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What's the most baffling thing about neurotypical people?
Farideh:
It is something that was noticed in last week's WCDT that the lack of non-verbal communication caused misunderstandings. If all you can judge is the literal text, than you can interpret it very differently from what the author meant to convey.
sitnspin:
Yea, I am very skilled at reading nonverbal communication, but it isn't an exact science with a one-for-one translation. It is largely instinctual and educated guess work based on experience and subconscious awareness. I can definitely understand how it can seem like bullshit to people who's brains are wired differently than mine since I can't really explain it in a way that make logical sense. It is such a deeply ingrained and instinctual part of my mental processing that it's hard for me to get how others don't see it.
I think it is important for both neurotypical and neuro-atypical (which is more of a spectrum than and either/or thing) to recognise that each other's experiences of the world are valid, even if we can't directly understand them personally.
Dock Braun:
--- Quote from: sitnspin on 05 Jul 2021, 06:42 ---Yea, I am very skilled at reading nonverbal communication, but it isn't an exact science with a one-for-one translation. It is largely instinctual and educated guess work based on experience and subconscious awareness. I can definitely understand how it can seem like bullshit to people who's brains are wired differently than mine since I can't really explain it in a way that make logical sense. It is such a deeply ingrained and instinctual part of my mental processing that it's hard for me to get how others don't see it.
--- End quote ---
As a mind who ourself don't instinctively recognize patterns not previously explicated, though a staid believer in the langue game; and it's manner of organizing thoughts of language: I have struggled through the collection and consideration of faces. So when I recognize an expression, my reasoning for it's meaning, while still primarily intuitively executed, is explicable approximately thus: This face has (how) many features according with this gesture and (how) few for any other facial patterns that I've recognized; So I respond with a commensurate distribution of appropriate faces. (This, to me, is as difficult to learn/use as any other ostensive definition, but in an area I strive to comprehend.)
Presently I am attempting to learn a foreign language---in part, this way---and have found, as I'd suspected possible, that their facial expressions seem differ significantly from those popular among my locale; For example: What I had assumed were a sort of grimace, was explained as a sincere expression of happiness. The ideas presently in this mind would have me believe that, albeit wordless, gesticulations of various sorts may well be construed as an aspect of the language, and varied as widely as words or grammar, albeit undictionaried and unthesaurussed---at least, not with similar esteem as worded language affords.
Morituri:
Interestingly, trouble with nonverbal communication may be why I seem to have ... I guess I should say, no *MORE* trouble - understanding ESL speakers than I have understanding EFL speakers. Accents are mostly a matter of substituted vowels and sometimes unusual rhythms, and I can get used to them pretty quickly. But I probably haven't internalized a vocabuluary of "nonverbal" to the same degree as most, and therefore I'm not misled or confused by differences in that side of things. OTOH, I've long recognized that the American smile is an aberration. You don't see a similar expression in photographs from any other nation.
American notions of a "socially comfortable distance apart to be standing for purposes of conversation etc" were also larger than anyone else's, right up until the pandemic hit. Once people internalized the pandemic, American social distance started to seem downright normal.
Morituri:
People are weird about clothes.
Thrift shops and retail stores have vast areas of shop floor devoted to clothes, implying that people buy and abandon clothes at a ferocious rate that I absolutely can't understand a reason for.
Kids outgrow clothes. People who've had bariatric surgery shrink out of clothes. But otherwise... Adults tend to gain weight slowly but not so fast that they'd be getting rid of things before they wear out. And there's tons, literal tons, of clothes for adults on the racks at thrift stores.
And on the other end, in the retail stores, that's kind of freaky too. I know places allocate floor space based on the amount of profit something generates. If 60% of a store's floor space is devoted to clothes, the store is probably making about 60% of its profits on clothes. And I look into all these retail places and there are acres and acres devoted to clothes. An amount of space that wouldn't make sense unless people are buying ten times as many as I can imagine a reason for.
In a given year I make one or possibly two shirts. Every two years or so I decide I need a new pair of pants. I make a new coat every four or six years, but to be honest that's really more often than I need a new coat - the coats have accumulated in my closet and they're all still perfectly good coats.
But people who can buy off the rack - how much do they actually buy? And why?
I get that there is such a thing as "fashion" - but for mens' clothes, it hardly matters. A guy can wear something forty years out of date and unless it was considered fairly radical even when it was popular, nobody notices. And the 'mens' sections in clothing stores are correspondingly smaller. Still seven or eight times as big as I understand a purpose for, but still only a third or less the size of the 'womens' sections.
But on the other side of the coin, several women I know have been wearing the same outfits for years - and I've noticed mostly because I think those particular outfits are awesome. They don't answer to "fashion" very much, but these women all have their own "style" - like Rachel's embroidered Nehru Jacket with the standing collar, which is amazing, or Jacqueline's whimsical collection of poodle skirts. They don't need to buy "fashion" because they can do better. Which is kind of how I feel about some of my coats TBH and likely the reason I have more than two.
So anyway. Another thing that I think is baffling about 'normalcy' - people keep buying clothes. They buy so many that they have to get rid of clothes they haven't even started to wear out.
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