There is a common misconception that autistic people have no empathy. Thanks to Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, the whole world now thinks that autistic people do not have empathy. That is not true.
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There are 3 types of empathy. Source HERE.
Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand how a person feels and what they might be thinking. Cognitive empathy makes us better communicators, because it helps us relay information in a way that best reaches the other person.
Emotional empathy (also known as affective empathy) is the ability to share the feelings of another person. Some have described it as "your pain in my heart." This type of empathy helps you build emotional connections with others.
Compassionate empathy (also known as empathic concern) goes beyond simply understanding others and sharing their feelings: it actually moves us to take action, to help however we can.
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Practical Emotional Empathy
Emotional empathy works via mirror neurons.
A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another. Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting. Such neurons have been directly observed in primate species. Birds have been shown to have imitative resonance behaviors and neurological evidence suggests the presence of some form of mirroring system. In humans, brain activity consistent with that of mirror neurons has been found in the premotor cortex, the supplementary motor area, the primary somatosensory cortex and the inferior parietal cortex.
Source HERE.
Source HERE.
When I look into another person's eyes and see anger, the mirror neurons in my brain fire anger. If I see love in your eyes, my mirror neurons fire love. If I see irritation in your eyes, my mirror neurons fire irritation. What I see in your eyes, I actually feel. Autistic empathy works a bit like a transducer. We pick up and amplify the feelings reflected in someone else's eyes. The problem is that we have no way of understanding where these feelings come from. They are not OUR feelings. They belong to someone else who himself/herself understands why and from where his/her feelings come from. This inability to make sense of what we are feeling makes us uncomfortable and thus, we would rather NOT make eye contact at all.
It does not help that the autistic brain is hyperconnected in the amygdala region. This means that there are more synapses and more dendritic mass in our amygdalas, than in a normal brain. Whatever you are feeling, we feel it MORE... much MORE. We just cannot make sense of it. Now, YOU imagine someone yelling at you in a language you do not understand.
Imagine yourself looking into a pair of eyes that pulse lust, and amplify that feeling inside yourself X 3. Imagine next that these feelings are not yours but you cannot stop them from flooding you, nor do you even understand why you feel them. Now, do you understand the sheer panic some of us feel when we look into someone else's eyes?
Of course, I have been deliberately provocative in using lust as an example. I want neurotypicals to understand the extreme distress caused by the emotional transfer. Anger, irritation, hate, interest... these are no less overwhelming when they do not belong to you. Too much of this and you are looking at the famous autistic meltdown. In the grip of an autistic meltdown, I have actually even bitten The Husband on his arm.
Of course, I have been deliberately provocative in using lust as an example. I want neurotypicals to understand the extreme distress caused by the emotional transfer. Anger, irritation, hate, interest... these are no less overwhelming when they do not belong to you. Too much of this and you are looking at the famous autistic meltdown. In the grip of an autistic meltdown, I have actually even bitten The Husband on his arm.
Personally, I am only comfortable making eye contact with little babies. Their eyes are clean of those disturbing emotions that I can pick up, but cannot make sense of. Babies' eyes only communicate curiosity about the world. I like feeling wide-eyed wonder again.
Of course, at my age, I have become an expert in masking. I have 3 ways to pretend that I am making eye contact:
(1) I look at your nose and mouth.
(2) I take off my glasses. Without my glasses, I can see nothing. If I look in the direction of where your eyes are, you think I am looking at your eyes but none of my mirror neurons fire because I actually see nothing at all.
(3) If I am rested and alert, I can force myself to look into your eyes and fight the mirror neurons. However, nearer the end of the day, if I am tired, this is something I find impossible to do. I just want to NOT look at you at all.
Practical Compassionate Empathy
Many autistic people become social activists. Click here for one. Personally, I went on a warpath in the years 2010 to 2012 to push for changes to the education system, driven by compassionate empathy for overworked children and children from disadvantaged homes.
Non-Existent Cognitive Empathy
I have very little cognitive empathy. I cannot read faces and immediately understand what they are feeling and thinking. I need time to figure it out. Yes, I literally FEEL what these faces tell me to feel but I don't understand what I am feeling. That scares me and makes me uncomfortable. If you want to get through to an autistic person, be explicit in naming what you are feeling. This helps us to assign what you feel (and therefore what we also feel) to something meaningful. If you are not explicit then I am just going to avoid looking at you, because my own feelings that mirror yours, scare me shitless.
More damagingly to my social relationships, I cannot read hints. When The Husband first tried to date me, he asked me to go out for a coffee. My response to him was, "I don't drink coffee. I drink milk." It is my life's greatest blessing that The Husband did not give up on me right then and there. It is a miracle that I have a doting husband. Many autistic men are single and lonely. Many autistic women are sexually exploited. If you want to make friends with an autistic person, do not drop hints. We will not understand.
Even more damaging to my social relationships, I cannot project what is offensive or not until AFTER I have put my foot in it - like HERE. It is hard for me to reason out a priori how people will feel when I do or say certain things. I am just grateful that I have a few friends who look past my awkwardness and accept me as I am. These friends are so precious to me that thinking of them makes me cry. All neurotypical people have to do to get through to me is to explain. I will ask forgiveness for my rudeness.
Accumulated Learning
For people like me, scenario accumulation is very important. In my socio-emotional classes, I break down for low EQ children, scenarios that I myself have previously encountered and analysed. This is something that neurotypical people cannot do, because neurotypical people do NOT have to analyse such things. They intuit these things. I do not. I need to slowly reason it through.
It is a little like someone who is gifted in Mathematics who cannot explain how to solve a certain equation. He just knows. This was the case of Srinivasan Ramanujan. Click HERE. He had huge problems detailing his working. He intuited his solutions.
Most people need to break down Mathematics into parts and solve.
Emotionally, this is what I have to do and know how to do and can therefore explain to kids, in the hope of shortcutting their learning process. I do that in the same way I am doing the breakdown and analysis in this blogpost.
People who cannot intuit Math can get quite good in Math too, right? People who cannot intuit emotions can get quite good at them too, right? That is my hope for all the little kids who are like what I once was, except that I can now show them the way.
People who cannot intuit Math can get quite good in Math too, right? People who cannot intuit emotions can get quite good at them too, right? That is my hope for all the little kids who are like what I once was, except that I can now show them the way.
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