Autistic Literalism
Oct. 11th, 2022 11:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kimberlysteele
Autism is more than just a common condition with many possible causes ranging from hormone-disrupting plastics in the environment and vaccine schedules. Autism is the zeitgeist of our time. As a high-functioning autistic who has battled the more problematic and antisocial aspects of autism, I believe I am qualified to speak on the subject.
The Girls Who Could Not Shudder
Though Temple Grandin, the high functioning autistic who figured out how to build a better slaughterhouse, believes autism grants her the ability to think like an animal, I tend to disagree. The most high functioning autistics, such as myself, have a weird and serene overview of what fear is made of. Grandin's genius where fear is concerned was to figure out how to trick animals into believing everything is OK until the last second when the bolt shoots out of nowhere and ends his or her life. Mine was to figure out that the seemingly demon-possessed masses (nobody will ever know for sure if it was demons, gods, God, or plain old human nature) reacted to a minor seasonal flu with draconian lockdowns and deadly injection regimes because at their core they were afraid of losing easy affluence and high status. My odd relationship with fear has made it impossible to get the creeps. I finally saw my first full-body apparition a couple of years ago and I had no fear reaction at all. I can watch the Exorcist or any other "scary" film and be grossed out but never scared.
Autism truly is a spectrum and most people have it to one degree or another. If I were to take a guess, I would venture that it is a Plutonian influence because it seems to have an affinity for prosthetic digital fantasy worlds, plastics, and cheap oil wealth.
Autists Love Rules
In the film Rain Man, Dustin Hoffman plays Raymond, the institutionalized adult autistic brother of a sleazy car dealer played by Tom Cruise. Realizing his deceased father's 3 million dollar fortune is held up in Raymond's institution, Charlie (Tom Cruise's character) springs his brother for an epic road trip where they get to know each other for the first time. Rain Man made a splash in 1988 because it brought autism into the spotlight as a real disorder and audiences got a fascinating glimpse into the every day world of an idiot-savant. Raymond's worst meltdowns in the film are triggered by disruptions of routines and rules. Raymond is unwilling to board a plane. His reaction is so extreme, Charlie ends up taking him on the long journey via car. Raymond loves watching The People's Court every day at the same time on television, which means that Charlie must accommodate his wishes despite being on the road.
Rain Man was based on the true story of Laurence Kim Peek, a real life savant who the character of Raymond was meant to pay tribute. The depiction of Raymond won multiple awards for its unflinching truth. For better or for worse, the autists I have known and taught all have a certain love of rules and schedules. One adult autistic student may request me to write everything she is expected to practice in a week down to the finest detail of fingering as well as how many times she is to practice at a specific time of day predetermined by me. Another autistic adult who was more severe on the autism spectrum loved the same funny demonstration of the Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol pentachord week after week. She loved it for its predictability and not in spite of it. When I was a child, I presumed all families gathered for supper at 5:30pm because that is what my family did. I loved order, dependability, and routine and still do. To this day, when I am forced or obliged to stay up past my usual bedtime, I get very irritable and snippy about it if I am not keeping my temper in check.
Autism can bring out the worst in people, especially the children of rich people. Greta Thunberg descended into a horrific eating disorder at the age of 11. Her indulgent parents cancelled everything for their child, including her mother's career as an international opera singer. Greta went on long campaigns of manipulative, seemingly-intentional anorexia right as her body was supposed to be experiencing maturity and a final growth spurt.
Svante is boiling gnocchi. It is extremely important that the consistency is perfect, otherwise it won’t be eaten. We set a specific number of gnocchi on her plate. It’s a delicate balancing act; if we offer too many our daughter won’t eat anything and if we offer too few she won’t get enough. Whatever she ingests is obviously too little, but every little bite counts and we can’t afford to waste a single one. Then Greta sits there sorting the gnocchi. She turns each one over, presses on them and then does it again. And again. After 20 minutes she starts eating. She licks and sucks and chews: tiny, tiny bites. It takes for ever. “I’m full,” she says suddenly. “I can’t eat any more.” -Malena Ernman on daughter Greta Thunberg
Thunberg and her equally molly-coddled autistic sister, Beata, straddled the line between legitimate disability and total brat. Both sisters clearly enjoyed torturing their parents. A part of them coolly observed as their parents indulged ever more hysterical antics in order to appease their every whim. Greta was willing to starve to death as a child in order to have her rules, her way, and her parents were appointed with the responsibility for her starvation by default.
The Motive
I think rule-following gives autistics like myself a dopamine rush and a fun distraction from the harshness of life. That is why it can be addictive to make and follow one's own strict rules. There is a vision of how proper and perfect everything would be if only the rule was followed at the same time every day. Perhaps the origin of the impulse is demonic but honestly I have no idea. Once I bore witness to an autistic child throwing a violent tantrum in a public space over a lost toy. Toys are not supposed to be misplaced; that is a breach of the rules.
