Two Brain Theory

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After my stroke, I suffered quite a bit of brain cell damage. But I am told that the brain can rebuild itself again. So we will see.

I was looking at the subject Peter Pan Syndrome. I feel that adequately describes me. That is actually a syndrome. Most things are syndrome in the modern world. But when I read the interpretation of this symptom, it doesn't really fit at all.

The other syndrome, might be called the Mr. Spock Syndrome. Well that actually turned up a published book called:
Loving Mr. Spock: Understanding a Lover with Asperger's Syndrome



It is interesting reading some of the book reviews.

Here is a good one:

My goodness, I bought this book to help me understand my relationship with my ex-husband five years after we split up, but I ended up reading all about my relationship with my next partner! Bloody hell, I obviously go after AS qualities, albeit they were both completely different types! It was pretty shocking but helped me understand so much.

Another person describes the book in the following way:

This is a brilliant work about being in an intimate relationship with a person who has Asperger's Syndrome (AS). AS is a neurobiological condition that affects sensory processing/integration and is on the autism spectrum. It also affects communication.

Many people on the a/A spectrum don't care for hugs and find them intrusive and just endure them to appease others. For many people with AS, hugs can be a sensory onslaught that can include an aversion for the feel of scratchy beards; perfume or body odor; the feel of the hugger's clothing and the feel of being enclosed in a seemingly "restrictive" fashion. Many children on the a/A spectrum dislike loud displays of affection. For neurotypical (NT) counterparts, the natural response when confronted with an adverse response to hugs is to draw the erroneous conclusion that people on the a/A spectrum are devoid of affection.

I guess I am now on the a/A spectrum.

That last sentence

For neurotypical (NT) counterparts, the natural response when confronted with an adverse response to hugs is to draw the erroneous conclusion that people on the a/A spectrum are devoid of affection.

That does bring up an interesting discussion. In High School when the other boys were dating girls, I was not one of them. I only went on two dates. Both with the same girl. And it ended badly.

On my second date I took her to see a movie. I was holding her hand while we watched the movie and she placed her head on my shoulder. I could feel the heat of romance in the air. But then I began to think of my hand. A year earlier, I had developed warts in my hand. And while she laid her head on my shoulders, I began to think:

I wonder if warts are contagious?

I wonder if I might spread them to her?

That would be bad. So I moved a little. She sat up and you could feel the cold falling over her. She thought I was rejecting her. But I was trying to save her from getting warts, if they were contagious.

An adverse response to hugs is to draw the erroneous conclusion.

Adapting to the idea of hugs as being a positive thing took me well into my twenties to adapt to. Even then it was still awkward. The concept of positive touch was pretty elusive to me. Eventually , did get better, years later.
But only if had known the other person for years . But did have a weird upbringing.Either way, that made for a good excuse on the topic.

Is Mr. Spock and Aspie?

He is a man of two worlds, and cherishes the dual nature of his heritage. Unlike Data (the android in Star Trek: The Next Generation who was forever pining to “be more human”), Spock is perfectly comfortable with who he is — not a bad message to send to kids whose neurological state is classified as a “disorder.”

So too have those with ASD been habitually misunderstood, their reluctance to socialize mistaken for aloofness, their difficulty making eye contact interpreted as signs of deviousness. Emotions run deep in half-Vulcans and persons with autism alike, even if they are not always apparent to the untrained eye.

All I can say is that, as the father of an autistic son and a lifelong member of the Trek-curious club, the new film filled me with hope. Watching Kirk and Spock — two men with vastly different worldviews — form a friendship based on mutual trust and admiration, I found myself thinking, “that’s the future I want my child to grow up in.

Does Spock have Aspergers?

The Logic of Mr. Spock

Mr Spock - My Favourite Scientist

and then for a little humor

Sheldon Logics with Mr. Spock

Lolololzzzzz .. interesting junctor of personalities ...... Sheldon logics with Mr Spock might be embarassing for Mr Spock ..lols .. Then a possible female adept of the aspie personality
one might consider 7of9 of Star Trek Voyager .

I think I will take a break for a few seconds and give a story.

