There's a thing about blogging - the writer perceives their entries as a connected sequence of text. The reader hits on a portion and needs significant encouragement to look further.
Never mind. If you're interested, the last episode is here http://www.wrongplanet.net/modules.php?name=Journal&file=display&jid=10296
After that, you're on your own.
As am I. I work in an organisation supposedly dedicated to delivering the best possible results in a difficult and fast changing field with ever diminishing resources.
Would YOU find it odd that such an organisation would not even have begun to measure what is in fact delivered? Let alone considered the effort expended in its creation, or in sustaining it through its useful life?
No, I've adapted to all that. I demonstrate how it can be done, but the mental state induced by clearer perception of our current state is manifestly less acceptable than the one enhanced by ignorance. To perceive a path to improvement requires some estimation of our present state, and consequent modelling of a path to a less parlous predicament.
Life goes on. The budget keeps dropping. People accept packages and disappear, taking their expert knowledge with them. I endure.
(Comments) Cut and come again posted at 05:13 am on 07-15-2009
Which, as every Australian child - or parent who's raised an Australian child - knows is a nickname for Albert, Norman Lindsay's Magic Pudding.
The special advantage of the magic pudding is that, however many slices you've taken of him before, there's always plenty to come. And of course that whether it's a plum duff or steak and kidney that takes your fancy Albert's your man. Er, pudding.
Add to that a dainty pair of legs on which he can skip from place to place, and the evergreen ability to enliven a conversation with new insights, and you have a friend for life.
Unless someone steals him... but that's a different story.
The context here is that it's almost a year since I started the narrative in this blog of an invocation to the gods of neurofeedback to reduce the degree by which I was different.
Is that what I wanted? I'm not sure now. There were conversations around hemispheric coordination and executive functions, amongst other things.
The upshot was, I did the training. Not much changed, except my bank balance, although the jury is still out on long term effects. Lost the job by which I put great store, after losing the ability to make any difference at it - that was neutral overall. Reduced my ability to produce high scores at mind games - again, neutral overall. Perhaps, lost some of the frenetic edge from my mental meanderings. Maybe a plus. Lost another slab of self-confidence - a minus.
Since the start of the year I've completed the formal diagnostic process for AS and been registered as autistic with the local organisation. Neutral.
Currently I'm talking with a new psychotherapist, reading too many new books (check "Can the world afford autism spectrum disorder?" by Digby Antam,
and "The imprinted brain" by Christopher Badcock), working with a voice coach - who's wonderful, and seems to understand how someone can go through
most of their life without talking. Working through having not got yet another job by which I set great store and staying, determinedly, alive.
There were a couple of threads on WP recently that triggered this latest. The first was asking about aspies with successful relationships with NTs who didn't talk about it much.
I'm one of those, I think: this is a post-childrearing relationship that's survived fifteen years so far, through the aspergers diagnosis and into the onset of old age. She's wise, wonderful and caring but doesn't care much for publicity.
The second was discussing the Akashic record, that mythical cosmic repository of all knowledge, all history past and future. The reason that one caught my eye was that I lived out of the record for more than a decade somewhere back there and it never let me down. Of course now I know there's no such thing, which is a shame in a way.
What there is, I think, is a mechanism for spinning obvious truths out of the gaps between what I know. Well, plausible explanations anyway. Somewhere down in the parietal lobe, perhaps. Maybe it's more prevalent in aspies, due to the missing demands of social involvements, who knows?
Who indeed - back to the relationship. Being a pair of enquiring minds, life becomes an ongoing workshop in how to deal with what was always invisible to me but is as plain as the nose on your face to her...
And, of course, spinning plausible explanations for it all to guide the next experiments.
(Comments) Aftermath posted at 03:27 am on 12-30-2008
That was the year that was. Wasn't it? There aren't a lot of years on the history books where so many people wound up so far behind where they'd started it.
Well, all right, there are enough of them to give any depressive food for thought. Meanwhile, though, this grand free market endeavour to fuel the furnaces of marketing with ten billion independent spenders has taken a mighty step backwards.
Me, I battled on. Just like my ten billion fellow passengers on spaceship earth. Trying one more time to find the next step up on the endless ladder of improvement.
I set out a year or so back to try and find some way to soften the edges of an aspie future. There are bands to that - the basic living one where I use what skills I have to make some kind of difference in my work places; the feeling good about life one where I strive to find ways to get up in the morning feeling that I'm one step on from the day before; the staying alive one where I stack up the practice that fills in the gaps where I'm one step back from that...
And here I am again. Same old story. New chapter, though, and I'm determined to open up new plot directions if I can.
(Comments) Neurofeedback training - a personal record posted at 07:25 pm on 12-21-2008
Neurofeedback
There are indications that assessment-guided neurofeedback training can help with some aspects of having aspergers
Neurofeedback also reliably helps the ASD trainees to feel calmer, happier, and less prone to anxiety and anger. Linked to this are improvements in flexibility, with greater capacity to tolerate and successfully cope with change or unexpected events. Behavioral and emotional self- control is frequently improved. Another frequent result is improved motor function - motor planning, improved tone, better handwriting. All of these together seem to lead to improved social functioning.
It is important to recognize though that there are difference among trainees in the degree of change. With a few clients, we have seen no discernible change. This is rare, representing only 6% of the individuals we have worked with, and in all of those cases, the individuals completed no more than 15 sessions. Sometimes the results are subtle. Our most frequent outcome is a substantial improvement in most of the areas listed above, so substantial that family members, educators, and other professionals involved agree that there has been benefit. We have seen a few individuals where neurofeedback has made a huge, probably life-course altering impact.
