Autism And The Lost Plane

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Been watching this on the news a lot as it is just about all that is on there, or at least on CNN, for a very long time, which is why I have started a rather intense project to watch every single episode of Dexter (all 96:-), of which I have never seen even one episode previous to starting this project, as fast as possible.

This thread is NOT intended to be about the specific event or the media coverage per se, but to use the way the public and media is responding to this as a certain kind of allegory for autistic brain function, specifically in regard to the way the autistic brain catalogs various information that is maybe related to trauma.

Why dont YOU tell us?

How IS this "an allegory to how the autistic brain works"?

You know perfectly well that no one in the human race but you has any thoughts on the subject.


Instead of annoying us by demanding that we discuss (what looks to anyone else but you to be) contrived nonsense-why not just be straightforward, and say whats on your mind?

What has the (excellent) series Dexter got to do with the Malaysian lost/crashed plane?

Like I said (before I edited that part out) "its ironic that she seeks refuge from a real life drama about dissappearence and death in a fictional drama that involves death, crime, and dissappearence".

And thats the essence of the issue.

Humans are wired to pay attention to bad news for survival reasons.


But we also like neat endings to stories. The airliner, and the little girl in DC who dissappeared, and the Crimean Crises wont be resolved in just one hour.

Both the public response, and the OP response, have little to do with autism vs NT-ism. Just typical human responses to information about danger.

Deep Thought and/or brain function™ , I expect - but whether we'll find out before the universe ends is another matter.

littlebee wrote:

Okay, Getting down to brass tacks. I am going to be watching Dexter now and making food, but can put it on pause. Let's start with these first few words of my first post, which is the real introduction, and go little by little..



Does everyone understand this? There is much in these few words. Let's go into it little by little if anyone does not understand. Take your time. Then we can go to the next part.

Last edited by littlebee on 29 Mar 2014, 5:14 pm, edited 3 times in total.

Something about time which is why I put the part about time in italics, but I am still cracking up (not the plane hopefully) as I write this....

and also, am intending to make a detailed analysis of that series and relate it to autistic brain function when/if I ever finish watching it, so by mentioning it, kind of priming the pump....

I feel like an alien even here, though and to me this feeling is not at all funny...

But Dexter is a psychopath not autistic. His redeeming feature is that when he gets the "blood lust" he kills serial killers or murderers who have escaped the justice system on technicalities. Also, autistic people don't tend to go around dismembering other people and disposing of the body parts in bin bags. Dexter often expresses that he has difficulty feeling any emotions and it is only through his violent acts that he feels truly alive. Brutally murdering people is an emotional release that Dexter seems to need on a frequent basis. The only similarity I've seen between Dexter's behaviour and Autistic behaviour is a problem knowing how to socialise but IMO the cause is entirely different. In Dexter's case his lack of emotions means he doesn't spontaneously react in the appropriate manner in social situations but Autistic people have plenty of emotions and we just don't know how to express them appropriately, plus we have difficulty reading the body language and emotions of others. I'll just add that I've watched all the Dexter episodes/series.

I didn't have time to write more yesterday, but wanted to get this started while it was still alive in the news so as to convey a certain flavor. At the time I wrote what I just posted there were no other messages on here yet so saw all of these messages after posting that. And no, I am not demanding that anyone discuss anything. Where do you get this idea from? I have written several times on that other thread my opinion that thinking about the material is a form of participating, and also some people may not be interested, and you probably read that.

This was intended to be a very short thread. If I had seen all of these messages I do not know if I could have gone forward without first writing a lengthy message about the function of allegory. In short, some subtle but important concepts cannot be conveyed directly--such as by saying "look at this tree"-- because different people have different kinds of understanding and can only grasp certain concepts through story, plus some material needs to be elaborated to allow for comprehensive integrative processing so that it does not just go in one ear and out the other, meaning if a persons struggles to process it, this gives it the necessarily grip so his brain function can peg into it.A story is kind of like a picture. On the recent "cat thread" the cats did not just mean pictures of cats. Anybody who participated there or followed the drama as it unfolded already knows this. With that experience there the participants have taken something out of it that could not have happened without the cat pictures, so in this context those pictures were integrative, but without being in relationship to the other material on the thread they would not have had the same value.

Different people due to their subjective experiences have different experiences of time. When someone is writing a long boring message with elaborate zzzzz detail about some personal problem, I bet the time passes really fast for him because for him it is interesting, while to the general reader the time passes very slowly. But in another context, slow is fast. The tortoise won the race.

To give an example using one of my special interests, religion--Zen Buddhism, which is a wonderful, arose out of another school of Buddhism that had an entirely different approach to time that involved deliberately stretching out certain teachings so that more people could be included. In fact people are even cautioned to delay the experience of nirvana until they are grounded in the basic teachings, (not that most of them being so cautioned would probably ever experience enlightenment anyway:-). Neither school is necessarily better, though the participants in each school probably think their school is better, but actually they are in some way complimentary. Without one there could not be the other.

Last edited by littlebee on 30 Mar 2014, 10:19 am, edited 1 time in total.

To Tallyman, I put an explanation in my original message that you have quoted that I do not think Dexter is autistic, but then I edited it out because I didn't want to make it too long or get on that topic yet, but yes, this should be clarified. I also wrote and edited out that I thought some of the writers maybe were autistic, though:-) and that was meant as a compliment. But the fact that I edited all of this out shows how stupid I am in some ways, as it is kind of obvious people would think I was going to say Dexter was autistic ....

