Higher order Theory of Mind (test yourself)

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Thanks for the link. I tried to find some of his artwork on Google images but had no luck. There was one but it said 404 error not found. He sounds like he had a lot of spirit. I actually knew an old man once with a similar life circumstance. He was born of a prostitute mother and raised in a mental institution.

That seems to happen a lot with his art......these seem to work, though they're rather small images:
http://www.galerie-susanne-zander.com/e ... stein.html
http://crowwithnomouth-jesse.blogspot.c ... stein.html

Thanks.

I remember the after feeling of watching the movie "DUNE,"as one example. It was a feeling of after walking out the door, due to needing a score card to keep up with the movie.

The "dissonance" here T.D. is definitely uncomfortable, and you really know you're missing something when the audience grabs it, and/or your mate.

This blank in cognition causes that intense focus to understand "it"- at all costs- much like Captain Ahab's drive into madness.
Maybe it's an instinct to fill in the blanks to allow it to be 'bridged' successfully in the future, IDK. Funny thing is, is that I haven't had these "glitches" in a long time, so maybe it's either my personal CBT worked or it amended itself in another way.

Come to think of it, maybe "taking the heat^" off as you said is the key. I think of things as these in terms of test anxiety and maybe letting this go is the factor.

As a wacky analogy: I think of Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk caught in a force field in the old series, and they deduced that rather than fight it, to move slowly out of it. Funnily this seems to work for me.

I think that everybody, Aspie or not, felt like that after seeing Dune. They just tried to put too much of the book into the movie. Also the book is really not plot driven. It's more about politics, religion, and philosophy, which don't translate well into a movie.

One thing that I find that helps me when I get stuck on something is to recite to myself, "it really isn't that important." I say it over and over again, and eventually, I start to believe it.

I hated "Dune." I had some consolation when it became apparent that practically the whole audience was confused and were saying things like "blimey, that was obscure!" on the way out of the cinema. I think they should certify obscureness in the same way as they certify sex and violence.

I don't know what the cause of getting stuck on a lost bit of plot is either. It's as if my brain feels that the whole venture is deeply flawed once I notice that I've missed something, so it feels (and often is) wasteful to just try to plough on regardless. Of course if a chunk of the plot fails to convey itself, then there is a very real risk that it'll come back to bite me later on. Possibly Aspie perfectionism has a role here too - spotting minor flaws and wanting to annihilate them.

Also I read once that professional musicians behave differently to amateurs when they make a mistake while sight-reading sheet music - the amateurs tend to dwell on the mistake they've just made, and therefore lose focus and make further mistakes, while the pros just accept that they goofed and move on without worrying about it. They found that there was no difference in the frequency of "original" mistakes between the 2 groups, i.e. it was only the amateurs' concern and their tendency to glimpse back at the problem that had gone by, that made their rendition inferior. Maybe that's roughly what happens to us when we try to comprehend anything difficult?

Yeah, I was stuck on the cool imagery as some of the effects were interesting for '84. Aside from that I was lost- with myself I took it as "another one chalked up to missing a bunch." The above poster mentioned the "same," generally - I don't think this one is the 'acid test.'
In principal though I got the gist of "exactly" your experiences, I believe.


Bingo. I'd say this is the 'model' or the dynamic.

I believe that "getting stuck" with the followed mired cognition is the force of our thoughts and emotions or the "inertia" at work - "that Aspie thing."
Maybe the probable mechanism:

There is a 'mini column mechanism' that is different from the controls in a study of imaging the different brains . A "mini column" is a basic unit of storage, probably analogous to a byte. The 'autism group' has significantly "more" than the NT controls- there are "more" of these per volume /area. The paradigm suggests or asserts that this is the causation of the bias to encode for details and this perhaps causing an inertia of this phenomenon? It does assert that this 'pack of density' causes the exaggerated intensity and a resultant dis- inhibition of certain behaviors.

Could be.......another thing I notice is, I find it incredibly difficult to just drop a thought, especially if I don't feel I've chewed it over pretty much to completion. Naturally that makes it hard to follow anything "linear" such as books and films, and it also seems to be a part of my "talking past the point" problem - when I can't stop talking, it's because I've got a thought and I can't drop it (i.e. stop talking about it) until I've really made it "clear" (though I'm more clarifying it in my own mind than for the listener). Also the apparently poor "working memory" of many of us - perhaps the data isn't lost, but is just hard to switch back to if an interfering idea happens to grab our attention at the wrong time. Though that doesn't explain why we're able to switch our focus onto the interfering thoiught but not back again. When I get that memory problem, the tangent I've flown off at (and failed to return from) has usually seemed at first to be just a brief detour - the brain seems to see the new thought as strongly related to the main issue, but then it "expands" the new thought until it's too far away from the original concept. You'd think I'd be adept at nipping such thoughts in the bud by now, but once it's there, I just find myself exploring it to the full. Again, the prime directive seems to be that dropping the thought, however insignificant or distracting it may be, just isn't allowed.

