Show threadDouglas Edwards Mar 3

@KatyElphinstone If I may sum up:

(1) Neurotypicals are the ones who are rigid, not #autistics! They have a hardwired set of assumptions and mental reflexes that facilitate efficient interaction with common environments (especially social environments) but can fail very badly outside their native domain. What I call the #EnvironmentalYoke.

(2) Autistics appear to pay a heavy price for our disconnect from the hardwired social interactions at which neurotypicals are so facile, but it is a FIXED price, paid up front. In return we get a potentially unlimited income stream of principled insights into how the world — the WHOLE world, not just the socially relevant part — REALLY works.

(3) Given (1) and (2), no wonder evolution keeps inflicting our kind on a bewildered neurotypical social world that sees nothing in us but weirdness and inefficiency.

(4) Your references appear to be a gold mine of resources for giving detail and concreteness to the very general concept of an #EnvironmentalYoke.

@autistics

Show threadDouglas Edwards Feb 26
@KatyElphinstone This line of thinking entirely makes sense to me, and ties in with my idea of #autism being due to the lack of a hardwired #EnvironmentalYoke that constrains neurotypical interests and engagement far more strongly than our interests and engagement are constrained. One of the ways that constraint could be exercised is by the #EnvironmentalYoke imposing far more dogmatic #priors than we have. Beds contain pillows, not ravioli!
Show threadDouglas Edwards Feb 4

@emily_rugburn @autistics Those leveling such accusations — that we do not act like "real people" — are confusing THEIR PERCEPTION with reality. Their instinctive "people radar" (the #EnvironmentalYoke) can't lock onto us, so they think there can't really be anything there. To them, we're stealth people!

More on this phenomenon:

https://zeroes.ca/@dedicto/115981748119894563

Douglas Edwards :neurodiv: (@[email protected])

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] My comparison was with the "relaxed stability" (a euphemism for instability!) intentionally designed into the F-16 fighter jet because of its contribution to high performance! #kaleidotropy I'm aware of double empathy theory and I intend to look further into it, but my guess is that it can't fully explain our communication difficulties. I have difficulties in understanding other people generally, autistic or not. But in understanding each other, there's at least one important obstacle we DON'T face, that neurotypicals must overcome when they try to understand us: failure of the #EnvironmentalYoke. They assume they'll be able to understand us intuitively, the way they understand each other — and when they try it on us, NOTHING REGISTERS. To their special mind-sensors, we're invisible! It must be a terrifying experience for them. As if we were Ringwraiths. If you've seen the Peter Jackson movies of "The Lord of the Rings", think of the confrontation on Weathertop, before Frodo has put on the Ring of Power. The Lord of the Nazgûl turns to face Frodo, and you expect to see his face — and there's NOTHING THERE. Just a black void within his black hood. No wonder they compare us to robots and chimpanzees. That isn't the reality of our existence — but I suspect that for many neurotypicals, it IS the reality of THEIR EXPERIENCE OF US. We're visitors from the Uncanny Valley! https://zeroes.ca/@dedicto/114562251449610899

zeroes.ca
Show threadDouglas Edwards Jan 30

@avuko @autistics @adelinej My comparison was with the "relaxed stability" (a euphemism for instability!) intentionally designed into the F-16 fighter jet because of its contribution to high performance! #kaleidotropy

I'm aware of double empathy theory and I intend to look further into it, but my guess is that it can't fully explain our communication difficulties. I have difficulties in understanding other people generally, autistic or not.

But in understanding each other, there's at least one important obstacle we DON'T face, that neurotypicals must overcome when they try to understand us: failure of the #EnvironmentalYoke. They assume they'll be able to understand us intuitively, the way they understand each other — and when they try it on us, NOTHING REGISTERS. To their special mind-sensors, we're invisible! It must be a terrifying experience for them. As if we were Ringwraiths. If you've seen the Peter Jackson movies of "The Lord of the Rings", think of the confrontation on Weathertop, before Frodo has put on the Ring of Power. The Lord of the Nazgûl turns to face Frodo, and you expect to see his face — and there's NOTHING THERE. Just a black void within his black hood.