Neurofeedback is not a cure for autistic spectrum disorders. It is not miraculous. It doesn't help every child. It can be complicated and trying. Sometimes it helps a lot, sometimes a little. But it does often help in ways that no other method I know of can match.
Being an experimentally-minded sort of bloke, I wanted to explore the reality of the technique. In the same vein, whatever the outcome, it'd be good to be able to share it. I resolved to make notes as the process went on
You'll have noticed the reference to children in the quote above. As with any remediation of aspergers, the earlier it starts, the better. My personal interest, though, is in the fate of adults who are unfortunate enough to encounter aspergers diagnosis.
(Comments) Yes, I know... posted at 07:17 am on 12-19-2008
Believe me, I'm only too aware that I started out along this line to deliver a result.
Months trickle by, and really I'm very little closer to that goal.
Today I spent much of my work time in close proximity to the very superiors who have shafted me, refused to discuss their reasons for doing so, and then pretended that nothing ever happened. Back when I first read Chris Argyris on this same organisational tactic I thought I had it worked out - just talking about things would break the spell and the undiscussable could be dealt with as well as anything else. That isn't, though, how things work out.
Anyhow, acting on the careful advice of my mentors, I refrained from alluding to painful subjects, smiled often, and stayed carefully aloof from the mire of conversation. I may have looked like a loser, but at least I didn't lose any more.
(Comments) Lumosity Scores posted at 04:34 am on 12-07-2008
I played Lumosity's games for a month or two earlier in 2008, and I've been playing again since completing a program of neurofeedback training aimed at making my headspace less constrained.
You know, it feels to me that my scores are often about half what they were then. Sometimes it'll give me a score that ranks with the earlier sessions - because the nice thing about Lumosity is that it doesn't forget. Or is that the nasty thing, I forget. - but that's often when I've pulled the difficulty back down into my comfort level.
There are a number of changes, of course, in the gestalt since the last time I played these things seriously. My partner has been playing Lumosity for a whie now, so I'm keen to stay out of the depths - might put her off. Or spread the odds too wide and fall through the cracks.
And I've shifted too. Whereas before whizzing up high scores was an end in itself, now it's an effort and a distraction.
(Comments) Assessment - QEEG posted at 02:00 am on 12-05-2008
Saw the before and after comparison today - the psychologist looked fairly pleased with himself, because the movement in the numbers followed his instructions pretty well.
Interestingly, the alpha wave measurements were even more extreme than they were at the beginning. I wish I understood how it is that the numbers measure the things he says they do. Correlations between electrical activity in one part of the brain and another have been reduced, he says and points to a row of numbers.
It's remarkable that the numbers highlighted in red on the "before" chart - prepared by the Quantitative part of the QEEG incantation - that the psychologist marked before the therapy as the ones he would address - are no longer highlighted in red on the "after" chart while others close by didn't change.
It's less remarkable, perhaps, that I don't know what the numbers represent or what difference their change might make in potential or actual realities.
I need to read through the numbers to get a sense of what the rest of them indicate about the relationship between "before" and "after", but I don't have copies of them. Yet.
IndexLumosity
(Comments) Progress posted at 04:59 am on 11-28-2008
I've been cast back down to the salary level I've occupied - under duress - for the six years since I joined this organisation.
I'm expected - apparently - to continue doing the same work I did for the higher level.
I've chosen to redirect my efforts, running the risk of being labelled one who can achieve by himself but not when others are involved.
In my favour, I continue to rate highly with my users - a pattern established over several years now.
Against me - well, I don't know yet.
In the background of all this, I'm dealing with the situation, moving on in the most effective way I can visualise, and still delivering what I can to the project that has rejected me.
At least, that's how it looks to me. If I can learn more about how it looks to those who make decisions about me, that'd be a plus/
(Comments) Catalog posted at 03:17 am on 11-27-2008
Work in Progress
If I organise this stuff from the end back to the beginning, it might make a little more narrative sense. Neurofeedback itself - sitting there letting the beeps train your brain - isn't at all exciting.
In the wake of being summarily demoted in my job, I'm at the tipping point of a classically executed lateral traverse, and wondering, as one always does, whether I picked the right direction. Still, anything's better than staying still.
On top of that? Well, nothing really. Go on delivering as best I can on each of the four fronts I've currently got burning. I've been through two full working days now still working with these guys. Neither of them have mentioned last weeks events and I'm not keen to give them the satisfaction of cracking first.
I suspect, though, that I'm going to need a bit of fresh insight to get through the next few weeks. I'm unsure of the extent of going on doing the same job that's appropriate. This week I can just move on with documentation and reviews without doing very much at all. Next week, I've got training courses, corporate plan, and so forth filling up my timelines. Past that, I've a few months of solo project lined up - after a few weeks toasting my toes over Christmas.
The various verdicts will be coming in then. Right now, though, I'm reflecting on whether I'd be coping as well if the current events had erupted a few months ago. Better? It's hard to tell. I'm relieved that I can get through the days on as even a keel as I can, but I've no idea what I'm missing.
Getting through it
(Comments) Exercise what? posted at 02:59 am on 11-21-2008
The ten per cent pay cut was real - this government department apparently expects me to go on doing the same job I was doing before on a pay grade a few levels down.
My manager, when he eventually got around to telling me about it (a couple of days after the payslip) tells me I haven't performed to his expectations. How can I improve?, I ask him. I've spent a year and a half rescuing an appalling cockup of a software development from being a complete embarassment and I haven't performed to his expectations.
