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fernando
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05 Oct 2008, 2:01 pm

Inner Changes

On the morning of saturday 19, august 2006, i did something i had never done in my life, i was going to say goodbye to a girl and instinctively i put my hand on her shoulder and turned her body to face me. Two things happened there that weren't aspie anymore: I felt like touching somebody and i felt a need to be connected before saying goodbye. I walked away asking myself why i did that, but it would take me 2 years just to begin to understand it. That's how inner changes happen and i was going to experience it hundreds of times in the years to come.

Crisis

On Thursday 17, august 2006 an unrelated personal crisis started developing. By Tuesday 22 it had escalated and i dropped out of my masters and stopped all effort on the exercises. By the end of the month all i wanted was to die. That's when i went crazy and i started writing stuff on my wall, which would later become the place to write all i was learning about asperger, society and my exercises, it's the perfect place to write something you don't want to forget. For the next 2 years i would only see the outside world once per week, or less. I would speak an average of 6 words per day, sometimes none. The crisis hasn't ended, but by october 2006 i had nothing to do anymore so i went full time on aspergers research and working on my exercises, the ones i could remember. I was expecting the whole changes to take more than the usual three months because of how many they were.

The Miserable Experience

Months kept going by and i was growing tired. By mid november 2006 i stopped researching asperger syndrome, i stopped visiting aspies and left wrongplanet, and just focused on doing my exercises and just occasionally added new ones. That's when i started playing Warcraft.

The whole thing was just a miserable experience. Too many exercises. It didn't take the usual three months, i was barely making any progress. There were so many exercises i kept forgetting them. By the end of 2006 it was common to identify a "new" symptom, then design an exercise for it and then remember that i had been doing that exercise half a year ago and then forgot it. I think i succeeded in about five changes, for example i did learn to walk looking ahead instead of at the floor, but i failed at all the rest.

The Qualifiers

During the first months of 2007 i was so tired i stopped adding new exercises and instead started dropping exercises from the list, the ones that seemed pointless. I was tired but not disappointed. Something had happened. I started noticing changes in areas i wasn't fighting directly. I am now calling them Inner changes. It was like my exercises were rearranging my mind and turning me a bit normal. Something was working far better than i ever expected.

By march 2007 i stopped all exercises and the inner changes i had felt disappeared, i went back to full aspie state. I devoted my time to analyze what had happened. I started eliminating from my mind all the exercises that obviously couldn't cause those inner changes. I wanted to separate the good ones from the bad ones and build a complex therapy that would be complemented by the life philosophies i had written on my wall.

Quitting

By april 2007 i had reduced the list to a 20 exercises therapy that could improve an aspie's life considerably. Now that i was done analyzing all that, i devoted myself to play warcraft full time. It had been more than a year since i had been motivated to change. That motivation had faded completely. I had been locked inside my room all day, all days since i dropped out. I was happy and i saw no reason to change. Project canceled.

6 months went by.

It is now Wednesday 24, October 2007 and an aspie girl commits suicide. I found out the next day. I read her blog and she was so unhappy about her lack of social skills. I had a list of 20 exercises in my mind that could have helped her. I felt guilty. I decided it was my responsibility to the world to do something with that knowledge. I decided i was accountable for every death related to asperger syndrome that happened from mid 2007 to the day I publish my knowledge.

More Inner Changes

On october 25 I restarted doing the exercises. As before, but much more strongly now, i started feeling changes in areas I wasn't fighting directly. On early november i got control of my body, i could dance well for the first time. I finally understood what it means to "move to the rhythm". Mid-november i was watching the news one night, a little girl had been killed and her mother was on screen crying. I felt awful, i felt a sort of pain inside me and i tried to make it stop but it wouldn't. Then i realized... "oh my god, this is what they call empathy... i have empathy!". On december my obsessions stopped, my fear of heights stopped too.

As i was doing them again i kept removing the exercises that were obviously stupid. By the end of the year i had it down to 10 exercises, and i thought that i was gonna end up publishing a complex therapy, which i actually began writing in a file that i am now ashamed of. It sounded just like any other self-help guide for aspies.

The Finding of the Cure

On Monday 14, January 2008 i reached mental silence, after more than two years of looking for it, i finally stopped daydreaming. The next day, January 15 was the day i finally put two and two together and thought that maybe it wasn't a coincidence that i managed to reach mental silence at the same time that so many other inner changes were happening to me, that maybe mental silence is impossible for an aspie, maybe my other exercises had enabled me to reach it. I noticed that all the inner changes i had been seeing in me lately had to do with asperger syndrome. It's like if asperger syndrome was caused by one thing only and that thing had been removed from me and now all symptoms were fading away. I HAD FOUND THE CURE! That was the day the whole game changed, this was the stuff Nobel prizes are made of. I ordered pizza that night, it was the best celebration i could afford at the time. Those were the best days of my life, i was breaking new ground every few days, walking the middleground between AS and NT.

Fear

On January 16 I stopped doing my exercises again. I also reversed the "stop daydreaming" exercise and started making an effort to daydream all day long. I had the idea that heavy daydreaming would return me to full aspieness.

There were many reasons why i decided to stop. For one: i got scared by what i was turning into, going completely normal wasn't part of the original plan. Another one: I didn't know where i was heading, what was going to be the final result of my cure. One of my theories was that i would keep becoming normal and then pass normality and reach the opposite end and become permanently angry, as opposite to permanently anxious. Another reason: i wanted to slow down the inner changes i was getting, because i was getting them much faster than i could analyze them. And i needed to analyze it myself because nobody in the world knew what happens when asperger syndrome gets cured. It was up to me. Another reason: I needed to revert to my original full aspie state so i could try only the good exercises, it was a sort of detox to make sure that the eliminated exercises weren't having anything to do with the inner changes.

Even More Inner Changes

At first this "antidote" didn't work, i kept noticing more normality changes. On january 30 i was talking to a girl and i noticed that she was making too much eye contact with me. It took me a while to realize... I was making eye contact too!... and liking it. Early on february i became small-talk capable.

Trigger Events

On Wednesday 6, february 2008 I went to church and they were having some sort of ritual where everybody uses body language to ask to get a cross painted in their forehead. Everybody seemed to know how to ask for it. I didn't. As time went by more and more people had a cross in their face and i didn't. In the end i was the only one without it. I felt scared, ashamed, rejected. I shut the whole world out and i hid inside my mind, thinking. I asked myself how can stuff like this still happen if i'm supposed to be cured. I decided that the problem was that i failed to imitate everyone else blindly the way NTs do. The "lack of instinct to imitate his peers" symptom was still in me.

A few seconds later i noticed that I was aspie again. All symptoms had returned. And it had happened in just a few seconds. It was then that i had the biggest lightbulb moment of my life and i thought: "this is how asperger syndrome gets triggered in kids". The lack of imitation was biological, inheritable, it wouldn't be removed by my cure and it triggers all other symptoms. I finally had an explanation of how a mental condition can be inheritable.

After this i decided asperger syndrome was pretty much a solved puzzle for me so it was time to move on, i finally started reading other people's theories and researching lower functioning autism.

... and Even More Inner Changes

February 6 was also the day i started feeling drawn to crowded places instead of turned off by them.

On the night of february 6 i went to sleep with a monotone voice and on February 7 when i woke up the voice in my head was multitone, so i spoke up and my physical voice came out multitone too. The most interesting part is that the change happened overnight. I hadn't been doing any sort of tests, so all changes got noticed probably days or weeks after they happened, the change of voice is the only one i could track down. It is the only hint i have that could shed some light into why the cure works.

By february 11 i had theory of mind, though i think i felt it before, since late january. I also started using my hands when i talk, body language appeared, but i didn't write down the date for that one.

Antidote

By mid february the antidote started working. I stopped getting new changes and late in february i started losing the changes i had got.

At that time i had it down to five exercises: Stop talking, Make pauses, Move with grace, Stop daydreaming and another one. I started theorizing that i was gonna keep eliminating exercises until there was only one, i theorized that all these months i hadn't been improving a complex therapy, i had actually been pinpointing the one exercise that cured me.

Next I eliminated the stop talking and the stop daydreaming, plus i merged the make pauses and move with grace into a "slow motion" exercise. Even then i still couldn't find a reason to eliminate the other exercise, so i didn't. I had it down to the last 2 exercises.

On march 1, 2008 i was watching the news and someone was crying on screen and i felt nothing. Empathy was gone. All changes were gone. I was back to full aspieness. I panicked. Suddenly the idea that i had cured myself with a physical exercise sounded more stupid than ever. I started thinking the whole thing had been a dream, and to make it worst i had already told people i could cure asperger syndrome. I panicked and instead of taking the chance to analyze aspieness for a while i started doing my 2 exercises that same day. For five days nothing happened. Those were the longest five days of my life.

On march 6 i got empathy again. All other changes came quickly and by march 13 i had theory of mind again. I was back into the realm of NTs.

Moving On

As i got cured a third time it became obvious which of the two exercises was the one that cured me, it was the stretching exercise i designed in august 2006. I had no idea why, but it worked. That's the point where i lost all motivation to go out and tell people about my cure. Nobody was going to believe this and i'm not the kind of person who enjoys begging. I started a new lonesome adventure under the title: "Why the hell does a physical exercise cure asperger syndrome?". I cannot publish until i find an explanation. I stopped feeling guilty about aspie deaths, confident that even if i had told them the cure they wouldn't have believed me. I had no hurry anymore, I now had all the time in the world to research my cure properly.

Recent Achievements

By early April i found out that scientists discovered in the 1990s a special type of neurons, called mirror neurons, which are responsible for making people imitate each other. Years later they discovered that autistic people lack mirror neurons. This perfectly backs up my Trigger Events theory. Looks like i'm doing things right after all.

Around june/july 2008 i reached the point where i didn't need to do my exercise anymore. My personality was adapting and those personality changes were keeping me NT even without the exercise.

By mid august after a few adventures with hypnosis i got the first clue that indicates that my exercise does nothing to NT individuals and thinking about that i asked myself "If an exercise i do during the day cured me, then the changes should be happening at day, exactly while i'm doing the exercise, why did the changes happen at night, while i was sleeping?" Thinking about the migraines in autistic people i started thinking about stress and by late august Lock theory was born, but that part you don't get to hear.


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LePetitPrince
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05 Oct 2008, 3:16 pm

Quote:
The Miserable Experience

Months kept going by and i was growing tired. By mid november 2006 i stopped researching asperger syndrome, i stopped visiting aspies and left wrongplanet, and just focused on doing my exercises and just occasionally added new ones. That's when i started playing Warcraft.

The whole thing was just a miserable experience. Too many exercises. It didn't take the usual three months, i was barely making any progress. There were so many exercises i kept forgetting them. By the end of 2006 it was common to identify a "new" symptom, then design an exercise for it and then remember that i had been doing that exercise half a year ago and then forgot it. I think i succeeded in about five changes, for example i did learn to walk looking ahead instead of at the floor, but i failed at all the rest.


I can relate , I once quit Wrongplanet for 3 to 4 months and get obsessed in other things, I think that was the last year. I was getting tired from all this forum and asperger's research addiction.....maybe I should do that again.



ethos
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05 Oct 2008, 4:21 pm

wow. your story is incredible.

also, the mirror neuron thing is something I have never heard of, but it makes a lot of sense.



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05 Oct 2008, 7:14 pm

fernando wrote:
i managed to reach mental silence at the same time that so many other inner changes were happening to me, that maybe mental silence is impossible for an aspie, maybe my other exercises had enabled me to reach it.
........
I HAD FOUND THE CURE! That was the day the whole game changed, this was the stuff Nobel prizes are made of.


If you reached a genuine 'mental silence' (is that actually possible whilst still alive?), then where were the rather grandiose thoughts of Nobel Pizes coming from?


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05 Oct 2008, 7:19 pm

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On march 1, 2008 i was watching the news and someone was crying on screen and i felt nothing. Empathy was gone. All changes were gone. I was back to full aspieness. I panicked.


NT's don't always have empathy for everyone. Especially the news, where we see people dying on a daily basis. Maybe it was the panic that triggered the aspyness to return?

I wonder if it's possible to keep positive aspy traits after the cure, or a method of switching at will. This "Vol 3" is the first of these I've seen. Is there a centralized site for this?