Autism is in some part the indulgence of laziness. The idea behind the laziness is that the world around the autist must conform to his or her wishes. The same television show needs to come on at the same time and Raymond needs to have his butt planted in his seat in order to watch it every day. Greta needs her gnocchi a certain way come hell or high water or it's imminent death. The kid acted like the Hulk on a bender because his toy was missing.
When autists find out that the real world does not have to comport to their wishes, many of them shut down a la Greta Thunberg and would rather die or skip puberty than grow up and face the music. Depending on the autist, the determination to culminate desire can result in an idiot or a savant. In my case, my determination to understand the music that was lodged in my brain from birth led to relentless experimentation with copycatting songs on the piano and eventually provided me with a career as a music teacher. I am an idiot in many ways, including where music is concerned, but there are certain aspects of music where I lean towards the savant. Every time I used to run to the piano and force my will on my own ear, that dopamine hit gave me the impetus to move on to bigger and better harmonies.
Autistic Literalism Gone Wild
As I mentioned, we all have a bit of the autist in us. In 1995, a book called The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right arrived on the scene. The Rules for ensnaring the not-yet-born Christian Grey were grotesque and oversimplified: play hard to get, be unfriendly and standoffish, stop all communications if he forgets your birthday, yet be easy to live with. In other words, follow this impossible formula to be certain to ensnare an ideal man who does not exist.
The same large female group who fell for The Rules bought into Rhonda Byrnes's The Secret in young adulthood and Covid paranoia in middle age. "If the details of the formula are correct, my desire will manifest", they assured themselves. They were also told going to university would land them good-paying jobs in their field and that they needed a degree in order to succeed. How is that working out for them collectively right now?
Dilbert is a comic strip about formula-following, mouse-find-cheese engineers working under an evil boss. One day, it will serve as a time capsule of the years 1960 - 2040 on display. There is a sociopathic evil boss who doesn't care that he is draining the life out of his employees. Dilbert goes to a psychiatrist, who suggests he is insecure about his looks because his mother was a moth (an absurd formula) and Dilbert ends up agreeing that she was a moth because Dilbert had a sweater that disappeared as a child. In other words, no matter how insane the illogic, the formulas must work because an expert says they work. In companies like the one parodied by the Dilbert strip, consultants are hired to solve company problems, when the baseline problem is that the employees are treated like robots and not human beings. Robots do not deviate from the rules.
I still drive a car a few times a week. There are many people who drive while autistic, expecting everyone else to follow the rules and getting very upset and stressed out if they don't. That used to be me and still is sometimes. The hard facts are that driving is a sh**show and making it out alive and intact must be the primary goal, not following the rules to the letter and expecting others to do the same.
If autists of every stripe can understand that autism is neither a superpower nor a life sentence, that would be a good first step towards adjusting to a world where autism permeates almost every aspect of daily life. Autists of moderate to high function need to wake up and realize that nobody owes us our living, especially not our parents. Another realization I would suggest is that compliance with your own rules or anyone else's can dig you into a deep pit. Autistics may be plagued with literalism but we are routinely blessed with insight. Being so detail-oriented means you can see the hidden faces, if only you can overcome your fear and put your mind to it.
no subject
Date: 2022-10-12 12:24 am (UTC)Rules... sigh. This is a thing I struggle with. I get really bent out of shape when I learn a set of rules that everybody is supposedly following, or supposed to follow, and then figure out that hardly anyone actually follows them.
We moved from one rental house to another a couple months ago, and according the "the rules" our landlord was supposed to give us our deposit back. In fact, we could have given up the keys to the previous rental a week earlier, but I wanted to make sure everything was spotlessly clean, and any smudges and chips in the paint were fixed, to make sure we were right-and-tight to get our deposit back. I reviewed the lease. I reviewed the state law regarding landlords, tenants, and deposits, and made absolutely dang sure I would get the money back. Cleaned behind the stove, mopped under the refrigerator, changed the air filters, scrubbed the baseboards, everything.
And then they didn't give it back, citing a problem that the house had when we moved in.
My brother, who is not autistic in any way, is like: "Actually, I just see a deposit as like a tip. They can keep it if they want. Sometimes they're nice and give it back, which is like an unexpected win on a scratchoff ticket you found in the parking lot"
I can't do that. I just can't. So I've spent the last week composing emails to my ex-landlord that try to strike the right balance between polite, friendly, guileless, and tacitly threatening. Have put literally hours of composition and editing into each email.
They finally sent me a check for $500, which is less than half the deposit amount. So... partial win? But... I'm researching how to take this to small-claims court. Because on some strictly-intellectual level, I do understand that committing minor fraud is just part of the landlord/renter game, we're not gonna starve without that money, etc. But I WANT PEOPLE TO BE HONEST, tell the truth, and abide by the rules they set out for others. Otherwise, the world is too confusing. And on some level, this is one of those intransigent autistic traits.
Sigh.