Yes, I have Aspergers. I told them that in the interview - another first - and still they gave me the job. Then they sack me from it because not everyone likes me. All the people I do good things for like me - it's my fellow workers who find me difficult. Some of them, anyway.
Oh yes, went back for the "after" QEEG this afternoon. It'll be two to three weeks before the results get back. By then, I'll be emptying dustbins for a living at my present rate of decline.
Getting through itForwards, into the past
(Comments) What a day posted at 03:08 am on 11-18-2008
Among the gems my inbox yielded today were an advice that I was nominated for a staff award, and a payslip that showed a ten per cent cut. Such is life.
At least it isn't boring. Well, that's not true - a lot of the time it is boring. Sometimes I think for a while things move more freely, and then it goes away again.
Even if the neurofeedback had made (is making?) a difference in my capability, it would take changed behaviour to give any effect to that difference, wouldn't it? Unless the difference is constrained to acceptance of the excommunicate position, that is.
I have to exercise the (hypothetical) extra capability against the resistance of all the people around me who expect consistency from me in order to have any chance of gaining. If there isn't any extra capability then there's nothing to gain anyway, unless it's some additional recognition of how hard it is to get away with the semblance of normality I manage.
Getting through itExercise what?
(Comments) Lost in the night posted at 08:28 pm on 11-12-2008
Drifting around the net this morning, I came across the Long Slow Chat - take a look.
Back on the neurofeedback track - well, this is a one-track blog. I set out to get through treatment and assessment and report on them and that's what I'm doing.
Or not doing - end of next week is the QEEG, but that'll take a couple of weeks before I'll learn anything.
On the sheer brain performance numbers, yes I know. It's harder to care enough these days - not because I'm not glued to a keyboard most of the time - I am. But there're so many threads to nurse and so little time to do it all. Getting bored with the Witcher would help but that may not happen for a while. Experimenting with ways to catch media clips and tag them with metadata will ask a lot for a while. The ongoing Ubuntu and development tools stuff would take all the time I could give it. I'll get to it, really.
I only have time for this because I had a minor surgery this morning and I'm home coming around from the anaesthetic.
On the relationship front, at least going through the process eased some of the tensions. Sickness and death in the family have taken a lot of the limelight and sometimes it's hard to believe anything's different beyond that but perhaps...
On the work front, similarly, it'll be a slow process charting change. As with the relationship category, the process of doing the neurofeedback could have as much to do with any change as any changes wrought within my brain.
At least the team is getting along well, we're delivering change, and we're likely to stay pretty well on schedule for the remaining few months. It's what I can negotiate myself into in the meantime that will count.
Getting through itWhat a day
I was about to embark on a twenty session course of neuro
feedback training in an attempt to ameliorate the effects of aspergers on me and those close to me.
Now, I've completed the twenty sessions, and I'm waiting on a QEEG appointment to provide some evidence as to whether anything changed.
There are a number of interesting issues involved here - whether the neurofeedback training itself, or something about it, can influence the behaviour or the adaptation of an adult aspergers victim is one; what it takes to adjust the social lock of an adult aspergers victim; how any of us would know change if it happened; -are just a few of them.
There are those who suggest that having aspergers is bad enough, trying to do anything about it is silly. There are those who suggest that neurofeedback is too shockingly different from anything that we accept as learning to be acceptable. I'm by nature disposed to scepticism, yet here I am doing the hard yards. Why?
My job: I'm an MBA qualified, significantly performant, software engineer perched on three decades of frustration. If there's any way at all I can give some small benefit back to the state that has offered me a home, I'm strongly motivated to find out what it is and to give it.
My life: I've spent too many decades hidden behind various flawed analyses that allowed for me being special. Finding a way to deal on a playing field that's as level as is practicable is a potent driver.
My children: One with aspergers - apparently - and the other - apparently - without. Anything that adds to their ability to cope with life and to understand where they came from is important.
(Comments) Twenty sessions posted at 02:54 am on 11-05-2008
... and I'm glad to see the back of them. There's something about sitting in front of a screen, knowing that anything you can do will just get in the way of the training, but hoping that there's a chance - just a chance - that some tiny change here can trigger bigger changes? Sounds horribly like witchcraft to me.
So, the next step is another QEEG appointment, and a comparison of the before and after charts.
Still, there are changes - whether ten weeks of additional focus on my predicament account for them adequately, or whether the neurofeedback training contributed are a little uncertain. Whether they remain exclusively in the subjective world too or are shared by people who have contact with me is uncertain too, but there are some slight indications to the latter hypothesis.
Getting through itRecap
(Comments) Down to the wire posted at 04:25 am on 10-29-2008
There are two sessions left of the twenty I contracted for.
The evaluation criteria I'm down to, ten weeks in, are:
Repeat QEEG scan
Lumosity scores
Work experience before and after
Life and relationship experience before and after.
There's a subjective criterion too, on how it feels to do the damn thing, whether I'd recommend it to anyone else, whether I feel OK to talk about it, stuff like that.
Well, whether I feel OK to talk about it is strongly negative. Hell, I don't even feel comfortable talking about Aspergers - whether it's with someone else who has it, or one of the normals who appear from time to time in my life.
There's all sorts of stuff around the edges, though - how courageous I'm feeling, how easy it is to fall into the old slip away early routine, how bad I feel about doing that. Ideally I'd have records that equated to cold hard numbers of that sort of stuff before, and that sort of stuff afterwards. In practice, I've neither.
