I now suspect there’s a dimension of communication that’s hyper-salient for me but invisible to you.
I won’t try to convey that maybe invisible-to-you dimension here. I don’t think that’d be helpful.
Instead I’ll try to assume you have no idea what you’re “saying” on that frequency. Basically that you probably don’t mean things they way they implicitly land for me, and that you almost certainly don’t consciously hold the tone I read in what you’re saying.
That’s as close as I can get to assuming that you “mean just what [you] say”. Hopefully that’ll smooth things out between us!
Okay, this is perhaps a complete side note, but this feels like a very precise pinpointing of what things like reduced affect and other of the most mysterious autistic communication difficulties can look like from the other (allistic, hyperfocused on emotional expressiveness, or otherwise very sensitive to affect) side.
From the perspective of folk with reduced affect, talking to people who rely strongly on affect, the experience strongly resembles that people they are interacting with are effectively listening to a random word generator rather than what they are saying. It is quite baffling and frustrating; especially since the explicit communication is often very carefully selected to communicate what they are trying to communicate.
So, basically, it’s really good to recognize that this channel of communication can indeed hold random noise sometimes, and be aware of the extent to which you’re focusing on it and the failure modes. (Presumably some of the times people have indeed corrected your perception of them.)
I don’t think reduced affect necessarily corresponds (though might correlate) with an inability to discern things like emotional tone in other people, but it might be a bit trickier depending how much processing mirror neurons tend to handle. (I don’t think anyone knows that, currently.)
Okay, this is perhaps a complete side note, but this feels like a very precise pinpointing of what things like reduced affect and other of the most mysterious autistic communication difficulties can look like from the other (allistic, hyperfocused on emotional expressiveness, or otherwise very sensitive to affect) side.
From the perspective of folk with reduced affect, talking to people who rely strongly on affect, the experience strongly resembles that people they are interacting with are effectively listening to a random word generator rather than what they are saying. It is quite baffling and frustrating; especially since the explicit communication is often very carefully selected to communicate what they are trying to communicate.
So, basically, it’s really good to recognize that this channel of communication can indeed hold random noise sometimes, and be aware of the extent to which you’re focusing on it and the failure modes. (Presumably some of the times people have indeed corrected your perception of them.)
I don’t think reduced affect necessarily corresponds (though might correlate) with an inability to discern things like emotional tone in other people, but it might be a bit trickier depending how much processing mirror neurons tend to handle. (I don’t think anyone knows that, currently.)