@autistics For example, #Barkley writes (p. 80), in the course of a discussion of nonverbal working memory, which he classifies as an #ExecutiveFunction:

"If you have trouble learning from the successes and mistakes you've observed in others, you're stuck learning everything the slow, painful way: by yourself, on your own, through trial and error."

He continues with the following charming vignette:

'Claire's coworkers sometimes wondered whether she was taking drugs. Otherwise, how could she have failed to notice the reaction others got when they interrupted the boss at a meeting, took too long to return a customer's call, or missed a report deadline? When she complained bitterly about being barked at in front of everyone for these transgressions, they all wrote her off as "either an idiot or stoned"'.

Now, this kind of experience MIGHT conceivably be due to a failure of nonverbal working memory — being unable to RECALL past experiences in a way that makes it possible to learn from them. But — as Barkley's own use of the expression "failed to notice" hints — it could occur for a quite different reason, in someone with perfectly normal, or even superior, nonverbal working memory. They might lack a functioning #EnvironmentalYoke, so that the hierarchical, disciplinary social interactions of others aren't instantly lit up with attentional floodlights, as they would be for neurotypicals. They pass unnoticed, or nearly unnoticed, amid untold thousands of other things being observed. It's a storage problem, not a recall problem. And it need not even be that this person stores material in nonverbal working memory less easily than the norm — just that their focus of attention selects different things to store.

@graymattergrcltd @autistics Overall, I'm totally with you. Indeed, this kind of point is behind the very notion of an #EnvironmentalYoke. What counts as a "problem" is very much context-dependent. Failing to notice the boss chewing out coworkers might be a problem if your goal is to keep your job, but very much the opposite of a problem from a larger perspective.

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. Those who have an environmental yoke typically can't imagine living without it; but it doesn't follow that the environmental yoke always provides the best way of interacting with the environment.

@graymattergrcltd @autistics 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