Please don’t make me read between your lines: How this autistic woman uses information to read people

Originally published on Medium.com

I recently learned that we all have more than 5 senses. The 3 other senses are: vestibular (our movement and balance sense), proprioception (awareness of the body’s position in space) and interoception (feeling internal body signals like hunger and thirst).

Clearly, my first-grade science lessons are outdated.

I think I have another sense, too, that I use to understand people. Although I can’t read faces that well, I read other information like an open book written in a foreign language I learned overseas.

Let me explain.

In books, we can’t see faces, right? So how do we know when a character is upset? The author “shows” us with description, like the following sentence:

She crossed her arms, narrowing her eyes at the photo.

But based on this description, the character could be feeling suspicious, or standoffish, or maybe she’s just examining the photo closely with narrowed eyes since she forgot her magnifying glass at home.

The author needs to add clarifying information, either some context or a simple adverb. For example, she edits the sentence to say:

She crossed her arms, narrowing her eyes angrily at the photo.

Ah-ha! Now we know for sure that the character is angry for a reason the author will soon show. There’s no doubt about the emotion. The author told us and she knows her characters well.

Unfortunately, real life doesn’t have authors writing clarifying descriptions for me.

I’ve always thought of books as working backwards from real life. In books, authors set the scene for context, sprinkle in descriptive clues and reveal the feelings. In real life, we see the feelings, struggle to decide between red herrings and real clues, and then need to work out the context (which sometimes remains unknown). Real life can be a real mystery.

So how do I know what someone is feeling if I don’t rely on facial expressions?

Evidence, my dear Watson.

I examine the evidence available. I notice the person’s stance, eye gaze, body placement, stated cultural background and language. Are there other people in the room? Where are those people placed? Is the overall vibe positive or negative?

If the person I’m with is an acquaintance or friend, I gather all this evidence and run it through tests: What did the person say before this moment? How did they say it: rushed, slow, hesitating? Is this a normal speech pattern? If not, what’s changed? Is this a normal topic for them to discuss? If not, what’s changed?

If communicating by text with a friend, I check the textual information. Is the message all caps, all lowercase, properly capitalized at the start of sentences? Is that normal? If not, what’s changed? What happened before we started communicating? Has it been a long time since we talked and I need to update my mental database?

My mental database keeps a lot of information on people. Even I’m unsure how much information it contains. It runs in the background and updates me with working hypotheses. The longer I know someone and the more information in my database, the more accurate I am. With my husband, I have a 99.99% accuracy rate (so far) knowing whether a one word text means he’s busy at work or upset. I know the difference between a normal text and one that tries to hide a day going badly.

But even with strangers ahead of me in line at the store, I can read their character, which I will immediately discard as speculation because we all know to “Never judge a book by it’s cover.” And then the stranger begins interacting with someone ahead and…somehow I was right. Or I scroll past a post on social media from an old acquaintance I haven’t seen in years, then scroll back up, concerned suddenly but dismiss it for a lack of concrete evidence. And then later a mutual friend updates me about the old acquaintance’s new concerning situation. I’m not surprised but I can’t explain exactly what information led me to be concerned.

(My database doesn’t yet support conversion into words.)

So if you stand in front of me feeling complicated feelings, I will be busy gathering evidence and may not see your facial expressions. But next week, when you reveal big news, I will have already figured out a quarter of it and pieced together the rest by the time you are halfway done talking.

Of course, I wouldn’t have to do all this work if people just told me what they’re (honestly) feeling when asked and then (honestly) explain why.

So it’s up to you: do we want to do this the easy way or the hard way?