neurodiversetea | Recent Entries

Welcome!

I have created this space to discuss any/all things that fall under the brain neurodiverse umbrella: autism, ADHD, auhd, dyslexia, dyscalculia, dyspraxia, etc.

You can talk about anything you want related to neurodiversity here, as long as you don’t spam or harass anyone. Hate and bullying will not be tolerated.

If you have a special interest, please share with the rest of us. We would love to hear about it.
This is my first rodeo for managing a community, so I want to keep the rules list short (I'm a reddit refugee, I have ADHD and I have Autism - a long list of rules makes it harder to follow if you are a participant, and just obnoxious to enforce if you are an administrator/moderator):
1) Treat everyone with dignity and respect. Bad faith arguments will not be tolerated.
2) Assume all disagreements come from a place of good faith/a learning opportunity
3) No hate/bullying - Three Strike System (since this is a community for neurodiverse, and neurodiversity does have an impact on communication/social skills, I do not want to kick out anyone who says something offensive and it was a learning opportunity vs. "no, I intended my statement to come across that way & I stand by it" The latter falls under "bad faith" arguments)

4) If your post may be triggering to others (spiders, reptiles, violence, abuse, etc), please use a content warning and a cut tag to ensure others can make a decision about reading/seeing further based on where their headspace is.

Guidlines:
These are focusing on the "bigger picture" and are open for discussion. They are here to help guide you on the rules and will be numbered in accordance to which the the rules they are corresponding with.
1.a) We are not interested in policing the language people use for themselves (person first or identity first). We ask that you respect the language others use to describe themselves (including pronouns).

matsushima

*gently blows dust off of the community*

I recently read Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity by Dr. Devon Price. In Unmasking Autism, Price writes about "Special Interests Week," a social media prompt challenge run by Jersey Noah.

I thought, Maybe we can get neurodiversetea active again with a week-long prompt challenge? because there has been a Dreamwidth revival lately but none of the disability/neurodivergence communities have much going on these days. (I found this community through a comment

ysabetwordsmith made in

newcomers.)

So, Special Interests Week
Day 1 prompt: Your oldest special interest
Tell us about your oldest special interest! You could choose to interpret this as the first special interest you remember or tell us which of of your current special interest(s) you've been into the longest. (… or both!)

(There is a PDF of the complete Special Interest Week prompt list available here.)

Current Mood: hopeful

cora

Cross-posted to thatautisticadhdfeel & cora

I fell into a bit of a TikTok rabbit hole last night (maybe the night before last? Time - what is it?) about how autistic people see faces vs. how allistic people see faces. I thought I would info dump here about it and see if I can help revive this community a bit (the last post was from 2018).

KC Davis has a great series on this on her TikTok (link). A few of the take aways:

Autistic people think "eye contact" is literal - it's not. Staring directly into someone's eyeballs like you are trying to stare into their soul is just as overwhelming for allistics as it is for us.
Allistic people are able to take in the entire face of someone; autistic people tend to take in bits & pieces
Autistics tend to look away from someone's face because looking at someone's face is distracting. ADHDers will look away from someone's face because everything outside of that person's face is distracting.

A friend sent me an article about this phenomenon today which validates everything KC Davis has been talking about on her TikTok:

The findings indicate “that the basis of eye contact avoidance in autism is the result of an abnormal sensitivity of the threat processing system,” Hadjikhani said. “From early on after birth, the subcortical face processing system is too sensitive to basic face configuration and gets over-connected. Since this system over time gets involved in gaze perception, this is experienced as a stressful thing. -- MSN PsyPost

As an AuHD, I have noticed I tend to look *everywhere* else in the room when I am talking with someone in meet space. As a kid, I used to do drawing/doodling/knitting that I would look at instead, but as an adult such stimming while someone talks isn't socially acceptable, so I'm literally drawn to looking at *everything* else around the room to avoid face contact.

On video meetings, I tend to get myself to look at the computer screen (always a different window than the conference, though). I have Cookie Clicker in a tab to get me through the meeting. I don't really like looking at people while they're on camera. It feels far more intimate than making face contact in meet space - not only do I see the person, but I also see their background. I can easily tell who priorities house aesthetics vs. who does not (which inherently comes with an implicit bias about socio-economic backgrounds with those realizations which can then lead to a bias for or against someone).

I'm not sure how to end this, so I'll just end with a random, *completely unrelated* fact: Neurodivergents tend to bond through infodumping. This is why we're not so great at small talk, and the small talk we *are* good at is random facts. Because it's just micro infodumping.

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31

Neurodiverse Tea

Recent Entries

Admin Post: Sticky: [Intro] Community Intro

Special Interests Week: Day 1

Autism & Eye Contact

Profile

October 2024

Syndicate

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags