The United States as an Analogy of Autistic Brains

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Chronos
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16 Apr 2018, 7:14 am

Looking at a roadmap of the U.S. you might have noticed that it has a lot of interstates and freeways. This makes it possibly to efficiently drive from one end of the country to the other.
This is an NT brain and NT brain signals are zipping back and forth from Los Angeles to New York quickly, without spending much time in either city and getting a general sense of the scenery along the way but not becoming very familiar with any one place.

But the U.S. didn't always look like this. There was a time before interstates and freeways where towns were connected by meandering country roads that became main streets with stop lights, and there were many many more little towns than today. It could take weeks to get from Los Angeles to New York. This is an autistic brain.

On the way from Los Angeles to New York, the brain signals of autistic spend a lot of time in little towns, getting to know them well and sometimes getting stuck there and not even bothering to leave, becoming very familiar with the scenery but only in that area.

The result is autistic brains do not sync with NT brains. NT brains are going back and forth between Los Angeles and New York faster than autistic brains can keep up and talk about Los Angeles having a lot of sunshine and the walk of fame and New York having a lot of buildings and plays and the Statue of Liberty while autistic brains are moving slowly through small town American getting to know each little town in great detail, eventually forgetting they were trying to go to New York.



fluffysaurus
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16 Apr 2018, 7:26 am

naturalplastic
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16 Apr 2018, 7:51 am

Interesting analogy.

Here in the mid atlantic first the big cities built "beltways" (limited access freeways) to go around the big cities like Baltimore and Washington. Then they build smaller "bypasses" for the smaller cities like Frederick and Leesburg. So you have to pick from among the gaggle of road signs between "Leesburg Commerical", and "Leesburg Bypass".

So a driver does tend to stay both physically and emotionally wedded to the long distance destination on the freeway. Back in the day you would get lured into loitering in every town on the way.


And supposedly autistics differ from NTs by lack of "neural trimming". So we keep all of the defunct roads and reailroads running.