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JCJC777
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06 Oct 2008, 2:38 pm

Wonderful to read, and very congruent with my experience of escaping Asperger - unlearningasperger.blogspot.com - please keep telling people it is possible! and so, so good, once out...
very best wishes
JC



Taly
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06 Oct 2008, 3:01 pm

when I "day dream" I try to do what I day dream in the real world. Of course 90% of things we day dream never get to come true. So like you I use this "mind silence", I wait for the moon and the stars to come and appreciate them and when it's windy I like to see the leaves dancing, then my mind is empty and filled with colours. I am 21, I still walk looking at the floor, but I started appreciating the things I found on the floor like the drawing caused by wind and rain, the seeds, the leaves, I usually collect an dtake something home. I've learned to appreciate things. Like building my own museum and I am happy, I overcame depression and I know that asperger is like a seesaw. So whatever I know that is going to addict me and make me daydream I destroy and that was HAARD and it hurt a lot to give away things. My father is an aspie, and we have 6,000 books and I am planning to give away some of my favorites and I know it's going to HURT a lot, but it will bring me peace. I don't hate to be who I am, I just hate prisons. I know I have lots of things to overcome, I am more like eccentric.



JCJC777
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08 Oct 2008, 7:35 am

Please can you describe the stretching exercise you do?

Imho the 'silent mind' = that you stopped systemising.
Your experience is similar to Fernando's on the Update page of my site (unlearningasperger.blogspot.com).
I'm also theorising that there may be 2 ways of Aspie's getting to NT functioning;
1. Dis-abling your systemising from being active in some communications, by
(a) distracting the systemising by giving it something else to do, such as doing your exercises, and/or
(b) being tired.
With systemising thus distracted, there is then this element of 'surprise' as we find we are NT empathising in another bit of what's going on at that time. Both you nad Fernando expressed this surprise; 'wow, then I found I was empathising, using my mirror neurons' feeling.
2. Mentally switching off systemising and stopping collecting data.
This is exciting stuff, and imho holds great hope. Please keep communicating, and/or write more of your experiences.
JC



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08 Oct 2008, 10:38 am

I hope you don't mind a long and detailed response. (I'm responding mostly for you -- nobody else has to read it if they can't deal with this much complex detail. :P )

Hmm. I am not going to reply to this in order. I am first going to reply one by one to each of the specific changes noted by the OP. Then I will reply to other concepts in the post. I don't think you have found what you think you have found, but I do think that the things you talk about are interesting and worth discussing.

One of the things I suspect from reading your post is that you don't know many other autistic people, or don't know them well enough to know the different abilities that different autistic people can have. Please also note (when reading what I write) that while I've been diagnosed with autism (and earlier, atypical autism, although that was more because of insurance reasons than because I actually fit those criteria) I've never been diagnosed with AS. There's no functioning label attached to my current diagnosis; in the past they've called me low-functioning, but I don't know why they did so and they never explained.

Also, I think it's great you've gotten some of these changes, even if I don't agree with you about what the changes actually constitute.



fernando wrote:
Two things happened there that weren't aspie anymore: I felt like touching somebody and i felt a need to be connected before saying goodbye.


Many autistic people feel both of those things. Those are not purely "NT" traits.

Quote:
I think i succeeded in about five changes, for example i did learn to walk looking ahead instead of at the floor, but i failed at all the rest.


Many autistic people don't look at the floor while walking. That is not purely an "NT" trait.

Quote:
On early november i got control of my body, i could dance well for the first time. I finally understood what it means to "move to the rhythm".


Many autistic people are good dancers. That is not purely an "NT" trait.

Quote:
Mid-november i was watching the news one night, a little girl had been killed and her mother was on screen crying. I felt awful, i felt a sort of pain inside me and i tried to make it stop but it wouldn't. Then i realized... "oh my god, this is what they call empathy... i have empathy!".


Many autistic people have this trait. I am included. Many of us, in fact, have more than the usual empathy in these situations, to the point where it is totally overwhelming to us and it causes us to shut down.

Quote:
On december my obsessions stopped,


I am not sure what you mean by obsessions, could you clarify? Do you mean OCD obsessions (recurring, intrusive thoughts that you do not want), or do you mean special interests? In either case, while both are more common in autistic people, not all autistic people have them.

Quote:
my fear of heights stopped too.


While autistic people can have more phobias than usual, many don't. When I was 18-21 I trained myself out of most of my phobias to the point where they either disappeared totally, or reached an almost normal level. Prior to that I was, among other things, severely arachnophobic and emetophobic.

Quote:
On Monday 14, January 2008 i reached mental silence,


Congratulations, that is a good thing. Having too much chatter in your head can be highly distracting.

Consider, though, that many autistic people have mental silence. I actually have trouble getting to the point of having a ton of thoughts in my head, or sustaining those thoughts at all. There's a short period when I can get trapped in them, but this overloads me and eventually some mechanism shuts it off again pretty quickly, in that case it's a case of momentum.

Many other autistic people have the same problem I do there -- rather than too many thoughts all the time, we have trouble getting those kinds of thoughts at all. (This leads some to say they "don't think", but it's really a lack of a specific kind of conscious thinking. I have the same experiences as some who say they "don't think," but I am aware that there is more than one kind of thought and that not all thoughts feel like "thinking".)

Interestingly I find that when I do get into the kinds of thoughts you are talking about, those thoughts cause more overload than if I do not get into them at all, and I start also feeling very lost and confused.

Here is a quote from a blog post I made awhile back on the topic of thinking. I compared myself to the character Tom Bombadil from a book. He was highly competent on his own territory, which nobody else knew the boundaries of but him. I am quoting it, it is a long quote, but I will put the parts that are of the most interest with your post in bold. The kind of thinking I describe being bad at, is the kind of thinking that you have described above, and described finally "silencing":

Quote:
When I was a school-age child (but not before and not after), my thinking often appeared very inflexible and rigid. This was not because my thinking is just naturally that way. This was because the kind of thinking I was trying to use was outside of my natural areas of competence. I managed for a time on sheer brute force, and the strength of that brute force created the apparent rigidity (as well as the moodiness, low frustration tolerance, coming home from school and screaming and crying all night, etc). The kind of thinking I was being expected to use, was the kind that requires stacking blocks on top of blocks and remembering where you put all the blocks in order to avoid knocking them all over. This is not sustainable, eventually they all fall down.

And when they all finally fell down, the rigidity in my thinking was almost gone. I was of course still grasping at those blocks, at random sometimes, producing some fairly scrambled-looking results. But I could not sustain it enough to sustain the kind of rigidity that held them together in the first place.

