TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name

I am autistic, and I am convinced that autistic people are just a group of people who have completely different instincts from the majority of others, but that we have instincts that are VERY MUCH in line with each other, and that we do, in fact, get social cues from each other.

But expecting autistic people to get social cues from neurotypical people is like expecting your cat to behave like a dog and then thinking it's the cat who's not making sense in this situation.

Really. Autistic people's senses tend to be OFF THE CHARTS sensitive. And people think that WE are the ones missing social cues. No. We're experiencing the environment in full 32-bit color with 7.1 audio, Smell-O-Vision, and the "Experience two senses at the same time while everyone else is only experiencing one" package thrown in. THAT is why we hate certain foods, because we're coping with BOTH the texture AND the taste.

And when anyone asks us to imagine a situation where something is happening, we have to ask clarifying questions, because we just imagined three separate scenarios which fit the description.

When we interact with neurotypical people, we have entire simulations of each person in our head, not just the moments we're interacting with the other person and the current situation, but literally seventeen different possible scenarios that might happen and every single aspect of everything we've ever been told about that person. We have our entire interaction with the person mapped out like a movie lasting from the beginning of time to the heat death of the universe. And we do this for literally every person we ever interact with.

And yet they make the accusation that we are the ones missing something and that we have no imaginations.

No, WE are using our imaginations literally non-stop every moment of our lives, from the moment we wake up to the moment we pass out from exhaustion.

Neurotypical people succeed in social interactions because their brains try to come up with the laziest explanation for why their understanding fits the known facts, and because they almost all do precisely the same small amount of work, they come to the same conclusions. They see a twitch in the eye or a slight delay in an action, and they go "Aha! That person must be being deceptive!" And meanwhile, the autistic person is constantly building new simulations and completely discarding the old ones and integrating all of the information that's learned in order to be able to model the behavior of whomever they interact with. And as long as whomever they're interacting with is not deceptive, it works incredibly well. Not just for other autistic people, but for animals, too. That's why your autistic family member gets along with your pet that hates everyone else.

Neurotypical people are in fact, the odd man out when it comes to life on this planet.

And if humans EVER encounter aliens, you had BETTER hope that it's autistic people doing the interacting, because autistic people have a full understanding that neurotypical people have NO ability to read what we're thinking and so AUTOMATICALLY assume that we have negative intentions, and then resort to violence.

People often ask "Why were there so many different species of human on the planet but now there's only one left?" And any autistic person can tell you: Neurotypical people are violent toward those who behave differently. Being identified as different gets you targeted, gets you attacked, gets you killed.

Odo doesn't treat everyone like a criminal. He just builds profiles of their behavior in ways that they have trouble even understanding their own behavior, and he can identify potential risks exceptionally well.