No wonder they compare us to robots and chimpanzees. That isn't the reality of our existence — but I suspect that for many neurotypicals, it IS the reality of THEIR EXPERIENCE OF US. We're visitors from the Uncanny Valley!

https://zeroes.ca/@dedicto/114562251449610899

Douglas Edwards :neurodiv: (@[email protected])

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] My comparison is with the F-16 fighter jet, which was the first aircraft deliberately designed to be unstable (the engineering euphemism is "relaxed stability", but it's instability!). The original Wright flyer had been unstable, though not by design, and was barely controllable even for short flights at slow speed. The engineers of the F-16 believed that it would be better at fast maneuvers if the airframe accentuated and reinforced, rather than opposed and neutralized, small deviations from the current flight path. But how can you possibly fly such a thing? Answer: YOU can't — but an automated fly-by-wire system can. That's why this approach to airframe design was not attempted until the early 1970s: earlier aeronautical engineering would have been unable to offer effective accommodation for its disability. So which was the "real" F-16? The grotesquely unstable machine that required thousands of microadjustments per second to its control surfaces just to take off safely? Or the terrifyingly agile air-superiority fighter that asked no quarter from anything that flew? It was of course both. That's how absurd it is to think that disability, in the sense of a condition requiring accommodation, sets ANY limit on high performance when the appropriate accommodation is offered. So am I saying my brain is an F-16? Not exactly. Maybe, at most, an F-16 alpha-test prototype that needs some serious work on its fly-by-wire system. But in the broader outlines, I believe this is what neurodivergence, especially #kaleidotropic autism, is fundamentally about. Trying to design for high performance poses some challenges that you don't face if you're aiming merely for a Cessna 152.

zeroes.ca
Show threadDouglas Edwards Jan 30
@independentpen @misaimed_brain @autistics The "environmental" in #EnvironmentalYoke refers to what they're yoked TO. It's the neurological structure that yokes them to the environment — the social environment, and the socially relevant portions of the physical environment. We're free of that.
Show threadDouglas Edwards Jan 29

@independentpen @misaimed_brain @autistics And this addresses the question why the term "yoke" was chosen for the #EnvironmentalYoke. It facilitates attention to, and understanding of, certain socially relevant things, but also CONSTRAINS attention in ways that can be detrimental if the things that need attention aren't within its purview:

https://zeroes.ca/@dedicto/115508631395851934

Douglas Edwards :neurodiv: (@[email protected])

@[email protected] @[email protected] The term #EnvironmentalYoke is NOT intended as laudatory — as defining autism through lack of something which everyone ought to have. No doubt neurotypicals would see it that way, but I am NOT implying agreement with that perspective. If I could somehow acquire a fully functional environmental yoke, I would find it suffocatingly oppressive: forcing me to be concerned continually with things that GET IN THE WAY of what I'd rather be thinking about — and, especially, with social interactions with people I'd rather not interact with. Indeed, I chose the term "yoke" specifically as a pejorative — to emphasize the role of this neurological structure as a facilitator of oppression. But the term "yoke" is used so often as a metaphor that the ugliness behind it is easily forgotten. I found the Wikipedia article on actual, literal yokes helpful in reminding myself what they're really about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoke

zeroes.ca
Show threadDouglas Edwards Jan 29

@independentpen @misaimed_brain @autistics I'm not sure the concept lends itself to a succinct definition. This excerpt is the closest I have to a definition:

'The neurotypical environmental yoke is NOT necessarily superior in addressing even the matters it highlights as important. What it provides is a "canned", "hardwired", instinctive attentional apparatus for engaging with the portions of the world that are relevant to survival in human society — prominently including direct social interactions, but also aspects of the physical world that are relevant to survival.'