If I am pushed to engage in that more difficult kind of thinking, even today, I will suddenly appear rigid, black and white, and every other stereotype in the book about autistic thinking, few of which actually apply to me in daily life. It comes from the force of trying to hold foreign ideas together in what amounts to a foreign cognitive language, and watching them all slip away as rapidly as I can put them up. The easiest way to do this to me, is to make me do intellectual work to a deadline. I might get it done, but I become rigid, explosive, self-injurious, and so forth, along the way, and then everything shuts down for a long time afterwards. For those who think that blogging means I could hold a writing job, there’s your answer. When my staff hear I’m writing to a deadline, they give me a wide berth. This is also one reason why I don’t present at conferences more often than I do. You can also get the same reaction out of me by expecting me to perform intellectual tasks in an unfamiliar environment. (Note that for me, “intellectual tasks” start at the level of recognizing the typical identities and functions given to objects,and then work their way up from there.)

But on my own ground, I’m incredibly competent. What people don’t see, is the fact that I rarely stray off that ground. (That ground, by the way, contrary to [an online friend's] statement, is far from being unaffected by autism. My way of thinking is in fact a very autistic one. But “autistic” does not mean a certain stereotype.)

About seven years ago, I was given a bunch of extra equipment for my (still) camera — a nice telephoto lens, a flashbulb, and a light meter. It made no sense to me, it was a jumble of chaos, and after a bunch of frustrating sensory explorations of the equipment I put it all in a box and forgot about it.

I opened the box two days ago. I could instantly mount and use every single piece of equipment that baffled me seven years ago.

I can’t even count the amount of books I have poured into my eyeballs without always understanding them. I could read a book and be unable to answer questions about it right afterwards. But given enough time, the information sinks in somewhere, because it’s there when it’s called up some other time.

This is the territory I operate best on, the very non-foreign cognitive territory that allows me to do all the things that seem to impress people overmuch. But it’s also the territory that gets the least respect for what it is. People see me operating well on this territory, and they want, expect, and sometimes demand me to step over into a kind of cognitive territory that, if I did, would result in a short blast of achievement (if anything is achieved at all, which isn’t always) followed by weeks of burnout and shutdown.

They see the extent of my triggered knowledge and expect me to answer questions that don’t trigger that knowledge, they see the gracefulness of my climbing and expect me not to fall on my face while walking, they see how detailed a triggered memory can be and expect me to call up non-triggered memories on command, they see how well I learn when the material is given and then allowed to percolate and expect me to learn well while they forcefully cram information into the parts of my head least equipped to process it.

I was in a room full of people with intellectual disabilities recently. We were all given a form to fill out. Some of them had trouble reading the form, but could answer the questions once they understood them. I could read the form at a glance, but I could not answer the questions (like “Why are you here today?”). Guess which one of us was more confusing to the staff.

Someone replied to my video making it sound as if I have simply not been pressured enough, that if I were pressured enough, I would give up the activities I am good at, and somehow gain all sorts of abilities I’m not so good at. That’s not how it works. I don’t learn through pressure. Excess pressure in fact may have created the burnout of a lot of those things that I wasn’t so good at to begin with, but now can barely use for any length of time at all. The more pressure you put me under, the less I can do, understand, and learn.

I can say, that if I were forced to move into that foreign territory (and if I were even capable of sustaining life there, which I’m not), I would look less intellectually competent, more rigid, more black and white in my assessment of the world, and like I was missing a lot more information about the world. And I would be thus classified into a different “type of autism”, when really all that’s happened to change me from that “rigid-thinking type” into the “type” I am now, is I’ve become much more efficient at staying within my own territory, and much less able to stay within foreign territory.

I suspect much “rigid thinking” among auties (when it’s actually rigid and not just thought to be) is actually an artifact of trying to brute-force thinking with cognitive equipment that isn’t what they’d be most skilled at, rather than a fixed trait of the autistic mind. Sort of a by-product of mental overclocking.

I’ve also noticed, in the changing-over-time department, autistic people who describe thinking like me (as I think now), and then they describe that as a way they used to think. In some cases they view it as something they were glad to discard, in others as something they wish they could get back to but can’t. And now they are way more at home than I am in the kind of thinking I’m not so good at, even though in the past they weren’t. Some so at home that they cannot conceive of understanding something without words, for instance, despite the fact that many of them had a time period when their best understanding of things was largely or entirely wordless. The changes happen in more than one direction.

Meanwhile, I still do best, like Bombadil, in my own territory, even if nobody else knows quite where the boundaries are, and even if the boundaries shift a little every day. But a lot of people who interact with me treat me as if I don’t know what I’m doing, as if they in fact know what’s best for me, and that if I don’t go along with what they’re expecting of me, then I’m either stubbornly refusing to do what is good for me or unaware of what is good for me. The idea that I already have a better idea of what’s good and bad for me than most people, doesn’t cross their mind, nor does the idea that I’m more able to do things overall if they’re done the way I think best, not some other way.

Basically, put the information there, let it come out on its own time. That’s how I best accomplish things — the results are higher-quality, too, than if I’m forced to do it some other way. So even if the way I do (and don’t do) things doesn’t seem to have any rhyme or reason to it, even if you can’t see the boundaries of my abilities, it’d be best to respect that I probably know more about them than you do.

…of course nobody’s ever figured out Tom Bombadil either, despite years of ridiculously complex analysis on lots of people’s parts.

Tom’s own response to being asked who he was: “Don’t you know my name yet? That’s the only answer. Tell me, who are you, alone, yourself, and nameless?”


So in the above quotes, the kind of thinking that made me seem inflexible and rigid when I attempted to function within it, is the kind that you have silenced.

The kind of thinking describe myself as good at, is a kind that works best while the other kind is silenced, and does not feel like thinking at all. However, this kind of thinking is not by any means an "NT" way of thinking. It is more foreign to most NTs than the kind you describe silencing, in fact.

However, I have long believed that many thought-related deficits attributed to autism, are actually not attributable directly to autism at all. They are actually a result of an autistic person trying to function within the sort of thinking that you have silenced, and yes, frequently getting so caught up in it that they cannot silence it.

These "deficits" can include some or all of things such as black and white thinking, rigid thinking, cognitive inflexibility, over-forcefulness of thought, pedantry, a certain kind of literalism, stilted language, missing the big picture, difficulty taking other perspectives, and many other things. Those things seem to me to be a by-product of an autistic person who is stuck in the kind of thought you have silenced.

