stark perceptions

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Sceadufaux - could you give me the link to your avatar's website? I'd like to create my own avatar from the Simpsons.

I think I might know what you’re getting at. It’s hard to know with the limitations of language.

It seems non-autistics are more connected with an intuition for the current social medium whereas we are more connected with an intuition for more general patterns in our experience. In some ways language itself forces us into viewing only a facade of reality because language is arrived at through a cultural consensus on meaning. It seems like the only way to truly understand the meaning of something is to completely divorce it from confines of language and social consensus.

I’ve entertained this theory that the mute autistic person is, in a way, more in tune with reality than the rest of us. Their experience is pure and unadulterated by the social medium. Yet, they are too hopelessly disconnected to outwardly communicate or record their experience.

I seem to have an extremely strong intuition for things. I have this inherent skepticism towards all things arrived at through cultural consensus. Sometimes this leads me into a very stark and disturbing vision of reality. It’s like living in an Old Western movie set where all the buildings are facades. All the social customs, trends, and norms that surround me seem so trivial and emotionally empty to me at times. This kind of disconnect can be almost frightening, like I’m living in some solipsistic nightmare.

_It’s like living in an Old Western movie set where all the buildings are facades._

That's what I feel about my relationships always - like the houses are only their facades.

love that description of the "Old Western movie set"--I've often wondered if others are thinking like me and this made it worse because then I, too, was part of the facade, merely a prop. I've reconciled with the idea that we are all connected on a human level wether we like it or not. I am just more of an observer--(behind the camera). I just love to watch people move and interact and speak--always have.

equinn

Exactly! I get that “observer” feeling constantly. Watching the world is often like watching a movie unfold to me. There are the constant comings and goings of humanity, yet I don’t ever completely feel like I’m a part of it. The fact that I see things from this outside perspective makes it all seem slightly fake to me - two-dimensional, like a facade. People always seem to be playing roles, putting on a show of themselves for others.

The fear of being completely disconnected is something that haunts me. It scares me to feel like I’m living in a world where everything is automated and scripted. Maybe I appear the same way to other people. The only place I really share these kinds of introspective thoughts is on this forum. I often wonder if the majority of people even have these thoughts in their life. A lot of people seem to live completely inside their perceived role in life and don’t have much curiosity about anything outside of it.

I am not at all superstitious or new agey, but I fairly regularly experience déja vu, I've had dreams that later came true, and I can be extremely perceptive about people's motivations. I wonder if it is because I had to learn about people through observation instead of intuition, I notice details, and I have very good visual and long-term memory. If you notice details about people and things and your memory allows you to retain them, possibly the subconscious assembles the information into scenarios that then appear to come from some extra-perceptive, otherworldly place.

Z

I believe this wholeheartedly - but I'll not go into why. I could write a whole book on it.

That's what I suspect anyway, having had similar experiences and then in retrospect being able to figure out what some of the details were I'd observed.

I've just last night started reading the Sherlock Holmes series on ebook for the first time, and my suspicion is a lot of what we do is very similar to what he does in many of his stories, only he does it all consciously and through logic rather than unconsciously through intuition (where I'm using intuition to mean "anything you know without knowing exactly how you got there"). I'm delighted to see his explanations to Watson where Watson keeps saying that he "doesn't see" things in comparison to Holmes, and Holmes keeps saying basically, "No, you see them, you just don't put them together the right way." Watson also points out that other people could see it as magic, when he says something like, "If this were a different period in history you'd have been burned for witchcraft."

Well, as far as extrasensory perception goes, I am a bit skeptical, though I have had experiences I can't readily explain. When I was in elementary school I used to win bets by predicting that we would be dismissed early that day because a tornado watch would be issued. This, without watching the weather, and hours in advance. I mean I don't even think NOAA knew they were going to issue a tornado watch for that time and day. But somehow I always "knew". I am wondering if I had some kind of atmospheric sensitivity that has since vanished. There were other things, like noises, that I seemed to have an unusual sensitivity to. Unfortunately I was diagnosed with a perceptual problem which was defined as the way you see reality is not the way it really is and so much effort was dedicated to eradicating the way I see reality. All I know is that everytime I disregard my instincts regarding a person or situation because "the way I perceive things isn't the way they really are", that is the time I run into trouble.

