codeman38’s tumblings

An old post from elmindreda, which gave me some major “aha!” moments when I first ran across it.

(No, any of a variety of problems with speech is not necessarily coming from Purposely Being Difficult, and/or Worrying Psych Symptoms. Shocking idea 😒)

With the state of my health sucking a lot of energy, I’ve been running into increasing troubles with communicative speech for a while now. I was reminded to hunt this down again, and thought I might as well share it.

It’s very common to divide autistic people into a ‘speaking’ and a ‘non-speaking’ group, and also to assume that the ability to speak implies the ability to communicate with speech. Those people who do so quite naturally place me into the ‘speaking’ group, since I’m most of the time able to produce understandable words, almost always strung together into sentences.

However, there’s a large grey area between being fully able to use speech to communicate and not having access to language at all, and it’s not linear either…

People use neural networks for translating languages, recommending movies, delivering ads, and more, but this here is one of my favorite applications: utter surrealism.

Last year I trained a neural network on 4,500 Halloween costumes that you readers helped me collect. This year, I teamed up with the New York Times to train a different neural network on over 7,100 costumes. Jessia Ma illustrated lots of the costumes, even the ones that make NO SENSE and they are all SO GOOD.

Please please go look at the rest of them. You will be so glad you did.

And yes, there will be ill-advised sexy costumes.

Thank you, everyone who contributed a costume! You can still contribute to the dataset (maybe I’ll revisit it next year) by filling out this form.

After 10+ years of psychotherapy, almost all of my social anxiety triggers are now at a manageable level—even academic public speaking, which was my #1 worst trigger for most of my life—except for my phone anxiety. It’s literally the one and only thing I’ve never been able to significantly improve.

I have to talk the whole conversation through with my friends beforehand.

I have to get explicit confirmation from my friends that “yes, you really need to ring that person right now”.

I have to write scripts.

I have to take anti-anxiety meds, or get drunk.

I only ever ring someone as the very last resort, when all other methods are unavailable.

I hyperventilate and cry afterwards.

I’m also a 28-year-old scientist with three degrees and a teaching position. I’m normally a logical (albeit emotional) person. But anxiety is not logical.

Anxiety is due to inability to correctly perceive threats—more specifically, due to both increased expectation and increased frequency of false recognition of threats in response to neutral stimuli (this is called “pessimistic bias”). Social anxiety simply means that this inability to correctly perceive threats is specific to social interactions, rather than generalised to all aspects of life. (For example, a resting facial expression or lack of verbal acknowledgement is more likely to be perceived as anger, disgust or rejection by a socially anxious person than a neurotypical person. But a socially anxious person is not particularly more likely to worry throughout the day that they’ve left their stove on.)

Therefore, socially anxious people learn to cope with this bias by becoming hypervigilant to social cues such as posture, hand gestures, nodding, eye contact, eyebrow position, mouth tightness, tone of voice, talking speed etc., and then using all the available information to attempt to be logical and “talk down the anxiety”. We also learn to be high self-monitors, which means that we closely observe our audience and constantly (subconsciously) monitor their responses in order to ensure that they accept us and deem us “appropriate”.

But non-verbal social cues aren’t available during phone calls!

There isn’t any body language to read, or eyes to look into. You can’t monitor your audience for approval. They don’t follow the script you prepared. All you have is their voice, which is usually masked (everyone seems to have a “phone voice”, “customer service voice” or “professional voice”) and distorted by the phone and is therefore useless. All of a sudden you’re back to relying on a single neutral stimulus, and the pessimistic bias kicks in, and you start to panic because you’re not getting constant feedback.

It’s a Recognised Psychological Thing™.

Phone anxiety (actually, phone phobia) is one of the most common, most recognised and most treated phobias in the world. Social anxiety—of which phone phobia is an extremely prevalent trigger—is one of the most common, most recognised and most treated anxiety disorders in the world.

it’s like trying to read semaphore in a snowstorm while having an allergy attack.

yes, that is hard.

no, it’s not just you.

no, you’re not making it up for attention, being a baby, or lazy.

voice calls are simply not as good as text.

I’ve dealt with more calls than I’d like where, even after asking someone to repeat themselves, I just could not catch what they were saying. It got to be frustrating for both me and the other person as I kept asking for repetition and struggling to understand. And it’s totally luck of the draw if I’m calling anywhere new, or answering a call from an unknown number, so the anxiety skyrockets in both of those cases. (Will the pitch and timbre of their voice be something that I can hear clearly, or something that gets distorted by the phone line? What accent do they have? How fast will they talk?)

My auditory memory is not that great even when I can hear clearly, and it gets even worse when I’m using up mental processing cycles trying to decipher what I’m hearing, so any call that’s really information-heavy is probably going to result in some information getting lost in transmission. And it’s only worse if the information is numeric (like prices, product codes, times, or credit card numbers), because all the contextual cues that I typically use for disambiguating what I’m hearing are not really useful. (“Sorry, was that six fifty or six fifteen?”)

Another problem for me, though slightly less of one, is worrying about being misunderstood by the other person. This is especially true for any call where I would need to give my name and/or address, because it feels like every time I try to give this information over the phone, it gets misspelled or mistranscribed in new and interesting ways.