Whereas the kind of thinking I am good at, allows me a great deal of flexibility, extreme and rich level of detail without necessarily losing the big picture, ability to see a huge number of grey areas (in fact seemingly less black and white than the average NT), more naturally-flowing language based on echoes and patterns (often leading to the seemingly metaphoric kinds of language that were often attributed to autistic people before 'total literality' became the new norm), facility with patterns, a relative 'silence' of conscious thought (leading some to characterize it as "not thought"), difficulties with immediate language/symbol comprehension at all, etc.

The kind of thinking I do is not at all typical of NT thinking. It is also not the stereotype of autistic thinking (with its rigidity, black and white, etc), but it is in fact (according to a couple cognitive researchers I've talked to) still a very autistic thinking style, and in fact the thinking style that many autistic people excel at, enabling us to (for instance) do well on certain cognitive tests and tasks that non-autistic people are not as good at overall.

So I find that whenever I 'silence' the kind of conscious thinking that creates the 'rigidity' etc., it enables me to function better within the kinds of thought I am best at. It also causes a loss of many traits that are normally just attributed to autism. It doesn't, however, make me any more NT. And the kind of thought I am good at (and which is not all that conscious or deliberate) is one that autistic people often are good at in general. The kind of thought you silenced is a kind many of us find difficult or taxing when we can do it at all.

I wonder how any of that compares to your experiences. And it makes me disbelieve your assertion that autism is all about being unable to silence that kind of thoughts. I do believe however that certain stereotypes of autism stem from observations of specific kinds of autistic people (or autistic people under certain circumstances) who do have trouble suppressing the kind of thought you describe. And you have probably confused those peripheral and non-essential-to-diagnosis traits with autism itself.

Quote:
after more than two years of looking for it, i finally stopped daydreaming.


I know a number of autistic people who have done various exercises to stop daydreaming, including some who came up with them entirely on their own and viewed them as highly valuable. They report more living in the now, less distancing of themselves from reality (not in the psychotic sense, more the dissociative sense), less depression, and a large number of other highly positive changes. They are, however, very much still autistic.

Quote:
On january 30 i was talking to a girl and i noticed that she was making too much eye contact with me. It took me a while to realize... I was making eye contact too!... and liking it.


Some autistic people really do like eye contact. I used to know an autistic guy (classified as low-functioning by others) who used to run up to people and stare straight into their eyes and smile while doing a sort of hand-stimming that I also like to do, and that he liked if others did back to him.

Quote:
Early on february i became small-talk capable.


That's good. It's an area many autistic people learn with practice.

Quote:
February 6 was also the day i started feeling drawn to crowded places instead of turned off by them.


Sounds as if your overload might have decreased (in any of a number of ways), allowing your natural social tendencies to be more of the deciding factor in when you dealt with crowds. Many autistic people are quite social, but many lose that over time as social experiences become unrewarding or overloadng.

Quote:
On the night of february 6 i went to sleep with a monotone voice and on February 7 when i woke up the voice in my head was multitone, so i spoke up and my physical voice came out multitone too.


Interesting.

Quote:
By february 11 i had theory of mind, though i think i felt it before, since late january.


I don't know what you mean by theory of mind. The majority of autistic people, though, can pass the false-belief tasks that you have to have theory of mind to pass. The trouble autistic people had with such tasks was mostly language-related -- on non-linguistic versions of such tasks, autistic children do the same or even slightly better than non-autistic children.

So lack of theory of mind is clearly not essential to autism, it was just thought to be based on yet another set of biases in the research. I know people classified as severely autistic who have been thinking about their own and others' minds since very early childhood.

Quote:
I also started using my hands when i talk, body language appeared, but i didn't write down the date for that one.


Sounds like maybe you felt more connected to your body, and maybe less like you had to concentrate just on getting the words out? I have more obvious body language now that I type than I did when I spoke, because typing is less overloading.

Also a comment on the following:

Quote:
I decided i was accountable for every death related to asperger syndrome that happened from mid 2007 to the day I publish my knowledge.


You do realize that when people with a given condition kill themselves, they may sincerely feel the condition caused it, but unless the condition is depression, then the condition didn't cause it, right? So no you are not responsible for the death of autistic people who are also depressed. Fixing the difficulties they are depressed about is after all, only one way to fix the depression -- I still have all the same difficulties as I used to, but am no longer depressed because I have learned to think differently about having them than I used to, and because I am no longer in environments very often that treat me as defective for having those difficulties (and when I am, I have other areas to draw on).

There's more than one way out of suicidal depression, and it actually contributes to such depression more in some ways, to assume that there is only one way out of it. Because when a person believes that and is depressed, and is unable to take that one way out, they feel hopeless and like there is no other way out. But if they know there are many ways out, they can feel free to take any of the ways out that are possible. Since being suicidal is usually feeling there is no other way out, then leaving as many ways as possible open is critical.

Quote:
The next day, January 15 was the day i finally put two and two together and thought that maybe it wasn't a coincidence that i managed to reach mental silence at the same time that so many other inner changes were happening to me, that maybe mental silence is impossible for an aspie, maybe my other exercises had enabled me to reach it. I noticed that all the inner changes i had been seeing in me lately had to do with asperger syndrome. It's like if asperger syndrome was caused by one thing only and that thing had been removed from me and now all symptoms were fading away. I HAD FOUND THE CURE!


It sounds to me more as if you had certain difficulties for a long time, that were related to autism, but not the whole of what autism was. You found ways around some of your most difficult areas, and your level of overload decreased. This in turn allowed you to perceive things and respond to things in ways that you did not used to be able to do. This was an extreme period of growth for you.

You should know, though, that it is a kind of growth and change that you are not the first person to experience or discover. Many autistic people eventually mature in these areas, and many find that after they remove specific problems then a whole lot of other problems go away.

They are not cured though. It's just that autism doesn't always truly require having difficulty in those areas, it just creates difficulty if specific other things aren't alleviated.

A friend of mine who went through these changes themselves, once said something like, "I see a lot of young adult autistic people believing that they have finally cured their autism, because they are now able to do these things. I don't know what to say to them. They are in for a rude awakening in a few years."

Quote:
A few seconds later i noticed that I was aspie again. All symptoms had returned. And it had happened in just a few seconds. It was then that i had the biggest lightbulb moment of my life and i thought: "this is how asperger syndrome gets triggered in kids". The lack of imitation was biological, inheritable, it wouldn't be removed by my cure and it triggers all other symptoms. I finally had an explanation of how a mental condition can be inheritable.


