stark perceptions

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How many of you (aspies) believe that kids/adults with autism are on a higher plane of consiousness and more connected with ithe unseen, more aligned with the sensory world and possibly clairvoyant to some degree.

I know autos=self which connotes a withdrawal, but maybe it's because so much is coming inward so it's difficult to sort through the imagery and sensations. (am I crazy?).

Maybe it's not a misperception but a keen perception, an intuiting what isn't visible and reacting to it. Of course it seems out of wack because outward appearances are what we trust as our reality.

My son seems able to identify positive energy vs negative energy--even when someone is speaking kindly to him. I can tell by his reaction--he might start stimming, pacing, turning away from person or flat out ignoring the person even when he/she speaks to him. If he senses something but is forced to repress these perceptions as misalignments or misperceptions, then I can see how confusing it could be for him!

Any ideas/experiences similar?

equinn

Yea. Mum always said I have a sixth sense about things. I just... I'd call it people intuition, but that doesn't even seem right. It's like I already know what kind of person that is, if they are someone who is just rough around the edges, or if they are someone that sweettalks but is really a douche.

I think there could be something to that..

I wonder if they could do some studies on that.. with willing, hopefully paid, participants from the autistic community.. There used to be a Parapsychology Department at Duke University for a long time, but I think it was discontinued.. A lot of research dollars were spent there and I believe it was determined that there was a certain amount of psychic occurrences and things that happened that were beyond chance.. I think they used cards with symbols on them and maybe dice rollings? and other ways to measure psychic phenomenon. I don't remember much of what I read on that though honestly -- it was years ago.. I wonder if they ever worked with any autistic populations in their psychic research over the years? or if anyone else in the world has?

Interesting concept.. maybe we can come up with some links here?

Agent Mulder thinks we build telepathic connections, or something like that.

Sure.
I think so too. I have experienced a lot of the same things.

Has anyone here ever heard of a psi-ball? I used to throw them at teachers back in the day. It was awesome to watch them jump and twitch but nothing is there.

Basically it's energy coalesced into a small ball, usually invisible to most non-sensitive people. You can form it between your hands. Even then they are hard to see. Mine were always a sea greenish... but with hints of blue mixed in.

Anyway... I don't do the bloke with cards trick. Never been able to 'see' something. Not like that.

They need to have more metaphysical tests, rather than the ones based on magicians tricks. Yea, some people can do them, but the majority cannot, as it's not their skill.

And mum and I can, to some extent, 'talk' telepathically. It's more like making the other person sense something... like when I needed her to come home cause my brother was sick, but had no phone, I could give her the 'urge' to come home. Worked well for us. We can also tell when the other is experiencing a strong emotion.

I think my mum may have AS as well, which could be part of it, since my sister is an NT and has never been able to do that.

This sort of question requires a lot of disentangling superstition from reality. At least, the way you asked it, it does, because you're giving elements of real things and elements of mythology people have built up around real things. It's hard to answer a post like this because it seems to require dissecting a lot of the words. I'm sorry about this but in order to answer I'm going to have to relentlessly pick your post apart. It's nothing personal, I'm just dedicated to accuracy as much as possible on this (because terminology and ideas like you are using confused me a great deal for a long time because they were all I heard to describe or explain various things), and you seem to string together a combination of accuracy and ideas that distract from accuracy.

"Higher plane of consciousness" -- that phrase seems like a stock phrase out of certain mythology, so won't comment on that part of the question, because the phrase is a sort of nonsense-phrase. Plus my own personal set of symbols stubbornly views my consciousness as lower than others, but "lower" doesn't have a negative meaning.

"More connected with the unseen" -- I'd put it a different way than that.

For most people, what they see takes place mostly in their heads. It seems like they see one tiny part of what is around them, filter out all the rest, and then fill in the massive, massive amount of blank space with what they expect to see. This is conditioned at a very young age, and it's true that there are many things that a culture conditions a person not to notice, or rather, it's noticed, but it's then distorted by the perceptual process into something that is expected.

This is true in autistic and non-autistic people alike. But I have noticed in autistic people, for whatever reason, we are often able to notice things that we are not expecting, because we seem to do less filtering -- how much less, and in what areas, depends a lot on the person. This gives us all kinds of other problems, including being so flooded with data that we can't interpret it in any standard way, but it often enables us to be the only ones to notice a particular thing, as well, and we do interpret things in non-standard ways.

I'm not trying to make those categories absolute, because they're not. I'm just saying this happens.

Anyway, whatever huge amounts of people are conditioned not to notice, from what I can tell, they then call that the "unseen". And again, it's often not truly unseen to them, it's just that when they look straight at it, their brain tells them it's something else. So then if they, or someone else, does manage to get data interpreted this way, it becomes attributed to a supernatural explanation even if there's nothing supernatural about it.

