Note: this document describes what I do not have, see below
See also: NT Experience, Autism Experience, My Experience
The word “salience” has to do with assigning importance to something. In computer vision it is identifying parts of an image that are important.
Social salience network is the label for a very low level part of the brain that gives meaning and importance to social signals. For example in Theory of Mind an NT person will observe a large number of nonverbal cues as input to their simulation. Social Saliency grades these and decides what inputs are important. Sort of a gain control on the primary signal.
Social saliency doesn’t just apply to nonverbal cues, it also affects:
- perception
- cognition
- memory
- anticipation
Social salience is roughly the volume control on the social signal.
Note: the social salience network is primarily the anterior insula and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. Yeah, I don’t know where those are either, but if you are curious, that is what I read!
My Experience: Lack of Social Saliency, Signal Blindness
This signal blindness, the lack of any social signal, is the main key to my condition and behavior.
I experience a complete lack of social saliency – the volume on the social signal is turned to zero. It is Pure A-salience, a complete signal blindness (hence the website name).
I don’t receive any social signals. I don’t pick up nonverbal cues. I don’t know what people are thinking or how they are feeling unless they explicitly tell me. I didn’t even know this was a thing!
I am not only missing the social signal but also the social connections and pressures that go along with it. I don’t particularly care what another person thinks of me: either they are right and I should take note or they are wrong and I can ignore it. I don’t experience Shame or a whole host of other socially triggered emotions.
See also:
Why No Social Salience
Why do I think it is none rather than just very little, e.g. Hyposalience.
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.