Towards a Pragmatic Theory of AS: Your Input Highly Desired

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Hello everyone,

I have to warn you, this is going to be a very long post by the time I’m through with it, but for the first time in my brief years of AS awareness I’m trying to make sense of the conditions in light of my own experiences and the similar ones recounted on this board. Since coming here and hearing from others I’ve sat down and reflected on the greater scope of this mess, and I think I’m coming around to a roughshod theory of how this condition operates on and shapes my mind, although I could really use input from everyone and anyone who cares to contribute. So here goes.

This is basically a continuation of an older post I started last week...<Link>…where I came for the first time to this message board in search of answers to the abyss of my recent predicament. Thanks to everyone who replied to me, as I was in really, really bad shape when I pumped that out. The story in a sentence is basically that at age 25 I’ve spent the past six years doing everything in my power to defy AS and live a normal life, succeeded to an extent I would never have foreseen, in the process lost all the cerebral gifts that made me successful at everything non-social, and now I’m trying to crawl out of a situation where I have neither the mental energy to keep pace with the world nor the social energy to otherwise compensate. Worst of both worlds in other words, and upon exhausting every resource in my dwindling psychic inventory, I reluctantly broke my six-year vow of silence on the issue to learn from people more informed than me – that means all of you.

I’ll issue another warning that this will not only be long and didactic, but what I can only describe as Socratic in reasoning, given my dilettante background in philosophy and my marked ignorance of the psychological literature. So please don’t think I’m trying to set up a lecture podium to hear the sound of my own voice – I’m genuinely trying to make sense of my world and really want your input, explaining things the best way I know how.

With that admission in mind, I guess it’s a good place to say that this whole thing got started a few nights back when I was exhausted as usual and searching for the faintest sign of insight from, go figure, Confucius. Before long in ‘The Analects’, I found a passage that gave me much more than I bargained for:

“If one learns from others but does not think, one will be bewildered. “If, on the other hand, one thinks but does not learn from others, one will be in peril.”

He goes on: “Use your ears widely but leave out what is doubtful; repeat the rest with caution and you will make few mistakes. Use your eyes widely and leave out what is hazardous; put the rest into practice with caution and you will have few regrets. When in speech you make few mistakes and in your action you have few regrets, an official career [or what I interpret as full-spectrum competence] will follow as a matter of course.”

That hit me like a bombshell, because it reminded me of some literature I had recently skimmed suggesting that people like us are born with significantly fewer “mirror neurons” than our more-endowed counterparts, which are responsible for fluid and passive learning through subconscious mimicking. I can only guess at this point that the causes and AS-behaviors run far deeper than that, but this at last gave me a starting point for trying to understand this whole mess, and our esteemed Chinese scholar just put it in an organic context and jump started this chain of logic from then onwards.

So OK, what’s bothered me for all these years is that I figured I came into this world with severe handicaps in the exercise of good judgment. I could never figure out why exactly that was, but things that were just complete common sense for everyone else were either alien concepts or took a ridiculous amount of extra work to acquire. Yes, I spoke with an encyclopedic authority and memorized things with snapshot clarity, but even then I came to realize I didn’t really understand what I was talking about and was just spewing out things I picked up word for word – unless of course I took the inefficient step of stepping back and consciously forming logical connections to the disparate details I latched onto.

But when Confucius met cognitive psychology in my apartment the other night, I stopped and realized that, there is nothing innate about this lack of effective judgment, which all people acquire only from experiences outside the womb. Whether from your own experiences or that of others, we're all subjected to causes and effects in the outside world, and the wiser among us are able to make more accurate and wide-ranging associations between the two, which is basically the essence of good judgment. Only problem for us here is that we apparently lack some of the hardware to do this with ease and effectiveness. So fine, autistic freaks like us can’t learn anything from other people while the rank-and-file normals seem to do just peachy…except how do you explain the diversity of judgment and common sense in the neurotypical world? Yeah yeah, questions ranging from dumb to obvious, but in my own mind I just have to form just one airtight truth about this one critical issue.

But I guess raw IQ can explain a good part of that, which I understand is kind of a measure of how quickly and efficiently your brain transmits its energy. So sure, I know some really really bright people who can soak up new information ten times faster than me, and then quickly process it through their vaults of existing information to produce multi-layered and interrelated conclusions that would take me a week of head-scratching to accomplish. But how many people reading this board belong to MENSA, have IQs in the stratosphere but a self-professed deficiency of common sense? There’s obviously more than that at work here.

If Confucius here speaks any truths, he basically said that while you’ll be lost if you just follow everyone else without thinking on your own, but if you spend all your time lost in pure introspection – hello, this ring a bell or two? – and don’t learn from the trials and errors of your fellow humans, then you’re actually imperiled by your absent-mindedness. Paraphrased: You’ve got to exercise judicious perception to really succeed. Taken a few logical steps further: is it fair to say that the AS mind-blindedness is a deficit of perception? That makes more sense to me than anything I’ve ever concluded before.

So OK, our kind is often blind, deaf and dumb in the social world. But I’ve managed to learn a few new tricks through A LOT of trial and error, and it sounds like many others here have as well. So it’s not like we have no ability at all in this regard (maybe that’s true for pure autistics, but not us). Hell, there’s a lot of things we’re quite perceptive of, like let’s say, everything there is to know about this TV series, that specialized arm of an academic field, etc. But it’s always an interest that’s either narrow or razor thin, often at the complete negligence of so much else in the world, and is essentially an exercise in super-selective attention.