(This isn't to say I don't believe in some things considered "supernatural," just that the whole concept is overused for things that are really really concrete and physical but not noticed in the right way.)

So, yes, autistic people are often good at seeing what most people don't. And some people call what they don't think they see, the unseen. But it's usually not what people assume it is when they use that term, so I prefer not to use that terminology to describe it.

"More aligned with the sensory world" -- exactly what I just described, a lot of us have more tendency to perceive sensory information with less filtering. Or else, with different filters. It can be hard to tell which for obvious reasons, such things are invisible to the person doing them.

"Possibly clairvoyant to some degree" -- I know what you're getting at, but it doesn't need that explanation. Autistic people are often better than average at dealing with patterns of sensory data and other information (this is "better" as in "more skilled", not "better" as in "more valuable", I'm not a supremacist, just for those who are overzealous in looking for them, lots of people are more skilled in one thing than another, it doesn't make anyone better than anyone else).

Is it "clairvoyant" to know that when you see a pile of books teeter in a particular way, then they are likely to fall on the floor? Many autistic people are adept at putting far more complex bits of information together than that. I get really annoyed when people call me things like "clairvoyant", it seems like they use ideas like that to mystify totally ordinary processes that combine being observant, seeing patterns, and being a good guesser. (Even if all of this isn't done on purpose.)



One important thing to do when thinking of autism, is do not trust the words over the reality.

Autism coined from autos was a word created by Bleuler to describe presumed withdrawal.

Kanner and Asperger both got the word from the same place, and used it to describe what they saw as withdrawal. (Kanner even went so far as to view regurgitation of food in infancy as a part of that withdrawal.)

Because of this, the word is a judgment on what they saw. Which means that, likely, in some people it really is withdrawal, and in other people it merely looks like withdrawal because of a lack of certain signals that most people recognize as engagement.

All of which takes a long time to write.



Probably accurate at least for many of us.



Isn't visible to who, is the question. Just because your brain shuts out a particular piece of data doesn't mean it's invisible, any more than closing your own eyes makes the world invisible to everyone else. There's nothing any more mysterious to it than that.



People who responded to outward appearances would almost be a relief to deal with compared to what most people actually seem to respond to. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad there are more people with standard perception than without it, there are extremely good reasons for it. But at its worst, what it seems to me (and keep in mind, this is from my own personal biases as to what happens to aggravate me) is as if people see a tiny bit of appearance and then create what a friend calls a "mental hallucination" or "cognitive hallucination" on top of it. Then they call that appearance. (And this is something that happens in pretty much all people's brains to one extent or another, it's just a matter of degree and how often.)

Appearance is too passive a word for it, when it's really an active process, I think a more accurate term might be, people usually see what they project as an overlay on top of appearance, and then cannot understand that it's only an overlay, nor understand the boundaries between the overlay and the actual appearance.



"Speaking kindly" requires only the sending of a small number of signals overall, as far as I can tell. Most people read those signals and stop there. When people are trying to appear (or feel) kind, they control those signals.

But let's say there's a hundred perceptible signals the body is sending out at once (this is an arbitrary number to prove a point), whether they're visual, auditory, olfactory, or whatever else.

"Speaking kindly" might only involve five of them, while the other ninety-five signals are screaming out some concept of what's really happening with the person.

And then most people seem to be focused intently on anywhere from one to five of those five. And then they fill in the other ninety-five with an image of what they think a "kind" person would look like, but they don't realize they're filling all that in.

I've written a few poems about this in the past, but all that it is, is that I see some of those other ninety-five signals more easily than I see the five everyone's looking for, or perhaps just have an easier time interpreting the others out of the ninety-five, than interpreting the five. Either way, a human being inadvertently sends out all sorts of signals most people aren't paying attention to.

When we are tested, autistic people are not tested on reading those signals, we are only tested on reading -- and giving names to -- the signals most people consciously understand.

We're not tested so often on the ones some of us are better at picking up and interpreting, nor on our ability to comprehend what is going on when we are not having to handle language, both of which are major flaws in ideas about autism.

Not that any of this is true of all of us, but it's a sizable number anyway.

Anyway, you can tell a lot just in the noise a person's foot makes hitting the floor, their smell, their overall pattern of movement, and especially the things that people don't generally perceive and thus don't generally learn to control as well when being either deceptive or self-deceptive. You can even tell a lot sometimes in pattern of words, typing, etc.

Not that a person's always right in their conclusions. But often is.



Confusing is an understatement.

I have some amount of training to suppress my instinctive reactions to various people and situations because it can seem judgmental and because until I met (some) other autistic people, people either had no idea what I was talking about or reacting to, or they, sort of like you, made something supernatural of it.

There have been occasions in which I felt like someone was... something beyond normal nastiness, into quite malevolent or hateful in an overwhelming and scary way. Every time I've ignored that, I've been burned, badly. What interests me is that when other people have been around to compare notes, autistic people were more likely to notice what I noticed, and non-autistic people were more likely to be fooled by the five (or so) signals that people seem to pay attention to, and believed the person to be nice or okay or honest, only to discover the hard way they were not. And had no inkling of what was coming.

