Quick explanation of aspergers

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I spend a certain amount of time striving to understand this nonsense - what do you mean, I've been 'mind blind' for fifty years?! !?
and I came up with this as an "explanation".

How does it work for you?

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You know that there's a - roughly - half-second gap between forming a conscious intention and acting upon it. The gap is filled with patterned behaviour learned in one way or another.

In a neurotypical brain there are feedback loops between some agglomeration of optic nerve and value recognition and the patterns getting priority in that gap. These take shape from birth through to age maybe two or three and are associated with social behaviour and 'theory of mind'.

In a brain with aspergers disorder some or all of those feedback loops are missing. Other mechanisms take their place, social learning is afflicted and 'theory of mind' is absent or odd.

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Too brief and simplistic.....

1. There is MORE to autism than that.
2. It continues past 3. I WISH it stopped at three. Did you ever stop to realize that a lot of autistic symptoms almost seem to indicate a certain part of the brain never "matured"? I mean if it failed to "mature", you might have things like easy distractions(and young kids appear more sensitive to noise, etc...), poor coordination, emotional instability, tantrums, stims, etc... YEAH, I know, not everybody has all of them, but apparantly all autistics have some of them.
3. I STILL have trouble believing the social problem cause is as simple as you indicate.

Steve

OK, Steve it does look a little over-simplified: but something important happens - or doesn't happen - back there when the basic brain structures are joining up. The biochemical complexity is rising from the first cell division onwards, so three's really quite late.

Really, it does seem to me that everything after whatever primitive circuit difference that is, is adaptive. All the social training that works so well for them but twists and turns for us looks like it's built on those feedbacks. It's operating inside the half second consciousness delay that makes them so powerful

I'd agree that being a little assertive about what it's like to live with the damn thing is a good idea.

HUH?

Some of the difference happens long BEFORE any adaption could take place.

It DOESN'T work so well for them, and ONLY works as it does because it does! Which communicates better?????? EBCDIC or ASCII????? ANSWER? OH come on! It is a TRICK QUESTION! The REAL answer is that it USED to be EBCDIC, and now is ASCII! WHY? Because ASCII is the new STANDARD(more prevalent. NOT better, just more popular). OK, I like ASCII better because it is more consistant, etc... but even the new UNICODE throws THAT benefit out! The ONLY reason UNICODE takes off is the ability to handle LARGE alphabets, and multiple alphabets, otherwise, it is inferrior in every way. Anyway, THAT is why it seems more powerful! NOT because they have a better program, but a common understood language. STILL, that is faulty so you get all the porn, dating services, etc....

As for them being quicker? It is like older computers. THEY are operating from faster ROM, and we have to program into slower RAM. AGAIN, YEAH, I know ram is now generally faster than rom, but there was a time when ROM was much faster than RAM.

BTW did you ever see "what women want"? NTs make no secret they aren't perfect. even the body language garbage. My polls have been 100% RANDOM! different age groups, areas, sexes, etc... I have YET to find any case where they agree with what the books say! Incredible, but true! Maybe it is like when the IBM PC came out. IBM made a mistake in their switch layout diagram, and almost everyone copied the MISTAKE! It was YEARS before they corrected it. Likewise a lot of "studies" are simply parroted!

Steve

How about this:

It's like living your entire life in a foreign country where you never quite learn the customs or the language.

Now THAT is more like it! DEAD ON RIGHT! Who knows, maybe there was a country where most were autistic, and it has been hidden because autism is recessive.

Steve

Here's a quick explanation:

Aspergers and autism is where the brain is wired differently the NTs

http://www.nas.org.uk/nas/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=114 think you will be lost for a while with all that information in 1 place

That's a spot-on definition IMO. 'Stranger in a Strange Land' is how I'd describe it, like the title of the Robert Heinlein sci-fi novel.

I tend to be a stranger in a strange land.

talking about mirror neurons should point you in the right direction

I like everyone's definitions so far,they all make some sense.
My own thinking on Asperger's is that it's like you're mind is not 'pre-programmed' to live
instinctively,but instead uses logic to try and figure out the best actions to take.

Here's my VERY layman's terms description.


A very highly tuned brain, and a ridiculous lack of social skills.

dgd1788's, alicorn's, and hale_bopp's really explain it. The mirror nueron theory seems to stink to me, but it certainly doesn't explain everything.

Steve

It's like feeling you are an alien and nearly everybody else is speaking in a language you eventually learn some of but it is still impossible to understand it all.

If we are wired differently, does that mean if we undertake social skills training or other training to be more like NTs, it somehow changes some of our wiring? Or do we just learn things like a parrot? If the 2nd applies, wouldn't we still seem a little stilted or odd?

Pandora,

Computers USED to be hardwaired to a degree. Eventually, they miniturized that, and it became a ROM! When an IBM PC is booted, it can do only 3 things! That is it, THREE!! !!

1. Create vectors for I/O.
2. connect those vectors to ROMS on the cards.
3. Read a little program on some media. The program is VERY small. Probably like 512 BYTES!! !

The computer is essentially WORTHLESS!! !! Linux and M/S DOS and windows NT programs have a tiny program that loads a larger one, etc.... That small program is called the bootstrap program, and run by using that 3rd feature.

Some computers have different boot methods. AS and NT people are like they have a different rom, and the computer is a little different. Like the IBM PC, they BOTH have RAM, and can work around some of the wiring issues.

Steve