Signal Blind

My Experience

You can read my History and how I discovered that I was ND after over 50 years thinking Everybody is the Same.

Mechanism

I have identified two root causes for my ND condition:

everything else falls out of that, perhaps the important piece being:

What Does it Feel Like?

Calm, quiet, peaceful. I think there is a ton of social stress that is just not visible to me. Social salience is perhaps unique in that it is responsible for both perceiving the signal and caring about it. I have neither. I am usually happy.

Here are some examples that might give a hint:

I think Theory of Mind: Identity of Others might also give some insight if I explained it well enough.

On top of this lack of signal, I think different than other people – necessarily because so much NT thought is around social things. I even have different Ethics. These might sound a little more familiar to autistic people, though they probably use Affective Deontology – both of these will probably look about the same to NT people (Social Utilitarianism).

You can read about my emotions but you might not perceive them as I have somewhat Flat Affect and no emotional mirroring or signaling. I have emotions but they are different than what either NT or autistic people experience. I have no Shame, see Hard Truths for an example. There are quite a few socially oriented emotions that I simply can’t experience. Others, like Compassion I use the same word (it looks the same to me) but it isn’t the same feeling. Anger and Sadness are two that are probably the most similar and recognizable.

Despite all of these differences from the norm, I have Zero Lag, low Friction (personally), and experience some Benefits from the way my mind works.

Does it sound like your own experience? I think these are discriminating questions: Checklist.

The TLDR is: I don’t receive any social signals. I don’t know what other people are feeling or thinking. I don’t know about social positioning. On top of not knowing, I also don’t care. Not in a negative way, more like asking somebody how they feel about radio waves.

What Friction Do You Experience?

I experience very little Friction myself. Although I exhibit category A autism social effects I can’t really perceive them. People have told me about them and as I learn more about ND and NT people I can understand that there are differences. I don’t have any of the category B effects or high social cost effects like meltdowns. I am not worried about how others perceive me (again a unique effect of no social salience).

That isn’t to say there is no friction. I know that I can Say The Wrong Thing and I give off unusual social signals. This sometimes causes trouble. I don’t always know it at the time, sometimes people like my wife have to tell me. For the longest time I thought it couldn’t be true – how could somebody make things up about me and then believe them? I now know about the mechanism and have a little more insight here, but still don’t really understand it.

Also perhaps unique to no social salience is the fact that the friction is asymmetric. I have no Empathy, I don’t react to emotions in the same way other people do. I don’t react at all. This is not a big deal at work, in fact I might just appear very calm. It isn’t so important with friends, that is more casual and fun – they can accept that I am a little odd pretty easily. It is a lot harder with my closest relationships: my family, my wife, my kids. Well, so they tell me.

Perhaps I can illustrate this with an example:

  • Wife: “I feel alone.”
  • Me: “I’m right here.”

The Logical Collision:

  • My Perspective (Spatial Fact): I am physically near, in the same room. It is not factual that you are “alone”.
  • NT Perspective (Social Resonance): “Alone” is the absence of a social signal or “vibe.” Because I have Pure A-salience, I am physically present but socially “silent.”

Conclusion: I am responding to the explicit signal (location); she is responding to the social vacuum (connection). Both are technically correct, but we are measuring different things.

Why No Social Salience

Hypophantasia is directly observable – once I knew it “was a thing” I could describe my imagination experience and google/LLMs easily gave me a term. Sure enough that was a match.

No Social Salience is a bit trickier, see Stage 3 for how I discovered it. There is plenty written about Theory of Mind and the social salience network, but very little about what i experienced. Each time I would read something that sounded close there would be stressors that I just didn’t experience. For example, noisy social salience seems to be one of the root causes for autism (your mileage may vary, I understand people are different). It produces a huge overlap (and Overlaps) but also a big gap.

Eventually I settled on no social salience – literally no social signal. I couldn’t perceive it, in fact I didn’t even know it was there. It was like being achromatic and nobody mentioning that color exists. Well, maybe more like people not mentioning breathing – everybody has it, it is automatic, it is just a thing. Nobody talks about breathing either.

OK, so why do I think it is actually no social salience?

  • Occam’s razor – it is the simplest mechanism that explains everything I have observed
    • it continues to be a good predictor of my behavior and thought process
    • it has helped me explain myself to myself and others
  • there are some non-flattering examples of how it fails
    • there are plenty more situations that show it but that one I think captures what having no social salience looks like in a way that is unambiguous and impactful
  • if I encounter a situation where I have elevated emotions, say sad or angry, as soon as the topic is resolved I am back to steady state
    • there is no post-interaction rumination
    • I don’t store emotions in my memory
      • lack of capture: no social salience
      • lack of storage: hypophantasia
  • I am immune to phatic pressure – the need to say something to fill silence
    • I might talk to relieve boredom
  • I do not respect Authority (social positioning), only competence
  • no Masking
  • no social contagion – I don’t pick up the mood of the room
  • no Shame and a variety of other emotions

Those are all good evidence of something being different about my social salience, but zero?

My hypothesis is that if I had any social salience I would:

  • notice that I am different
  • notice that I am failing or struggling in social settings
  • and I would care about these things
  • and be very stressful

There is a description of this – it is called hyposalience (note: the author does not use that term, but I think that is the term for what he describes). He had a very low social salience signal, too low to be usable, but he was aware of it and experienced the points I make above (with perhaps less effect on the last two).

Anyway, I could be wrong, but the consistency of this model matching my own experience makes me confident that it is at least partially correct – there might be more to it.