To the OP:
Sorry to have strayed so far off topic. Please let us know if you're not happy with this, and we'll create a new thread.

I got bored with the stories plot very quickly so I couldn't make myself follow them. I could answer the lower-level questions up to level 3 but with level 4 the only reply I could give was 'I could not care less'. If it was a real test situation and if I was pressed to answer, I would say that I didn't know the answer - so as to get the examiner off my back.
My working memory seems to be OK. I have always had memory for detail though.

Most of the grammar that you object is correct British usage. To my ear "have gotten" sounds just as old fashioned and King Jamesy as "spelt" looks to you. (Though as an Irish woman I spell the word as "spelled", as you do. How's that for a confusing sentence!) "Class four were" is, however, incorrect, for the reason you cite.

I would suggest it's an overly wordy article no matter where you hail from. I found it a bit turgid as well... and as a result didn't bother to answer the questions because my head ached already by the time I got to them.

And, on top of it, turns out that my own English is archaic.

I thought "gotten" was American slang. But apparently it's official, and the rules are quite sophisticated:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/aue/gotten.html
To my mind, it's more logical and economical to just use "get" for the present tense and "got" for the past tense....."gotten" always seems like it's overdoing the job, like saying "stucked" instead of "stuck."
No offense though, it really doesn't matter. It doesn't slow me down much when I read it.

I have heard the same thing said about professional athletes. Many of the best coaches say that the important thing to do after a mistake is to move on, and not let it affect later play.

I wonder if this is true in the social area too. I find that when I make a mistake in a social situation, it haunts me, and really disrupts my functioning for a long time. Sometimes, it can even be a very minor mistake, which nobody else notices, but it still bothers me. Perhaps this is part of the reason that Aspies have so much trouble in social situations. We make mistakes, and cannot move past them. NTs make mistakes, and are not bothered so much by them, so are able to continue to socialize.

Yes, this is SO what I do! That´s a big problem I have with lectures, or informative programs; my mind often gets distracted by a passing detail, and suddenly my mind is going somewhere else, with no idea what the person talking is actually saying. This happens with films too, and suddenly I miss the plot. Luckily, nowadays I watch dvds mainly, so I can rewind as much as I want....and often I need to do a lot of rewinding.....

Another problem I have is I guess what´s called a central coherence difficulty. Basically, I can watch something or read something, but not notice how things in the story interconnect with each other- basically, making it difficult to see how things fit together to make a plot. (I wonder if that´s why so many of us feel like we´re "forgetting" the information? Maybe we see it as a lot of separate details that are hard to keep straight, rather than one interconnected whole?) Funny enough, when I first read the AS literature, I didn´t think I had this problem at all! ("Intense preoccupation with Parts of Objects"). But, now that I can watch the same dvds over and over again, I realize how much I actually miss how things connect together.....sometimes I only ever realize it the 4th, 5th, or 10th time I´ve watched something!

T.D. this is executive dysfunction at work, but there is obviously a (functional) dynamic going on here with this atypical brain. There is enough evidence about the "mini column" anatomy, and I'd surmise the E.D. part is equivalent to not enough RAM memory to cover too much at once as you posted.

There are other significant differences ( anatomical ), but the fascinating thing to me is why or how can a variant arise as this, i.e. why not a loss in homeostasis with these anomalies?
Why not a brain # 3 with another set of significant differences .........? This just wouldnt work here.

We are way off the tracks now, but it must be that E.D. working here as you outlined.
Sorry to the opening post.

You mean like this?
Central Coherence (Frith 1989) Detail Focussed v Global Thinking, Similarities v Differences
Are theories about what lies behind the drive to look for and, the ability to recognise and use patterns in the information we receive. Although some people have a better eye for detail and some will miss details but be good at getting an overview the "normal‟ thinking style is to categorise information. That is, we process information "globally‟, putting details together to get an overall picture of the world around us, and the situations we are in. These theories seem to explain how people extract meaning from incoming sensory information, categorise it and develop generalised understandings or concepts. In most people global thinking dominates but does not exclude the "detailed‟ processing. For people with an AS the latter thinking style dominates. They have such a strong awareness of detail it is hard for them to categorise information, recognise similarities in situations, see connections between things, structure their learning or, recognise the perspectives of others. In the educational setting this means, for example, that they can find it harder to read articles and research papers and extract the overall perspective, or understanding of, a topic. They can recognise and learn the separate facts but struggle to "jigsaw together the pieces‟.