'Autism and the Self: Fortress Walls and Foggy Courtyards' - ChatGPT

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Autism and the Self: Fortress Walls and Foggy Courtyards

Do people with high-functioning autism (HFA) experience the boundary between self and other in a different way? Not just in the obvious social terms—awkwardness, rule-breaking, missing the beat—but in the deeper sense of what it feels like to be a self in the world. Does autism affect how firmly a person distinguishes between their own feelings and those of others? Between what belongs in their mind and body and what leaks in from outside?

This isn’t the usual theory-of-mind question. I'm not asking whether people with autism can understand others. I'm asking something more structural: whether the contours of selfhood itself—the felt architecture of being—are drawn differently. As if consciousness, intellect, and language sit above a kind of fog: a less clearly bounded emotional or affective ground-state that confuses what’s 'mine' from what’s 'yours'. And if so, what evidence is there for this?

Surprisingly, the research says: yes, but it depends on the level you look at. The self is not a single thing—it is a composite of bodily experience, agency, emotion, cognition, and social interaction. And the boundaries are not drawn in the same ink across all levels.

1. The Rubber Hand and the Proprioceptive Fortress

Let’s start with the body. One of the classic neuroscience tricks is the Rubber Hand Illusion. You sit with your real hand hidden from view, while a fake rubber hand is placed in front of you. Both the real and fake hands are stroked in synchrony. After a while, many people begin to experience the rubber hand as their own: it feels like my hand, even though your eyes and brain know better.

This illusion exploits proprioception—your brain's unconscious sense of where your body is in space. When visual and tactile signals are aligned just right, your brain is willing to revise its body map to include the rubber hand.

But autistic people, especially high-functioning adults, often don't fall for this trick. Their proprioceptive system resists visual hijacking. The internal model of the body is more rigid. The same is true of studies on personal space: autistic participants prefer a larger bubble, and don’t easily adjust it in response to social cues.

This suggests that the physical boundary of self—the skin-and-space perimeter—is more firmly patrolled in autism. In Bayesian terms, the priors governing bodily position are assigned unusually high precision, and so conflicting sensory evidence is discounted. One's own body is a fortress with stone walls.

2. Agency and the Blur of Intention

Relatedly, the sense of agency—that felt authorship of one's actions—is often altered. In experiments that measure temporal binding (how closely in time you perceive your action and its consequence), autistic participants typically show weaker or more variable binding. They are less inclined to feel, in that gut-level way, “I did that.”

Again, this aligns with a stronger boundary at the bodily-motoric level. The self as a causal actor in the world is less easily manipulated; illusions of control don’t land as effectively.

3. Emotional Fog and Self-Other Confusion

But now we move inward—and here, the fortress becomes a fog. Many autistic adults experience alexithymia: difficulty identifying and describing one’s own emotional states. This isn’t a problem of not having feelings—physiological studies show normal or even heightened responses—but of not being able to label or interpret them consciously. The interoceptive system (which monitors internal states like heart rate or gut tension) seems noisy or poorly calibrated.

If you can’t clearly tell what you yourself are feeling, it becomes harder to distinguish your emotions from those of others. Studies using mirror paradigms and self/other confusion tasks bear this out. In some cases, autistic individuals attribute their own states to others—or others’ feelings to themselves. Emotional contagion without clear boundaries becomes more likely.

Neurologically, the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ)—a region implicated in distinguishing self from other—shows altered patterns of activity in autism. This may underpin both the difficulty in separating representations (“Is that your anger, or mine?”) and the heightened emotional distress reported in interpersonal encounters.

4. Theory of Mind and Social Boundaries

The more cognitive side of this story involves Theory of Mind (ToM): the ability to attribute mental states to others. High-functioning individuals often pass explicit ToM tasks, but struggle with the fluid, intuitive grasp of others’ perspectives in real-time interaction.

This means they may misjudge social cues—talking too long, standing too close or too far, being overly trusting or oddly distant. It’s not a lack of empathy as such, but rather a dislocation of boundaries: where do I end and you begin? What does that facial expression mean? How do I know when to pull back?

Again, the issue is less malice than misalignment: the autistic person may feel closer than the other perceives them to be. Or vice versa.

5. The Composite Picture

So what does all this amount to? Autistic people, particularly those with high cognitive ability, often show a paradoxical boundary profile:

• Strong bodily boundaries: reduced susceptibility to illusion, stronger proprioception, rigid personal space.
• Blurry emotional boundaries: alexithymia, poor interoception, self-other confusion in affective states.
• Ambiguous interpersonal boundaries: impaired ToM, difficulty inferring unspoken rules, trouble modulating intimacy or distance.

It is not so much that the self is missing—it’s that it’s carved in different ways. Solid at the edges, amorphous in the middle.

This helps explain why autistic people sometimes seem too distant, and sometimes too close. Why they may seem robotic in conversation, yet overwhelmed by emotional closeness. Why they may struggle with trust, not because they are cynical, but because their own compass of emotional ownership is unreliable. The fog inside the fortress can make it hard to tell what belongs where.

6. Drawing the Lines

Understanding this layered picture of self-boundaries in autism opens the door to more humane and effective interaction. Social training that focuses only on behaviour misses the deeper texture of experience: the way one’s own emotions feel illegible, or others’ feelings feel invasive.