“Particularly interesting is the unpublished observation that in girls with autism, the social brain seems to communicate with the prefrontal cortex, a brain region that normally engages in reason and planning, and is known to burn through energy. It may be that women with autism keep their social brain engaged, but mediate it through the prefrontal cortex—in a sense, intellectualizing social interactions that would be intuitive for other women.
“That suggests compensation,” Pelphrey says. It also jibes with women like Maya saying they have learned the rules of social interactions, but find it draining to act on them all day. “It’s exhausting because it’s like you’re doing math all day,” Pelphrey says.”
The constant ignorance of women with autism is something that seriously needs to stop.
My shrink used to talk about this, and it certainly seems familiar from my own experience. I’ve learned how to perform socially, but it took me a good long while, and it certainly got much easier once I figured out I had to – and was ALLOWED to – approach it like any other kind of study instead of just castigate myself for not being able to intuit it all.
These days… it works kind of like doing everyday math. When I’m toting up this much per hour times this many hours plus this much bonus minus this much in income tax, I’m not consciously thinking about the rules of math – and when I chat with someone, I’m not consciously thinking about “they made a self-deprecating remark, therefore right now my choices are to commiserate and encourage, or to turn the whole thing into a joke”, but those kinds of calculations are still going on, and using up a lot more processing power for me than they would for an allistic person.
The Invisible Women With Autism
Published
Kimchi and Justice 