So there might be some areas in which people on the spectrum might be able to pick up on things others can't. I refer you to the writings of Rupert Sheldrake for more on that possibility. I personally think he may be on to something with his theory of morphogenetic fields. I could attempt to explain it but I don't think I could do his arguments justice. Read for yourself and decide.

On the other hand, I have personally witnessed several instances in which so-called psychic abilities turned out to be false. The most memorable and tragic was the time I was involved in the search for a missing co-worker's body. The family called an out-of-state psychic who informed them the body would be found in a car in a ravine in a very specific location. She had the streets down pat. The trouble is, there isn't a ravine within several miles of the place, as any local resident will tell you. While the rest of the county has numerous hills and ravines, this particular area stands out because it is a broad, flat prairie, a fact remarked upon by early French explorers who gave it its present name. And I mean really, really, stands out. Like you can't miss it stands out. But because the family was so grief-stricken and desperate, they didn't realize that the psychic had picked out the ONE spot in the county which had no resemblance whatsoever to whatever she saw in her vision. Nor was said psychic along for the search. Needless to say, we did not find the body that night; and when it was found several months later not only was it NOT in a ravine, it was not even in the same county! So that is why I am less than impressed with psychic claims.

Yeah, ClosetAspy, It's too bad when "fake psychics" give the whole concept a bad name... I've been disappointed by them too.. but I DO know that there really is phenomena that we really don't understand, but that it DOES exist.. like your ability to tell when bad weather was approaching, for instance

To paraphrase Holmes, "Indubitably, my dear anbuend, indubitably."

Z

speaking personally, i know i have esp sometimes; like, out of the blue i 'know' i will see someone round the corner- and then two minutes later i do. it happens fairly regularly, and always has done.
and as a child, i used to hear the conversations of a family id never met, who- judging by their acecnts- lived in the north of england. they were really boring and talked about their tea. it didnt last too long... i also thought that it may have been in the past- but i wasnt sure...

obvoiusly shrinks said i had schitzotypal pd- which is just cobblers. i mean- anyone going to section the pope????- he 'hears' the voice of God,a nd believes in the supernatural (miracles, the afterlife). this is just a condoned belief in the same thing- literally, it is an organised belief system, and one which is taught- when a single person believes similar things they are 'mad' even if they show no other signs...
there was a really interesting dutch study a couple of years ago where they found that a really high - i cant see the percent key- percentage of the adverage population heard voices at sometime in their lives. (think htis might be it--http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2001/nov/16/mentalhealth.medicalscience)

i think weird things like this may be fairly normal/common- maybe aspies are just less hung up on what's normal, so dont disregard it... like being a pop star's child- you tihnk your lifestyle is normal until people tell you otherwise. but if you lived with a load of other pop star's kids....
anyway, sadly my esp has not led me to winning lottery numbers yet, but i live in hope...

Exactly that. In my case (when dealing with untrustworthy people especially), either being taught that my perception wasn't reliable, or that it wasn't nice to react to people like that when I had no way of saying outright what I was reacting to. Or, worse, when I desperately wanted to believe something would be true. (Such as friendship or services I desperately needed, when in both cases I got neither.)

Interestingly it also seems to work in reverse for me -- there are times when I perceive someone as someone who works hard to do the right thing, when everyone else thinks they are scary (often more because of subtle prejudices they don't notice they have, such as regional or class-based or disability-based markers, I've noticed). Twice in particular I've been around someone that turned out to be nearly limitless in what they would do for other people even under conditions of extreme hardship, but people other than me were scared, hateful, or distrustful of them.

So in terms of Harry Potter, this is like, the first set of people are like Voldemort, who was seen by many people while in school as a trustworthy, studious, and quiet person, when in reality he was a dangerous sociopath. And then the second set of people are like Hagrid, who was seen by many people (because of his looks, background, and liking for monsters) as scary or even dangerous, when in reality he was always trying to do the right thing and extremely brave. And for whatever reason I can usually tell early on, when most other people around me can't until they've seen proof (and sometimes not even then).