Whereas I often know what's coming but have no knowledge of how to react or prepare myself.

None of this is something I do particularly voluntarily, either, it's just the way I perceive things and it happens.

But seriously, even when I'm not consciously aware of (or more like, understanding of) all the details I'm noticing and putting together and so forth, they are there, they're just not what most people notice, they're other things, and/or they're things other people notice, but put together into a different pattern than most people would form.

However to call this sort of thing psychic leads to all kinds of problems. It mystifies the entire process and makes it seem as if there's no true way to understand it, it becomes just "magic". When it's no more magic than facial recognition is magic. It's perception, it's just different (or a different brain-based process of figuring out perception), and certainly not extra-sensory.

I know people who experience the same things I do who put it into that terminology, for a whole lot of reasons, and I used to do it because I'd been given no other terminology. But for the most part, no, it's not that, it's something else, and it can be anything from misleading to dangerous, to portray autistic people as having some kind of magical powers that others don't, when what we (or, some of us) have is just different skills and/or different applications of similar skills.

Everyone would be in touch with a higher consciousness if they weren't busy talking on / playing with their cell phones.

And hooking too many meaning onto words instead of watching things.>-<

not that i mind that, but sometimes it causes WAY drama.

I can do that with some people. I will send an email out, and I just feel it when they read it.

yeah, could be....but then some NTs also have this ability.

In paganism auties and aspies are very valuable because they are said to have the abilites to 'see the unseen' and have a sort of sixth sense. They often become priestess and priests for their communication skills with nature and skill in healing spells.

Anyone child that is autisic or aspie are considered gifted, and are said to be chosen children of the earth for their ability to sense nature better then NTs.

I'd also like to add that thoughts are not ideas, they are concrete electrical patterns of connectivity in the brain. Thoughts are things. Radios can pick up signals without wires, why not humans?

anbuend-

Excellent post... It explains Aspies perceptions on a much more neuropsychological way, which is also another good perspective. I don't have any issue with Aspies saying they are more tuned into their surrounds; I feel like that as well, but the terminology you used definitely made me agree a bit more because it was far more specific.

I sometimes get an almost physical perception that my body is mechanically moving itself for me; that I'm sitting in the back of my head simply watching passively, and all of my actions are automated.

I think a lot of this “seeing the unseen” is our exceptional non-linear dynamics analysis capability. We know things without the “conscious” linear analysis that is the way we have been conditioned the thought process “should be” by the NT world

bookwormde

Interesting responses--thanks all--didn't mean to be so cavalier with my terminiology--I should have been more specific, but I wasn't exactly sure what I was referring to, believe it or not, or how to verbalize it. I will try to be more precise in this posting:

Anbuend,

No magic--hocus pocus or dark sorcery here. Supernatural, from my primitive understanding, was a way to explain unusual coincidences, control other people and it dictated how one carried out his/her affairs.

Nevertheless, supernatural happenings originated out of a belief system that was antithetical to religion and the divine mysteries. If I'm off base here and simplifying this it's due to the little I know about supernatural. I'm sure thare are missing pieces, layers that I'm not considering.

Considering a more grounded argument--

I do like your filtering argument. It makes sense. Perhaps not as much is filtered out so more is recognized. If it is too much, then shut down occurs or stimming etc.

Clairvoyance (sp--sorry)--is prophetic to some degree (right?). If an autistic person is able to identify patterns in the environment, then they are more likely to predict outcomes. I'm not talking about the person that talks to deceased relatives--(I"m very skeptical). Your interpretation was excellent when you identified autistic individuals ability to see what most don't see. It's not magical, it's there but unseen due to NT's intact filtering mechanism. Interesting.

My major point is that there is, as you alluded to, the great fallacy with the perception of autism is that they are tuned out of the world. On the contrary, they are more tuned in, more engaged due to their inability to filter out incoming information. This can be an asset if they can be trained to organize incoming information AND undstood properly.

I can imagine how a nonverbal autisitc child could disengage from a world that comes at him/her as an assault or barrage of information. The child will hone in on one item and hyperfocus in order to block out the rest. The repetitive behaviors, too, are an attempt to block out the overload. Behaviors can be explained:

Ability to see patterns and identify dishonesty on larger scale-- leads to strong sense of justice
inability to lie and rejection or hostile behavior towards perceived wrongs. (sometimes this might get mixed up and this is the theory of mind problem that results)

tantrums (melt downs)

avoidance behaviors

special interests or hyperfocusing

gathering knowledge/facts in an attempt to block out incoming information and concentrate
on one item/topic

repetitive behaviors or stimming (to free the mind and relax)


Thank you for your insightful response!

equinn