That would bother me too
Date: 2022-10-12 03:48 pm (UTC)Ugh with the landlord. What a detestable human being. You know what might hurt him/her quite a bit would be to leave a detailed review of the complex online somewhere, basically making it known that they cheat people out of their security deposits. It won't always be a landlord's market. There seems to be an eerie foreshadowing of human die-off (sirens and ambulances EVERYWHERE the last 2 days) and they may come to regret openly swindling their renters.
Re: That would bother me too
Date: 2022-10-12 04:33 pm (UTC)Yeah, the stimming behaviors... I think the only time I've engaged in those as an adult has been when I was dealing with full-on PTSD, at which point I was dismayed to find myself hand-flapping. Hadn't done that in... I can't even remember. Maybe not since I was a little kid. But I'm reassured, knowing that... while it's not completely gone, it takes an almost superhuman amount of stress to push me over that line, these days. I know a lot of people dread becoming middle-aged, but I can honestly say crossing the forty line has been great. So many of the social and neurological issues that plagued my youth have just been gradually, slowly, improving over the years. I'm a much, much more functional person after forty than I was at 35, 30, 25... I may have been prettier then, but I sure don't miss it!
I puzzle a lot over the relationship between sensory/neurological issues, and the deep need for rules, schedules, and order. Perhaps it is all just a function of aging and learning, but... I suspect that getting more functional has also been related to age-related decline in sensory acuity. Over the years, I've stopped being able to hear the hypersonic noises that drove me bonkers as a kid. Is it coincidental that I also now have less trouble with noisy rooms? I'm still keeping tabs on the situation because I'm really curious about it, but since my last bout of COVID a few months ago, which poleaxed my normally-extremely-acute sense of smell, my incidence of migraine has gone down noticeably. I have such mixed feelings about this-- my nose was a big part of how I navigated and made sense of the world around me, and having that chopped down to something like a normal sense of smell... it feels like I've been amputated somehow. I can't smell 24 hours in advance when my kids are getting sick. My husband is not as attractive without that... normally, he just smells so great I almost get a buzz off of being close to him. I can smell when people are afraid/stressed (or could, rather). I can no longer tell the difference between good butter and the cheap stuff (normally the cheap stuff has a weird chemical tang) and I find this a bit distressing. But at the same time, I'm in so much less pain. Was hyperacute smell contributing to the headaches??
How much have I circumscribed my own life due to sensory hyperacuity? How many of the things I can't do/don't enjoy have been dictated by simple need to avoid overstimulation? I don't know, and it's a weird thing to consider. That rigid clinging to rules and compulsive following of patterns... like, what if it's just a life-raft we are clinging to because otherwise we'd drown in the chaotic, overwhelming, uncontrolled, unintelligible sea of information we're taking in all the time?
Re: That would bother me too
Date: 2022-10-13 03:25 am (UTC)From what I can remember about being oversensitive, yes, it did have a great deal to do with the craving for order and schedules. Lack of sleep and/or food made my sensitivity issues far worse, and one of the worst issues for me in public school was the constant disruptions in my sleep schedule, abuse of caffeine in order to stay awake through classes, and constant, unrelenting stress/fight or flight state. I got so frustrated with it all that I broke down several times and ended up crying so hard, my breathing was disrupted and I felt as if I would suffocate.
Getting older, despite all the sagging, gray hairs, and wrinkles, has only been a blessing. You're right -- rules can easily become a life raft and not in a good way.
Re: That would bother me too
Date: 2022-10-13 01:20 pm (UTC)Re: That would bother me too
Date: 2022-10-15 10:37 pm (UTC)We were considering moving into a cheap little condominium, but the very presence of an association fee disqualified us from getting a mortgage. Total seller's market and it still is -- we could sell our current tiny fixed-up house for a small fortune if we wanted to move, but the problem there is we would have no place to go.
Re: That would bother me too
Date: 2022-10-16 12:25 am (UTC)Re: That would bother me too
Date: 2022-10-20 06:00 pm (UTC)Carefully-worded, friendly-in-tone but vaguely-threatening, obsessively written, re-written, edited and re-edited certified-mail paper letter for the win! We did not have to take it to court.
I of course replied with a cheery and effusive thank-you note about how much it means to us that they did the right thing, and how deeply grateful we are :)
Re: That would bother me too
Date: 2022-10-20 08:38 pm (UTC)Re: That would bother me too
Date: 2022-10-20 10:48 pm (UTC)And I figure, even if they were gonna try to cheat me, even if they did the right thing only under duress... just like with kids, when you get the behavior you want: reinforce, reinforce, reinforce!
I want them to feel as GOOD as possible about it, so maybe they'll lean toward not-cheating the next tenant who moves out. Spread the love around, you know?
Re: That would bother me too
Date: 2022-10-21 02:44 am (UTC)Re: That would bother me too
Date: 2022-10-21 01:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-13 06:00 pm (UTC)—Princess Cutekitten
no subject
Date: 2022-10-13 10:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-14 12:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-14 03:23 pm (UTC)the autism thing...
