Mental experiment: brain re-configuration

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Cockroach96
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28 Jun 2015, 12:32 pm

This is impossible, but it is just a mental experiment.

What would happen if someone's brain got permanently reconfigured from Aspie to NT, or from NT to Aspie, overnight?


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HighLlama
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28 Jun 2015, 12:51 pm

They would behave differently? :)



Cockroach96
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28 Jun 2015, 1:11 pm

Of course, but we are exploring the social consequences.
A former classmate once told me if he were like me, he would commit suicide. That's because he is used to being normal and socially accepted and having friends. He takes these things for granted. On the other hand, I am used to being abnormal, hated passionately by everyone, socially rejected and alone. It's no big deal for me.


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HighLlama
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28 Jun 2015, 1:26 pm

So what you mean is how would people react to the change. Is that right? If I was aware of the change, I would probably not like it. I think most of us would feel violated and dislike not being the person we've known our whole lives.



Cockroach96
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28 Jun 2015, 1:55 pm

Yes, I mean how people would react to the change.
If I became NT overnight, at first I would probably have an identity crisis. But that would go away in a few weeks. In the long run, it would be great! I would be socially accepted, I would make friends, I would get a job, I would have a normal life. Those things would be effortless to accomplish.
On the other, if an NT became an Aspie, the consequences on his life would be disastruos. He would probably kill himself.


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HighLlama
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29 Jun 2015, 5:24 pm

That wouldn't all necessarily happen that easily. I have an NT friend who was married and his wife decided she wanted to be a man. Now he has a new partner, and has moved on, but he still had a major crisis despite being an NT. I used to envy the ease with which he could fit in while we were in college, but fortunately I've never gone through anything like that.



olympiadis
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29 Jun 2015, 10:23 pm

Cockroach96 wrote:
This is impossible, but it is just a mental experiment.

What would happen if someone's brain got permanently reconfigured from Aspie to NT, or from NT to Aspie, overnight?



I think it would depend greatly on the age of the person and how far their identity had developed, or how big their collection of schemas was.
A very young person may be able to adapt satisfactorily, but an older person may have the experience of dementia or going insane, and find it unbearable.

A person will tend to hang on to what their normal state of mind is, and thus the brain will try to re-wire back in a way to accommodate that way of thinking.

An experiment was done using glasses with lens that invert the image people were seeing. After a couple of weeks the test subjects were seeing things right-side-up again and would see inverted when the glasses were removed. After the experiment the brains re-wired again to return to normal.

The bottom line is that we have a strong need to perceive the world in a way that we are used to, or comfortable with.
The brain tends to adapt to that need.



justkillingtime
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29 Jun 2015, 10:42 pm

Being NT is no guarantee of friends and acceptance. What kind of NT would you become? Maybe, you would just have a different set of problems. It would be better to become someone with charisma.


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