In autism and Asperger tests there are always questions like "Can you easily understand what others are thinking or feeling when you are talking to them?"
I can't answer those questions easily because it usually understand quite well how others think, and even guess their beliefs, opinions and how they are going to react regarding purely rational questions.
But I have a very hard time grasping what they feel, besides basic and clear-cut emotions like joy, boredom, sadness, anger and fear. If I someone smiles at me, I can't tell at all if that's because they are happy, want to be friendly, are being polite, want to flirt, or in extreme cases are making fun of me or thinking I am weird. As a child it was very hard for me to tell if other kids were teasing me in a friendly or hostile way. Some bullies would lure me into thinking they wanted to play with me only to play tricks on me. I have improved a bit from experience, but it still isn't natural at all.
It is very difficult for me to guess if someone likes me, and close to impossible to know how someone feels about a third person. I have read in books about differences between how men and women think (like Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus) that women are typically much better than men at sensing who likes whom when arriving at a party, even if the people are all strangers. Just by the way they look at each others, talk with each others and through body language, a woman can know if people are lovers, former lovers, are attracted to one another, have a one-sided attraction, hate each others, etc. Neurotypical men are usually quite bad at this, and Aspies like me normally have no clue at all.
In spite of that, I can tell if someone is religious and guess how strongly very quickly the first time I meet them. I can sometime guess before I even speak to them ! I can also tell right away if they are intelligent, if they are more scientific-minded, artistic or neither. That proves that an Aspie can have very good intuition for anything that relates to the left brain, their strong hemisphere. Maybe it's because I have a high IQ (Mensa++) and reasonably good empathy (I sometimes cry during emotional scenes of films or animations).
Do other Aspies here have the same experience in being able to discern easily how people think, but are nevertheless clueless about how they feel toward you or others ?
I can't answer those questions easily because it usually understand quite well how others think, and even guess their beliefs, opinions and how they are going to react regarding purely rational questions.
But I have a very hard time grasping what they feel, besides basic and clear-cut emotions like joy, boredom, sadness, anger and fear. If I someone smiles at me, I can't tell at all if that's because they are happy, want to be friendly, are being polite, want to flirt, or in extreme cases are making fun of me or thinking I am weird. As a child it was very hard for me to tell if other kids were teasing me in a friendly or hostile way. Some bullies would lure me into thinking they wanted to play with me only to play tricks on me. I have improved a bit from experience, but it still isn't natural at all.
It is very difficult for me to guess if someone likes me, and close to impossible to know how someone feels about a third person. I have read in books about differences between how men and women think (like Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus) that women are typically much better than men at sensing who likes whom when arriving at a party, even if the people are all strangers. Just by the way they look at each others, talk with each others and through body language, a woman can know if people are lovers, former lovers, are attracted to one another, have a one-sided attraction, hate each others, etc. Neurotypical men are usually quite bad at this, and Aspies like me normally have no clue at all.
In spite of that, I can tell if someone is religious and guess how strongly very quickly the first time I meet them. I can sometime guess before I even speak to them ! I can also tell right away if they are intelligent, if they are more scientific-minded, artistic or neither. That proves that an Aspie can have very good intuition for anything that relates to the left brain, their strong hemisphere. Maybe it's because I have a high IQ (Mensa++) and reasonably good empathy (I sometimes cry during emotional scenes of films or animations).
Do other Aspies here have the same experience in being able to discern easily how people think, but are nevertheless clueless about how they feel toward you or others ?