Date: 2022-10-14 12:57 am (UTC)I was never impaired/disruptive enough to get dx'ed and drugged for it (weirdly, my very inoffensive husband who shares almost none of my neurological quirks is the one with the official "Asperger Syndrome" diagnosis). I don't go out of my way to hide it, but it's also not a core part of my identity, so... eh.
It has contributed a lot to my "research your way out of it" approach to life's difficulties.
Re: the autism thing...
Date: 2022-10-14 03:25 pm (UTC)Re: the autism thing...
Date: 2022-10-15 06:58 pm (UTC)Re: the autism thing...
Date: 2022-10-15 10:43 pm (UTC)I was in an ice cream store recently and a little girl about four years old was starting to act up. Her mother immediately pulled her aside and said "We don't cry and also get to have ice cream. If you cry, we leave right now, no ice cream." The girl stopped her shenanigans immediately. I wanted to give the mother a standing ovation (I did this silently, in my head). A similar situation happened at the park today, though there was not ice cream involved and it was a little boy. Maybe, just MAYBE, young parents are starting to understand that setting reasonable limits and not allowing your children to push your buttons is a good idea.
Re: the autism thing...
Date: 2022-10-16 12:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-13 11:39 pm (UTC)However, I do think that hormone disruptors in the water (read: birth control pills, microplastics, etc, rather than any explicit evil plot) and various other environmental triggers have made things worse.
Virtually all children have a natural inclination for The Rules and a desire for order. The world is a terrifying, dangerous and bizarre place, and rule-following is a survival strategy. The children who obeyed their parents not to go near the watering hole full of crocodiles survived to pass on their genes.
Consider all of the weird superstitions that children follow and invent: don't step on the cracks in the pavement, keep a special shiny rock in your pocket to ward off danger, don't lie too close to the wall in bed, or the house will eat you (I read a 'teen horror' book about that when I was 6, and spent the next 5 years piling pillows against the wall each night to prevent the wall from eating me. My parents always wondered why I needed 8 pillows, but I'd semi-stolen the book from the library, so couldn't tell them...).
The absence of a strong father figure probably also factors in as well, as the toxic feminine is more likely to indulge the unreasonable whims of the autistic child, as well as fail to establish the strong boundaries the child actually desires, rather than the proxy-rules they invent for themselves. Interestingly, autistic brains apparently show features of both male and female brain psysiology, which to me at least, may explain a lot of the gender confusion in children nowadays, backed up by a predatory medical/media industry only too happy to encourage them.
As religiosity has decreased, there is also the lack of a sense of 'cosmic order' to right wrongs. I think part of the horror which H P Lovecraft tapped into in the early 20th century was the hitherto-unimaginable idea (at least to a Victorian mind) that the universe is an inherently chaotic place full of mad, spiteful gods who do things for no reason and with no comeuppance. (Though I, personally, do not believe this is the case)
After all, what is Communism, but a desire to impose an artificial 'fairer' (in theory) system on humanity, going against all natural human impulses. And so, to prop it up, there are the invetible camps and executions until a mythical endpoint where the world is 'fixed'. I'd be interested to know how people with autistic traits score on the authoritarianism scales - my guess would be quite high. The meme goes that it's only the high-functioning autists who saw through the lies and deception of the whole corona business, but I don't think that's true at all - I've worked with a fair number of people who are definitely on the spectrum and they LOVED following the arbitrary rules and are vaxed to the max. The reasoning and any actual data or logic was irrelevant, the rules were the rules. I've noticed it tended to be the poorer ends of society, who are all-too-used to being scammed and grifted, who saw through the deception.
I enjoy the fact that you freely admit you may be wrong in your various essays Kimberly, as for many autists, to do so would be an unforgivable sin. Part of the reason I stopped hanging around with the "nerds" at school, despite having similar interests, was how much time they spent trying to prove each other wrong. It was just petty power-play, and I still see it in the grown man equivalents of those nerds now in silly little workplace dramas. I'm more than happy to be proved wrong (and if anyone wants to take me to task on this essay, feel free) - to me it's just new data, and I will adapt my thinking accordingly.
So I think autism is effectively an atavism - a juvenile trait which has persisted into adulthood, much like how (many) humans can digest milk in adulthood. The cause is multi-factorial - as as I say above, I'm certain there are environmental factors, but consider how many 'kidults' there are these days, collecting toys, sorry, action figures, in their 30s and getting alarmingly excited about Nintendo Switches. The human race has been infantilised through a cultivated risk-averse culture and cheap energy, and we are weak and malleable because of it. In a sane world, Greta's parents would have let her starve, but in our world, they would be jailed for neglect, and she knew she had that power over them.
Consciously or not, there is a definite power trip to be had in getting people to kowtow to one's arbitrary rules. I know I used to mildly torment my parents as a young child by insisting on a certain story being read before I went to sleep each night, for a period of about 2 years (I am an only child, and I think that smaller families factor in too - it's hard to manipulate your parents if you're one of eight siblings). And not a single word could be skipped, or else the whole page had to be repeated... Nowadays we'd call that autism, in the past, it would have been called "being a horrible little brat", and part of me feels sorry for my parents, whilst another part feels they deserved it for putting up with my bad behaviour.