BREAK TIME

When I was in 8th grade, my fellow students voted me "least likely to succeed".
Four years later when I graduated from High School, the students considered me "the class genus".

I do not know for sure but I think it was because of one of the classes that I took in my first year of High School. The class was called Speed Reading. Up until that time I was a poor reader. My form of reading was limited to Comic Books. But after that class, my ability to read expanded exponentially. I do not know if they still teach this class, but THEY SHOULD and every Aspie with some reading difficulty should sign up for the class. So what is this class. It taught me to read from the inside out. Most people read from the front to the back. Speed reading takes a different approach. It teaches a person to find the one or two key words in a paragraph and then start to join the words together from the inside out. It is a really weird way to teach reading but for me, it expanded my reading skills exponentially.

Another course that improved my writing skill was a course in English during my first year of college. During my first year, I went to the University of Texas at Arlington. It was an all boys school that decided to go co-educational. As I recall there were no girls in our class. The teacher was a young girl who had just obtained her teaching degree and this was her first class. She was a knock-out. Most of the guys in the class thought they died and went to heaven.

Well she gave us our first assignment. We were to write a two page paper about something we read and turn it in. One of the boys said, "We can write about anything? What if we wanted to write about Playboy?" She repeated and said "anything." I thought to myself, something is not quite right. So I turned in my paper and the next day I got it back with a large "F". I wasn't the only one. Everyone in the class had received and "F". Hummm, this class is getting interesting. She then went on to say that anyone could take their paper and make corrections and turn them in again. So everyone submitted their papers for Round 2. Everyone got them back the next day with all "F's". Finally by Round 3, one or two students got something other than an "F". I think I actually got a passing score on my 5th submission. The only way I was able to do this was by taking each word in my submission and looking it up in the dictionary. The letter "A", there it is, move onto the next word and then two hours later I had checked every word.

So as we approached the end of the school year, everyone in the class was in a panic (that is except me). I figured that she would make the final easy and give good grades and all students would wipe the sweat from their foreheads and exit the class with acceptable grades and count themselves lucky to having survived. I was right.

Interesting story, nothing like having a good quality education , early in life.

Here is a review of Mr. Spoke, the Aspie
[or rather the alien character who portrayed Aspie like characteristics.]

Did Spock Have Autism or Aspergers?

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I guess if you think about it Aspies have been a part of the television programs for a very long time.

The first TV program I fell in love with was about Aspies.
It was titled: The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.
The Series ran from September 29, 1959, to June 5, 1963.
The series revolved around teenager Dobie Gillis, who aspired to have popularity, money, and the attention of beautiful and unattainable girls.

The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis

The series contain in my opinion many young characters who performed a variety of Aspie roles, long before there was even the term "Aspies". It was a remarkable series.

Last edited by jimmy m on 22 Feb 2022, 9:30 pm, edited 3 times in total.

The girl who had a crush on Dobie Gillies (Zelda), and who flickered her nose, had the most Aspie traits, in my opinion.

Dobie, himself, seemed like a clean-cut "normal" kid with few Aspie traits. Same with the beatnik guy played by Bob Denver. The beatnik guy was "weird"----but not demonstrably "Aspie."

Thank you. For those wonderful old episodes

what a very interesting conversation/thread here. Glad you are going strong Jimmy, I am learning a lot through you posts here. Strokes run in my family, my mother was autistic, diagnosed with parkinson's and eventually dementia. Dementia runs in my mother's family line, with her sisters, her mother and her great grandmother all having had it by their 80th birthdays. I think all were autistic too, though all had passed away before I got my own diagnosis at age 68. I have been trying to learn about stroke because I suspect it is almost inevitable that I'll end up on this list too. Following with interest. Thank you.

The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis generally begins with a scene of The Thinker.

I almost think this is somewhat symbolic because I associate The Thinker with my form of Aspie.

The Thinker was originally conceived as part of Rodin's design for a set of bronze doors for a museum in Paris. This figure represented Dante Alighieri, an early Italian Renaissance poet. Rodin depicted Dante reflecting on The Divine Comedy, his epic poem about heaven, hell, and the fate of all humankind.