Of course most people are not so extreme as any of that, and there are also plenty of scary people who look scary to everyone (in which case they're usually not very effective), as well as plenty of very good people who look that way to everyone too. But most people are not Voldemorts nor Hagrids anyway, there's a lot more subtlety than that.

Another thing that surprises me often is how quickly I pick up on areas of competence and incompetence while people around me don't. (I have frequent opportunities to test my observations because of the high turnover rate caused by low pay in the developmental disability field.)

In one extreme case, there was a man who seemed to me barely able to understand a 3-word sentence or follow a one-step instruction. I could tell he had a receptive language impairment more severe than most people he worked for. I tested this in assorted modes of communication and found that it did not matter whether it was written words, spoken words, or pictures. He also walked out frequently in the middle of shifts and vanished, and did many other inexplicable things. I brought it to the attention of the agency and they thought I was putting the guy down even though I kept telling them that he was nice and seemed to mean well. I told them I thought this was a dangerous situation to have this person handling my medications, and they didn't listen to me until he tried to give me a drug -- in front of a witness -- that would have quite probably killed me in the dose he tried to give it to me in. At any rate, a long time later it was found that he had Alzheimer's and had been hiding it from his employers, and I was the only one who noticed. My views, however, didn't count, because I was "only" a client -- and in fact my complaints only served to convince them I was a "bad client".

I've had two staff, one female and one male, who did something else. They were both mostly incompetent at the requirements for their jobs, both for seemingly similar reasons. Both of them masked this or compensated for it by trying to make themselves indispensible in other areas. Both of them did this by being able to find food bargains and cooking excellent meals. And both of them also did this by lying about other staff people and spreading nasty gossip about them. And both of them also did this by doing or encouraging things that were technically highly illegal, not to mention unethical, in order to get things for clients that nobody else would get for us (because their methods were illegal and unethical). Both of them ended up causing their employers massive headaches through the lying, gossiping, and illegal activity, and both of them quit just before they would have been fired. In both cases (with two different employers, both of whom were decent people) I noticed before the employers did -- and the second time I was even able to tell the employer, "This person reminds me strongly of this other person, and here's what the other person did," and he was able to watch it all come true before his eyes.

And even among other people, people who could stay at their jobs, I've often proven more capable than the people hiring people, of rapidly mapping out the strengths and weaknesses of any given employee.

Of course sometimes it's not clear-cut. Some things are ambiguous. With one person she was hiding a great deal, but it was impossible to immediately tell whether she was innocently hiding serious personal problems at work in order to be professional, or hiding a more problematic personality trait. I perceived this as ambiguous and so did another autistic person I checked with. When I got to know her better, I asked, and I found out that she had extremely serious (way more so than usual problems) problems at home that she was trying to avoid taking to work with her but not entirely succeeding. This actually made it easier to work with her because she could then come in and tell me when something really bad was going on and to try not to make her do anything too difficult that day. And also sometimes she needed only partial shifts to go to court, etc. So that worked out.

But all of those things, with people, are I'm sure the same sort of thing Holmes was doing in those stories -- noticing things other people missed because they didn't see them as important. And I'm pretty sure I developed these instincts for survival-related reasons: When you (a) are otherwise naive and prone to being taken advantage of, (b) are subject to a lot of abuse by people who hide that they're the sort of people who would do that, and, (c) depend on other people for as much support as I do, you end up developing some method of trying to figure out danger ahead of time. I know a number of autistic people who also notice these things and I suspect it's for one or more of the same reasons, combined with our tendency to latch onto details that other people block out as a matter of course, so we end up picking up on different things than usual, etc.

anbuend, that is a wonderfully informative post!

I think there's a case for believing that those with autism could in fact have more scope for insight into a higher level of consciousness.Whereas there's a global society that seems to drive the general population with a herd mentality towards what is seen as 'normal' status,with the emphasis on physicality and material concerns,autism on the other hand leads to the person
looking inward continually.At first this may have it's own problems and result in a 'detached' relationship with society but at the same time it can give more focus to the individual's place in the universe,whether it's from a spiritual or scientific perspective.