The kind of way I would be approaching would be more from the perspective of the data presented by the writers in order to make a show --the way they off characters for their own convenience and to stretch out the plot...it is already starting to piss me off and the same thing happened with Homeland...and how it all goes down in the way people process it, but I would have to see the rest...have only watched 27 so far and will probably watch 4 or 5 more today. One thing that interests me is the theme of lying. That is kind of fascinating. They seem to be asking some kind of existential question about what is truth, but whatever...ha ha....

The thing is just anything can be used to say talk about just about anything, and there are these common themes...

And yet you choose a tragedy to ask Aspies to talk to you about who knows what. Perhaps you should start looking at your own decisions before engaging us in a mental train to nowhere.

To everyone else: Don't feed the troll.

Nothing.
I believe that was her point. Its an escape from the repetiveness of CNN.

littlebee, I suggest you try to make your threads/posts more concise and to the point. You ramble and keep going off at tangents and nobody knows what you are intending to communicate, leaving everyone guessing or making (incorrect) assumptions about what you actually want to say. At this point, several posts into the thread, I suspect nobody still knows what you are trying to communicate with this thread. Even your thread title is misleading / sufficiently vague to make no sense.

I don't know what on Earth the OP is talking about at all. I suppose everything that has ever exited in the whole history of the Earth has something to do with Autism.

The only thing I have learnt about this airplane is that I will never trust an airplane again, and my family are going on one at the end of this year and I worry so much about something similar happening to their plane.....oh my God I can't bear to even think about it....I have lost all my friends because I'm not good enough any more.....my favourite bus company (my precious special interest) is going downhill and I have a feeling that's going to collapse one of these days....I really cannot lose my family. I hate airplanes, they are deathtraps and are so dangerous, anybody who uses them are asking to die.

Extremely hostile comment. Sounds to me as if you're the troll.

By writing this you are eliciting a comment, which is I presume what you want to do, which is kind of interesting. Trolls do not make messages packed with ideas and full of questions. In my experience what trolls generally do is make messages like the one you have just made, but trolls need food, too, so I am going to feed you. It occurs to me that you may be experiencing emotional pain as a result of reading and not being able to understand my messages, and I am sorry if I have written anything to upset you, but I am just speaking my truth the best I can (which according to feedback is not so good sometimes), and by participating learning here learning to do that better. There are many messages on here that I do not really understand, but they do not cause me any pain at all, though sometimes it can be a little frustrating, so I assume it is something about the idea content in my messages that conflicts with your idea of the world and this is why you are attacking me.

I notice since being on Wrong Planet there are many different threads about bullying and how to handle it, and I have been planning for some months to start a specialt hread on this subject, but am not ready, but as an older person who has had much experience in this world, I will tell you for now that the best way to handle bullying is by communication.There are different kinds and qualities of communication for different kinds of people and in different kinds of situations, and that is okay, but if someone is trying to communicate with you in a language that is difficult to understand, then yes, that can be frustrating.

It is to the benefit of anyone who is interested, and imo especially to some autistics who are often literalists and tend to get stuck on one facet to learn and even deliberately practice reading various material comprehensively, so from many different angles, because this kind of thinking will help a person understand himself and the world better and also learning to process material in this way can help a person developing a certain kind of mental and even physical muscle that can be connected to sensation and breath in such a way as to become able to work through various inner obstacles that have formed around past trauma..

I think the lost plane is a good analogy for a person losing touch with a certain essential part of himself. As I wrote eariler, I do believe this describes what happened to me. and that is a tragedy. Imagine living your whole life this way and the horrible suffering a person has to go through. It is really heartbreaking to me to think of any else having to spend their precious life suffering in the way I have, but my thread is really not so much about the lost plane, but about the people who are drawing out the news story of looking for it.

As a social scientist I find this very interesting. it is sad that the plane went down, but personally I believe that what is drawing people's interest is the actual search, which, as I wrote previously, is akin to looking for food. Looking for food together or looking for the plane together on one level probably represents finding new life and a reason to live. What is reason? Reason is another word for for meaning. Mean is an interesting word. It can mean to bully someone, to intend to do something, to imply a specific idea content which gives life a reason, so intelligence, and it can also mean the middle ground, such as the golden mean.

Here is some material to think about. No one has to respond to it. No one even has to read it, though if a person does not, maybe he will miss something, but if he reads something else instead, that will maybe be more to his benefit, so he will gain something.

I am trying to simplify my material, but I have to get something out of participating here, also, or else it is not a two way street.

People do not have to read my messages. I understand that the title of my other thread appeared to be loaded, and so some people probably felt obligated to read it to protect the community from possible false ideas or whatever, but that was not really my intent with that title. I was just looking for a catchy title (which that surely turned out to be, much more than I ever expected) that expressed what was a very real question for me. My big mistake which I do feel very sorry for is not so much the title but that I did not, as I went along, give enough explanation to new readers so that they would not be attributing a negative meaning to the title. I explained it a couple of times, but there should have been a brief qualifier in each message for new readers and people who did not have the patience to plow through all that material. For that I really do feel sorry, as it was not fair to new readers and also if I had done that then the thread never would have been locked.

I just saw this after posting a long message. Sorry...I guess. Tallyman, are you sure no one understand me? The thread got quite a few hits...maybe someone did....if anyone would like to suggest what parts I could edit out of my previous message which was written from both ends of the stick, please post the part that should be edited out here. Also, if a person doesn't understand a specific comment, feel free to ask me a question. Do people understand how a lost plane could easily represent a part of ones self that has been suppressed or one has become disconnected with?