In 2009 I started to send letters to the board of the Sheltered Employment Services about the many problems of Sheltered employees. The letters were on average 15 pages long. People told me that while the letters were very interesting, they were too long and too complicated. After that I continued for years to send letters to all kinds of authorities. Nowadays, most letters are shorter than one page and easy to understand.
The difference between neurotypicals and severe autists is that neurotypicals have an internal dialogue and severe autists have a visual thinking process. A kind of videos in their mind. In 2009 I started out by translating the videos in my head into words and put that in the letter. That resulted in letters of 15 pages, which people thought were too long.
Then I spent a period trying to summarize those stories. But 15 pages is well over 7,000 words and I soon discovered that my self taught verbal thought process also struggled to process such large amounts of words. Moreover, it resulted in a lot of duplication of work. After going through all the trouble of translating the video in my head into words, I deleted entire parts of the story. Over a number of years I have learned that it is easier to make the summary in my visual thought process.
Neurotypicals can only think about one subject at a time. So it is practical to delete as many details as possible. Then I translate the remaining video into words. The goal is to end up with a story at a length of one sheet of paper. If the story is longer, I go back to the visual thought process and delete even more details. Until the story is short enough.
If the story is very complicated. Then it is allowed to divide it into several chapters. But this only works with written communication. In verbal communication, neurotypicals are unable to keep attention and are very easily confused.
If you ever attend meetings, you will have noticed that topics are closed after five to ten minutes. Even when a problem is far from being solved. This is because neurotypicals have absorbed the maximum amount of information on that topic and are no longer able to concentrate.
Severe autists have a photographic memory. One of the advantages of a photographic memory is that you can remember information that you do not understand. This makes it possible for severely autistic people to delve into a new topic by starting with a random article or book. As their knowledge of this new topic grows, they understand it better and better.
Neurotypicals are incapable of this. If neurotypicals don’t understand the first paragraph of an article or book, they stop reading. If neurotypicals don’t understand the first few sentences of your story, they look up, yawn, and walk away.
When a severely autistic person enters into a conversation with a neurotypical, they must ensure that they presents the information in the correct order. First offer the names of basic concepts. Then how those concepts relate to each other and what they do. Then the problem and the solution you found for that problem.
It took me a lot of trail and error, practicing stories in my mind, to get some idea about the best order to offer information.
While telling a complicated story the autist will have to regularly look at the eyes of the neurotypical, to check whether they are still listening. It is not necessary for the autist to constantly look the neurotypical in the eyes. Its enough to get a general impression of their eye movements.
About the same rules apply to communication between autists as to communication with neurotypicals. In oral communication, the attention span of autists is not much greater than that of neurotypicals. Only we have never learned to indicate that, by yawning and looking at the ceiling.
In written communication, autists can process enormous amounts of information. But most of the time they only do that for topics they are really interested in. So if you’re bothering an autistic person who isn’t interested in trains with a very long story about trains. That bores him just as quickly as a neurotypical. The difference is that autists haven’t been taught to look up and yawn. Which makes it harder to recognize it when autists get bored.