So we aren’t wearing sunglasses while navigating from a seeing-eye dog here. It’s more like we’re always using our tunnel vision, and every once in a while checking out the periphery when we’re so inclined. I can actually think of an even better, if clichéd analogy, which is seeing the forest through the trees. AS people really love those trees, able to describe every square inch of them from the roots to the leaves and make otherwise negligible distinctions between them. But we spend so much time in this little botanical exercise that we aren't looking at the broader geography we're operating within, and thus we're at a loss if someone stops and asks us how to get out of the woods.

Then why is it that 99% of everybody out there is more or less motivated to scan their greater field of vision, while we can’t but don’t. Best as I can tell, it’s more like we won’t. Because when a given person is good at something, she more often than not tunes in to it. Some people are born athletes, you’ve always got your preternatural businessmen, and of course there are your natural politicians. In our case, things like abstract mathematics and rote memorization make that kind of sense, and we do it with expertise and intensity.

But what about something people are bad, even horrible at? Can you think of anyone who is fascinated by something for which they lack near all ability? Personally, I completely suck at math and could care less about anything involving it. But just now I’m starting to think that the same held true for people, society, relationships, and all that stuff. Like math and unlike memorization and reading, I couldn’t grasp it with ease or even a modicum of effort, so why try further?

In fact – and I would really like some second opinions here – I think that those areas of expertise and/or fixation come to soak up much of our attention simply because we’re so good at them. But it also makes sense that because that one little slice of reality makes so much sense and everything else out there is so confusing, maybe AS people reinforce this gravitation by retreating inward to that one perceptual place they can call home, where everything is in its right place, under your control, and operating under your own rules as they make sense to you. The forest is a large, confusing, and sometimes dangerous place; so why not just run back to the safety of your most familiar tree where you can exercise some degree of control.

And here’s where things really start to conceptually come together for me: I’ve lived under this affliction for long enough that I know I invented my own code of cognitive rules that made perfect sense to me in sorting out my reality. This sound familiar to anyone else? If so, can you recall any times that even when compliance to outside rules – ranging from the normative to even the hard and fast – was just an abhorrent thought? Examples like dressing your in your freakishly unique way, ignoring instructions from teachers and authority figures so you can then do things as you see fit, refusing to yield an inch to someone else’s established wisdom when it’s all but obvious in retrospect you should have?

That fits my personality to a ‘T’, and I think has been the source of much friction in my life as I’ve tried to fight my way into the anonymity of regular society. The rules that govern everyone else just make little to no sense, and even if you’re perceptive enough to realize that the rules exist in the first place, it’s really hard to comply with them so long as they remain counterintuitive at best. That’s yet another incentive to shut yourself off from the outside world and play by your own established principles, even though your unavoidable contact with the outside world and the inevitable dissonance from noncompliance is a persistently painful reality. All this because our perceptive abilities are so limited; not in functionality, but rather in preference and scope.

Alright, took me a long time to arrive here, but at least from my own reading – and I really want to hear from anyone who disagrees with any part of this – AS can be boiled down to a problem of social perception, brought about by faulty neurological hardwiring. We’re honestly quite bad at it, which reinforces our innate desire to look away from the confusion and cling to the security blankets we weave for ourselves. That makes absolute and total sense when I recap the troubles I’ve experienced all my life and the battles I fought just to get where I am today. But at least in my case and that of others I’ve spoken with here, simply making this acclimatization to the neuro-typical world can create problems in and of itself, which seems to manifest itself in this pervasive sense of complete and unforgiving psychic exhaustion.

Helpful individuals here advised that I may be suffering from over-stimulation, as my perceptive faculties are working at meltdown capacity in the social world, and only worsened by my somewhat recent workoholism at home. The advice I’ve received generally reflects a belief that AS minds are like really stubborn Windows-platform PCs, where we need regular downtimes and resets just to get back to performance-shape. This is advice that I’m personally struggling with, as my life has been consumed by the pursuit of cognitive/social progress for so long it’s hard to give that up even for a moment. But while I sit here and weigh the established experiences of people older and wiser than myself, there’s just one more piece of this enigma that I’ve got to make sense of: the wider roots of this exhaustion and the steep learning curve we experience.

Sorry to toss around the word ‘we’ so much, but all the experiences I see here are so much like my own that the reverse assumption has just become ingrained as I write. But along those lines, I’ve read many accounts of people whose moods and abilities seem to swing back forth on an endless pendulum trajectory: some days you’re sharp as surgical tools and on top of your game, other days you’re just struggling to get dressed in the morning and get through your day without embarrassment. And yeah, that’s so true for me as well, and when I had one of my recent upswings lately, I realized something. There’s no telling which one was cause or effect, but I noticed myself being a lot more perceptive than usual. I was more aware of my surroundings, more attuned to the non-verbal communications of others, more curious about what went on around me, and spent virtually NO time lost in my own thoughts and insecurities. And that was just improvement in my usual deficiencies; the mental advantages I’ve historically held came back to me just like that. Most importantly, I thought back to the usual differential between the world’s rules and my own, and I saw myself operating more in the former. I stopped paying attention to my usual nonsense principles, going with the flow it’s so hard at times to follow, and upon seeing it in this light as I’ve described it, the feeling was just magnificent.

