I want you to talk about autism in eye contact.
I kind of want to talk about my experiences and maybe this is you or maybe somebody will listen and understand the phenomena.
I guess I should start with saying the rate of information is a concern to the region of interest.
But also just the biological aspects of some of this stuff.
The brain is a prediction machine.
I've covered a little bit about the metabolic bank account as well, which kind of is how the brain is facilitating our energy throughout the body.
The central nervous system is designed to move the organism based off of what it needs or wants, returning its self to homeostasis or whatever.
And how it's doing this is through the sensation perception process.
So really what we're talking about are the sensations, the information coming in from the environment, extracting that physical phenomena and making sense of it.
Now socialness is the most unpredictable thing that humans do.
Generally speaking, that's true too.
It's hard to take all of this information in real time and process makes sense of it, especially when things have different meanings.
Or if we don't know what the meaning even is suggesting.
A lot of human communication we convey like body language, tone of the words and so forth.
These are all factors here.
But another thing that we need to consider is, since I mentioned the central nervous system and this is how we grow and or develop as an organism.
And we do this through learning and memory.
We've talked about some internal calculators a little bit in different brain regions.
Through learning and memory and the so-called neuroplasticity, how we change from experience, we go through a long periods of time and pretty continuous really.
Of having these kind of social interactions, social history that's very troublesome.
It's very challenging.
And often we can even get cut off or interrupted or we can kind of see that the situation didn't go the way it probably ought to go or the way that other people can do it.
So kind of processing this through to allow for the eye contact because it is a source of extracting that physical phenomenon to make sense of it.
The nervous system uses it to make sense of.
And I've also mentioned the B movie examples.
How there's an opening scene.
It's probably about 12 to 15 minutes into the B movie.
I don't know where the two main characters, Jerry's character and his little buddy B, it kind of zooms out and just so much is happening.
And it's all at high rates of speed.
Whenever I saw that I was like, wow, that's fantastic.
I can really see this pattern and I can really, I feel at home at that.
So with these certain considerations about the neuroplasticity, our nervous system, what it's trying to do and our history of things.
Making eye contact.
Because we're trying to predict the situation so we can fit in and properly undertake this task.
Whenever we are communicating, it's already a lot of energy.
It's already a lot of trouble.
Remember the metabolic bank account about how the body, the brain, I should say is trying to use as little effort as possible for movements for any type of learning bow.
Any situation really, it doesn't want to exhaust itself.
It has to allocate this energy properly through the whole body.
So whenever, whenever someone is speaking to me, I can tend to them a little bit better with the eye contact.
Depends on the context though, of course, much like all of us.
But whenever I'm speaking, it's a whole different story.
Whenever I'm speaking, there's a lot of energy already from the kind of choppy speech and language, which is very common with autism.
It's very understood.
It's not controversial.
There's a speech and language component here that's off.
Even studies with neurobiology indicate this.
It's not complicated.
So undergoing this, undergoing this while considering previous experiences, it's a big barrier.
And looking at someone while speaking or looking at people plural while speaking is just impossible.
If we have to deliberately do it, it just takes that much more energy, something that's taking a lot of energy anyways.
The brain has to allocate a lot of energy for this process.
It has to do even more so.
And it is easier to just avoid the eye contact to kind of allow the brain and whatever it's recruiting for the task, for that situation, to allow the energy to go there instead to kind of rescue the speech and language.
And a lot of times this isn't accepted.
There are definitely different scenarios here where it is absolutely not accepted or it's kind of so-called looked down upon, or you can even be kind of deducted or judged about eye contact.
And then there are situations where it's not necessarily a big deal.
Maybe it just makes this awkward, or maybe even not.
Maybe it's just draws some comments from the spectator or someone else in the environment.
Whatever the case, whenever I'm speaking, the eye contact is just simply a no-go.
Predicting in the social situation is a very fascinating thing for me because of what I've learned about it and how whenever I've learned about this stuff, I can attach it to my life and just make sense of it.
And whenever something just fits, I've tried to come up with an analogy, but I can't.
But if you're on a roller coaster and it's a very fast-paced, scary, stressful thing, it could be exciting, which are just the same stress responses.
You're just attaching different contexts to it, positive versus negative.
The stress system is very finite, by the way.
There's not much going on there.
It's just us with a higher-order context attaching the valence to it.
It could be the same situation as a happy stress is the same situation bodily as a negative stress.
It's very fascinating.
But if you're on a roller coaster, you can see the next moves.
You can see the next turns, the loops, the hills, etc.
And you can predict that with autism and socialness, especially not limited to autism.
The socialness, because everything is unpredictable.
You can't navigate that in a way that helps the living organism in that situation.
I think the last thing I want to say about it is the social norms.
I am also very fascinated with social norms.
Who develops these?
Who decides that it's proper in this culture or in this situation, in this context, that you maintain eye contact?
How does that interfere with the conveyance of the message?
How does that interfere with the objective of that moment?
I can think of a couple that, okay, it makes sense that you maintain eye contact.
But a couple out of all the context in socialness, it doesn't even ring or it doesn't even kind of move the dial.
It's not even anything.
I really want to just mention again about a major source of the problems with autism is being forced into these social norms.
The delta of, okay, what's our autistic phenotype?
How are we constructed here versus being forced into doing things like this?
I can't highlight enough about the experiences.
Maybe you're a two, three, four, five-year-old autistic.
And then what that looks like for a six, seven, eight-year-old autistic.
And then as you move up the lifespan, what that looks like.
A bonus, if it is a bonus, a lot of times, autistics won't worry about that so much, but that's not completely the case.
It's not 100% the case. So it kind of sticks with us through the lifespan.
I do think we do a good job of not attaching emotion so much to things, which allows us not to kind of consolidate those memories in a way that's that harmful.
It could be harmful, especially because sometimes, and I've mentioned that we do want to socialize and we do have social desires, not always, but sometimes.
So if you encounter someone that's struggling with eye contact, maybe check yourself before you start judging them.
Maybe it's not a problem. Maybe you're making it a problem.
And in my life, I'm happy to think that people have just learned that this is me and there's no kind of resistance there.
And I also can kind of limit my social interactions.
Okay, last thing for sure this time is sometimes the data say that autistics outgrow the autism.
And that might be true. I don't know.
I do know that as we're older, we can better control the environment.
And I think that's what it is.