The areas I'd like to have made a difference in take many layers of practice in those sorts of areas - and the best I've dared to note so far is a slightly higher - equivocally - tolerance for stress.
I suppose that my lessened dependence on contact with computers (claimed but not supported by evidence) - or perhaps a slightly changed pattern of dependence on computers (arguable: more willingness to be on record? less enthusiasm for the deep technical and more for contact with people?) might count as a change. The shift I've been striving for, from my greatest value being delivered when I'm lost to the world in the deep technical to delivering value by changing other peoples behaviour, is still out there. Still possible, but still absolutely free of evidence.
OptimismMore chance...
(Comments) But there posted at 05:39 am on 10-24-2008
It's an odd experience, having signed up - I thought - for twenty sessions,,,
with two or three left to go, I've missed a second one recently, and the news is that they had me scheduled for the full forty sessions, and are concerned that I should fix my scheduling fast.
Well, I'm sure that on every occasion that I've ever discussed it with anyone I've reacted violently against any suggestion that I was interested past the twenty session mark - mostly because the only comparative evidence available talked only of twenty session courses.
I'll hit that mark, and then reassess whether there's any change worthy of revisiting. Sorry, Tim.
Back on the straight and narrow, I'm dubious. There's a feeling that if the effort hadn't led to any reward yet, I'd have a feeling about it, and the absence thereof is evidence of reward. There's a feeling too that I have such a feeling but I'm reluctant to acknowledge it in case of feeling ripped off.
All that feeling, for an aspie, is a little unusual. It's all self-centred, which is normal, but why the layered affect? Effect? No effect?
I'm sorry, it's beyond me. Perhaps the key event is that someone beyond me will take an interest? No, I don't think so. Perhaps the key will be some other kind of extra-self change? As long as I notice it...
OptimismMore chance...
...(joke) - it's never over. It just keeps rolling along.
Here's a perception for you: I'm less absorbed in keyboards and screens than I've been the last year or two.
I think, on the whole, it's an erroneous perception: I still sit in front of the things most of ten hours a day, and there're still two of them that I say goodnight to at night, and gaze longingly at in the mornings.
The Witcher Enhanced arrived too, which soaks up a lot of my screen-focussed enthusiasm. Worth the wait, by the way. If you played it the old way you'll enjoy the improvements.
Back to the point: there are three, four, five? sessions of the twenty I contracted for still left to limp through.
There's a major new broom push going on at work, and I'm moderately well placed to make some sort of gain through it - we'll see. I'm a little less complacent than I was, and a little less ready to believe that the rest of you are doing a good enough job of running the place that I don't have to bother.
Frankly, I'm a little tired of pissing off early a couple of afternoons a week and sitting in front of the idiot box for an hour. If the closing QEEG shows no change, that means I won't have to do it again. Hmmm...
OptimismMore chance...
(Comments) Was that a giant roc? posted at 02:46 am on 10-15-2008
...or just an airtruck load of guano?
If you've been an unknowing aspie in a work environment for a while, you've probably come across people whose inner wickedness is stimulated by the presence of one of us in their social web. People who spy a weakness and can't desist from worrying it.
Being a knowing aspie now, but encountering the same predicament is tricky. "I'm an aspie, blame me; blame me!" isn't the right tone, but nor - without documentation - is "That's harassment."
"I don't see you as a leader, so I'm not going to do what you ask" doesn't play terribly well either, IMHO. Escape from the bullying triad is often revealed when one of the dominant pair trips over the values of the other .
Perhaps I exaggerate? Who knows, but if I don't buck against the things that really concern me, I'm bound by that same restraint when there's something I can actually change, aren't I?
Oh yes. Neurofeedback. Down to the last handful of sessions - and let me tell you I'll be glad to see them done. Then I'll commission another QEEG and we'll see whether there's any noticeable difference.
OptimismMore
(Comments) Outspoken? posted at 04:24 am on 10-09-2008
I may have to start biting my tongue again.
It's hard, though, when people report on how hard it is to go on doing the counterproductive things they feel they've been told to do, not to ask why they go on that way.
OptimismRoc
(Comments) Ticking off the sessions posted at 04:22 am on 10-08-2008
There are so many things vying for my attention that finding time for neurofeedback sessions is getting difficult. I'm being a bit more talkative around work, after a weekend of being more talkative in social settings. My partner still complains that she's forgetting how to carry on conversations, so any improvement isn't that dramatic, but any change - almost - is a change for the better.
Finding time to sit and play with computers is getting difficult too - I never thought I'd see the day...
OptimismOutspoken
The wedding is done. Beautiful day, lovely couple, everything went fine - why weren't more people happy? Don't ask me - I've never understood people.
Never mind. Tomorrow we'll be back at the venue cleaning up. And then it'll be back to work. Back to the neurofeedback grind too. Only a half dozen or so sessions to go, before we settle back and decide that it was an interesting experiment, but did it really make any difference?
(Comments) and sometimes it stays away posted at 08:17 am on 10-02-2008
Life's pace is too brisk even to steal a few minutes to reacquaint myself with a keyboard. I just struggle to keep up.
In a day or two it'll be back to normal, and in the meantime I strive to stay in the pool. I know it's harder for everyone else - there are parents and partners everywhere, all striving to look good. I'm not related to any of them, so it's easy for me. I just have to stay awake, do what I'm told, pick up the conversational ball from time to time and not hang on to the damn thing for too long.
Perhaps neurofeedback has made a difference to my capabilities in these regards, perhaps it hasn't. We'll see what happens.