To no surprise, I’d fallen back down by the next day, prompting me to think back to my observations the day prior. And while I can’t tell which came first, I’m positive that in all my moments of upswing, my overall competency and effectiveness is positively correlated with my external perceptiveness, and quite negatively correlated with my time spent introspecting and flashing back. Like all highs, I think those of us who complain about this wish we understood what was at work behind this and how we could spend more days in “the zone” than not, and I’m willing to gamble that redirecting our attention from the internal to the external – in spite of all psychological resistance – might be the best chance there is for leveraging these moments of clarity.

That said, I’ve been trying to follow my own advice lately, and it’s real tricky. At first it’s not hard; I just remind myself whenever I’m daydreaming or repeating the same useless thoughts to myself that there are more important lessons to be learned in front of my own two eyes. And low and behold, my mood gets better once I’m not fixated on my own shortcomings and better able to react to events around me. But at some point or another a lifetime of retardation comes back and sucker punches me, as despite all my alertness I make the same mistake I’ve made a million times before, and then defeatism sets in. Before I know it I’m back in the business of self-loathing and hopelessness, and a dozen more repeat-offender mistakes are made, and the rest of my day is a wash. Like usual, I’ll end these worthless days saying that maybe tomorrow will be better and I’ll try again then with renewed energy. But unlike most such empty promises, when I start again the next day with a focus on perceptiveness, I inch closer back into that wonderful and euphoric zone where for this brief time I feel in control of myself, and by extension my surroundings.

I’m almost done here – I promise – but from my week-old experiment thus far, I’ve learned that it’s not hard to get on the wagon. All it takes is silencing your useless thoughts and paying greater heed to the things around you; it even becomes fun and challenging as you start to make little tiny realizations that you know should have dawned on you a long, long time ago. But then I’ve identified two things that can quickly and easily knock you off: overconfidence and defeatism. When I see myself behaving well…neurotypically, I start to think like I can handle anything that comes my way and I get careless. I forget that before I was really able to make any progress, I had to impose strict discipline upon myself to make habits out of the little things that would otherwise consume valuable mental energy. When I feel like I can procrastinate and ignore my usual rules of organization, kind of like the old days before I knew about AS when I could waste my whole day screwing around and still pull off ‘A+’ work at the last minute, no such result happens and I realize I’ve now screwed something up.

That’s not the exclusive source of the latter, as mistakes inevitably rise from a whole constellation of influences, but whatever fouls I inflict on myself, I begin a one-way descent to the downswing when I realize that I’ve screwed something up yet again. First I start thinking that “the zone” was just a temporary trance at best, which makes me feel like I’ll never be any good at obeying the dictates of “common sense” which by definition alone shouldn’t entail a struggle, and that maybe I should just retreat back to my old isolated constructs that seem so inviting when failure becomes far more the rule than the exception. But like so many times before, when I’m back in the upswing I see how short-sighted a worldview that is, and that if I had just kept my head up I’d be that better poised to keep fighting the good fight, and with any luck win a battle or two. But now familiar with the role played by active perception, which for the first time gives me a degree of control over the normally random upswings, I can see just why pessimism is such a quagmire that I had best stay clear of altogether, and may even explain why exhaustion sets in when all you see is one step forward and one step back – over and over and over again.

Final Summary:

1. Stripping away all the psychological jargon, AS might be usefully deconstructed as an acute deficiency in perceptive inclination, which is often excludingly narrow in nature.
2. This leads AS victims to heed the rules we create by ourselves, for ourselves; and at the peril of creating friction with the rules governing everything else around us.
3. I feel positive and functional when I find myself in relative harmony with society’s rules, and I’m more attuned to these rules in the first place when I’m in an externally-oriented state of mind and perception.
4. It may be possible to stay in that “zone” of recognizing and complying by these external rules by keeping a disciplined focus on your surroundings.
5. And to stay in that zone without being worn down by exhaustion, resist your pessimistic and defeatist impulses that come from inevitable failings, knowing that you’re less likely to make them if you get back on the high path and don’t climb down.


*******************

Ok, this is where my analysis ends, as I’ve brought my thoughts up to where they are now, and in any event I’m tired of talking about my own thoughts and far more interested in what anyone here can say about them. In the past week I feel like I’m on the verge of a breakthrough in understanding our common condition, our relations with the outside world, and how to bridge the gap between the two – but it’s relatively new and quite imperfect.

But what I’m really looking for here is a wider discussion with anyone else who cares to comment. Does any of this correspond with your reality and the lesson’s you’ve learned over the years? Speak your mind and add some clarity to this account. Think this is an exercise in philosophical hot air and in stark contrast to your own experiences? Then speak your mind because I know I’ve been shot down too many times to put unrealistic expectations on myself now, and if that’s the case I wouldn’t want anyone else to take this too seriously anyhow. Or if you see merit in some aspects but erroneous thinking in others, then help generate a more useful construct here with your commentary. I can say that I’ve done enough solitary introspection in all my years to know it’s not worth much by itself, and I really want to stay true to my recent insights and learn from others in hopes it will make life better for me, and for that matter anyone else who sees merit in this perspective.

