 Hi guys. This is going to mark the first of the series. I'm trying to do all month where each day I will cover some autism-specific topic, especially things that aren't talked about very often or that I think should be explained differently for various reasons. This is not going to dive deeply into anything in particular. I just sort of want to cover sort of what I think is a good starting point for this. And specifically on one of the most widely known parts of autism, that there are social communication difficulties. But exactly what that is, why most difficulties happen. One thing I did note, all of these are going to be based on actual research. So this isn't just my opinion or things that I wish to be true. These are things that are actually rather well-known, documented, published and reviewed journals. I have to go through that whole process. And yeah, I'm not going to be too theory or data heavy or any of that stuff. I'm going to be doing very layman's descriptions of what the actual research findings are. Now, this is specifically based on work from Damian Milton, who has numerous credentials, sociologists, psychologists, philosopher, a few other things. Really passionate about his education. But he also happens to be autistic. And he was the first to sort of reframe, I think the first, but to reframe the social communication difficulties into a new framework. And then his work on the ontological status of autism, something titled something like that, is behind a paywall. Now, I'm trying not to include things that you guys can't read. So there's also the work of Dr. Laura D'Athorn, who is a PhD in certified speech and language pathologist, who also wound up covering this, originally based on some observations of her son, and trying to reconcile that and stumbling upon Milton's work. So both of those will be down in the video description. D'Athorn's is not behind a paywall. So you easily read that. And it's also less researching or treatise. Now, one of the, as I said, one of the most widely known parts of autism, there are social social communication difficulties. But what exactly does that mean? You know, that's, it's part of the diagnostic criteria, whether you look in the DS5 or ICD-11. But there's a lot of ways in which you can have difficulty socializing. Is it anxiety? Is it awkwardness? Is it difference? Is it perspective? Is it something, you know, what, what, what is this actually? And that's where their work comes into play. For a long time, we've been doing it in a very particular way. Their work refrains the whole thing. Now, something I want to get out of the way because it's built on it, double empathy problem, this has to do something with empathy, is that when we're talking about empathy, there are two different forms of it that get talked about in the literature. And understanding the difference between those two is actually rather important for this discussion. So first, you have cognitive empathy. And that is specifically the ability to see things from other perspectives. Exactly how well you can do this is up for debate. But this is the one that it's said that autistic people struggle with. And this is sort of more so what the double empathy problem looks at. Whereas, effective empathy is the ability to feel what other people are feeling. And there's no actual deficiency as far as that goes. In fact, it actually kind of looks like if you're autistic, you have slightly higher affect. So seeing another person sad is going to make you feel that same sadness. But somebody describing something that made them sad, if you don't have similar life experiences or similar values to the other person, that's where cognitive empathy may fall short. And as I had said, there's some debate over whether cognitive empathy should even really be considered a valuable thing. Or if it's trying to pathologize life differences. I'm not going to delve too much into it, but Dr. Sam Vaknam has some really great stuff out there on how cognitive empathy breaks down, that it's literally nothing more than differences in life experiences that you can't reconcile because you didn't go through the same thing the other person did and so you can't really understand what you're feeling. But that's not particularly important. Now, the older way that's going to look at was from two very closely related things on theory of mind and mind blindness. These really are essentially just cognitive empathy. The idea behind it is that you can you see things from a different perspective. Desorn, as I had mentioned, one of her sons, one of being autistic around two years old, they started noticing signs. She originally had a hard time reconciling this because she had always felt her son was incredibly caring and affectionate. And some of the traits were obviously autistic, but she was having a very hard time grasping that. Because especially at the time she had this son, the empathic side of this was viewed as highly deficient. Some of the language in literature out there is rather disturbing. You know, she was hung up on that. The literature was saying that the son should be highly, you know, cold and unempathic and hears this incredibly affectionate child who is exhibiting all the other characteristics. Could be that this child is different, or we could be misunderstanding or misinterpreting. So now she had begun reading the work from a lot of autistic adults. That's how she eventually stumbled upon Milton's work as well. So the double empathy problem, what is this? Essentially, it reframes the entire thing as a bi-directional communication breakdown. So it's not that there's a deficiency in empathy on either side, because as noted, they're not noticing deficiencies and affective. So if you see the other person sad, you're going to still recognize they're sad and still feel some of that sadness. That's not a problem. It's the perspectives that are the problem. Understanding why another person is sad when you wouldn't be sad over the same thing. It might seem like that's a, why are you struggling with that? Why you shouldn't be struggling with that? And a touch on that after this one thing. Communication's a, you know, it's not just the verbal language. It's, there's a lot of other things that have to do with it, body language and all of that. Eye contact in particular is one of the things that autistic people are regarded as deficient in. And so this eventually led to what got misinterpreted, and I'll cover that in a later video, actually looking into what is going on with interpreting people's faces when you're autistic. But I think Carly Fleischman, who is severely autistic, the nonverbal, has to communicate through like typing on a laptop kind of thing. She described it phenomenally well. You trouble with faces because it's like you're taking thousands of pictures every second of their face and it's overwhelming. Now if you think a little bit about this, the highly detail oriented nature of autism, this starts to make a lot of sense. There are a lot of details in the face in the subtle movements that the face makes when you're expressing different emotions. And yeah, there's a lot to analyze there. So if you're essentially over analyzing it, over processing it, that is incredibly demanding. And so you look away a lot at the time because you don't