(Comments) Sometimes it gets away from you posted at 08:32 am on 10-01-2008
One thing an aspie can be relied upon to rejoice in - a long weekend of intensive social interaction. Not.
So, I'm dragged away from my cosy computer corner to attend to social duties while someone I'm unrelated to exchanges vows with a very nice young lady who's probably wasted on him. There were so many last minute commitments to be met before I felt I'd done enough to escape from work that I had to cancel today's neurofeedback appointment. That's unlikely to be statistically significant, but the forthcoming trial will be interesting in an assessment of coping skills sort of context.
(Comments) Brain training posted at 08:51 am on 09-29-2008
It's apparent that among the long term effects of aspergers syndrome are withdrawal and depression.
Neurofeedback training has the potential to reverse, temporarily, these effects. While the cloud is lifted, so to speak, there's a chance to establish life patterns that have more constructive effects.
So goes the theory. I began a course of neurofeedback with an EEG map that showed a lot of alpha activity. My interpretation of this was that I was coasting - absorbed in contemplation of my navel, metaphorically speaking. I'd withdrawn. If there's practical gain to be made from the training, it'll be reflected in a shift from that original pattern.
Six months or so ago, I spent a few weeks playing mind games on Lumosity 's site.
If you've never indulged in it, it's worth a look. They'll give you a week's free trial, after which it's ten bucks a month, roughly, to keep going. After a month, though, the rewards start to drop off, and if you're like me, you'll go elsewhere.
What you do there is play games, and collect scores, that exercise things like attention, memory, cognitive control. Being aspie, I did well at some things, and less well at others. Being human, as I got bored with the games my willingness to go on playing dropped off.
Among the things I was interested to discover were whether I'd score better, going back after - well, still during - the neurofeedback, at the things I wasn't so great at: working memory and cognitive control.
So, I've worked through a few sessions of that now, and the results - while not earth shatteringly different - are mildly encouraging. My working memory, by Lumosity's reckoning, hovered stubbornly between 2.4 and 3 the first time through, and has shown up at 3.9 and 3.4 so far this time. And so forth...
Tomorrow I start week 7 of the neurofeedback. Which has, really, to be one of the duller practices known to mankind. Washing dishes or peeling potatoes at least come to an end, and so do neurofeedback sessions, but at least when you're washing dishes you can play with the bubbles. Doing neurofeedback you just have to hover somewhere between paying attention and falling asleep and hope that it's working. It's tough. The reason I'm doing it, really, is to find out what it feels like to do it, and to find out whether there's any noticeable change as a result of doing it. Last resort of the terminally discouraged, perhaps.
(Comments) More grind posted at 09:42 am on 09-26-2008
Picked my way through a set of Lumosity exercises for the first time tonight. I have records from the month I spent playing their games in March / April, which may provide interesting comparisons. As time goes on.
I scored well enough, for a first time. I'm looking for a lift in my working memory, but I'm not sure if I'll find one.
(Comments) ...but perhaps not a lot more posted at 08:50 am on 09-24-2008
It seems like keeping my energy levels up at work - responding brightly and enthusiastically to each successive interruption, pushing new ideas, making successes from the chances to demonstrate the power of said ideas - is a negative sum business. I suppose that's why they pay me, but wouldn't it be more fun to work somewhere where performance mattered? Does my continued subservience to an obviously dysfunctional system demonstrate inner meanings that I'd prefer not to be associated with? Or does keeping going, doing the job as it presents itself to me, catching the plates as they stop spinning and fall, demonstrate a commitment to reality and concrete achievement?
There's no way to judge, from here. A decade or two up the line, either no change, constructive change, or continued decay will be obvious but even an aspie can see that rocking the boat when there isn't a better one in sight is self-indulgent and probably harmful.
Today I passed the half-way point in this course of neurofeedback training I'm indulging myself with. There's no way to judge, from here, whether any concrete changes are flowing from it - if I spent more time talking with people who knew me and cared whether or not anything was happening, it might be clearer. But hell, I'm an aspie. I don't spend time talking with people. And there isn't anyone who knows me. Not entirely true - I've a partner who is pretty good at reading me, but her perspective is largely neurotypical and autistic behaviour bores her.
TheoryMore grind
isn't there? On top of the measurable possibilities I canvassed in the last note, what if another web of connections were to grow in my awareness - even if it amounts only to two or three conversations in a year, that's a significant improvement.
So, I still haven't a lot of change to report. A lot of going on the same, a noticeably steadier mood, perhaps a little more optimism? With the world's economy going to hell in a hand basket, optimism counts as insanity, doesn't it? Ah well.
The asset application is going to production this week. It does everything it's supposed to now - the only sad thing is noone will ever know how bad it was when we took delivery of it.
And the neurofeedback course reaches its halfway mark tomorrow. GP reviews. Lumosity benchmarking. Another five weeks of tedium...
(Comments) What can possibly change? posted at 08:20 am on 09-19-2008
Well, my life could roll on exactly as it has in the past, and I could remain just as involved with it / isolated from it as I have in the past.
Life could roll on exactly... and I could be less disturbed by my difference
Life could roll on exactly... and I could be at ease with it to the point where things began to change on their own.
Something could change in the outside world. Unconnected perhaps causally with the neurofeedback, but synchronistically associated with it. Conditions 1, 2, or three will pertain, as above.
Now, given that those four options cover a fair part of the potential spectrum of change, how would I discriminate between them?
One test - the QEEG after week 10. Any detectable change there is interesting.
Another test - the Lumosity training results - four weeks starting after week 5.