To conclude – at long last – thank you for spending your valuable time reading up to this point, and I greatly look forward to the input of anyone and everyone who has something to say on the matter.

Sincerely,

Ben

Wrong Planet
Wrong Planet - Aspergers and Autism Community

Last edited by ExhaustedImpostor on 10 Mar 2007, 7:35 am, edited 4 times in total.

-THAT's LIFE!! -a constant struggle -it's not just you it's everybody. --some people learnt along time ago that this is life,, and that doing something about it is just too hard. --although there is a big 'self help' market out thier, in the form of books, tapes, dvd etc - even the show OPRAH is just that.... I think the problem isn't you, it's the free-economy requiring reasons for it's citizens to be interested ,,, self help is that invention which keeps some smart peoples pockets lined.... which brings me to the piont and the reason I though I would reply...

GREAT BOOK , or is it an excerpt? -I think you shuold become a writer or Phscholigist if you are already not ... have you seen HUFF! (I think the question mark is supposed tobe upside down) --him and his hungarian conscience? ,, constantly analysing untill, he himself needs to create , a second personality to get.....oh what's the word, you would know,,,, umm to get gratification -no wrong word ,,, ie another entity to tell them they are wrong/right. The homeless hungarian in HUFF is a great example of - what happens when you think too much about yourself - you will either.. A Divide B Get Phchosis. --I know I have been thier,,, what you have written though is much more ariculated then what I could have ever come up with, but the gist of it is the same, it's not only the same with for someone that grew up with AS and knows it, it's also the same for someone that did'nt know it (like me) and even just the general population.

---What I think you should be more concerned about is the Title of your first book.... I think you are a great writer.

Great post. I do not identify with the concept that I am incorrectly hardwired. I see this in a different light. In my analogy, I will compare my mind to an engine.

It is easy for a private rebuilder to improve the performance of his engine across the board. One can do better than stock in all areas of performance simulteneously assuming small improvements are all that is desired.

If the rebuilder wants NASCAR performance in HP however, he must be ready to sacrifice other performance criteria such as fuel consumption, smoothness, longevity. That HP level cannot be had with anything like a stock engine's overall usefulness.

And I'd he wants NHRA performance then the resulting engine will be at least nearly useless at anything else. I think that my brain is optimized in the extreme for logical - or perhaps more correctly for conceptual thought. It sucks at emotion just as a race engine may lack low RPM torque.

As I have aged (53 now) I have learned how to coax my brain into doing some mundane tasks. But it is still best at concepts and I wish my social skills had been better enough to allow me to succede as a student as I should have been a physicist.

But my noggindoes architecture too, and that pays the bills. I soar the heights of thought and this is still fun.

Less of a corpus collosum - that might just be part of it. But no malfunction here, just enough difference that I regard myself a different sub species.

I myself, am reluctant to do anything that I don't have a chance of doing with at least 90 percent accuracy, but I do admire people who excel in areas I couldn't even hope to do well in such as medicine, athletics and science. (eg. Roger Bannister) I am not a skater or a runner, but I like to watch the best in those sports.

You live in a four room house powered by a battery. You can light up one room and run the computer, off and on you can light a second room and still function. By the time you light a third room, the computer has low voltage malfunctions, but if you shut it off, all four rooms can be lit, but the battery runs down and leaves you in the dark.

All of the people around you speak in ways you do not understand, their guestures and shrugs confuse you. If you apply all your effort to exhaustion, you can barely get by. You can mimic, but never understand in depth. One day you see a sign, half of it is in the words you have struggled with so long, the other half says clearly, this way to England. You go to England, everything makes sense, you learn that your parents thought French culture was important, so they dumped you there.

In England you function well, have lots of energy, live without effort. Your darts team are city champions.
Now you start feeling guilt, your parents would not have abandoned you in France without a reason, that guilt drives you back across the Channel, with all of your new found energy you come close to mimicing the French. You find it exhausting, you cant hit anything with a dart, by force of will you become more French, you can get by in that world, except one day you just can't figure out how to make those strings hold your shoes on. You buy slipons, next it is something else, through constant adapting, you lose more and more just to maintain Frenchness.

One day you learn that the French do not see you as one of them, all was in vain. You also learn that your parents were getting a check to support you, and the money went a lot farther, after they dumped you. It was enough that they drank themselves to death, and you find that you are living a lie based on a deceit.

You try to come up with a French Theroy where you being French is the logical outcome. More abilities are lost constructing Le Grande Illusion. You discover modern French thought, Nothing Exists, No Exit, everything is a lie constructed for a purpose, many of which are hundreds of years dead and forgotten, but the lies continue, because everyone does it.

You are always tired, everything has become so hard, you pace your room in a robe for you have forgotten how to dress. You write long French essays, logic forms a perfect circle, you follow it. Philosophy says the meanig of a thing is defined by the meaning of words which are not precise, therefore one must study the letters that the words are constructed from, for in the final anyalisis it is the ink that forms the letters.

Walking down the street in your robe, you yell out in French, It is the ink!, the ink!, A policeman wishes to hear your Grande Theroy, he brings you to a Doctor of Grande Theories who agrees with everything, and provides you with an office to complete the Theory, it is lovely and quite, for the walls are thickly padded.