There's also the post from 3 months ago that introduced the #EnvironmentalYoke, although at that time I wasn't hashtagging it yet:

https://zeroes.ca/@dedicto/115457107590672323

Douglas Edwards :neurodiv: (@[email protected])

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] There are numerous known genetic conditions, involving completely different genes, that can cause autism, like your PTEN; and many more cases of autism that are thought to be due to complex, poorly understood interactions between various as yet unknown collections of genes. Autism is a "final common pathway" that can be reached in many ways. To explain this convergence, I've hypothesized the existence of a complex neurological pattern I call "the environmental yoke", that is common to allistics, and is involved in closely monitoring the physical and social environment and integrating information gathered from the environment. Anything that TURNS OFF or DISABLES the environmental yoke results in autism. Since it is such a complex structure, there are many ways to turn it off. A point mutation in any gene critical to its functioning could disable it. But so could a complex pattern of subtle changes in multiple genes. And there may even also be a specific "off switch" that disables the environmental yoke with few or no other, separate effects. To allistics who rely constantly on their environmental yoke, and take it for granted, its absence may seem at once bizarre and pitiable. They have a hard time seeing autism as anything but a defect, and an equally hard time seeing how anyone could manage daily life without the environmental yoke. Yet it's also possible that, critical as the environmental yoke may have been to human survival and development in the past, at present it GETS IN THE WAY of the exercise of other valuable capabilities that we have developed. So allistics are confronted with the spectacle of a strange and seemingly incomprehensible pattern of thought and behavior that is commonly associated with things like seizures and intellectual disability — and yet is also commonly found in people who do NOT have any such problems, and even turns out to have distinct and considerable advantages whether or not it is associated with any other problematic abnormalities.

zeroes.ca
Show threadDouglas Edwards Jan 29
@misaimed_brain @autistics I have a different concept of what we lack — one that doesn't tend to assume that lack of it is necessarily a tragedy. I call it the #EnvironmentalYoke. Check out that hashtag.
Show threadDouglas Edwards Jan 23
@autistics @adelinej It's the work week so I can't write too much, but — something just occurred to me: if neurotypicals rely on the automatic mechanisms of their #EnvironmentalYoke (and not on any actual THEORY of mind) for understanding of other minds, that could help explain why they react so negatively to #autistics. Because that #EnvironmentalYoke doesn't work on us, or not nearly as well as they think it should. They misread us, or can't get a read on us at all. They compare us to robots or chimpanzees because that’s how they experience us! But the relevant limitation is in THEM, not us.
Douglas Edwards Jan 18

@autistics @adelinej

I just read the Wikipedia article on "Empathy in autistic people", and discovered that there's at least one prominent autism researcher who had already reached the same conclusion I recently did, about the "theory of mind deficit" theory of autism: namely, that it is almost the opposite of the truth. From the article:

> Peter Vermeulen argues that “people with autism, especially the most intelligent ones, do not so much suffer from a deficit in theory of mind, but rather from a deficit in ‘intuition’ of the mind.” He further states that “given the efforts that autistic people make to understand the inner world of others, one could even say that they are the only ones who truly possess a theory of mind.”

Just as I had thought: neurotypicals mostly rely on "click, whirr" hard-wired automatic mechanisms — what I have termed the #EnvironmentalYoke — for their understanding of the social world; WE are the ones who are left to do the actual theorizing about it.

Having read that, my first thought was to get hold of the book from which these quotations are taken. But for me there's one slight problem: the book is in French, a language I don't read!:

Vermeulen, Peter (2009). Autisme et émotions [Autism and emotions]. Questions de personne. Série TED (in French). Brussels: De Boeck Supérieur. ISBN 978-2804103941.

Vermeulen has published books in English, but none of the ones I found appears to be a translation of this specific French book.

If anyone has read this book, or anything else by Peter Vermeulen (in any language!), I would be interested in hearing your reactions!

In any case, I can highly recommend the Wikipedia article. Although Vermeulen is the most explicit, several researchers whose work is referenced in the article also tend toward the conclusion that what we #autistics lack is intuitive — not theoretical — understanding of other minds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy_in_autistic_people

Empathy in autistic people - Wikipedia