We need to look outwards, and understand it

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I don't know what to call the title. But I need some opinion on this. I've for a long time been trying to acheive all the other skills, knowledge and awareness that people generally have, and try to exceed them. Trying to undersand the world.

This is some of my earlier realizations, and I wonder what you think or have to say about it.



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The mind expansion that aspies needs, to understand the world (including people around you) better. Here are some thoughts. This is a quick draft.


== People see reality differently, and they feel/see stuff that you've never felt our even heard about ==
The brain consists of, among other things, brain cells. The brain cells sends information to each other. Obviously, depending on how your brain is built physically, it's going to change how you behave. The physical processes in your brain is direct equivalent (not just gives ries to, but is equivalent) with what you fell, see, how you behave, how you feel, what you think, and everything else that's your unconscious and your conscious. Whatever you feel, think or experience had a direct correspondence physical reality; your brain.

When you feel good, something physical is happening in your brain. Your vision, that conscious experience of seeing whatever you're seeing right now, obviously has a physical form in your brain. This text that you are reading, enters your eyes, it reaches your 'primary visual cortex' as impulses, and i then further to your language area of your brain. Don't get hung up on "primary visual cortex", it's just the physical part of your brain that first receives the images from your eyes. So, whatever "physical state" your visual system in your brain has, directly your consciousness or your experience of what you see is having the same state. Now, this is not an exact explaination of the neurology if the human brain. But bottom line of all this is that whatever is occuring physically in your brain, defines your subjective reality.

If you think about it, the physical form of a brain (including the different states the electric signals in it has) can be formed in seemingly limitless number of different ways. Just think about the different states you have been trough at different times. You have been angry, glad, happy, sad, crying, hurt, thirsty, felt hatred, felt cold, felt warmth, felt optimism, felt pessimism, excited, afraid, .. the list is long. In fact, every milisecond of your life has been different. The physical state of your brain has never been exactly the same thing. But, physically your brain can do almost exactly the same things over and over again; like feeling happy etc. You might feel and see about the same ting every time you play tetris in your room with exactly the same clothes on, on yet another monday. Well, that's close enough. But where am I going with all this? Well, think about it. What physical form could a brain take? Could it take such a form that it'd have a consciousness that'd be totally unthinkable to any human? Yes. Turtles, dogs, and other animals experience stuff so much different from what humans do. They are physically very different from us. When you dream, things gets weird, right? That's because it goes to an "electrical activity state" that you don't experience when you're away, which in turn creates your reality at that time. You might think that "a dream is just a dream". But when you dream, that experience and consciousness is ultimately what you experience.

So, we could in theory create any arbitrary consciousness experience of a brain, having any conscious experience. That conscious experience could be so unimaginable different from what a human ever has experienced. Our concepts of time, color, sound, etc, is a human biological thing. Now, we might in theory be able to form a consciousness that looks like a human's too, for example a brain that holds a thought and sees a color and experience a time flow. Anyway, here's my point. We don't need to do that experiment to create such consciousnesses. They already exists.

Poeple are different physically, we experience stuff differently. We react differently (different physical objects behave differently). So, what do a "neurotypical" person experience in different situations? In order for me (the writer) to get that, I first had to realize this very important thing. That people can experience and think so differently from what I am. I first realized how different that potentially can be when I read a book about neurology. I know a lot of details about the brain and the different scientific views on it. But the bottom line is that it's a huge complicated machine, that is in a different state for all of us, even though we experience the same feeling some times; often we do, but that's not all to it.


== So what do other people experience or think? ==
In order to fell or think like someone else does, you need to somehow be able to put yourself in that person's situation. And you might not have any idea what so ever about what I'm talking about here. Here's the techniques that I've found working best (even if it's not a complete technique).

One thing that I've tried, is to pretend that the physical body of someone else is an extension of mine, but under anestethics. If your arm is under anastethics, and someone pokes it with a neddle, you'd know what it feels like, you could still imagine the pain (hopefully). I just do the same with the physical bodies around me. I imagine how it'd feel like if that extended body of mine was not under anestethics,
thus I am approximating what they feel, I am being somewhat more aware of what they feel physically when I observe them. I am projecting my imagination on them. Meanwhile, I cannot know exactly what they feel physically when they get in contact with things, but it's a first step.

Now, I want to make a very important note here. This is something that I've realized by experience. Could you imagine what it would feel like to get your hand tazed by a 200-volt current? Probably not. But still, you're probably imagening it right now (if you're not, try it). Chanses are that you're relying to an earlier experience, of having chock by a smaller current. If you're trying to imagine what it feels like to have a 200-volt current trough your hand, and if you don't have experience of it, that imagination will be nothing but phantasies. Of course you might be able to get pretty close, by reasoning that it "would be hot, it would shake my hand, it would be painful in X way, and it would make my hand feel like it dissapeared" etc. But in general, most of the time when it comes to imagine stuff we havent done before, we're pretty bad and inaccurate at it. So my point here is that, when we try to imagine what someone feels in a given situation that we havent experienced ourselves, especially we aspies, are not that good at it.