Back in England you are deeply missed by your dart team, whatever became of that odd bloke, I miss him, best anchor we ever had. All raise a pint to your memory.

EI - I found your post interesting and thought provoking. Thanks.

A few thoughts, FWIW, which I shall keep as brief as I can...

1. You sound really worn out with thinking and trying to do things right. I am sorry that you're feeling like this. May I suggest that you force yourself to have some time off? Take a break, a few days holiday, away from your usual environment if possible. The 'problem' will still be there when you get back, so you can afford to put it down for a little while!!

2. We can never defy and deny anything for ever. It's not sustainable. The key to resolving a problem is to accept that there is one. ACCEPTANCE. Self-acceptance, self-forgiveness, self-love = self-esteem.

3. Willingness to learn is another key. That's a great attitude! Learning from other folk is very helpful. I disagree that 'rank and file normals do just peachy' and that autistic freaks like us can;t learn from others.

4. We are not 'autistic freaks'! Expunge that vocabulary from your thinking please!! Autism is 'only' another neurological difference. If you look at it more positively, you may find that you will be able to accept and even celebrate your differences more easily! (unless of course you're being ironic here - I can't tell!)

5. There are many neurological 'causes' that add up to AS/ASDs, not just lack of mirror neurons, as you know. Thus it's not just about 'perception' and 'lack of good judgement'.

6. Often, negatives can be reframed as positives. E.G. where you see your lack of good judgement, I see myself as very innocent, naive, honest and open. These qualities are good, most NTs would applaud them (even if they can't actually be like this asmuch as I am!).

7. I imagine many who post here are MENSA level - AND share not a deficiency of common sense, but a DIFFERENT common sense!

8. It IS possible to succeed in the NT world using this DIFFERENT common sense, your intellect, and AS perception. Don't let anyone say you can't - it may be harder to succeed for AS people in some ways , but not as hard as it is for E.G. NT people who have only average intellectual ability. Many NT people have faulty judgement too. Just take a look at any police court! Or 'true confessions' talk shows!


9. AS mind-blindness IS written up in the literature as a deficit of perception - but that's only from the perspective of NT 'experts', those who are observing. Who says they are right? Why do we have to believe them? Maybe this 'mind-blindness' actually enables other positive faculties like the ability to cut through the crap or the ability to see things as they really are to come to prominence??

10. I agree that AS folk often choose NOT to see the wood for the trees. We're wired that way - AND we can learn to go big picture sometimes, or teach ourselves to do it. The more you do something, the better you get at it. That's common sense in any language!!

11. Please drop the 'affliction' thinking! This is negative self-talk - it creates a negative feedback loop in your brain, and a self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm guilty of negative self-talk too, but I have learnt to catch myself when it happens sometimes (though not always...)

12. yes, I have my own rules too. Quite often external rules are crap to me. Make me feel truly deceitful and that I've betrayed myself. I imagine that many people, AS and NT, feel this way about some rules or other. I've learnt as I've got older which rules I can totally ignore and which sets of rules are essential to follow. This is the same for everyone. I think we AS folk just take rules a hell of a lot more seriously though. Too seriously sometimes! Just recognising and accepting this fact of AS life is a relief!

13. Rules - any rules - are just a social construct for the sole purposes of ensuring that social institutions a) function according to consensus agreement and b) provide a strong level of order and comforting routine/predictability for as many people as possible.

14. I do agree about the psychic exhaustion. You're right...so we have to learn how ot switch off sometimes for the sake of our own sanity. The reality is that it IS an insane world out there - we Aspies are just more attuned to that. This is extremely taxing.

15. Swinging back and forth from day to day - well, AS is neurological, the brain IS dependent on chemicals and electrical energy to make it work...when you have a sensitive neurology it seems to me to make sense that this intermitent wash of chemicals and electrical impulses can affect moods so greatly. Acceptance is a Good Thing with this too!

16. There's also evidence to show that the hippocampus and amygdala are different in people with AS. These control, amongst other things, anxiety levels. If they are functioning in a very sensitive way then it also makes sense that anxiety and consequent poor concentration arise more often (you can't be at the top of your game and very perceptive if your system is awash with adrenalin!)

17. I don't agree that you'll never be any good at common sense. You've displayed a great deal in you post and in fact in coming here to find more answers and support. I think you're giving yourself a hard time unnecessarily.

18. You write a lot about logic, yet you use very emotive language...are you really listening to yourself? Read over your post and see if you can feel what you're also saying with those emotive words...

18. 'Quagmire' is what it all feels like at the moment. But it's subjective and a negative way of putting it! Some might say that they were in a state of creative chaos! = a positive place to be. And sometimes one can just 'overthink' - I do it all the time, and usually end up in a meltdown of some sort...it's hard to spot when you're in the middle of it. But I get the sense that you'd really benefit from putting the thinking aside for a little while and if it's all still such a 'quagmire' when you come back to it then go and see your doc and talk about how down and exhausted you feel (it may be that you have depression??)

19. 'Simplify, simplify, simplify' Henry David Thoreau. VERY wise!


EI - thank you very much for sharing your thoughts and giving me the opportunity to write back. In doing so, you've helped me to clarify some things for myself.

I sort of agree.

