This describes the typical NT experience of Theory of Mind.

Note: I do not experience this and have only secondhand knowledge and information gleaned from LLMs.

See also: Autism Experience and My Experience.

• Always on, fully automatic, low or zero effort knowledge of the state of other people’s minds
  • You don’t think “X is angry” you know “X is angry about Y”
  • A variety of signals
    • Phatic expressions (how’s it going?) – pings
    • Prosody (tone)
    • Gaze direction
    • Facial micro expressions
    • Social proximity
    • And probably others
  • Bidirectional – you signal back nonverbally as well
    • Meaning exists between people, not just words. Full of emotion and it is shared
    • Called: mirroring
  • Ambiguity is normal and fine
  • Not perfect
    • Subject to bias and belief of the person
    • May not be accurate
    • But is close enough and expected in NT people — maybe it works because it is continuous
  • Prioritize the implied intent over the literal word
• They detect and predict the thoughts and emotions from people around them
  • What they know
  • What they believe
  • How they feel
  • Sense people as bundles of feelings
• What happens when an NT person encounters somebody who is not processing this way
  • Lack of emotional signaling (say Flat Affect) or lack of mirroring
  • Automatic simulation mispredicts
  • The other person appears to be unpredictable or weird
• Mechanism
  • Simulation theory
  • One person’s mind simulates the conditions for another and predicts - senses feed through a series of systems that decode and compute saliency — this mechanism is THE SIGNAL (highlighted here as it is important in my experience)
  • This part of the brain is known as the Salience Network
  • This is called Affective Theory of Mind
  • It is pre-reflective, meaning it occurs before conscious thought