If autism is at heart a lack of imitation, then why are some autistic people extremely (far more so than usual) echolalic (imitative of others' words) and echopraxic (imitative of others' actions)?

Careful study has found that autistic people's cognitive differences are not specific to social situations. Rather our social problems are an outgrowth of particular cognitive/perceptual differences applied to different situations. It sounds as if you have found ways of changing some of the internal aspects of your situation.

Other people have also learned of these things, and changed these things, before you, though. You don't have any unique knowledge here, and some of what you seem to think you know, sounds more like a bunch of misconceptions about autism. In particular, you greatly underestimate the variety that exists in autistic people.

Quote:
After this i decided asperger syndrome was pretty much a solved puzzle for me so it was time to move on, i finally started reading other people's theories and researching lower functioning autism.


What conclusions did you come to?

Quote:
On march 1, 2008 i was watching the news and someone was crying on screen and i felt nothing. Empathy was gone. All changes were gone. I was back to full aspieness. I panicked. Suddenly the idea that i had cured myself with a physical exercise sounded more stupid than ever.


Sounds like you got back into an old cognitive mode, or you experienced a shutdown. This happens.

Quote:
On march 6 i got empathy again. All other changes came quickly and by march 13 i had theory of mind again. I was back into the realm of NTs.


Empathy and theory of mind are not the realm of NTs, most autistic people have them too, and some in pretty extreme ways.

Quote:
As i got cured a third time it became obvious which of the two exercises was the one that cured me, it was the stretching exercise i designed in august 2006. I had no idea why, but it worked.


I think it might have enhanced your body awareness, which in turn would enhance certain kinds of self-awareness.

Quote:
By early April i found out that scientists discovered in the 1990s a special type of neurons, called mirror neurons, which are responsible for making people imitate each other. Years later they discovered that autistic people lack mirror neurons. This perfectly backs up my Trigger Events theory. Looks like i'm doing things right after all.


Actually, that's not precisely what they found. What they found was that in response to specific events, autistic people's mirror neurons were not active in a particular way. To my knowledge, they have not yet tested all situations that would cause a conclusion of "autistic people have no mirror neurons" to be accurate. Also, your own exercises (or at least your conclusions) show that it's not possible for that to be accurate -- if what you are experiencing is the firing of mirror neurons, then obviously you had them all along.

Such studies also appear to suffer from similar flaws to some of the older studies that supposedly showed that autistic people did not have the area of the brain that responds to faces, and that an "object area" of our brains lit up when we saw faces. What was really happening was they were not controlling for whether the autistic people were even looking at the faces. When they did control for that, then suddenly the "face area" lit up like with anyone else. The earlier study turned out to be flawed because the autistic people were looking at objects, not faces, so of course the object area lit up!

Not only might mirror neuron studies be flawed because of that, but they might also be flawed because autistic people might well have those neurons firing off in situations involving people they can actually identify with (such as other autistic people of similar subtype). Additionally, non-autistic people might not have those neurons fire off when they look at autistic people. These things have not been tested and therefore are not known, which seriously limits the research.

Quote:
Thinking about the migraines in autistic people i started thinking about stress and by late august Lock theory was born, but that part you don't get to hear.


It seems odd and contradictory to me, that on the one hand you act like you feel responsible for whatever bad things happen to autistic people who don't know what you know, and on the other hand you keep leaving out significant aspects of what you know (or think you know) about this.

Also... I think you might find the following post interesting: "...knew the moment had arrived, for killing the past and coming back to life. In that post, I describe how negative experiences can cause autistic people to shut off certain parts of ourselves. I also describe how over time, autism research has never fully teased apart which aspects of what gets considered autism are innate to the autistic person, and which aspects are not really autism at all, but rather byproducts of being autistic in a harsh, inaccessible, and often also hateful, world. I experienced a re-awakening of those parts of me, but I am no less autistic for it.


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anbuend
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08 Oct 2008, 10:55 am

JCJC777 wrote:
Imho the 'silent mind' = that you stopped systemising.


That makes no sense to me. 'Systemizing', if it even exists (which I don't think it does the way Baron-Cohen means it does anyway, it sounds more like a convenient little mental widget for him to use), surely exists in forms that are not the conscious 'noisy' thought that this guy turned off.

Quote:
Your experience is similar to Fernando's on the Update page of my site (unlearningasperger.blogspot.com).


Aren't they the exact same person? That'd be why.

Quote:
I'm also theorising that there may be 2 ways of Aspie's getting to NT functioning;


I'm not sure that you can call it "NT functioning" when it's clearly going on in an autistic brain with an autistic perceptual system embedded in it. It's more like "a different kind of autistic functioning that is less stereotypical in some respects".

Quote:
1. Dis-abling your systemising from being active in some communications, by
(a) distracting the systemising by giving it something else to do, such as doing your exercises, and/or
(b) being tired.


Many autistic people are always or usually too 'tired' to engage in constant, conscious, 'noisy' thought. In fact, it might even be most autistic people. So why do you call it 'NT functioning' when we can't do that?

Quote:
With systemising thus distracted, there is then this element of 'surprise' as we find we are NT empathising in another bit of what's going on at that time.


Empathizing is not specific to 'NTs'. As should be obvious if a non-NT is sitting there doing it.

Quote:
Both you nad Fernando expressed this surprise; 'wow, then I found I was empathising, using my mirror neurons' feeling.


...because "he and Fernando" are the same person! !!

Empathizing is neither an NT trait nor an autistic trait. It seems to me as if you are still caught up heavily in the exact kind of thought that fernando described stopping. So heavily that you can't tell the difference between an abstract concept (the empathizing/systemizing thing) and the reality of the situation, and you are attempting to bend the situation to fit the abstraction. Which would be painful for my mind to even attempt, and is painful cognitively for me to even get into a mode where I can look at it and describe it, let alone believe it.

People like me who are obviously autistic, and don't engage in that kind of thinking readily or easily, sort of make it obvious that it's not "more NT" to not engage in it. I'm going to have to stop writing this because just trying to force-fit my mind into your abstract concepts so I can discuss them is utterly draining and it's making me dizzy. As I said in my other post, I'm better on my own ground, and this is not my own ground.


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08 Oct 2008, 1:29 pm

You didn't cure your autism. You removed certain symptoms. However your organic brain structure is not going to change.