I have heard more severely autistic people describe their sensory integration dysfunction as being able to attend to only one of the senses (e.g., vision) at a time and, even within that sense, only being able to focus on a small detail or part of an object at a time (resulting in a fragmentary field of vision or difficulty separating noise from relevant sound input). I realized that I have a less severe version of this: I have a unitary field of vision and can separate irrelevant noise from what I'm trying to listen to fairly well, but I tend to be more single minded rather than good at multitasking. If I have to attend to too many stimuli at once, I can get frustrated. This same trait of single-mindedness can also explain our special areas of interest. To an extent, the ability to focus on something intently for a long period of time is a valuable ability that most NTs lack, but by the same token, if this trait is too strong, it can result in at least some of the dysfunctional signs and symptoms of the autistic spectrum disorders—the stronger this trait, the more profound the autism.

I had difficulty mustering the energy, myself, to read your post in detail and follow your points but I did skim it and extract things that I'd like to comment on. I've been learning about cognitive psychology, myself. I'm not sure what all your questions were, but in case I hit on any relevant points about "pragmatic" social cognitive functioning, I hope they are helpful.

Firstly, I agree with you that there is a potential compromise between how much mental energy goes into social interaction and social information processing and how much goes into pure intellectual/artistic cognitive process. The more competent I become socially, the less overall "gifted" activity I can engage in.

There's an engineering concept known as "bandwidth". It's how much information can flow over a channel in a certain amount of time. The more information you pack into a frame of time, the less time that frame can cover because all systems have a bandwidth limitation. You want to develop social functioning that accomplishes the level of interaction that you need, at the level of depth of social insight into others that you need, where that social functioning is optimized to be as efficient as possible for YOUR system.

One of the afflictions of being Asperger, if you have developed social functioning, is that you have to cognitively process social information explicitly that NTs are hardwired to do more easily, and processing everything explicitly takes up a lot of mental energy. Optimizing the social functions you develop for yourself may help you to be less exhausted and more able to preserve free mental bandwidth to allocate to your gifted activities.

While you are designing and implementing your social function, you have to pay a lot of attention to "optimization". Optimization in computer programming means you write your programs efficiently so as to make them run faster and take up less memory.

One way to optimize is to lose some of the dimensionality of your processing, i.e. don't focus on all levels of detail of your social experience in real time. You have to focus on what is important for you to process and what social information you can tune out. Ideally, you learn to adjust the dimensionality of the information you need to mine from social situations, focusing more attention on social situations where the complexities are important and focus less of your mind on social issues where the situation is relatively shallow or intrinsically one-dimensional. In the following two examples, I would allocate more attention to detailed information for the first example than the second: (1) My professor screwing my psycho girlfriend, who then became jealous of my working with him because I'm hotter than she is (high dimensionality to the information I need to pay attention to), and (2) dealing with an insurance agent to buy a auto insurance policy (one dimensional interaction). To understand the dimensionality of information, you have to have patterned what is important to you in the situation and developed an idea bout what information about their behavior is relevant to know because it may impact your objectives and agenda in the relationship. After you do this for one type of relationship, a pattern is set and it takes less effort to work out what level of detail processing is sufficient for a similar relationship in the future.

For example, you know that you have to coordinate your reality to that of another person's in order to interact and that sometimes much of that other person's reality may be arbitrary, irrelevant or uninteresting to you. You don't have to completely understand them and pattern their reality to deal with them. You don't really have to know the worthiness or value of the social reality of others or reconcile their (often irrational or mystifying) social reality within some universal meaning. Instead of trying to internalize the social reality of others, which is exhausting, maybe you can create for yourself a social cognitive function process that is focused on the following algorithm: map out and identify the other person's schemas, meanings and values (their reality) that are relevant for you to deal with and quickly lay a foundation for translating between your schemas, meanings and values (your reality) and theirs. This involves learning the skills of psychological profiling and learning how to use generalized schemas (biases). Then you can decide later how much you need to understand about the other person's reality, what want to buy into, and how deeply you want get enmeshed into, the details of the reality of another person (say, someone you want to become friends with). Note that I distinguish between profiling the other person and patterning their reality.

The above was about optimizing your social function and how efficiently you can process social interaction information. It can get very exhausting having to relate to others if you have to internalize and reconcile every external reality you have to negotiate with your own internal reality at many deep levels. Different methods of optimization of your social functioning can help you stop having to commit your entire mind's bandwidth to social processing, and allocate only the amount of mental space that you need to accomplish what you need.

The below is about having your mood affected by others.

First, I want to establish where I think you are. I think that from a software engineering perspective, you can divide your social behavior development into a couple of layers of functioning, that can also be described in computer programming terms. A foundational level of social skills development includes identifying the components of the skills of interaction and creating the algorithms -- i.e. the foundations of social interaction skills divides into two sub-activities. Identifying the components for developing social skills involves mapping out your unique Asperger sensory-motor and neuropsychological function features that you will need to use to talk, smile, dance with. This is like writing the instructions for a computer system that you will later use to write programs with, and it depends on how the machinery is wired and how it works. This is knowing the smallest mechanics of how your particular autistic mind and sensory system works, which isn't necessarily consistent with the information we get from the Neurotypical world about how the mind-body works. The second layer of developing foundational social skills is like writing software on top of the instruction set you wrote for the hardware. The programs are like device drivers for how will you use your sensory-motor system and its wiring to accomplish social interactions. This involves creating a toolkit for higher functions that enable you to make eye contact, converse, respond with suitable kinds of smiles, dance, confide, express personality, establish rapport and etc. The social interaction functions are like a social habit toolkit that you can train up, once you know how they should work. You can define these and train them up with networking workshops and little classes on socializing and actual social outings. I assume, based on your writing, that you have the foregoing skills, which comprise what I consider to be the first foundational level of social skills development.