I also had an ex-girlfriend who was probably reasonably high on the Aspergers scale, and would periodically get herself into a panicked frenzy spiral of perceived slights and paranoid neurosis, and would obsess over everything she did or didn't do until she became paralysed by her own self-inflicted panic (there was probably an anxiety disorder in there too).
However, I would eventually get fed up of her nonsense and tell her off, then she'd 'snap out of it' and return to normal. I came to realise that it was the sense of order she craved.
I definitely have autistic, or Aspergers-y traits myself, particularly pattern-recognition, but they have definitely got better and easier to deal with as I have got older, and one starts to understand the nuances of life, and just accept "the way things are". Trying to fix everything is exhausting. It's kind of a case of "How I learned to stop worrying and love the chaos". Although I would say that developing an underlying sense of karma and cosmic order has helped a lot, especially when you've been around long enough to watch horrible people turn their lives into train wrecks.
The mirror neurons side of Aspergers is interesting as well - the theory goes that Aspies don't have them, and therefore cannot empathise with other humans. I personally happen to think that's a convenient get-out for just being rude, as I'm not a particularly empathetic person, in the sense that I don't feel what others are feeling, and generally don't feel much emotion at all. However I am a very good mimic, and highly observant, so I can 'fake' empathy, and have weirdly found that people open up to me a lot, as I prefer to listen rather than speak (despite what you might assume from my writings on here!) and I just ask open-ended questions. There was an interesting video game I played several years ago called Prey, where the enemies were mimic-creatures who could impersonate any given object (so you might get attacked by a teacup or a bin), but they ironically had no mirror neurons, and killed every species they encountered with impunity. At the end (spoilers), it was revealed that you, the protagonist, were actually one of the mimic-creatures and the whole game was a simulation to see if the remaining humans could make the mimic-creatures develop empathy through the choices they were forced to make in the simulation, and therefore spare the human race. I think it's a similar situation - the human brain is remarkably able to change (neuroplasticity) and can recover from even relatively catastrophic damage from a stroke or brain injury by getting other parts of itself to perform alternate functions (so the movement-control area may take over word-processing control as well). Is it therefore so hard to believe that mirror-neuron-deficient humans could grow mirror-neuron-like cells? Or is it just that the some people don't actually *want* to be able to feel empathy...? (The same could also be said of psychopaths, sociopaths and narcissists) Some might even say that, much like the mimic-creatures, we are incarnated in this reality to learn the lessons of empathy. (and going to the esoteric side of things, could the up-tick in Aspergers also be due to souls unfamilar with human bodies incarnating in them for the first time, having previously been something like a komodo dragon, which has no need for empathy?)
Finally, I still really enjoy reading Dilbert too (especially now that Scott Adams, having been duped into shilling for pharma last year, has now gone a full 180 and is on an anti-pharma, anti-woke, anti-ESG crusade), but I never used to understand why Dilbert simply doesn't quit his job or "go Wally" and learn how to loaf. Although fictional, I came to the conclusion he has low self-esteem and on some level enjoys and feels he deserves the punishment. I've worked with a lot of engineers, and it's amazing the similar levels of mistreatment they will put up with.
Mr. Crow
no subject
Date: 2022-10-14 03:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-15 03:22 pm (UTC)Autistic brains have been found to be heavier and denser than neurotypical brains. We have more brain cells. Does this make our brains more "powerful?" Yes... and no.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24798024/
This is one of the articles suggesting that autism correlates with reduced apoptosis - programmed cell death - in the brain during development. The brain is a network of networks, with various systems connected to each other at points that determine its functions, and the process of apoptosis forms the major channels in this network. The normal functioning of the brain depends on the network having a specific density. If there are too few connections, signals won't propagate in the brain and the circuits won't work. If there are too many connections, the systems in the brain will disrupt each other with constant crosstalk. The latter condition is what autistics experience.
This model explains more aspects of the autistic condition than any other I know of. Heightened sensory responses? Crosstalk. Meltdowns? Floods of signal due to the overconnected circuits. Muted emotional responses? Disruption to emotional systems due to overconnection. Heightened emotional responses? Increased propagation of emotional signals
About the mirror neurons. Autistics do have them, but they don't function normally. The mirror neuron system, from what I've heard is a large and convoluted circuit, stretching across each hemisphere of the brain. This befits its complex function, resonating with the perceived behavior of other people to drive social activity. Because of its size and complexity, having significant crosstalk in the brain causes massive disruption to it. Autistic brains can be more or less "pruned" in different areas, resulting in different ability profiles. However, it's likely that the nature of the mirror circuit basically guarantees that it will be rendered non-functional in a brain with low levels of apoptosis.
