As someone who has thought of himself as on the autism spectrum, I just want to write about the ability of eye contact to give you deeper insight into social dynamics.
It is not really the intellectual department that is my Achilles Heel but the emotional and affective underpinnings of whatever my intellect puts under scrutiny. It is not that I consider myself to be exceptionally intelligent, but that I know I can understand most things that capture my attention. It is just the emotional parts that push against understanding and acceptance of what I might be seeing.I have a tendency towards black and white thinking in this way, because I divorce so many thoughts from the emotional ambivalence and complexity that is the subtext of so many conversations and instructions. I can understand words. I just might not understand the full significance of what those words point towards. That means that a lot of words acquire a meaning that I intellectualized instead of empathized.
This gets on to the importance of eye contact. I have found that the more I try to have a decent kind of eye contact with others as I try to relate to them, the more I seem to be pulled into a more empathetic understanding instead of an intellectual understanding. My attention is not pulled inward towards my own intellectual structure but is pulled towards someone else’s, allowing me to act upon their understanding instead of my own.
This is important because in so many situations, I have developed my own system of doing things that is very Spartan and uncongenial to others. I need to work on not simply trying to bang all of the squares I see into my own personal round holes. There is a way of finding the right hole if only I can let my mind see it in someone else’s soul.
Not only will this mean that many situations will have better outcomes, but I will be able to have a worldview more conducive to others. More situations will be better and better learning experiences rather than triggers for paranoia, anxiety, depression, and resentment. I will be able to reach out to more of the world rather than finding myself in more and more isolation.
So, instead of being evermore obtrusive into my environment and social settings, I will have the move more and more into the lives of others. Humans are social animals. Our populations go extinct without the ability to cooperate. I will stare extinction in the eye and it will blink.
libercolumbia 