The next layer of social skills development is one that I think of as being higher level, that many Neurotypicals also have to work on. I think that this is where you are. It involves developing your socialization tactics, your social objectives and agendas, and managing your mood states, indentity and personality. I'm responding here to your mention that you may have undesired shifts in mood in dealing with the reality of others. There's an area of psychology known as "affective state control". It addresses how people maintain moods, self confidence, stable self-concept (identity, personality and etc.).

If you don't develop affective state control, you can become too vulnerable to being internally affected by everyone you have to deal with. Learning to objectify and pattern the features of other people's reality as quickly and efficiently as possible, and learning how to maintain your internal state (mood, confidence and stable self-concept) when dealing with others, may make developing social functioning and maintaining relationships be less exhausting. The methods of cognitive behavior therapy for mood disorders can help with affective state control.
__________

You can do what you set out to do, but it's very difficult and I questioned myself, too: one can set out to transform oneself into having a neurotypical level of social functioning but that entails three fundamental decisions/questions. (1) Just how interested am I in being a social being, and trading my magical world of inventions, theories and talents for the ability to be like any person next to me in the grocery store line? Am I willing to give up my uniqueness and my gifts to be an NT? (2) At some point, to attain a stable self-concept and maintain good affective state control when dealing with the multiplicity and irrationality of others when living in the social world of NTs, you still at some point have to learn how to accept yourself as you are. Otherwise you will have difficulty having a stable external self. Very few people can be fully realized social beings without limitations because being a fully realized social being in community means defining not only your own reality but influencing the external realities of others. This is what charismatics, con artists and manipulators do. The foregoing implies (3) Becoming a part of the social world of NTs ultimately also involves a kind of growing up that means that you either (a) find a place, an external identity that you mediate in society and then you accept the limitations and static features of that identity and role as your role and status or you (b) set out to be a fully realized social being and/or a charismatic or con artist so as to free yourself from static limitations of a social identity.

This is my answer. There's a certain amount of talented freedom and weighlessness in being autistic, whether or not you have what is defined as a high I.Q. You have to compromise between having the unlimited mind and giftedness of autism if you transform yourself to enter the social world of Neurotypicals. Developing social skills while continuing to be a high-performance individual in other ways is not easy. Some Neurotypicals spend their whole lives trying to find self-realization and self-actualization. You can optimize your functioning to be efficent in how much mental energy you put into processing social information and avoid getting exhausted by the demands of mediating the external realities of others. Finding efficient social functioning may also involve finding the right level of social functioning: the level at which you will be happy and your needs are met, and then accept yourself, your social identity and limitations, at that level. If you don't fix your requirements, you may find that developing your social existence will continue to suck all your energy and mental focus.

The above is what I hope is a relevant set of "pragmatic" thoughts about what it means to develop into a social being as an autistic one, in terms of how limiting and exhausting it can seem, and in terms of trade-offs.

I don't know how meaningful or accurate anything I have said is. These are just my own theories and ideas that I've worked out and no doubt many of them are half-baked.

I am here, I do understand. I am very sleepy and not feeling well though. Anyway, I deeply know Theory of Mind has much to do with Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. I am too sleepy to elaborte, but I think you do not need me to; you have shown me you already know. I mean that to observe, using my enhanced sensory modality, necessarily effects. (I drop a stone into water and it ripples, another stone and interference. Binary like laboratory instrumentation - signal to noise ratio). I cannot know a priori - I am not a mind reader, I suffer (suffer X 10^ (0/1)) from mindblindness: I see the unseen. Trust me, I do not lead you astray, I am a scientist. I am autistic.

I want under my heavy covers and need to take my prescription now and lay down. I get up at ~ 5:20 for my laboratory, where I live. I wish I could contribute more to what you have written, you deserve more too. Earlier this weekend, I had not slept for 71 hours so I need to recooperate. I become deeply transfixed and forget to sleep.

Before you can teach yourself to dance the waltz,you need to ask yourself why you want to dance the waltz.Because others do it so well?Because you will acquire wealth and prestige and a sense of self worth?You are tired of sitting on the side lines and watching others waltz?What if you could learn to waltz but had to agree to use a wheelchair when you are done waltzing,would it be worth it?

I dont know maths but I think I know some logic and this is what logic says to me.....

I dont need to be like everyone else,have never found value in "Pretending" to be in the majority at the sacrifice to my "authentic self".Some people actually want to BE something because they think something is more popular.True,if your popular team wins,you can CLAIM to be a winner...but is that reality,are you any better?



I would love to be wealthy.....and never have to go to a job I dislike but not at the sacrifice of my "ethics".I couldnt do it even if I wanted to,it just isnt how I work.I cant sell someone something they dont need or something I know to be harmful to the environment or something harmful to them.It's not because I am holier then thou....it is just the way I am.It is painful for me to do something against my belief system.....the rewards do not outweigh the pain.