need to pay as much attention to the face. You're not missing those things. And there is research that supports that, but just as accurate as determining facial emotions as non-autistic people. But it's interpreted as you're missing that information. You're don't care about the conversation. Or even you're untrustworthy, which is really unfortunate because that is a source of communication breakdown and social problem that really shouldn't exist. But unfortunately, is something you have to deal with. There are clever techniques where making it look like you're making eye contact when you're not looking at the like the forehead and other stuff like that works well. But another one of these that ties back into cognitive empathy and the theory of mind and how this is really a breakdown on both sides. I'm just gonna give a little trigger warning. I don't normally do that. But abuse among those with disabilities and autism in particular occurs about two, the two and a half times more often than for on civil non-autistic people. So you know where this is going. Skip ahead if this is something that's going to bother you. A lot of autistic children, a lot of autistic adults have trouble with physical contact. And it's easy to, if you've never had these problems to not understand where that's stemming from. Now, it's not always because of this sometimes it's due to sensory hypersensitivities that have nothing to do with any kind of abuse or molestation or anything like that. It's just over processing touch as opposed to processing people's faces when you look. But you know, if you don't have that going on, it's hard to understand that. But the other another component of that, of course, is the higher rates of use. I don't know if I've mentioned it at all in this channel, but I was blessed in miles 14. I know that's up on Twitter. I understandably, when you know that understandably, don't like physical contact. Now, with most people, if I like you, trust you, both of those, it's not just it's not like, oh, it's complicated. If you've been through it, you know, it's complicated. Have a hard time with that. And everybody gets it. Now, I've also mentioned, I have previous videos up on how I used to be a medical worker. Now, one of the things that you see, you have to be trained for, or at least you're supposed to be trained for is that when you've got people who are suspected to be abused, especially if that's what they're in the ER for, or wherever, you have to resist the normal urge to touch them, because that's how we normally express concern. Put your hand on their shoulder, put your arm around them, whatever. That's normally a gesture of concern. So in support, compassion, that stuff for them. But if they had been abused, that's not going to make them comfortable. That's going to make them uncomfortable. And if you've never been through that, it's very hard to understand that it would make them uncomfortable. That's essentially what's meant by the double empathy problem, just a jump there. But all that trigger warning stuff assigned double empathy problem isn't, if you studied sociology at all, you probably recognize this is something uniquely autistic thing. There's work from Dr. Joshua Green, I believe it is, from Harvard, on the moral tribes. But this is essentially something that happens all throughout society, and people cluster in little groups based on similar perspectives, and tend to respond rather harshly towards people outside of those groups, because of differences in interpretation that stem from differences in their life experience. It's just that, with optimism, in particular, because of differences in how the brain develops, you're guaranteed differences in how you perceive the world. Makes sense. It's, you know, sensory differences. It's not really a sensory disorder, but they're more and less sensitive to different things. And so that causes all sorts of different perspectives. If you haven't experienced it, it's hard to understand. Now, this sounds fine and banal, sounds a little bit like wishful thinking to some people. One of the things that got the double empathy problem a lot of support is the interesting observation that people had started to make around the time that this first got described. If autism is best characterized by problems with socializing appropriately, that is, with not knowing how to socialize appropriately, then you should see the same social breakdown in autistic to autistic communications as you should with autistic to non autistic communications. But you don't. In fact, you see about the same amount of breakdown in autistic to autistic communications as you do between non autistic to non autistic. You only start to see the breakdown when it's from autism to non autism. That sounds like moral tribes and the double empathy problem. Furthermore, the similarity in how autistic people describe their experiences in how they perceive different things and how they respond to different things are remarkably consistent. That is not not knowing how to socialize. That is, having a different set of values and all the things that go along with that is essentially a subculture dictated by neurological changes. That is why we're now viewing it as a bidirectional breakdown rather than a deficiency in communication. The easier way to explain some of this and just sort of a useful thing to keep in mind if you happen to know somebody who's autistic or parent of somebody who's autistic in De Thorne's work, she provides the example of a mother who was rather offended by the fact that her child didn't make the affectionate eye contact that she understand as affection. Love languages should ring a bell to some people because you see the same kind of problem a lot in relational therapy where you're providing couples therapy or that kind of thing. People have different ways in which affection is expressed and that's not going to be one of them for the autistic. You might be able to catch moments of it because nobody universally fits into one category and excluded from another. But that's sort of another useful way of conceptualizing what's going on that much like you can show affection in different ways and showing you're communicating in different ways. And that's really all that it is. Understand on each side, you know, each group has an under responsibility to understand the other's method of communication or the other's method of showing affection. But that seems to be the best description for what is actually going on. It's not a deficiency on one side or the other. Because I do see that I do see some rather volatile autistic people blaming non autistic people for this. It's not that either. It's bidirectional communication breakdown. So hopefully this helps. I have a follow up video that I'm going to do every day, hopefully explaining all sorts of different things from why sensory disturbances happen to often not talk about endocrinological issues to gastrointestinal issues. But tomorrow what I have planned is explaining why some autistic individuals are non verbal. Because we know almost certainly why that's the case. But even if this isn't it, there are some very interesting findings and differences that occur in the throat and the throat muscles seem to be why that's the case. So until then, have a good one guys.