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Could A Lot Of Symptoms Have Their Roots In Literal Thinking

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DGuru
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08 Sep 2011, 6:19 am

Mindslave wrote:
wavefreak58 wrote:
All behavior is tied to perception and thought. If thinking is incorrect, behavior will reflect that. But saying that it is all tied to literal thinking seems to be overstating it. How is eye contact related to literal thinking?


It is all tied to that. All people with Asperger's have difficulty with social interaction, so everything else stems from that. Typically, a lack of social skills in a society based on deception will cause people to take things literally way too often. So as for eye contact, it's an attempt to fit in. People that don't fit in to society are going to have more trouble with eye contact than those that have no difficulty interacting with their peers. You could take all "symptoms" (symptoms are simply an extension of the original problem, whatever it may be in any situation) and somehow relate them back to difficulties with social interaction in this case, if that in fact is what all people with AS have in common. And if no two people with AS have one base thing in common, then the whole diagnosis loses all of its meaning.


I think what we really have in common is a lack of filtering information.

And this causes sensory issues as well as difficulty with social interaction(from not filtering out socially irrelevant information). Our society just focuses on the social interaction.

When we consider our survival we consider all the information we take in. When NTs consider it they consider social context, and some aspects of material context but not everything.

Then again there might be some truly socially adverse autistic people out there who filter out the social information rather than having trouble due to the mountain of non-social information dwarfing it.



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08 Sep 2011, 1:17 pm

No. Literal thinking is an effect, not a cause. You've got this backwards.


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Tadzio
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08 Sep 2011, 11:30 pm

No, Literal thinking can be conditioned to be a stimulus, all the way to "interhemispheric intrusion", where activity on one side of the Limbic system crosses over to the other side of the Limbic system.

Pavlovian and Operant Conditioning doesn't require literal thinking as a necessary link in a chain of conditioning, and while it is generally "one-sided" against the "ineffable" side of the brain, words make good tools in conditioning Limbic tricks. The easiest Limbic trick is to condition "fear" with an otherwise neutral stimulus, i.e., ring a unique bell then deliver a painful stimulus, and pair this sequence together a number of times, until the ring of the bell has conditioned the "fear" of the painful stimulus. With a very painful stimulus, one time can work, and can last a lifetime. No words are required.

With words, different manipulations of the Limbic system can be easier to accomplish. Dangerous trial-and-error interhemispheric intrusion is reported to be accomplished with inducing great fear to where the fear "crosses-over" into divine bliss. This seems to work also with using sensations of "intense hatred" to cross-over and quell Limbic "emotional depression", while withdrawal of "divine bliss" induces Limbic depression.

Fairly unreliable similar results can reportedly sometimes be accomplished more artificially with the "God Helmet": http://www.shaktitechnology.com/shiva/G ... ciples.htm

Interhemispheric intrusion is one of the more simple models that somewhat explains how ictal "fear" can be replaced by ictal "divine bliss" with seizures of Temporal lobe epilepsy.

Tadzio



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09 Sep 2011, 4:10 am

The way I see it literal thinking, social impairment, lack of eye contact etc are all the result of a lack of resources; the brain either lacks sufficient connections, has a deficit of the necessary neurons or the mechanism(s) by which input is filtered or allocated is a bit wonky.

That is why we struggle to do more than one thing at a time, such as when listening to somebody we struggle so much following the words or trying to read the face, that alternative meanings which would be processed in parallel by most normal people are not considered at all.