Thanks for the explanation. Focus would definitely get in the way, since interpreting body language requires seeing many things at once.
I'll explain natural and intuitive by an example. In grade 8, I learned to juggle. Not well, but good enough. The process involved clumsily learning several motions and putting them together.
Now I can still juggle, despite years of not doing it. The skill, to the level that I trained it is intuitive. It no longer feels like many things, but just one.
Likewise, I learned to interpret many gestures. At first, I could only interpret them slowly, separately and consciously. Now I interpret them quickly, jointly and unconsciously most of the time.
Are there any skills you've acquired that can now run unconsciously in the background, or does everything require conscious effort and focus?
It sounds like the latter, but I'm curious how this works for things that require multiple separate actions, like driving, computer operation, cooking. Those feel like one thing, but really they're several smaller actions joined together.
Aspies are often noticeably clumsy when it comes to bodily movements. When they play sports, they use more analytical thinking than physical instinct. I often played badminton with my brother when I was young. Every time, I found myself analyzing the trajectory of the shuttlecock to decide where to put my racket. By the time I'm done, it's often too late to move my body into the right position. Ditto for pretty much every other sport I've tried. Beside social ineptitude, lack of skill in sports is a common reason why Aspies feel alienated in school.
But there is something called muscle memory, which allows even Aspies to do certain highly repetitive physical tasks without having to think too much. Typing and walking seem to fall into this category, though if there's nothing else to occupy my mind, it's not impossible for me to start being analytical about every step of a walk. I don't know where juggling fits in the spectrum, because I've never tried it, but the spectrum exists. Some types of bodily movements just seem to require some mysterious skill that can't be emulated with fast-but-single-threaded analytical reasoning.
Cooking is a piece of cake. You just apply a function to some ingredients, take the output, and feed it into the next function. Muscle memory takes care of stir(), and since it doesn't involve much thinking, I can afford to insert interrupts here and there to handle other events.
I'll explain natural and intuitive by an example. In grade 8, I learned to juggle. Not well, but good enough. The process involved clumsily learning several motions and putting them together.
Now I can still juggle, despite years of not doing it. The skill, to the level that I trained it is intuitive. It no longer feels like many things, but just one.
Likewise, I learned to interpret many gestures. At first, I could only interpret them slowly, separately and consciously. Now I interpret them quickly, jointly and unconsciously most of the time.
Are there any skills you've acquired that can now run unconsciously in the background, or does everything require conscious effort and focus?
It sounds like the latter, but I'm curious how this works for things that require multiple separate actions, like driving, computer operation, cooking. Those feel like one thing, but really they're several smaller actions joined together.