Another test - attempting the Mind Reading facial expression training again. The first time I tried this, the exercises just induced frustration and anger and I stopped trying. Sometime real soon I'll look at them again...
Other tests: feedback from my partner; feedback from work; trying something new?
TheoryMore chance...
(Comments) What can possibly change? posted at 09:01 am on 09-17-2008
I mean it - what can possibly change as a result of spending a few hours sitting in front of a computer screen. I've passed thousands of hours in front of the damn things, over a long, long period of time.
Suppose that my ground of being shifts along with whatever the nf training is working on. Suppose the boat I'm resting in drifts into a new part of the swamp. My close up stimuli remain the same - boat still here, boat not leaking.
My long range stimuli haven't changed much either. Birds, trees, water noises, the occasional scream.
For this record to track those kinds of change - it feels the same to me, but it's different - I'd need to be recording something that relates to the nature of the swamp rather than the "I feel good, I feel bad" sorts of judgements I've noted so far.
Not so easy, but the alternatives aren't much either. I just got to the end of session 8 out of 20 - another six weeks of training lie ahead, and I seriously doubt whether there'll be anything distinctive about any of them.
But the ground can change in that time. There are two software projects on my desk that'll have shifted their contexts markedly in six weeks - probably for the better, but nothing's certain. Outside of my field of direct influence, there are larger changes stirring up the primordial mud, and it's not beyond belief that I could play a role in that.
Not beyond belief? Well, on past experience the chances are infinitesimally small, but the ground of past experience is not the ground of now. We'll see.
(Comments) A hamster again posted at 07:41 am on 09-15-2008
Back here, the sameness of the days caught up with me.
Today, it did again. The dreaming thing got me bad last night - I spent the first few hours of the night battling broken glass, blood, knives, car chases...
By the time I got to the office, I wasn't in much of a mood for work. After a morning chasing phantoms born of incomplete database updates, and an afternoon chasing management reporting details, I just didn't want to play any more.
(Comments) Third week review - self-suggestion or spring? posted at 01:33 am on 09-13-2008
There's a feeling of change in the air - a few days of warmth, that "getting over the crest" feeling in the work projects, perhaps even some extra flexibility in my communication abilities. Self-suggestion could easily account for the same evidence, but faith is important, isn't it?
I installed the first additions into this ubuntu installation today. This machine had a Vista Ultimate on it when it arrived, which I've used diligently for a year. I hacked my way through the early Witcher versions, but went back to the XP machine to finish it. When they released the upgrade mid year I played most of the way through, working around the crashes that are still in there, and finally got sick of seeing Vista busily chewing up resources for absolutely no gain.
First I tried a PendriveLinux, then an Absolute install, and finally settled down with Ubuntu. Then I didn't touch it very much for a while and now it has the first pieces of machinery on it.
My partner's still talking to me too. Self-suggestion again? Or spring?
(Comments) Game plan posted at 06:41 am on 09-11-2008
I may not have mentioned back through the preceding three weeks of notes the following:
I can't see that there's any point in undertaking a course of neurofeedback training without there being some parallel project in the real world that stands to gain by it.
In the present instance, though, I'm left a little short of any concrete project to stand up against my experiment. Yes, I'm striving to deliver on a multi-year software project. Yes, I'm striving for some kind of social existence even though I'm an aspie. Yes, I've begun to work with Linux and its interactions with the web world.
In a few weeks I'll sign up once more with Lumosity and repeat the exercises I've stored results from back in April. I suspect that I'll be the only interested reader, but still. If there's no change then there's no change. If my working memory measure has crept from 2.4 to 2.6 then that'll be on record.
If I manage to negotiate the management upheavals facing my workplace and make some small gain, then that'll be on record.
If I fail in either of these endeavours that'll be on record too.
(Comments) Skipping entries posted at 05:00 am on 09-10-2008
When I started this thing, my intention was a daily note of anything and everything connected with neurofeedback training and in particular my experience of it.
Naturally enough, things degenerated into "Oh well, that was another day" fairly fast, and in recent days the balance between available time and attention, need to communicate, and brute laziness has tipped a bit.
At today's NF session, the tech asked me whether I'd noticed any changes yet. I was a little nonplussed - if any change due to the neurofeedback had happened, I'd have moved with it and...
I suppose most of their participants are kids, and kids are under much closer scrutiny most of the time than I am. Except when I get in the way, I'm the only person paying any kind of attention to me.
I have, a few times, remarked on a sort of "brightness". Even the crushing lows might, on some sort of subjective scale, be classified as "easier". On so few occasions, though, and over such a short span of time as to be indistinguishable from normal self-suggestion effects.
I'm keeping workplace records as well - perhaps slightly better - than the norm I've established over the last few years. This is noticably better than that of the last few months as despair and then pressure of work took their toll.
(Comments) Second week review posted at 08:52 am on 09-08-2008
It's still very hard to tell, from in here, whether there's any change yet. Occasionally, I've a sense of being a bit more cheerful, but that's not entirely uncommon in the normal run of things.
The consistency of the drifts of paper on my desk has changed a little - from time to time, small patches of desk surface can be seen between the piles. Again, not completely unheard of, but rarer. I'm keeping slightly more detailed records of what's done and what's to do - probably exogenous change still, but if the trend keeps up for the next eight weeks it'll qualify as internalised.
Today was a bit of a red-letter day, as application A made it into its user test environment for the first time. Well, last year's version has been in production for a good while, but it was too fat, too slow, and had great gaping holes in its logic. The new version is 40% smaller, three or four times as fast, and logically complete.
