The Social Factory

I guess we doin' social interactions now...

About a month ago (as of the time of this post being put up) the Circle in the Triangle Factory/I Guess We Doin' Circles Now meme began to circulate throughout the Internet. This meme has seen many, many iterations over its lifespan, from people putting different shapes on the conveyor belt to factories representing companies. With this in mind, I am proposing an extension to this meme, to try to better visualize the differences in social interactions between a neurotypical mind, and my mind.

Introducing the “social” factory:

The “social” factory, ready to operate.

So, how does this work?

To simplify things here, we’ll assume we’re dealing with one person, face to face. One can easily modify the template to handle multiple people, or cross talk (for instance, adding additional conveyor belts that also spew symbols).

So, in a typical conversation, people will talk about stuff. These can be represented as symbols on the conveyor belt leading out of the “social” factory:

The conversation has started! How are we going to handle this output?

The person is at the end of the conveyor belt, ready to process the output of the factory. In essence, the person itself is a “conversation flow” factory, using the output of the other person (the conversation flow factory that’s depicted here) as input.¹

A person will have a thing inside of their heads to handle the output of the factory. We can denote this with a function called “do_conversation”. Every person has such a function.

For a neurotypical person, I’d imagine them to have a brain that can handle any set of output coming out of the factory. In essence, their “do_conversation” function is included in a “standard library” of sorts, and can be called on without any issues.

Depiction of a neurotypical mind’s reaction to conversation. It should be able to handle any sort of topic/question without causing much stress or panic.

Now let’s move on to a brain that’s more like mine - an autistic brain. Some people liken the operations of this sort of brain as one that does not have the social rulebook built in. These brains will process things differently - they may take things literally, for instance, as I often do. Or, if something is said that is of great interest (a special interest) the person may go off and “info-dump”, that is, tell the other person everything that they know about that topic. In the language here, the “do_conversation” function might only be handle certain inputs natively, or the outputs it produces might be inappropriate for the situation at hand.

How can we depict this in our diagram? Well, suppose I am an expert in handling triangles. If our factory produces just triangles, I am happy, as I know what to do with them:

An autistic brain, which specializes in one thing, triangles, encounters a conversation that only produces triangles. This brain, able to handle these, is happy.

Unfortunately, most conversations are not like this. It is oftentimes necessary to talk about other things, which can be depicted as a different shape on the conveyor belt. However, this brain might have difficulty handling this and the “do_conversation” function may fail.

I’m not equipped to handle circles…

When this function fails, several things might occur. For me, typically there is a long pause, which can be preceived as being awkward by others. Others might react by shutting down, as they are overwhelmed by this prospect.

So, how can I (or other autistics) avoid this? The simplest would be to have no social interaction at all. However, that’s not really a solution - you have to communicate somehow (how else are people going to know you want to go out to eat, for instance?). We could also use other communication methods that don’t involve person to person contact, for instance, texting or a messaging board.

Sometimes though this is not possible. In this case other tactics might have to be employed. The one I’ll mention here is the idea of scripting, which is part of a larger thing known as masking (the process in which some autistic people hide their traits in order to present as being neurotypical)². Here, I come up with reasonable questions that someone might ask me, and come up with responses towards those questions. The “do_conversation” function then becomes a complicated sort of thing, instead of the streamlined function a neurotypical has:

do_conversation(input):
    if input = triangle:
        response one
    if input = circle:
        response two
    #and so on and so forth for other questions...
    #and hope I don't get something weird like a tesseract!

If I get something that isn’t in my list that I’ve prepared, then we fall into the issue we had before, only this time, it’s harder to dig out, as I’ve spent a lot of energy into preparing and deploying the script.

After the conversation, or after a long day, rest is required (which can take on several forms, including sleep itself), to prepare for the next day/conversation. This is crucial to avoid larger issues from creeping up.

The shift has ended for the masking autistic who had to script and the brain is exhausted.

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I hope this gives you a good idea on how social interactions might differ between neurotypicals and autistics. If you liked this, feel free to share this with others.

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1. To keep the drawing simple and to keep the spirit of the original meme alive, I will only show the inputs in the main picture. If we want to be more precise, we’d have something like this to depict the whole thing:

Two factories working in tandem to form a conversation

One factory initiates the conversation and produces product which the other factory must process inside and form new product, to which the initializing factory must process. This process continues for some time until the conversation finishes, at which point the factories stop. This shows the cyclic nature of a conversation, where one person talks and the other reciprocates and/or answers.

2. You can safely assume that when I am typing on the blog, the mask is essentially “off” - my thoughts are flowing freely. Most of the time I am typing these in my bedroom which I consider my “safe” spot.