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arielhawksquill
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16 Oct 2011, 12:36 pm

HalibutSandwich wrote:
Guys I'm sorry I should have come back to this thread earlier. The title of it doesn't really match what I was trying to ask.

I was trying to talk about those incidences where I was unable to think of what to do. And they occur many times where I'm "forced" to become creative/imaginitive. I was wondering if this is my version of a shutdown. In those situations it's like the entropy of my thoughts instantly increases many-fold to the point where there's thousands of thought processes running through my head but they're multiplexed in a way my brain can't decode. It's like a runaway chain reaction that I can sometimes keep in check with the control rods but often gets to the point where chaos takes over and the overwhelming feeling that I'm no longer in control of my thought processes makes me shut down to protect "the me". Does that make any sense?


Ah, that is a different problem--it's not about being able to think of a creative idea, but about having to do it on the spot, while under pressure. Aspies seem to think of all possible outcomes and have to run a lot of simulations before choosing a course of action. Nobody can run all those simulations in real time, so a lot of Aspies "pre-think" or carefully plan everything they are going to do. When faced with a problem that has to be solved in real time, the mind is overwhelmed with all the possibilities and no time to think them through.

Similarly, a lot of Aspies report not understanding what is going on in a social situation until thinking about it in retrospect, because there are too many variables to solve for consciously while social interactions are going on at the same time.



HalibutSandwich
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16 Oct 2011, 3:02 pm

arielhawksquill wrote:
Ah, that is a different problem--it's not about being able to think of a creative idea, but about having to do it on the spot, while under pressure.
Yeah I think that's pretty much it. But is it like a shutdown? I often have a similar thing happen when a shrinks asks: "what are you thinking about now?" The more I think about what I'm thinking, the more my thoughts evade me and just become mixed up. In a clinical setting I'm not usually feeling pressured or stressed. So I don't know why it occurs. Several psychs have said it's because I'm repressing memories and stuff. But that doesn't seem to fit with the other situations where it occurs.

I've read some posts where people say during a shutdown their mind basically goes blank and there's just "white noise" in their head. In the situations I'm talking about it's more like the sound of a pulsar captured by a radio telescope. That is, it's sort of random background noise, but there's still some kind of pattern in it. Something like this but slightly more damped:

http://astrosurf.com/luxorion/Radio/pul ... 8-nrao.wav