Why the obsessive interests? Neurotypicals have one too. They all have the same special interest - social dynamics. In the presence of the mirror neurons, the systems that drive our obsessive engagement are always turned toward analyzing the social environment. When the mirror neurons don't work, these faculties can be directed toward other topics.
Is the autistic brain more or less capable than the neurotypical brain? It depends on how you use it. The overconnection allows us to think laterally, process information in unique ways and draw parallels that others wouldn't. Without the mirror neurons working, our special interests can motivate us to accomplish amazing things - or just to play video games all day. Kimberly mentioned the "music that was lodged in my brain from birth". I suspect this is an effect of connections between places that would normally not be connected, which has led to her particular musical ability.
However, in order to realize the benefits of a more integrated brain, we have to learn ways to mitigate the floods of signal that can occur and synchronize our thought patterns so that they can be turned to constructive ends rather than interfering with each other. No one teaches us how to do this and the neurotypicals around us can't understand the nature of this challenge.
Your characterization of autism as an "atavistic" condition may reflect the fact that children have a more plastic neural network, likely with some provisional childhood connections that degrade as they grow older - possibly a cause for the childlike imagination and wonder that people lose later in life. Autistics having a more highly connected brain could thus result in childlike patterns of consciousness.
Lastly, on the esoteric front, I think autistic souls may be the opposite of inexperienced. I and other autistics I know have been called spiritually "ancient" on multiple occasions and I've felt impressions that suggest many past lives as a sapient being. I would guess that autistic souls have been through so many cycles of reincarnation that they have developed a sense of self that is more independent from their circumstances and the people around them than that of others. If the brain serves as a "receiver" for the soul, it stands to reason that a more complex, cohesive soul requires a more complex receiver.
A fascinating conversation to be sure, would be interested to hear whether you agree.
no subject
Date: 2022-10-15 06:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-15 10:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-16 01:06 am (UTC)https://www.olgabogdashina.com/post/the-role-of-sensory-perceptual-differences-in-autism
But lots more worth perusing if you're so inclined-- her "blog" is articles she's written on autism-- a lot of the same stuff as in her books, but in a nice, short format. She is, hands-down, my favorite researcher on the topic. Most of the rest of them get so bogged down in the social stuff, claiming that we have no empathy, no "theory of mind" blah blah blah I'm sure you've heard it all.
What Bogdashina claims --which makes *vastly* more sense to me, seeing it from the inside perspective-- is that it's primarily a sensory/perceptual/processing issue, and the social/behavioral issues are downstream from that.
no subject
Date: 2022-10-15 06:49 pm (UTC)Fascinating: I didn't know about the overconnection hypothesis. When I was meditating on various trees for my system of Ogham divination, I was particularly intrigued by the lore around the Willow or Saille. For instance:
"The weeping willow is native to China and figures in many legends, including stories and symbols of Kuan Yin, the goddess of compassion. The oval, elongated leaves of the willow are said to resemble tears and to stand for the great empathy Kuan Yin has with human suffering." -eHow.com
I believe one of the primary secrets of the autistic mind lies within the concepts of sensitivity, and for that reason my nickname for the Saille card is Sensitivity/Flexibility. When we are oversensitive, it can result in feeling triggered or assaulted, raw and laid out bare and bleeding for salt to be rubbed into our wounds. The flip side of imbalance is dullness, a sort of minimalistic, emotionless, obtuse, nihilistic trance state of ignoring everyone and everything.
A Druid Path: Saille
As far as the esoteric front, I tend to disagree. It tends to be a crapshoot. I have worked with plenty of autistic students and some seem not all that far removed from having been a chicken or a deer in a past life.
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Date: 2022-10-15 07:34 pm (UTC)All babies are born with zillions of neural connections. The process of growing up and making sense out of the world around you is a process of pruning those connections down to the stuff you actually need. Prioritizing information.
Autistic people, to some extent or another, don't prune connections as efficiently or as thoroughly as normal people.
This is why various forms of synesthesia are so much more common among autistic folks than in the general population: when we were babies, and all the info coming in through our sense organs was just undifferentiated signals... we never quite completed the process of sorting out which signals were visual, which ones were auditory, which olfactory, etc.-- they're not as walled-off as they are for normal people. So quite a lot of us can still see sounds, smell colors, navigate music as if it were a landscape, relate to the personalities of numbers or chords, that sort of thing.
But it's also... normal people learn to ruthlessly prioritize input, so they can listen to the person in front of them, but tune out the sound of cars going by outside, a siren wailing in the distance, a vacuum cleaner running two rooms away, the clock ticking on the wall, the HVAC system switching on, the crinkly noise made by the slacks of the guy sitting ten feet away when he shifts his legs around, the TV in the next-door apartment... autistics are WAY worse at this.
Can't. Stop. Hearing. The dang. Clock. I'm sorry, what were you saying again?
I mean, how are you supposed to pick up on something as subtle as social cues when there's a trash truck out in the street, and there is no way to *stop* listening to every thump, hiss, and squeak it makes? When your brain treats that input as completely equal to every other sound coming in?