In essence you are simply coping better, way better, hinting that you truly are on to something. I am happy for you that your life has been so improved! :D


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08 Oct 2008, 1:57 pm

I think you have to stop locking yourself in by labelling yourself as 'I am autistic' or 'I am NT' or whatever - I think your brain may well have all the kit and potential for both ways of functioning, and you can maybe change operating mode if you want to.
Just because you have always walked on all fours (rock solid, safe, secure) doesn't mean you can't learn to walk on just two feet if you so desire to.
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08 Oct 2008, 4:11 pm

Anbuend thanks your fascinating posts.

I agree that 'empathising' is a fairly ill-defined concept.

Mirror Neurons:
My reading, experience and thesis are that
- we all have mirror neurons
- those operating their brains in Aspie mode generally don't use them (they use clunky analytical systemising instead, to work out what to do in social situations)
- many of these people could learn to use their mirror neurons - which would give them better understanding of how other people are likely feeling - which would enable them to have more fun moments of shared understanding and communication with other people, and thus reduce their painful feelings of social isolation.

Aspie-ness:
- Aspie-ness is a way of using the brain to 'do' day-to-day life
- using your brain in an Aspie way will lead to it physically developing in certain ways (a tennis players racket arm is very different to his/her non-tennis playing siblings racket arm)
- that many people have been told by doctors, and unquestioningly believe, their Aspie-ness is not changeable; this MAY not be true! We were once assured the world was flat...

Where would you agree/disagree?



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08 Oct 2008, 4:15 pm

JCJC777 wrote:
- many of these people could learn to use their mirror neurons - which would give them better understanding of how other people are likely feeling - which would enable them to have more fun moments of shared understanding and communication with other people, and thus reduce their painful feelings of social isolation.


I like your idea of reducing systemising because I feel that my brain spends entirely too much time on obsessive stuff and I would like to be less that way.

But I think if I tried to use mirror neurons I would feel exhausted very quickly. It would be like writing with my left hand or something. I find that using systemising can work fine for social purposes, and feels more comfortable. It is empathising that feels "clunky" to me.


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08 Oct 2008, 5:24 pm

I'm not fully certain about the mirror neurons yet, because as I noted in one of my other posts, there's too many unanswered questions about how mirror neurons actually function in autistic people. (I mentioned many of them in a previous post on this thread.) So I would not consider them a good thing to base a theory about autism on, until more is known about them, and until the potentially problematic areas of the studies are looked at thoroughly.

The work I am familiar with shows that autism appears to be based on a set of fundamental differences in thinking and processing information about the world. This leads to both unusual strengths and unusual weaknesses, cognitively. Those differences occur in both social and non-social situations, so it is highly unlikely that social skills problems are the central aspect of autism's neurological basis. Faulty or unused mirror neurons don't explain things like frequent enhanced performance on Block Design, just as one example, nor do they explain non-social areas of difficulty.

Here is a post by a good friend of mine who writes about how autism is conceptualized. I would recommend it to anyone curious about a very clear explanation of autism.

She differentiates between three things:

1. The physical differences in the brain that make up what autism is at a basic level.

2. The perceptual and cognitive traits that lead to the lived experiences of autistic people.

3. The outward behaviors that get people identified as autistic.

She writes the following about the third part (emphasis mine in the quote):

Quote:
The orange column on the right of the diagram summarizes what most people probably think of as "autism" -- that is, the externally-visible things that generally get people suspected of being, or identified as being, autistic in the first place.

This is where we see such things as diagnostic checklists, observations about a person's developmental milestones (and when/if they meet certain expected ones), outward actions, language use, body language, tone of voice, social/educational/occupational success (or lack thereof) in the absence of modifying factors, etc.

What is interesting, and perhaps a bit unnerving, is that this category is at once the one people tend to put the most stock in (in terms of identifying autistics, in terms of determining what educational supports we might need, etc.) and the one most subject to cultural biases, personal biases, misinformation, and the ever-changing social lens through which different kinds of people are generally viewed.


I believe that the description of autism as a primarily social phenomenon comes from people doing what she describes in the final, bolded paragraph. And I think it is quite possible for autistic people to, immersed in a culture that believes this of us, focus a good deal on social problems as central to autism as well, even though it's pretty clear from cognitive research that they can't be the main factor that makes someone autistic.

I also believe that it will be impossible to tell exactly how many social problems are truly and inherently attributable to autism until we live in a culture that plans for the existence of people with far more neurological variation than our culture does now.

This is because often from the moment of birth, autistic people are subjected to a world in which there is mutual obliviousness to each other -- non-autistic people usually fail to understand the communication of autistic people (this has been shown in studies of young, non-verbal children), and autistic people fail to understand the communication of non-autistic people.

Additionally, many forms of social contact that non-autistic people find pleasant, can be anywhere from uncomfortable to intolerable for autistic babies and children. Non-autistic people, even well-meaning ones, often do not notice this and continue to do things that autistic people find intolerable. This sets autistic people up for an aversion to social experiences that might not be there if exposed to social experiences that are more geared to their perceptual systems.

And additionally even to that, there are people that, far from well-meaning, are actively hostile and seek out to bully and otherwise abuse autistic people. This means that not only do we often find well-meaning social experiences overloading and exhausting, but we also are exposed to enough scenarios that amount to active abuse, that we end up showing a lot of the same signs as non-autistic people who have been abused. Some of which amount to social withdrawal in self-protection, and shutting down feelings so as not to be overwhelmed by terror all the time.

Given that all of that is the case, I don't think it's known how much of our social trouble is due to something innate to autism, and how much of it is due to deprivation of positive (to our minds) social experiences, as well as exposure to a ton of highly negative social experiences. I also don't think it's known how much of our frequent trouble understanding the emotions of others is innate to autism, and how much of it is because of having to shut down various feelings in ourselves. And I don't think that can even be figured out with both society and science as they are right now.

I started wondering that when I started having enough positive social experiences for the parts of me I'd shut off due to both intentional abuse by hostile people and unintentional overload by well-meaning people, to begin to wake up again. I got an immediate increase in social understanding at that point in time because all I had to do was imagine how I (with those parts woken up) would feel in a certain situation. A lot of things suddenly made sense to me that never did before.

Additionally, it has been found in research that teaching autistic children social skills is far less effective in creating good social skills, than teaching non-autistic children how to be nice to autistic children. Suddenly when non-autistic children were nice to autistic children (in a way that accommodated autistic people's differences), then autistic children's social skills improved dramatically. Previously autistic children had been getting ignored at best and treated badly at worst.

