves the marble to a box. When Sally returns, children are asked where she will look for her marble. If children understand that Sally's actions will be based on what she believes to be true, rather than the actual state of affairs, they should answer that she will look in the basket, rather than the box. This correct answer requires the child to predict Sally's behavior based on her now false belief.
Neurotypical children aged 4, and children with Down's syndrome, pass this test, while children and adults with autism spectrum disorders generally do not. Adults with Asperger's pass it -- but Professor Frith's study shows that their success may be due to a very different mechanism.
The team asked adults with Asperger's, and neurotypical (NT) adults, to take the Sally-Anne task while their eye movements were tracked. Both groups got the task right when assessed verbally, but their eye movements told a different story.
The NTadults generally took their first glance towards the correct place -- the basket where Sally thinks her marble is -- in anticipation that that is where she will look. However, members of the Asperger's group looked equally often at both the box and the basket before making their choice. They did not seem to have a spontaneous understanding of the right answer -- the direction of their first glance was a matter of chance.
The implications of this are fascinating. It may be that people with Asperger's do have difficulties with theory of mind: unlike those with NT brains, they lack the ability to jump straight to the right decision, almost as a matter of instinct. What they seem to do instead is to work out other people's beliefs and intentions by means of logical reasoning.
The finding is also encouraging news for therapy. Theory of mind in itself, it seems, can be learned. That is, the same results can be attained via "intuition" AND logic.
Adults with Asperger's may arrive at social conclusions via logic, but feel exhausted after their success. It may be true that social interactions never do take on the intuitive, fluid quality many adults enjoy when communicating.
Perhaps when it comes to the social interactions of adults with Asperger's the most important part may not be the means, it may be the end itself. If you have Asperger's, you may benefit from focusing less on how you operate differently, and more on the results you achieve or want to achieve.
Chances are you're not coming across as poorly as you think.
4 comments:
It’s a very good post on aspergers. Children with aspergers may have slighter sleep requirements, and as such these children’s are more liable to turn into worried about sleeping. Social stories have confirmed to be a predominantly successful approach in decreasing a child's anxiety by providing clear information on how part of their day is expected to play out.
Theory of mind can be learned, but conscious processing is slow, and complex stuff (like theory of mind) is very slow to convert into faster, unconscious habits. So it is likely that for a very long time you'll be stuck making social gaffes because you just can't think fast enough to reason everything out in realtime (while also quite possibly coping with sensory overload, the actual content of the social interaction and the like).
The brain is a parallel processor, but why the heck can't I have a set of parallel consciousnesses :(
Haha. The thing is right! After reading the Sally-Anna task my mind went like: "The marble is in the box, that obvious! But wait... does Sally know about it? No... I quess she doesn't. She didn't see the switch after all. So she would naturally think the marble is still in the basket because she has no clue it's not there anymore."
Man... look's like I am really an Aspie.
Its very good, finally some people are beginning to.or at least attempting to understand what we have been trying to describe and understand all our lives --to our complete frustration and exasperation. Usually ending in lost jobs, lost relationships, and comorbid psychosis.
But they missed the mark got close, but did not explore the asperger reaction to the tet deep enough (because they just are not wired the same).
In the Sally/Anne test: First, as an Aspie, given the same information then asked "what would sally think" My response is that She (or if I was Sally) will think that if Anne did not steal the marble, or switch it, or bring in a bunch of different marbles, or put in her pocket or, or, or, or, then it would still be in the box --BUT --since Sally (or I) have no possible way to know then the marble may be anywhere, or gone, or even in the other basket.
But if I believe sally to be like all the other people in the world that do not seem to see the obvious right before them, then she would probably, happily, assume that is is in the box. And that is where I have such a difficult time understanding "normal" people. Because there simply is no current indication it is, Anne was left alone with it, why would I jut "assume"it is still in the box? The fact that the audience seen Anne move it is a side track, and not relevant to the test question at all.
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