There's also a sort of mass-intake-then-shutdown thing that can happen, where since we don't prioritize well, SO much info comes in that it overwhelms our ability to process, and you get basically a system shutdown. For some of us, that's a migraine. For some, it's more of an emotional thing. Meltdown. Rocking. Trance states. Anything to just turn off the firehose and try to process what we've already got. So on the one hand, we can often take in a crazy amount of detail and data... but then because we didn't automatically pick out the most relevant bits and dump the rest, it's gonna take us an abnormally long time to crank through that stuff... and you end up not being able to hold a normal-sounding conversation because you can't respond at the speed and rhythm that normal conversation demands.
Some of this gets better with age and the sort of natural injury-and-aging attrition in brain cells. I don't think it ever normalizes, but one does come up with coping strategies (smile, nod, make encouraging "go on" type conversation noises, and figure out what they said at your own speed) and learn one's limits (eg stay away from theme parks and action movies).
YMMV
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Date: 2022-10-15 10:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-16 01:44 pm (UTC)Interesting, were these the lower-functioning types or the higher-functioning Aspergers types? I had higher-functioning people in mind.
One more addendum: given the overconnection hypothesis, the mellowing of autistic symptoms with age is likely due to the natural death of brain cells pruning the neural network. This could mean that autistics mentally peak quite late in their lives. I certainly remember feeling like my mind was more unstable and chaotic earlier in life.
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Date: 2022-10-16 03:46 pm (UTC)One of the primary issues with autistics and oversensitivity/overconnectivity is the astral trash heap within which we all currently dwell. It's nasty out there. Anyone without a sincere, dedicated daily prayer routine, a banishing ritual, regular hoodoo baths or all three is soaking in a world of mental hurt.
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Date: 2022-10-16 07:43 pm (UTC)It all makes a lot of sense, and for going into so much depth. It's certainly a lot to think about, particularly the mirror neuron and receiver hypotheses you mention at the end. A more complex receiver would probably also receive a lot more unwanted input as well, and the issue therefore becomes one of screening out all the 'noise'.
Thanks to the other posters for their input on this as well - very interesting insights! I agree with Methylethyl and Kimberly about the issue being primarily one of sensitivity, almost like an amplifier turned up with too much gain. One coping strategy, as was alluded to, is to therefore just "switch off" all unnecessary incoming data, resulting in the emotionlessness mentioned.
Relating to the overconnection and inability to 'prune', I don't know about others, but up to about the age of 25, I found it very, very difficult to throw anything away. I guess one might call it hoarding, but it was just a sense of "but maybe I might find this useful at some point...", and I also would get deeply obsessive about trying to read EVERYTHING. Even if it was a book I hated, I still felt I had to read it. I felt like I had to learn and know everything, even if it was not useful, relevant or even interesting to me. For video games, I had to 100% complete them. So I basically couldn't get rid of anything. And interestingly, after the age of 25, I got much, much better at dealing with the unwanted autistic aspects.
Mr. Crow
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Date: 2022-10-17 12:23 am (UTC)A longer reply!
Date: 2022-10-15 06:36 pm (UTC)Agreed on toxic femininity being one of the roots of overindulgence. The fear of the (bratty) child is actually rooted in the fear of being utterly defenseless and parentless, and they push parental limits in order to prove whether or not they are correct about being defenseless. The proxy rules are put up as temporary partitions and taunts to say to the parent “well I can obviously be a better limit-setter than you and my rules work” even when they clearly don’t.
I’ll be elaborating my Communism=toxic femininity hypothesis in a future essay. Co-signed on Lovecraft — in a way, he showed the real fear of the atheist, who is always glorifying space travel and openly wishing for the aliens to land, yet would quickly become lunch on a plate if they did.
I find you are right about allegedly “high-functioning” autistics and their desire to quaxx like good little robots. They ate up the scam hook, line, and sinker. Many of the vegans I used to pal around with online and off are autistic. They loved the crap out of the masks and got themselves plenty of helpings of synthetic MRNA sauce despite those product’s origins in the beagle-torturing labs of Fauci and Friends. And these were people who criticized the Impossible Burger because the Impossible company had to do a single animal test (on mice, I believe) to obtain FDA approval. Sheesh…
Thank you. I enjoy admitting I could be wrong and the day I stop doing that is the day I will shut up and stop writing because I will be dead. I would still be atheist if I hadn’t always maintained I could be wrong. A friend of mine once joined MENSA. He described it as you do, a bunch of nerds desperate to prove each other wrong. They were mostly dysfunctional males, a freak show of the unkempt, malformed, and arrogant, often well-paid (MENSA is expensive as hell) from pigeonhole, specialized STEM careers.
I agree as well that autism is an atavism — a bit of the Puer Aeternis that can go away naturally or be driven out. The challenge is to keep the flexibility of the inner mind that manifests as uncontrollable rigidity in the material world.