I don't believe my experience is necessarily the case for everyone, I just think it's not known, and that the scientific literature showing innate perceptual differences as a root cause of autism backs up the idea that social stuff is peripheral to autism at best (an end result of mixing the perceptual systems of autistic and non-autistic people), and not even a part of autism (but rather autistic people's responses to both intentionally and unintentionally autie-hostile environments) at worst.

Anyway, there appear to be some fundamental traits in common between most autistic people, those being cognitive/perceptual traits. And I see the huge variation in outward appearance as more about those cognitive/perceptual traits being able to develop in a huge number of directions, rather than as evidence that autistic people have little in common cognitively (often in fact the most commonly-cited appearances of outward similarities or differences are a red herring, distracting from the internal similarities and differences).

I consider the fundamental traits autistic people have in common, to be what autism really is. I don't consider one or another more outward manifestation of autism, to be what autism really is. Because of this, I do not think that viewing a person as autistic limits them in any way -- if they have the innate perceptual/brain differences that constitute autism then they are autistic no matter what outward traits they have.

What is truly limiting is to view certain outward traits autistic people are frequently thought to have as "autistic," while viewing other outward traits that autistic people can also have (and some of them, that we near-universally have the capacity for, but have been wrongly thought to lack) as "NT". Both autistic people and NT people can have empathy or lack it, can have social urges or lack them, can be highly emotional or highly unemotional, caring or uncaring, etc. Those traits are neither autistic or NT, they are just traits that anyone can have or lack, and can lose or develop over time.

Viewing myself as autistic is simply a shorthand for certain aspects of my cognitive and perceptual makeup, it is not a way of saying "I can never be social" or something. That's not to say there are no limits (anyone who believes they have no limits is welcome to flap their arms and fly over here to prove me wrong), merely that what limits I do have are not self-imposed (in fact I have more of a tendency to do damage to myself by being oblivious to them).

Anyone who believes that saying someone is autistic is limiting that person ought to take a hard look at what they believe autism to be. Anyone who believes autism is being four-legged and NT is being two-legged (and for that matter who appears to believe quadrupeds are more limited in some way despite the fact that bipedalism actually introduced a number of problems into the human species as well as solving different ones), also needs to take a firm look at their own biases before believing they are commenting on someone else's.

Anyway, back to the other topics you were talking about.

I don't truly understand what is meant by 'systemizing' here. I mean, I've read Baron-Cohen but I believe the word to be essentially a meaningless widget-term.

As far as I know, "aspie-ness" is when people talk about autistic people who developed a certain kind of language by a certain age. Whether and how it's separate from any other type of autism is unclear. (As I noted before, there does sometimes seem to be a different cognitive strength, but then if you select out everyone good at something then that would tend to be true. Which gets circular.)

And autism is a set of fundamental perceptual differences.

The stuff about using, vs. not using, a particular kind of thinking to deal with the world, that seems to be a problem that both autistic and non-autistic people can run into.

Also, that particular kind of abstract thinking that some autistic people apply to socializing, is not (and not even close to) a universal form of thinking among autistic people. It's not a form of thinking I (or a large number of other autistic people) could even approach using until a certain age that is well within my memory (around 7-9). And it's not a form of thinking I (or a large number... etc.) could sustain long-term.

It is, however, a form of thinking that many formal tests of autistic people frequently rely on. Which makes me think that it's overly represented in the autism literature because it's the easiest to get data from autistic people within. This sort of thing was also a problem in studies of autistic people and body language by the way, and I was right about that one before the research proved me right, so I think I might be right about this as well.

(The body language eye-tracking research showed that autistic people looked at mouths a lot. However, they had only looked at autistic people with high levels of language comprehension. The autistic people were trying to read lips in order to hear better. They finally put autistic people with low levels of language comprehension into the same experiment and found, as I predicted, that the people did not focus on mouths, but looked at the whole face and body.)

Anyway, I don't think the form of abstract symbolic thinking you seem to be pointing at, is a universally-used thing in autistic people, because many of us are truly quite bad at it. Because of that, it can't explain why autistic people are how we are.

However, I do think that the fact that it is a clunky way for most of us to think, shows up in how we do things. Learning to not think that way can free up a lot of brainpower for a lot of different functioning besides just social stuff. (In fact a huge critique of ABA is that it relies on that kind of thinking and therefore cuts autistic people off from our stronger methods of thought.)

So I don't think that autism is a particular way of using a brain, but I do think that much of what people think of as autism involves autistic brains being used in particular ways. Autistic brains can also be used in totally different ways. Using brans in different ways with different levels of success is a problem for most people, really, and how non-autistic people use their minds is just as varied in effectiveness as the many ways autistic people can use our minds.

By saying a person remains autistic, I do not mean that a person remains within one limited way of using their mind, I mean that the underlying neurological differences remain constant whether they are using their mind in any of a number of ways. And I am also saying it to point out that some autistic people never use their mind in that manner, and are still autistic, so it's not the best explanation of autism ever, either, only of certain traits that autistic people are (perhaps erroneously) thought to have.

(And seriously trying to track your widgets gives me a bit of a headache and causes me to ramble.)


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JCJC777
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09 Oct 2008, 5:17 am

Zen mistress, I can report that using mirror neurons is not tiring, it is just rather liberating, novel and fun, and the net effect is very definitely less tiring because I now do not do all that systemising in social situations. So I'd encourage you to give it a go!

Anbuend thank you for another perceptive post. Many of your thoughts are very interesting.
By systemising I mean approaching everything in life analytically: collecting scraps of data, analaysing them, referring back to similar past stored data, and using these and logic to work out what to do. This is particularly hard work when applied to social situations.

More generally I am unsure where you are? You are clearly very perceptive, but you do not seem to be trying to improve your life by improving how you use your brain. I know that some autistics and Aspie's (particularly here on Wrong Planet) adopt an attitude that 'autism is great', and 'I don't want to change even if I could'. However I feel in reality many autistics experience huge social difficulties, causing huge hurt to them and their loved ones, and isolation. Could you think positive, and propose ways to help autistics not experience this? I'm an engineer; I'm just trying to find solutions (like the one that worked for me) that work, to prevent this pain.

Aurore I don't think its right to think of 'curing' autism, rather you just find way to not do it, to operate in another way.

best
JC