Super Bowl commercials, roundabouts, and Myers-Briggs. They all have one thing in common. They exemplify one key aspect of autism and some other forms of neurodiversity… the absence of social awareness. I like to call it the social bubble. Many neurodivergent thinkers live in their own social bubble, unaware of the people around them. There are several reasons for this.
Experts in Introspection
I’ve been cleaning out some old files lately, and I came across an old Myers-Briggs personality test I took almost 30 years ago. I enjoy personality tests, not because they tell me something I don’t already know. They just all prove how well I already know myself.
Like many neurodivergent thinkers, I know myself best. I’m so much easier to figure out than other people. I’m an ISTJ for those of you who speak Myers-Brigg. Introvert, sensing, thinking, judging for those of you who don’t. The results didn’t surprise me any more than any of the other personality tests I’ve taken.
However, my expertise ends with myself. I think I might be able to figure out my own kids (one because he’s so much like me), but outside my little social bubble my accuracy at guessing other peoples’ personalities is roughly 10-20%. I’m getting a little better, but I’d be a terrible therapist because I only really understand people who are like me.
Sensory Overload
Another reason so many of us live in a social bubble is sensory overload. With so much noise, movement, and general activity around us, it’s just easier to tune out anything unnecessary. That’s especially true for figuring out something as complicated as roundabouts… and other people who are also confused by roundabouts.
That’s why my driving is a perfect example. For years I’ve told people that my car is my own physical bubble, and the only thing I really process outside of it are the objects I don’t want to hit. I don’t look at other drivers or recognize specific vehicles (unless they have flashing lights or sirens). I can sing or talk to myself, totally convinced that no one else can see me and oblivious to anyone else in the cars around me.
For the record, this system works for me. I’ve only had one accident in over 30 years of driving using this system. The one accident happened when I was too busy talking to the person in the passenger seat at a massively complicated intersection in New Orleans and got distracted. Blocking out the extra noises and unnecessary information has actually saved me from several accidents that I know of.
However, I’ve been told that my uncanny ability to ignore other drivers and see their cars only as objects to be avoided has led to some hurt feelings when I didn’t recognize my neighbor or friend waving at me from the car next to me at the stoplight. Let’s be honest, most of my true friends who have seen me drive already know this about me and love me anyway. Right?
Simplification
Life is easier to comprehend when everyone sees things the way we see them. We relate to the world, but only through our own eyes and believe everyone sees the world as they see the world. We assume everyone’s social bubble is the same. That also leads us to believe we are the only people in the world and others perceive this as selfishness. There’s more to it than just plain selfishness.
A specific Super Bowl commercial shined a light on this a few days ago. I’m a problem solver and love puzzles. It took over half an hour, but I actually broke the code to enter the DoorDash contest with the super-long computer code. I was so proud of myself that was all the gratification I really needed.
My son, however, was absolutely convinced that we would win all those prizes. It was simple. Mom broke the code, so Mom should get the reward. It’s not that he thought we were better than anyone else who entered. He just didn’t personally know of anyone else who did it, so he figured we must be the only ones.
Neurotypical thinkers his age would recognize that there’s life beyond the bubble of our home and that there were thousands of other people who did the same thing. But often ND thinkers are also concrete thinkers. That means the world outside the bubble doesn’t exist or matter. Plain selfishness says, “I get something because I want it, and no one else matters.” ND thinkers say, “Wait, you mean there are other people out there?”
It’s not that ND thinkers choose to devalue others. We can just be unaware of other people because our minds oversimplify situations and don’t take other people into account. We know what we experience. People outside our bubble of experience add another complicated factor that many ND thinkers just don’t think about.
Bursting the Bubble
Everyone experiences neurodiversity differently. There are a number of ND thinkers (often in the ADHD crowd) who are hyper-aware of the people outside their bubbles and feel things very deeply. I hope that this gives you a glimpse of life from inside this ND thinker’s social bubble and helps you understand those around you living in their own social bubble.
For me, it took someone close to me who consistently pointed out the people outside my bubble and asked how what I was doing made them feel. And it’s taken years of that for me to stop myself on occasion and ask the same question without prompting. My track record of successfully looking outside my bubble and taking other people into account is still not great, but it’s much better than it used to be. Except for driving… that hasn’t changed.
