Recently I was reading a book called What to Say Next by Sarah Nannery. It was a really insightful account of what life looks like on the spectrum, and one of the interesting perspectives from the book was that contrary to the opinion that people with Autism are less emotionally sensitive, they are actually more emotionally sensitive.

The idea is that people with Autism experience certain emotions so strongly that it often causes problems in everyday functioning. For example, people with Autism have trouble making eye contact, and this is because the amount of information and emotions involved in it is overwhelming for them. Similarly, autistic people tend to spiral into negative emotions easily, because those emotions are felt so strongly.

I think the idea definitely has merit, and it actually made me think about what people mean when they use the work “sensitive”. In everyday context, we generally say that a person is sensitive to something if they pick up on it easily or can easily be bothered by it; but actually, this is a side-effect of a more fundamental type of sensitivity.

As an analogy, we can think of sensitivity as having the volume knob turned up on some aspect of life. A person who is sensitive will usually have a easier time picking up differences between different sounds, but this is only true if the volume isn't overwhelming. If a person is so sensitive that everything is incredibly loud, then instead of being more discerning, that person will actually be less discerning because they spend all their time running away from the noise.

So saying that a person is sensitive to something can paradoxically mean that that person is worse at processing that thing. Thinking about it, in everyday parlance, the better word to use to describe when someone is good at processing a certain type of stimulus is probably “discerning”. To a certain degree it implies sensitivity, but either the sensitivity is not overwhelming, or that person has learned to rein in their strong reactions to information, and has learned to direct that energy productively.

— Categorized under: #psychology, #communications, #thinking, #emotions

One of the interesting things I've noticed from effective friends and coworkers is that they tend to form unusually clear understanding of things they work on.

This is not to stay that most people don't have a sufficiently clear understanding of things they work on, but it seems... different with people who are very effective. Most people (including me) tend to operate on a lot of fuzzy knowledge – where the mental models are often vague because we haven't bothered to truly connect them to something we understand. To me, it seems that very effective people make those connections.

As an example, in my day-to-day work I am often adjacent to a certain technology called COM. However, my understanding of COM is still quite weak, and I think this is the case for the vast majority of junior developers. Most senior developers seem to have a good understanding of COM, however, I don't think that is because they've been around COM longer and incidentally picked up on it – I think they are at the senior level partially because they have a solid understanding of related technologies. And I don't necessarily think that they took much more time and energy to try to understand these technologies, though they easily could have done that too. I think a lot of it comes down to good habits when incorporating new knowledge, such that new knowledge are connected to very close to something that they truly understand.

What does it mean to truly understand something? At least for me, in the areas of concrete knowledge, it means to be able to understand and explain how something works (and ideally why it works this way) down to a fundamental level. Everyone has at least some sort of ground level knowledge, kind of like “2 + 2 = 4”, but how much of their understand of the world are connected to that ground level is dependent on the person.

What trips me up very often is that no fire alarms go off in my head when I get new knowledge that's not grounded. Perhaps this was evolutionarily good – it wouldn't do much for primate humans to obsess over random phenomena when survival itself was challenging. In practice though, I don't really like how I can't explain how a lightbulb works, or that sometimes I read a book thinking that I understood it only to have the knowledge be pretty useless when I try to apply them.

The type of confusion/fog when I don't really understand something, and the type of satisfaction I feel when I really understand something, are feelings that I'm trying to get better at recognizing now. I think there will be a decent amount of upfront trouble to implement something like this, but it's better than the frustration that almost always come from the lack of understanding. Besides, it's just nice to be on solid ground, or know that the bridges you walk on have strong foundations.

Related reading: understanding – nabeelqu

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Categories: #thinking, #psychology