A working hypothesis,
Introduction to the question:
Lately I am doing a lot of philosophical deliberation, about how or what is it that forms autism. Not the manifestations like behavior but what is the underling process, is there one and if so which one is it, are there more than one or are they all derived from one single deep-lying and covered issue.
Primarily am I trying to get more understanding into my own autism, it will have no real-world effect on how I am functioning. But there are pieces of the puzzle that are placed so far apart that they seem to have nothing in common but they are never the less part of what make me and my autism.
Somewhere in my guts I got the idea that they are related and that there is a common reasoning/motivator behind it all.
In the past I have learned to go with that little shred of feeling in my guts, for almost always it proved to be the right path, although often I needed to make minor course changes, but globally I seem to know the direction I need to go on a subject, when I have that “thing” in my guts.
Before people jump on the bandwagon with pitchforks and torches shouting, “you’re wrong my child/partner has emotions very much (you only have to know where to look at)”, I am using the phrase “seems to” effectively saying that the rest of that proclamation is actually wrong.
Many autistic people seem to have a (very) limited or no experience of emotions/feelings, This has a number of consequences, that could explain quite a few autistic behaviors. I will come back to this later on in this hypothesis.
As it turns out I am pretty stone-blind for my own emotions, but being blind means that I don’t “see / experience” them but that they are definitely there. I know this because people who are close to me and/or caregivers have seen me at multiple occasions displaying obvious emotional behavior and expressions. I don’t register these “emotional” behaviors myself, sometimes and this is very rare, I can afterwards, deduce that I must have shown some emotional behavior.
When you would analyze a great part of my behaviors you will have to conclude, when you look past the layers of covering behaviors, that almost everything I do is motivated by the need to avoid fear.
Fear is my biggest motivator and as I understand this is true for most if not all people with autism.
Although, due to my emotional-blindness, I do not know what fear “is” or how it “looks / feels” like, I just compared my own actions and reactions, with the actions an reactions of non-autistic people and only fear checked all the boxes.
Example:
Avoiding conflict (conflict avoiding behavior); because the other party in a conflict can and will* become emotional, which I don’t understand, so the situation/behavior will* become unpredictable (for me), this is unsafe, so it has to be avoided (at any/great cost), this can be described as fear.
I function exceptionally bad when things are unpredictable or chancing, so I avoid them (if possible), or force clarity, consolidate existing situations, actively oppose change, try to reverse changes.
but unpredictably can also be classified as “unsafe” so my behavior can again be explained with fear (for an unsafe situation).
*(in my mind this is a certainty)
But me still being blind for my own emotions and have close to no empathy is something I can’t explain from the way autism works, or at least not autism how it is/was explained to me.
Introduction to the hypothesis:
As it seem the biggest problem ( and possible the only problem) of an autistic person, is that the filtering system for external (and maybe internal) stimuli, is partly or even completely defective.
As far as my information on this goes, is this probably due to a much too long-lasting and/or too high level of testosterone, in the developing zygote/foetus (for girls and boys alike)
This renders the “filter” defective, no, a better choice of words is, that the channels for external stimuli to the processing center of the brain, have a much to high-capacity, they are too well/over developed.
What is great, if you have to hunt in a jungle or prairie for little prey and being actively hunted prey yourself. Being able to observe everything in your surroundings notice even the slightest differences that would indicate prey or hunter as well as knowing your escape path is safe.
In that kind of setting are social interactions not necessary, not even wanted for it could cost you dinner or a leg, when hunting together only pointing to important things and knowing the overall strategy is necessary.
But we now live in an information society, where even EQ (emotional quotient) has become more important than IQ (intelligence quotient), so the non-hunting and staying alive information and social requirements, have become much more important factors in your survivability.
Because the much to high-capacity of the (unfiltered) stimuli pathways, the processing centre in the brain of an autistic person, living in a developed country, is constantly overloaded.
There is 1000% of information/data/stimuli coming into the system, but only 100% can be processed, so 900% has to be discarded.
The NT’er(“Neural Typical” or non-autistic person) shall do this more or less automatic largely due to the smaller pathways (physical filtering), leaving a much smaller data stream actually reaching their processing center.
The ASD’er (“Autism Spectrum Disorder” or autistic person) has to actively discard that 900%, in their processing center (and maybe they can try really hard and are able to process for a short period 120%) but it still leaves 880% of unprocessed overloading data.
The most obvious way to speed up the process is classifying 900% of stimuli as unimportant, so they can be discarded in the first part of the processing center.
So by classifying specific stimuli (first actively) as unimportant and doing that for a longer time you (your unconsciousness) will start to discard these stimuli directly at the beginning of the processing procedure.
It is paramount to know which type of stimuli can be discarded. But someone with autism has to work under an overload situation, only being able to process a part of the stimuli, this leads to the situation where there is no telling which stimuli have disappeared in the unprocessed part of the data.
So trying to making a fitting selection (something that looks like an NT profile) of important and unimportant stimuli is almost impossible or at least improbable.
This could explain, why we people with autism, experience the world differently, we don’t get all the “important” data processed, as the NT’er does, but also doing it in a different composition or profile of stimuli.
This selection/definition process starts from birth onwards, so it becomes important which stimuli are deemed to be important or better unimportant or even unwanted, for depending on this selection at a later age they will be fully, partly or not discarded.
In my own situation it is likely that at an early age, sound was a stimuli destined important.
Because I was often left in my own room with the door closed, and then is sound the only way to still be able to follow what is going on in the rest of the house.
Now at 41 I’m highly sensitive to sound ( luckily not oversensitive) and people who are close to me can confirm, that I hear things that are sometimes so soft, that only by electronically amplifying them other people can hear them.