I once had a nervous breakdown in a theater as an adult. My boyfriend at the time took me to a loud action movie and we had to leave about 15 minutes in. I had no idea what was happening as I didn’t know I had a processing disorder or that I was autistic. I have had many panic attacks while driving and I often pull over and sit it out in a parking lot until it goes away. As a child, I hid my tics very well and was only exposed when I went into trances and could not be snapped out of it.
For me, understanding that “Kimberly Steele” is only one installment in a long, episodic series of lives stretching back to being a cat, a goose, and heaven knows what else has helped immeasurably. It’s much easier to forgive humans for their stupidity when you realize they may have been an ant, a squirrel, or a factory farmed cow in a recent past life.
As far as mirror neurons, I don’t think modern scientists have the remotest clue about how they function because those very scientists are the same malformed, mouse-find-cheese types who make it into MENSA. I think autistic people are often deeply empathetic and that it is a deliberate choice at some baseline level to turn off their empathy switch. I know it was that way for me for many years. Part of the issue is the astral garbage dump that human life has become. Becoming a sociopath is a self-defense mechanism. It hurts less.
Re: A longer reply!
Date: 2022-10-15 06:45 pm (UTC)I don't do action movies anymore.
Re: A longer reply!
Date: 2022-10-16 09:20 pm (UTC)I agree on the defencelessness fear, I remember being utterly terrified of being abandoned by my parents when I was young, and this lasted a good five or six years. I invented all sorts of weird rituals which would somehow prevent my parents from leaving me or dying, and followed them obsessively. Instead of testing my parents' boundaries though, I retreated into my own fantasty-land, where I could create the rules. Maybe, on some level, it even worked.
Funny you should say that about the empathy switch though - when I was about 10 or 11, I actually remember making a conscious decision to switch my emotions off, even visualising turning off a switch on my brain. As well as getting rid of the paralysing abandonment fear, this also corresponded with starting secondary school (I think in America this would be middle school or junior high school?), where school suddenly became a lot less fun and learning-focused and a lot more social and sport-focused, neither of which I was good at, and becoming an emotionless sociopath instead of an over-sensitive and delicate little boy was a good way to avoid getting bullied, as I saw what happened to the boys who did not make that change. It was only maybe 5 years ago that I decided to flick that switch back on again, partly because we got a dog and otherwise I would have just been hateful to her.
H P Lovecraft-related, I recently read a sci-fi book called "The three body problem", and it touches on exactly what you mention (spoilers) - a group of disillusioned, misanthropic humans contact and beckon a relatively local space-faring race, having projected on them their wishes that they will somehow 'fix' humanity. Obviously though, this race turns out to be predatory and hostile and they simply seek to steal our planet for its favourable orbit and climate. Oddly enough, a lot of the book is based in Communist China.
The problem with a lot of nerds is that they base their identity on being smart, and therefore being proved wrong is a direct affront to their sense of self. If every other aspect of your life is a smoking mess, then "but at least I'm the smartest in the room" is a powerful drug. For me, realising that I wasn't academically the smartest (again, at secondary school) was a fairly major wake-up call, and so I instead focused on becoming, for want of a better word, sneaky. Just paying close attention to everything around you (turning that excess of data inputs into an asset) and learning when to keep your mouth shut and your head down is a very useful lesson, and that it's often better to flatter and befriend an idiot than to argue with them. I also learned the skill of "saying one thing and doing another", which may be known as 'duplicity'. I therefore saw through the coronavirus scam for what it was, but the remaining Branch Covidians cannot contemplate that they have been tricked, as they are 'too smart' to have fallen for a scam, so therefore there was no scam. They tend to be the most dedicated zealots, and probably will be until their untimely deaths.
As soon as I read about the Puer Aeternis a few years ago, I realised it described me disturbingly well. It's a difficult path to walk, but as you say, the individuation challenge for the Puer is to balance retaining the childlike wonder, inquisitiveness and flexibility with not turning into a man-child unable to focus or progress at anything.
I used to be a terrible driver myself, as I really struggled to deal with and process all the data inputs and driving outputs fast enough, and couldn't learn what can (and must) be screened out, so I drove very slowly, and would have to take slow, deep breaths most of the time to stop my vision from spinning and completely freaking out that I had for some reason been allowed to be in sole control of a ton of steel capable of travelling at 70 miles per hour or more. I am better now, but I still hate driving.
The movie theatre thing sucks though, it does sound like the type of panic attack my ex-girlfriend used to have. She would also do the trance thing - sitting and rocking on the floor if she got totally overwhelmed, and generally a LOT of weird stuff used to happen and manifest around her.
And yes, it would make perfect sense that the over-sensitivity of autistics would leave them far more exposed to astral junk. I've noticed that if I don't banish, I get a lot of what might be termed 'intrusive thoughts' - I think I mentioned before how my interest in video games, certain genres of music, junk food and even horror movies all vanished when I started banishing...
Mr. Crow