Can you become autistic from being on Wrong Planet too much?

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Clearly, using you as evidence, we would have to conclude that obsessively posting to WP does not change a person. You still are just as indeterminate about your NT status as the day you arrived.

Darn, my skin's turning red and the spots on my back are starting to form. I've noticed when I was drying up after my shower.

Can you become a computer from being on the internet too much?

Anyway you're talking about what probably amounts to major structural changes in one's brain from... participating in an internet forum. I don't think so. Lots of people on the spectrum participate in "NT" forums and the reverse (becoming NT from being on a forum) is apparently impossible judging by what I've seen from many members here talking about other forums; I don't see why it would work the other way

Can I get huge by hanging out in a gym talking to muscle men

Yes.

That must be how I ended up so generously proportioned.
By talking to people in McDonald's all day.

Good Point!

lol.

No, no, NO people. It's more like... "Do I start talking and thinking like muscle men by hanging out with them at the gym?"

The answer is, why of course. You start thinking about building muscles all day and you lose your ability to comprehend complex thoughts.

You're talking about the hardware, but you overlook the software. Self-concepts heavily influence with your interactions and your thought processes -- For example, I know I get a whole lot more female attention when I think I'm a hot stud muffin instead of a wimpy geek boy. I don't see why thinking you're aspie or thinking like aspies because you hang with them too much wouldn't have similarly profound affects on thought, behavior and your interactions.

It sounds like you're asking if hypnotism or the power of suggestion works. The answer is yes.

Hanging around with autistic people and picking up some of their ways and mores and traits doesn't fundamentally alter the development of your brain though. It's just emulation

Ah, but what thought processes could possibly catch into the non-autistic mind causing them to embrace it, unbeknownst to him or her?
What software can get into those recessess?

-Would one develop consuming special interests in the place of 'people'? No
- could one misread body language and hence lose ToM? No

Aside from these what would or could rub off into them? What other "software"can 'makes its way into a non-autistic mind by exposure?'

With the exception of the two points, you have the "average" spectrum of introverts spanning through to extroverts. Right?

Typically what you have here is folks with social imagination impairment, and an underlying cognitive bias for consuming special interests.

The whole culture is underpinned on this. You would have differences here and common themes.

Culture can rub off two ways, either way one gets acculturated via the senses, the latter NT is more influenced by it- albeit subconsciously.

To stereotype: The "NT" would lose the non-verbal and would pick up on having more precision in terms of communication-- less vague.
Having ToM would cause an adaption to communicate in the other direction. One way here, as say you found yourself in an Aspie household 24/7 .

Stating the obvious, everything we do affects our cognition via any experience, you can say we get more influenced into doing this or that.

In my case, I stopped trying to read body language. I never gave myself a chance. I also allowed my special interests to consume me, instead of suppressing the desire. The desire to ignore people was always there. With WP, I lost the urge to be social.



Take eye contact, for example. Before I knew about AS, I thought it was strange that looking people in the eyes made me uncomfortable. I did it anyway, because I knew that I was expected to, but the moment I learned about AS, that all changed. There was a shift from "I can do this" to "I can't do this" after reading about other aspies who can't do it. We all know what happens when one believes one cannot do something.

Oh- absolutiely! Autism just rubs off onto you like shoe polish just from loitering on this site!

Just like the opposite happens all of the time!

Autistic people would become NT just from hanging out with NT's.

And Gays become straight just hanging with their straight siblings and classmates.

ret*ds would become mensans just from hanging out with college professors.

Boys who go to parochial schools, are so effected by their teachers and role models, that they invariably grow up to become nuns.

Black kids who are forced to watch TNN, and CMT, become White.

And White kids who listen to alot of rap get gradually darkening complexion.

And the list goes on.

Well, sammi, apparently you have the hardware. You've got it. And I believe this would then exclude BAP people. You are not BAP.

Really though, do BAPS fail or can they fail in the use of the non-vebal?

Any citations in the literature?

Thoughts anyone?

But what you are describing is getting permission from WP to stop doing something that made you uncomfortable. In order for this to be an actual software change from non-autistic to autistic, you would have had to start out with eye contact being a perfectly fine and enjoyable social experience and then have that change to being uncomfortable. You didn't get a software change from WP. You got permission from WP to stop running a program that kept crashing.

My daughter is autistic and loves eye contact. She is very much like a cat that way. I'll do staring contests with her because nobody else can tolerate that much eye contact except actual cats (and she stares quite often into the eyes of cats- I've warned her strongly to never do this with dogs). She goes to a special school and therefore spends her day mostly in the company of autistic kids who hate eye contact very much (except for the teachers). Those who are verbal will yell at her for staring into their eyes (so she tells me after coming home from school). If this rewiring-by-exposure thing actually happened, her eye-contact-averse classmates would have changed her love of eye contact. But that hasn't happened at all. If she hasn't been rewired into eye-contact aversion, then I seriously doubt just reading posts would do that to anyone. It hasn't done it to me. I've been reading posts about it for 2.5 years here and I still enjoy the staring contests we have when she gets home from school.

Are you saying do BAPs read body language?

I don't know. I am pretty sure that my father is BAP, and he seems to have a good handle on body language and NT ToM. He has many of the ASD cognitive traits, like excellent memory/focus/visualization skills, while also having enough of the NT social-emotional processing to get along in society. He doesn't do the social/professional power play though. Other than that, he seems to have the best of both worlds.

It's funny that whenever my mother behaves in her natural NT manner in casual social encounters, my father tells her that she is being fake.

This is an interesting question. As I am still fairly new to all this I do worry sometimes that I am just kidding myself into believing something is there that only exists in my mind, being aware of the potential for confirmation bias. There are a few reasons that I do not think that this is the case:

1. I was not actually looking for an answer to my problems when I came across AS, it was by pure chance that I encountered it while researching into it for someone else

2. I did not have to look very hard for it to start "ringing bells" for me (i.e. did not feel I was having to "make it fit"), although I have now put in many hours of research to see whether it does still seem to hold true as a theory

3. The "symptoms" have their roots way back into my early childhood and many of the concepts are not things I am just discovering so much as things I have always known to be true and with most of them it is less a case of "I never knew that" and more a case of "at last, there's a word for that".

I cannot be 100% sure whether I have full AS, PDD-NOS, NVLD or whatever as I do not have the option at present of getting assessed, but I am sure I fit in somewhere in that region. I am equally sure that there are some people on this site who will say that without an official diagnosis my own observations are totally invalid, but that is their opinion - they are entitled to it, but they do not have the benefit of 33 years of memories and I am sure they would not want me to attempt to list every single reason why I have come to my conclusions on this site.