Mechanism

I touched on this in an essay entitled It’s What Works for Me.

Since no one could offer me a useful explanation of why I was the way I was.
I created one for myself.
I did this to help me blend here on planet Earth.

Here’s what I found to be useful for me:

• At some age, based on someone’s research, between 2 and 4 years, the grey matter in the brain began to grow at an accelerated rate.
• By age 4 it was 10% larger than normal.
  • And, whether due to the availability of resources,
  • Or, by design,
  • Or, simply a matter of space:
    • There was somewhat lesser white matter, leading to some processes taking longer while they traveled to the lower brain,
    • And, the lower brain got a weaker signal than normal,
    • Or, the lower brain also developed somewhat less than normal,
    • Or, simply didn’t work,
    • Coupled with, the absence of mirror neurons,
• The social mechanism of the AS brain simply doesn’t work like a normal persons.

And the mechanism in normal brains, consisting of all those parts, collects social artifacts or metadata, if you prefer, and stores it in the lower brain—automagically.

The key word here being: automagic.

It doesn’t mean I can’t do it; I have to do it purposefully.

And that took a lot of work.
But, it was worth it.

Let me offer some examples of how I perceive normal brains processing social cues and how my work-arounds arrive at the same place.
Keeping in mind that this is theory based on my accumulation of studies, facts, pseudo-facts, anecdotes and experiences.

For the first 15 years of life, all those social experiences we went through, from lectures about picking your nose, sitting up straight, keep your hands to yourself, what works and what doesn’t work when talking to people, all get automagically stored in the amygdala—of normal people.

At about age 15, the time you start high school, all these little bits of meta coalesce into a repository of dos and don’ts, which in turn, automagically guide them in social interactions.

I had to rely on active memory in the grey matter to handle all this. And, depending on how salient the original message was, i.e. it:

• came with a loud voice from a scary person,
• was from someone I trusted implicitly,
• made good sense,
• could be immediately tied to another stored memory,
• or it came with a slap to the face.

Placed it higher up, more accessible or more memorable, subsequently easier to remember and apply to the current social situation.

All of which was happening automagically with the normal folks.
All of which I have to do on the fly.

This was further hampered by the fact that to that point, I was a “Little Professor” a sort of novelty among my classmates, showcased by the nuns and lay teachers in grade school.

When you’re a little professor, you can talk to adults as an adult.
Many of them find it alternately amusing and fascinating.

This characteristic of AS fits into the post-grammar school period, like screen doors on a submarine!
Especially in an all-male Catholic HS, where the amusement and fascination turn to threats to certain egos and reflections of what could have been.

High school was the beginning of a confusing roller coaster ride.

At the end of freshman year of high school, at about age 15, things start to unravel. By this time, the social skills apparatus in the normal brain—packed with 15 years of information, activating the ability to unconsciously or automagically handle social situations started its effect.

Normal people began to mature in this time period, and relative roles switched, where they began to mature, and I was left behind. I entered high school as a relatively mature child and left it as a clueless adolescent.

Those facilities and skills that were never required, tested, or utilized before were suddenly needed.
Emotions, less used, were less resistant to social drama.
Study habits never formed were suddenly required to survive.

This happened so fast; it caused emotional whiplash and head-shaking confusion. Previously the know-it-all and mature one, I was suddenly off balance and out of touch with what was happening around me.

The complicated social structure hit me as though the rules, the language, and basically, the fabric of my world had suddenly been torn. I compare it to the times when the earth’s magnetic poles are suddenly reversed. It was that sudden and traumatic. I could not process intellectually as fast as what the normals were doing automatically.

I hit a wall.

Everyone was reading from a new script, and I was without a copy!

Normal people were characters in a video game with guns that never ran out of ammo, while I had to stop, think, and reload the appropriate unique ammo every time a new monster appeared.

Social situations being the monsters, and they were everywhere—all the time!

High school is meant to prepare you for the work world, which is 60% social ability and 40% technical ability. I reached a peak of social development at 17.

Sure, I can cope, but I have to do this consciously with the front part of my brain, which is like a computer that never turns off with a constantly spinning hard drive searching for data.

In high school, things and events made less and less sense, and drifted from the concrete to the nebulous. Plans collapsed, footing became tenuous, morality started to flicker; the ground began to move, and there was nothing to cling to.

And, in the 1960s, there was no refuge. No one knew what was happening. Not I, not my parents, not the teachers, nor the doctors. I felt like I was banished to a raft and was furiously paddling to stay close to the shore while everyone else remained on dry land.

It started for me at the end of freshman year. It got worse and worse as the years progressed and didn’t slow down until I entered the police academy at 23, when, although I was still living on the raft, I was finally able to tie it to something solid.

All I could do now was hold on and try to negotiate the hell that was high school.

Before my diagnosis all I could do was trial and error.

I tried:

• Studying other people,
• Memorizing lists of pat expressions,
• Reading books on body language,
• Doing what everyone else was doing, (Within reason.)
• Asking for clarification.

These were useful to a point, but until the missing piece fell into place, the diagnosis, actually the Right-diagnosis, they all fell short.

Once I realized what the issue was, that I was missing mirror neurons and the automagic pathway to the amygdala, all I needed was:

• An interpreter—in the form of:
  • A mentor,
  • A human-whisperer,
  • A boss with a symbiotic need,
  • -and/or-
  • A place where no one else could do what I could do.

In my case built upon a foundation of:

• Extensive reading; I read at an early age, and read everything I could get my hands on,
• Voracious appetite for knowledge/learning,
• Extremely good manners, (Thanks Mom.)
• Patience.

At this point I’d like to quote one of my favorite Aspies:

So what? – Andy Warhol

If I had been given this outline at age 15; I could have backward engineered it to fit my situation at that time, and who knows what would have happened?

I do know that an enormous number of both externally and internally imposed obstacles would have vanished in an instant.

Another of Mom’s gifts, the expression “Can’t means won’t.” would have knocked those obstacles to shreds.

The thing is, I still fought my way to the top, regardless.

Along with “Can’t means won’t.” I utilized another expression taught to me by a store owner in Philly in 1967 “Never get good at doing anything you don’t like to do.”
So, I didn’t.

But, I did get good at:

• Computer skills,
• Writing,
• Problem solving,
• Pattern recognition,
• dBase building,
• Peace keeping.

And found someone who would pay for it.

To further help with the reverse engineering I developed The Flip Side.

Written June 22 2026