So how could we possible know what a person experience if we never has been in that feeling or thought that thought ourselves? That's one of the problems we aspies have. That's what I think atleast. Since we aspies react differetly and generally think differently than others, we will have more trouble to relate to people. "NT"s have been in many situations that we have too, but they have reacted and felt different than aspies in general has, and thus they have it easier to relate to other NTs. So this should also work the other way around, right? As you might have realized allready, many NTs can't relate to us either. But they can however understand our emotions that we show, since that's a universal thing. And, some NTs can relate to us very well, due to extraordinary empathy and understanding.

So, I want to bring up a further technique of empathizing with people. This technique is about "projecting" an emotion on someone, when we think we've realized what they actually feel. The hard part is realizing or knowing what someone feels. But once you know what someone feel, try to isolate that feeling and "project it" into someone else's head. It's the same as the "physical" technique above, but here you project an emotion or a thought instead of a physical sensation.

Now, realizing what someone feels or thinks, has been a hard practice for me personally. I'm doing it every day. I'm trying to build an "experience database", .. there's a lot of things I do intellectually (I'm what's called high functioning though) to try to figure what someone feels and thinks. There's much to say about this, but since this is a draft and drains my energy, I might write about it some other time.

== Why humans behave seemingly arbitrary/irrational ==
I'll just be short here, since this all is a draft.

Intellectually, we can explain all biological entities's behaviours and physical appearens in biological and evolutionary terms.

A gene wants to survive and reproduce. S&R. So a carrier of some genes wants to do the optimal for itself for it to reproduce and be in the next generation. This includes behaviours that helps siblings and family that carries the same gene to survive and reproduce, to protect oneself, to mate, to eat, to socialize (which in the long run leads to S&R) etc. I think many of you allready knows about these stuff.

But that made me think one day about why the heck people act so strange some times that seems even beyond evolutionary adaptation. Well, sometimes there's simply a S&R or social mechanism to it that we don't understand, but it's there. And, our genes are outdated in some respects, yes, but don't be to hasty to deem it that way.

First of all, there will be variations in people's genetics. Sometimes people simply gets mal adaptive. People chase imaginary dragons, they get born with three legs and seven arms etc. This is important to evolution, it's a trial and error process. But not solely. There is something called 'sexual selection'. Not to go too deep into it, "intersexual selection" is the phenomenon of the mates chossing their mates, selectively. Examples of this in birds is the female choosing their males based on the mail's physical appearence or the male's behaviour. Dolphins choose their males based on how well the male lifts a rock above the sealevel. Peacock is an example you probably know well. Here's the flix. There is a S&R value for a partner's choice of a partner depending on it's physical appearence or behaviour. But not in an obvious way.

A woman wants her offsprings to have as many children as possible, with the greatest survival and replication rates as possible. A partner that has the "attraction value" of females, is also valuable to a woman even if that guy does not have as much survival value as other males does. The woman who carries the genes that choses the males that's most attracted by women, even though those males are not more survival than other males, will have more grandchildren and thus repopulate the next generations. The "attractiveness" do not always have to be rational, it does only have to be reproducing for the sake of it for whatever reason. But, in evolutionary theory, women will find "good genes" attractive eventually. But sometimes, "good genes" also includes better reproducing. A simple example of this is 'intrasexual selection' in species where the males compete. An elk (correction: ther are real examples of the following of animals with horns, but I don't know if the elk is one of them) have an advantage over other males by having bigger horns. So, as expected, the elks gets bigger and bigger horns trough generations since the biggest horns gets the females. But, the biggest horns is and disadvantage in every other aspect than fighting competing males. But, as said, the females wants reproducing grandchildren, so they wait passivly till the biggest horn wins and then mate - for these males are the ones who mate. So, you can say that it's going on an evolution within the species as well, a "competition" among genes themselves manifesting in odd ways.

So some behaviours you find in humans can also be explained by sexual selection in various ways. There are many types of sexual selection.

I think I've been trying to write something similar to this for years, but never got it. Great work.

Thanks for writing/posting that. It was interesting, I think I will have to read it a few more times to fully understand what you are saying though

Does it help anything? If that is the case, how does it help?

Or, has it the potential to help?

This is interesting........ I think you are on the right road with this. I am trying now to integrate it with the knowledge that our physical brain can not tell the difference between actually seeing and remembering. it is our eyes and our perceptions that tell the difference.
So a person with Aspi may have a harder time staying in the now. I tend to revert back to my pictures in my head in times of stress, stim overload, or times of anxiety. My physical brain does not know whether or not I am participating in the collective reality. I hardly know at this point. My reality is subjective. A me vs. them. All these years I could not figure out how I came up with a different story of what happened. I doubted my sanity. Then I doubted everyone else. I took the logical/factual approach. I either live in my head, or I am drowning in a sea of emotion I do not comprehend. But I can not come from both, at the same time, like NT's do. this has been a very shocking revelation to me.
I am learning to do one of my favorite things in a different way. FACT FINDING. but now I am learning to do it in my relationships. "Is this what you saw?" OR "What do you mean, exactly?"
It is difficult. It messes with me. I have a therapist who is helping me through it. Else I am not sure I could undertake this altering of my perceptive reality. My friends and family are supportive and are using therapeutic tools from their end as well. I am blessed to have these people in my life.
I do not have to change who I am. Just the way I communicate. They, (f & f) will change the way they communicate with me. The Goal is to have my needs and wants met.
I still have mixed feelings about this.
It will be nice to be understood. It will be nice to have a subjective reality that everyone can agree on. Then I guess life, people and events, will not seem so foreign to me.