Application B is still hovering in the wings - scope still creeping, raw data still expected any day now, everything still largely untested. Its schedule says it'll be running fully completed next week, but that's unlikely to happen.
And tomorrow it'll be back to the training. The actual sessions are really powerfully irritating - the way the right stuff goes away when I get sucked in to trying to make it happen sends my stress levels soaring. And the feedback is trivial to the point where it's almost embarassing that it works.
(Comments) Makes sense to me... posted at 03:07 am on 09-06-2008
You have a good day, there'll be a less good one to balance it.
When I was a kid, I "knew" that a day that started well would have bad stuff before it ended, and that a day that started badly would be better before it ended. Not something I ever discussed with anyone - talk to people? Why would you do that?
(Comments) Rolling on posted at 09:06 am on 09-04-2008
Today I woke, feeling energised, at half past four, made it to work shortly after seven, and spent eight or nine fairly productive hours hacking away at two or three completely different applications, interspersed with a few meetings.
A fairly typical day, overall, but it's been a while since I felt good about it, and today I did. Well, you'd expect at least one good day in a week, wouldn't you?
It's occurred to me that the neurofeedback course - even if it does nothing else - does keep my attention focussed on my mood and mental processes. There's a feeling that's becoming familiar during the sessions themselves: when the flow is moving my way, the screen is beeping happily - a sort of "spreading" feeling. Usually, in the feed back sessions, everything stops shortly after I notice that, but then driving home afterwards I feel a similar sensation when the traffic moves well, or when I come across the easier solution to a problem.
Another week or two and I'll sign up at Lumosity again, and see if there's any measurable difference in my executive function skills, but until then there's just the daily turn on the treadmill, and minding the cat.
Sunday'll be fun - father's day. Me, my octogenarian and (undiagnosed) aspie father, and my putatively aspie son will get together for lunch.
(Comments) Just rolling along posted at 09:08 am on 09-02-2008
The point of this record was to record something of my feelings and experiences while going through the neurofeedback exercise - partly in case I get to the far side without noting any substantial change, partly in case there is some noticeable effect.
Today's feedback session wasn't a lot different from last weeks - my stress levels still rise as I struggle to do it right, and the effort still has very little effect on the outcomes. By the end of the session, just like last week, I was dropping into micro-sleep from time to time. Without seeing the operator results, I've no idea what effect that has on the brainwaves, but a couple of times as my eyes snapped open again it looked like whatever the damn thing is training me for was working just fine.
It's odd - in a week or more of writing about neurofeedback, I haven't spent more than a word or two describing the process itself. I think I'm still a little embarassed about the whole thing - paying good money to sit in front of some amateurish imitation of a game that I can't even play. So far, we're still stepping through the collection - later (be still, my beating heart) I'm promised I'll be allowed to choose which framework I'm to focus my frustration through. This afternoon's second choice had me flying little space ships, whose engines petered out when my brain misbehaved, but purred very happily along as long as it was doing the right thing. Like all the others, really, but I felt more at home in it. Space, the final frontier!
In and around that, the rest of the complicated constructions of life teeter and totter along. The software project, while running a little late, seems to be substantially on track. I'd summon up the energy to worry about something, but I'm just too tired.
(Comments) That old-fashioned hamster feeling posted at 08:39 am on 09-01-2008
Some days it's just hard to beat the grind - the slow uphill plod along the treadmill floor. It's not that things are harder, or that small successes don't accrue, but the black dog howls beyond the door, and shades of grey make up the entire rainbow.
Tomorrow, after a repeat performance of today in the office, I'm back to the neurofeedback screen. One step closer to the daylight? One step closer to another failure? Regardless, it's the one step that counts. Or, if it doesn't, at least there's that one step between me and the realisation that it doesn't.
The capability of the human mind to embrace delusion is one of its most endearing features, don't you find? For fifty-some years, I lived on the possibility that that one next step would expose the live wires of creation to my inquisitive touch, would make the connection the making of which would transform life into the magical fluid it ought to be.
There were times I believed it had happened - must have happened. Things would be different now...
Different they often were, but better? Connected? Networked? No. The slow viscous flow of time continued, and the darkness - although beaten back for a while - always returned.
(Comments) Off-topic (mostly) posted at 07:15 am on 08-31-2008
Since it's been almost a week since I've been near a neurofeedback installation, it seems silly to go on about it any more. Since I'm still hoping Alex will tell me why my blogs don't appear on Wrong Planet's blog list, it seems silly not to make an entry tonight.
I spent some time today browsing through an 'Old Scholar's' site for the school I last attended in England in 1967. There's a photo someone sent me last year from the last year - well, first year, actually - I won a prize there and I've lost it. Sadly it's not there any longer, but since it was forty years ago I don't think the planet is really any worse off.
One reason I lost the photo in the first place is that I replaced the Windows Vista on this PC with Ubuntu. The other reason is I had to go back to the manufacturer's install of Windows XP on the other PC because SP3 wouldn't install otherwise.
(Comments) Reflection posted at 09:25 am on 08-30-2008
Focussing effort on changing something about my life is a moderately familiar pattern. Sometimes, in the past, it's even worked. Usually, once I've absorbed enough new information, made some new behaviour habit, adjusted to some catastrophic change, I can confidently say "Yes, I used to do that, and now I do this"
Neurofeedback has some of that quality, but there's an unknown (so far) part underpinning things: even though I can't detect a difference internally, the feedback screen says something different is happening. With a regular commitment of time, attention, money to the effect will that difference subside or grow greater? I don't know.
Will the paying of attention to it create changes in the larger context? I don't know.