The Thinker

The Thinker is a symbol of reflection and deep thought. The sculpture is often used to represent philosophy. For artists, it represents an internal struggle with something that is intellectually tough. The open left hand is meant to grasp whatever reality his vision brings and he is ready to act on it.

For others, they think along the lines of the creation of men and that the solitary figure deep in thought is actually Adam, reflecting on what his sin brought to mankind.

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I see a link between some Aspies and The Thinker. I wonder if anyone else sees a link. Well here is an article in Psychology Today, titled "The Autism of Rodin’s Thinker".

The Autism of Rodin’s Thinker

Dual Process Theory proposes two distinct reasoning processes in humans, an intuitive style that is rapid and automatic and a deliberative style that is more effortful.

investigating deliberative and intuitive reasoning profiles in a non-clinical sample of 95 subjects from the general population with varying degrees of autistic traits. Additionally, 17 male participants with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) attending a University Summer School for students were compared with 18 controls (and were therefore high-functioning cases like those described by (Hans) Asperger.

People with high autism traits and those diagnosed with ASD showed a pattern of having a combination of lower intuitive and greater deliberative reasoning styles. Both those with high autism traits and those with a diagnosis of ASD consistently responded less intuitively and more deliberatively, when compared to those with low autism traits and without a diagnosis of ASD, on behavioural and self-report assessments of reasoning. Taken together, the results suggest that Dual Process Theory provides a useful framework for considering the strengths and weaknesses in reasoning on the autism spectrum.

The fact that there are strengths as well as weaknesses in autistic cognition is exactly what you would expect if normal cognition were inherently dualistic.

At the very least, findings such as these reveal just how right (Hans) Asperger was in his original characterization of autism and how nicely Dual Process Theory fits the diametric model—not to mention why you might think that Rodin's Thinker was indeed autistic in this respect.

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This article also provides an interesting observation. Some have compared those with schizophrenic and aspergers. How they came by this I do not know. This article states the following:

Interestingly, the present findings are the opposite results to that reported … for schizotypy traits in the general population, where higher levels of schizotypy traits were associated with high levels of intuition combined with low levels of deliberation. This opposing reasoning profile is consistent with the diametrical model of Crespi and Badcock (2008), who propose that ASD and schizotypy represent opposing poles of a cognitive continuum.

Anyone with even a few brain cells should automatically realize that Sherlock Holmes and Professor James Moriarty are direct polar opposites.

Please define schizotypy ? And incidentally have used intuition over the years to my benefit , to keep me out of serious trouble …very often. But I never ignore and most often use the logic presented in a situation . To get through life . Not always successfully . Had never assumed sculpture by Rodin to be Autistic .. until that comparison was
Just made in these posts . Although it does cause me to consider that possibility.

My mother had Alzheimer's disease for several years before she passed away. And I would come in and help her when she ran into problems. I lived about an hours drive away from her. She called one night about 3 AM and wanted me to come to her house right away because there was a large dangerous creature on the floor of the bedroom and she was trapped.

Well I got up, got dressed and drove for an hour to get to her house. I walked into her house and into her bedroom. She was fine and there was no creature in her room.

Well what was happening. Some might call it Alzheimer's but I would refer to it as something else. You see my mom was getting old and many of her senses were diminishing. For example when she heard a conversation, she would pick up a word or two and then FILL IN THE BLANKS for the rest of the words she did not hear. The same thing happened on her vision. She was almost blind. She would see something and it would become a scary dinosaur.

It wasn't that she was loosing her mind. It was that she was losing her various senses, they were beginning to fail.

Schizotypy is a word that was used around 100 years ago. Today we might refer to it as schizophrenia.
Here is a Wikipedia link: Schizotypy

You said "Had never assumed sculpture by Rodin to be Autistic". I hadn't really thought about the sculpture called The Thinker as a type of Aspie characterization. But I can see a type of connection. When I was in 5-8 grades I was beaten up by my classmates on a daily basis. What happens to other Aspies that endure this type of torture as they grow up. I suspect, many learned to deal with it. Some learned skills of how to protect themselves. I took wrestling classes in my first year of High School in order to defend myself. In a way, I became THE THINKER.