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Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

Paul Ekman has extensively documented micro expressions, which are trace views of the signal. Studying them will teach you the normal, longer expressions too, that's how I learned.

How exactly does asperger's work? For me the learning process went:

Learn that crinkles under the eye mean smile is real --> observe it quite a bit --> learn to see it naturally and intuitively

That doesn't feel any different from any normal skill acquisition. But I may have had the advantage of some neural mechanism absent in aspie brains.

Anyway, the whole process only took a few months. Ekman has som microexpression training CDs, highly recommended.

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> learn to see it naturally and intuitively

What exactly does it mean for something to become natural and intuitive? It's not unimaginable for an Aspie to learn to observe all sorts of behavioral hints -- BBC's recent incarnation of Sherlock Holmes does this exceptionally well -- but does he actually reach the decision that "This person is telling the truth" by the same process that a "normal" person does?

In my experience as an Aspie, it never happens automatically, and it never feels natural. I can hear every line of the code that's being interpreted and executed in my mind. I have a fast CPU, so it doesn't take long, but it definitely happens.

    if (smile) {
        try {
            check_wrinkles(under_eyes);
        }
        catch (CantTellException) {
            make_do_with_rough_assumption();
        }
    }

Even worse, Aspies tend to focus intensely on one thing at a time, so multi-tasking is risky business. An Aspie who learned to watch for wrinkles under eyes in real-time might focus so much on nothing but wrinkles under eyes, so that much more obvious signs of lying go completely unnoticed. In other words, check_wrinkles() blocks everything else. Similarly, even though I have extensive experience both in walking around and in hearing my own name, if somebody calls my name from behind while I'm walking, there's over 50% chance that the call won't even register, because every event handler must wait while walk() blocks. Also, the whole program crashes when an unanticipated exception occurs, resulting in extreme frustration.

As a consequence, when an Aspie finally gets enough practice to pass as normal, he might look like a normal person to casual observers, but the Aspie himself is always painfully aware that what he's doing is neither natural nor intuitive. At best, he's got the script cached in RAM for quick access.

Thanks for the explanation. Focus would definitely get in the way, since interpreting body language requires seeing many things at once.

I'll explain natural and intuitive by an example. In grade 8, I learned to juggle. Not well, but good enough. The process involved clumsily learning several motions and putting them together.

Now I can still juggle, despite years of not doing it. The skill, to the level that I trained it is intuitive. It no longer feels like many things, but just one.

Likewise, I learned to interpret many gestures. At first, I could only interpret them slowly, separately and consciously. Now I interpret them quickly, jointly and unconsciously most of the time.

Are there any skills you've acquired that can now run unconsciously in the background, or does everything require conscious effort and focus?

It sounds like the latter, but I'm curious how this works for things that require multiple separate actions, like driving, computer operation, cooking. Those feel like one thing, but really they're several smaller actions joined together.

Aspies are often noticeably clumsy when it comes to bodily movements. When they play sports, they use more analytical thinking than physical instinct. I often played badminton with my brother when I was young. Every time, I found myself analyzing the trajectory of the shuttlecock to decide where to put my racket. By the time I'm done, it's often too late to move my body into the right position. Ditto for pretty much every other sport I've tried. Beside social ineptitude, lack of skill in sports is a common reason why Aspies feel alienated in school.

But there is something called muscle memory, which allows even Aspies to do certain highly repetitive physical tasks without having to think too much. Typing and walking seem to fall into this category, though if there's nothing else to occupy my mind, it's not impossible for me to start being analytical about every step of a walk. I don't know where juggling fits in the spectrum, because I've never tried it, but the spectrum exists. Some types of bodily movements just seem to require some mysterious skill that can't be emulated with fast-but-single-threaded analytical reasoning.

Cooking is a piece of cake. You just apply a function to some ingredients, take the output, and feed it into the next function. Muscle memory takes care of stir(), and since it doesn't involve much thinking, I can afford to insert interrupts here and there to handle other events.

>Paul Ekman...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17221309

"M. O'Sullivan and P. Ekman (2004) claim to have discovered 29 wizards of deception detection. The present commentary offers a statistical critique of the evidence for this claim. Analyses reveal that chance can explain results that the authors attribute to wizardry..."

I wasn't talking about the "wizard" claims. Ekman literally wrote the book of facial expression classification:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_Action_Coding_System#s...

You could argue that the system is bunk, of course, but that's a different argument from te wizardry claims.

First I read about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physiognomy in the book from from 190x. Yes, the beginning of the twentieth century. They stimulated facial muscles with electricity and it allowed them to create emotions' expressions and classify them. So Ekman isn't even first to do that.

I see the FACS as a modern extension of the physiognomy. With all the scientific foundation of the latter.

I have both Asperger's and vision impairment. I can't discern microexpressions; I don't see crinkles under eyes or dimples on cheeks. What other ways are there?

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