Will I be left at the end a little older, a little poorer, but little better off? I don't know.
Will I respond to some opportunity during the course with a little more enthusiasm than I might otherwise have done and gain from some snowballing effect?
The overwhelming feeling, one week in, is that not much has changed. Doing the training isn't terribly much different from cutting code, or tracking my email ;-) - you sit there, look at the screen, and hope you're doing the right thing. There isn't a keyboard on the neurofeedback screen, that's the key thing. Trying to do it right doesn't work. It's a meditative experience. If only there was a message, it would be hypnosis, but there isn't. I don't really get it.
I can report that my sleep hasn't been greatly disturbed, although I'm dreaming more than I'm used to. I can report that I seem to be getting through the days without looking too much sillier than I usually do - we've a major milestone to hit over the next few weeks, and outcomes so far are close to plan. I've only buggered up my blood sugar once over the week, which is probably better than average, and I haven't forgotten anything important. Well, if I have, I haven't been reminded of it yet.
I'll be back on schedule next week, in dedicated pursuit of the undefinable. After three or four weeks, I'd be looking for signs of progress. From here, though, I'm not sure what they'd be.
(Comments) Down time posted at 07:43 am on 08-28-2008
There are always days when doing what's necessary to keep the rest of the machine in trim is all there is to do.
Today, I met my dad for lunch - he's 81, aspie as ever, and blissfully unaware of it. I can talk with him about the neurofeedback exercise - science has always been a safe area between us - but the background is opaque.
Speaking of opaque, I suffered a brief panic attack on the bus this morning. Reading - a fundamental life skill for well over half a century - seemed to desert me. Instantly I was constructing scenarios that had the neurofeedback to blame.
On later reflection, it seems likely that transient hypoglycaemia accounted for the anomaly, but the uncertainty persisted through the day. Odd, really, because dyslexia is one of neurofeedback's success stories.
I dreamed a lot last night, but remembered little of it. Odd, isn't it, that we can wake aware of having dreamed without recall of individual dreams. Normal enough, except that my usual pattern of sleep is waking without the awareness of having dreamed. Perhaps there's nothing going on in there, but my level of concern about the neurofeedback exercise leaves me feeling that something must be. Perhaps there's displacement activity in place - I'm disturbed and therefore things will move around until the disturbance subsides. Perhaps it's as I perceive it. No way to tell, and noone but me is interested anyway.
(Comments) One week down posted at 06:29 am on 08-27-2008
I was sprung last night wandering the corridors in a hypoglycaemic trance. Never mind, it's been a few weeks. A statistical anomaly. Shove a glucose or two between his teeth and lay him down. When the alarm goes off he'll be fine.
Squeezed in a long day of coding between that and the neurofeedback appointment. Second time in, I'm a veteran. I still don't understand the damned thing, though, and sitting there through the session wasn't as easy as yesterday. Yesterday, I fell asleep, for a second or two, twice. Today, I left feeling like some sensitive but hard to localise part of me had been grated.
It's odd. Without the still indefinite connection between the game feedback and the brainwaves it'd be nothing but hypnosis. But something in there moves. Under the silt of decades some undersea sinuosity is stretching. Any opportunity for a story, I know, but still.
Now I'll submerge myself in work for a few days, and work on expanding my meta-work practice. Today was one of my best "keep on track" efforts in weeks.
(Comments) That's one... posted at 09:22 am on 08-26-2008
Just for continuity, I'm a mid-fifties aspie a couple of years downstream from diagnosis and - more because I can't dismiss it without trying it - I've embarked on a neurofeedback experiment. Today I spent 45 minutes interacting rather more passively than I'm used to with a computer screen. The beginning of the story is back here
Now, just 19 more sessions and I can start wondering if there's any change. No, I don't think I'll leave it that long. I've a set of Lumosity scores from earlier in the year that I'll be comparing to fresh ones before September's out.
It's an odd sensation - that same helpless feeling that meditation brings. But behind your back there's a tech manipulating things to teach your brain something that doesn't have much to do with thinking.
I don't know. Even if it's just hypnotherapy with techie flash thrown in, does that mean it doesn't work? Life's not that simple. Suppose my old grey matter really has been idling along at 10% of its capacity, waiting for the real challenges? What will stirring it up do?
(Comments) Scientific method posted at 01:38 am on 08-24-2008
Back in 1972, when I embarked on yet another involvement with tertiary education, my preferred learning technique was spending a few weeks in the library basement absorbing random threads, and using frequent largish doses of LSD to avoid getting bogged down in the insignificant.
It's hardly surprising that it was thirty years from there before I actually accepted a degree from something a little closer to reality than the "universe city" I'd inhabited for a few years by then.
It was 1972 too when I first read John Lilly's "Programing and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer" and was confirmed in a lifelong goal of coming up with an idea for the first time rather than always approaching them from behind. Just once would have been enough, I thought, to feel on one's deathbed that it had been worth the effort.
These days, of course, I'm less idealistic. Five decades as an undiagnosed aspie on this planet would knock the stuffing out of anyone. Follow that up with a diagnosis and a prognosis of "No change possible" and you have a recipe for despair.
It seems from here that the best I could hope for is keeping up with the flow.
Anyway, the stimulus for these reflections is an impending course of neurofeedback - driven by a quantitative EEG that show ridiculous amounts of alpha activity and not much connection at all between the hemispheres.
Expected outcomes? Well, it seems reasonable to expect some change in the QEEG patterns. Does that translate into any behavioural change? Mood pattern change? Executive function scores? We'll see.