But even so can someone who classifies touch (not me) as critically important become so sensitive to it that only the slightest brush over their skin is perceived as painful.
This of course also works the other way around, many of the signals/stimuli from the body itself are deemed unimportant (this is the case with many autistic persons) or unwanted like pain in/pressure on the extremities.
Resulting in an inability to sense their own body signals (normal pain) accurately at later age.
For example when sitting in the lotus pose, the light to normal pressure and pain signals are not perceived, only then when they become extremely high are they noticed, but it can be so late that getting up will be impossible and only after stretching and massaging their legs for quite some time are they able to get up (and yes this is from experience, even so where I have a somewhat reasonable pain sensation).
Now is this classifying as unimportant or unwanted of stimuli or signals from the body itself, in my opinion the missing link that connects having a miss/under-developed emotional experience or possible (partly) emotional blindness to my understanding of autism.
The hypothesis:
If you listen closely to what people are saying something about emotions, they describe them as something physical and almost never as something mentally, but is they do it always something physiological (the physical reaction on released hormones like adrenalin, endorphin, etc..)
Some of the expressions used:
Feeling butterflies in your abdomen, Pain in your abdomen, feeling hot and cold, feeling relaxed/untensioned, having a piece in your throat, etc..
So the first question that this gives us, are emotions something mentally or physically?
Now is the common reaction on that question that it is both.
But when you keep on asking (as tenacious as I am), emotions are often related to recollections and those are often activated by a smell, sound, touch and/or situation, which activates the recollection and people become emotional, because their body produces the same physical reaction.
So an external stimuli activates a mental process that in turn produces a physical reaction (often the same one as during the remembered experience)
Now could you see physical reactions, or better the registration of those physical reactions, as registration of external stimuli.
The perceived temperature change, elevated heartbeat, “butterflies” in the abdomen, these are all signals/stimuli whose origins lays outside the processing center of the brain, but have to be processed there.
But what if during its development this processing center was hampered, by the (un)conscious learning process of which these signals/stimuli from within the body are (un)important or/and (un)desired, like in the case of an autistic brain.
In my case almost all were classified as undesired or unimportant so nowadays they are (as long as they are not extreme) ignored, discarded before I can conscious experience them. Thus explaining my emotional blindness.
But it also explains why some autistic persons have a limited emotional experience, like only experience the base emotions (angry/happy/sad..)
This because they haven’t classified all of their stimuli as undesired or unimportant , so they have learned to process them at a conscious level (probably discarding other stimuli in the process)
Also can the “normal” emotional or overemotional autistic personalities be explained (they classified the related stimuli correctly or extreme important).
And it of course also explains those of us that have distorted emotional experience.
The registration/storage is also affected by the way the “emotions” are processed, in my case I do not store the emotional part of a situation in my memory, so I store and remember almost only factual information. The omission of the emotional part in my memories allows me to store much more factual details, in such a way that more than once I can recall exactly what was said or happened than the others present can (this is true for autistic and non-autistic participants).
It is an assumption on my part but I think/reasoned that approx. 60 to 70% of a memory are constituted of emotions / own physical stimuli (smell,sound, etc.).
So that would leave me with twice the amount of data I could store in the same memory of a situation.
Where my processing center still drops 900% of the stimuli so I will store more but it is very well possible that it are all the wrong (unimportant) things and/or details.
This gives a new question: how can a person with a defective or no emotional experience project these on someone else.
That is like asking someone (born) colour-blind to describe the colour of the sky, he only has his own colour (greys/greens/blues) experience, that is not available/accessible for anyone else.
in my opinion is that impossible.
Even so is it in my opinion not or only partly possible for an autistic person, to predict/guess the emotional experience of someone else (preferably a NT’er) and to anticipate on this, because this has to be done on their own (defective) emotional experience.
Thus explaining the bad to no empathy that can be found in almost all autistic persons.
Note: I think that the overstimulation during the early age is responsible for the encapsulated / uncorporational (not include others in and/or not following a pointing or a look at) behavior of most autistic baby’s and later on the deemed unreliable expectation of the reactions of others contribute in an early behavior off not at all or no longer projecting their own experience on others.
It looks, when you accept this hypothesis that many, possible all behaviors that are contributed to autism, can be explained by the unfiltered overload of stimuli and the classification of which ones are (un)wanted, (un)important and finally exaggerated or discarded.
Even many of the differences between the autistic population, can be explained, because which part of the 1000% is classified and how, which decides what is processed how it’s processed, discarded or never noticed.
Conclusion of the hypotheses:
A question that pops up is: will stimulating (in a right way), how to handle these internal body signals/stimuli and external stimuli, result in a better quality of life.
So by helping the autistic child, to make clear and/or stimulate which physical stimuli are important and which are less or not at all important, so they are at a later age more able to understand/experience the right emotions in the right way and thus be more emphatic.
If this is the case it “education” will have to start at an age as early as possible to gain the maximum of result, in creating a “better” adapted autistic person.
Although one could start at an early age with learning these things, one should be very aware of the autistic way of dealing with things, so only using the right way (positive classified by the autistic brain way) will result in actual learning, for the brain will discard wrongly (negative classified by the autistic brain way) presented stimuli.
The ethical question, this poses is:
Do we want and “adapted”/”correct” autistic person that fits better into the “normal” profile?
At what costs?
What will be lost of the person that he/she would have been otherwise?
Back to my initial question:
I don’t have emotions, or do I?
The answer is:
Yes I do have them, just like everybody else, only it’s likely that I classified the stimuli related to these emotions as very undesirable and because of that they are now unconscious discarded.
So I don’t conscious experience what happy, sad, angry, love, fright, etc.. is, but I am it (got them) never the less.