Prestige?If I am not really being myself then what others feel about me is irrelevant...they wouldnt like me,they lwould ike what I am pretending to be(and most people I dont respect enough to care what their opinion of me is because I dont value their values)


People dont recharge my batteries,they drain them,so I have less to devote to things I do value.


I know that there are people who would find my intolerance for being "converted" as out and out paranoa.Why are you so afraid of being changed...just make a few compromises and life will be easier.I know that part of my hesitation to change is my "black and white thinking"(which it seems you also have during your good verses bad days).It is also a justifiable fear.People are trying to kill me.I realized since I was (under 5?)that people were trying to kill "ME".They wanted to shape me into them.I fought them and it has not been easy to remain me because society is structured to make "widgets" who buy "widgets"......I dont like widgets.I like moss and furry critters and words.Those are things I dont have to buy so I am useless to this society.I have made peace with that.I value me when I abide by my own values and chastise myself when I dont,but forgive myself and try and do better next time.

It wasnt always like this.I used to be me and was sad that others didnt like me.I wanted to die to escape all the feelings of being outsider.I would rather die then give up being me(it would be the same thing,really.)It is an unfortunate reality that the world was not created as a convenience for me but not hardly as bad as starving to death or dying of dysentery or being in Iraq or Duffar region right now...(just to put things into some perspective.)

I think humans are insane.That perspective helps me survive most frustrations.All other information is intellectual masturbation(which I enjoy on occasions but dont want mental carpel tunnel),so,I try and keep this in mind.

Humans are insane.

God, thanks everyone for making it through that ream of paper, let alone coming back with truly insightful comments. Truth be told, I was originally more interested in hearing other people’s comments and parallels, and less about how these things apply to me as an individual. But beyond my expectations going in or whatnot, these responses were deep the point that I had to just sit and let them soak in for a few, and at least regarding my own situation I already feel less confused. But there’s still a lot of wisdom in there to soak up, and I’m honestly still processing it and at a loss for how to respond to some explanations – especially the ones that are so at odds with my way of life as I’ve lived it for so long.

I guess because right now I’m not much capable of adding anything new, I should probably clarify something I should have earlier that may have resulted in some unnecessary posts and wasted time: I’ve been in this impostor role for so long and with such intensity that it’s no longer an unmanageable burden in and of itself. I’m still leagues from ordinary by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ve got a balanced enough blend of conformity and individuality that I usually come off as pleasantly/harmlessly offbeat, rather than bizarre and outworldly. I still screw up some of the most elementary social dealings, but I gradually learn from them, and am at any rate pretty skilled at covering them up. I’m at peace with the reality that I’ll never belong to a crowd, but will continue to enjoy quality friendships with diverse people who are interested in my point of view, and even appreciative that they can be totally honest with me in ways they cannot with their own group.

And if it were as simple as that I wouldn’t offend anyone here by complaining about these things, but I fear that some of these gains have come at expense of my intellectual endowments, which are/were so vital to my career and everyday dealings that I’m just completely lost without them. These days when I forget some truly basic information or scratch my head over formerly straightforward concepts, I get the same sense of shame and despair that I once got from run-of-the-mill faux pas. So now I've basically got to figure out whether I can even function in the field that’s been so generous to me thus far, and I’ll stop myself by just saying that the preceding analects were basically my way of figuring out how I can strike the right balance to enjoy as much as I can of both worlds – unrealistic as that may possibly be.

- Ben

Ive done alot of thinking along these lines too. For me, Ive simplified everything to this. When one looks at a computer desktop interface, they see all these folders and things that they could open and go into. I dont have that interface. My screen is all those files and folders and pictures open at one time, and I spend my life figuring how to deal with all of that and all of life outside me as well, which is also magnified cause its not going through a central interface, its coming all in at once. And its really tiring.

Like that, yes.

Ben and others this is really interesting stuff. My own view is that we have to put a '0.' before Ben's '1.' about perception issues, that then lead to exhaustion and the other issues. i.e. why do Aspie's have perception issues in the first place? My thesis is this happens because our/their heads are clogged up with systemising; they are trying to use a jack hammer to make an oil painting, which (a) leads to poor painting, (b) stops our/their artistic skills being heard, and (c) is exhausting.
Very best
JC

The applicability of the "Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle" DOES make sense if observing others. In fact, ironically, it makes LESS difference for a baby, because babies aren't seen as a threat. HEY, maybe that is ANOTHER reason why autistics may have trouble! After all, some people that would converse freely in front of a dog might NOT communicate in front of a magpie! The magpie might actually repeat the conversation!

How does it apply if you would have been there ANYWAY? HECK, some computer languages ALWAYS record metrics, and run in debug mode, and they ADVERTISE that because historically programs have run a little differently in debug mode. On my first assembly job, my program worked only in DEBUG mode. I eventually found out why! The stepper motor was slow, and my program ran too fast without the debug routine! Once I slowed down the program, it worked!

Steve

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher; all is vanity.

Yes, Chinese wisdom is that good.

You should try to search info on Chinese Five Elements. Pay attention to the element Metal.

I thought the most important thing was to become intelligent. That was because I had exercise-induced asthma, and couldn't do physical activities with other boys. Now I realized the most important thing is being emotionally-driven. Go figure.

Likewise, if you have CAPD you won't be likely to be in big groups.