Superconductivity analogy for the autistic mind

Post Reply New Topic

When it comes to intellectual capabilities, autism is characterized by two extreme groups. On the one extreme, you find geniuses, savants, with extraordinary abilities. On the other extreme, you find comatose adults, not able to even attend their own basic daily personal needs. I mean, no other condition exhibits such paradoxical manifestations.

Most savants abilities cannot be copied. Those abilities cannot be taught. That much we know.

For regular, mere mortals, when we perform thinking processes, we are constantly being distracted. This reminds me of "phonons," or thermal fluctuations that electrons encounter when they move through a conductor. Phonons are vibrations of the underlying conducting material, and when they are random and chaotic, they represent the heat loss. They are what we know as "resistance" at macroscopic scale. In a sense, our thought process inside our brain are constantly being bombarded by our brain's "phonons," so, we can't achieve what geniuses can achieve. We don't have their focus and concentration.

The autistic brain has extra synaptic connections. The neurons are no longer weakly coupled. The fundamental unit of information is no longer single neurons, but clusters of neurons. This is like Cooper pairs in superconductivity. When the coupling of neurons gets even stronger, then whole regions of the brain become coupled, and act in unison. This, is analogous Bose-Einstein condensate. Bosons are effectively attractive to each other. (That is in the sense of "effective potential." See https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256374921_Effective_Potential_Description_of_the_Quantum_Ideal_Gases. I know purists don't like to describe bosonic symmetric wave functions as "attractive forces."). What does this all mean? It means, when electrons hold hands with each other, they move as a block. It then becomes pretty difficult to kick at them (thermal fluctuations). If you kick at one single electron now, it'll not even be a mosquito bite on a dinosaur. Other electrons will simply pull the electron being kicked, and the whole block keeps moving as if nothing as happened. And that is superconductivity. Once you have superconductivity, you are no longer sensitive to bombardment of thermal phonons. There is no heat loss. There is no resistance. A similar phenomenon happens with superfluids. In the case of superfluids, there is no longer any viscosity.

So, in the brain of geniuses and savants, there is 100% focus and concentration. They don't get distracted. The whole brain moves in unison. It's a different state of mind. And either your brain is born that way (with all those extra synaptic connections), or you are not. There is no way to achieve superconductivity, when your neurons are not holding hands and moving in unison.

Then what's the difference between the brain of those geniuses, and the brain of those other comatose autistic people? If both groups have the same additional synaptic connections, why one group's brain works so well but not the brain from the other group? Why is the dividing line so thin, between the one group and the other?

It has always been my position that autism is autism. That there is no difference between high functioning and low functioning autism. In fact, I've met geniuses that can solve the most difficult math/physics problems, but that have the mental maturity of a 8-year-old. Albert Einstein himself has severe immaturity issues. (See his letter with conditions to his wife: https://thepowermoves.com/einstein-letter-to-his-wife/).

I also always say: low-functioning children are not born low-functioning. They are made low-functioning.

So, what goes on inside the brain of the comatose autists, that prevents them from becoming geniuses/savants?

That, is a very good question.

Which brings us to vortices.

Take a look at the last 30 seconds or so of this video of quantum vortices in superfluids.



And that is what I think is going on inside the brain of the comatose autists: turbulence, vortices. Their brains are still superfluid alright. They have all the potential to become super geniuses. But their brains are plagued with all that turbulence from vortices.

Mother Nature is very smart. But the only tool she has is statistics. She uses a shotgun approach. Some pellets will land within the target, most will not. Some people will become geniuses, others will not.

But we don't need to rely on Mother Nature's statistics nowadays.

Low-functioning children are made low-functioning. They are born with the same powerful brains of geniuses. If we don't develop them through their interests, establish connections, relate their bad experiences to their good experiences, then all that powerful superfluidity/superconductivity inside their brain will have no place to go, and turbulence and vortices will build up inside their brains. It's not that they were born dumb. It's just that they have not been properly developed. Sure, through chaos theory, a small fraction of these people will naturally find pathways inside their brains and they will become geniuses on their own. But we don't need to rely on Mother Nature's statistics anymore today. And that, is what we really ought to be doing.

My takeaway is to continue to encourage my children, and that I have fluidity of intelligence but a vortex in my self-esteem.

Superconductivity Analogy for the Autistic Mind. I like the analogy!

But do we really know that. Their abilities may be individually unique but the ability to transition into a savant may be very possible and the effort should be nurtured.

I am willing to explore a bit further.

But personally, I know my limitations. I mean, I've hanged around some very smart people before. A friend from college was able to memorize everyone's phone number, after being told only once. I couldn't do that, even if I came up with mnemonics. The guy didn't need any mnemonics. We worked together in some EE lab projects. This guy programmed straight in hexadecimals. He did not bother memorizing the assembly language. He was able to calculate all the memory address offsets in his head. Once, when we discovered a bug in the ROM (EEPROM) for the circuit we were designing, myself and a third teammate were about to reprogram the ROM, but this guy told us: "wait, there is not need to reprogram the ROM." He re-routed some wires. And by purely making hardware wiring modifications, he changed the circuit so that it would work with the buggy ROM to produce the desired outcome. Yep, he often preferred to solve problems via hardware, than via software. That was in my college days. In my PhD program, I hanged around with some big brains. I mean, people at the level closer to 1 in a billion. Sometimes I listened to discussion between some of the big brains (one of them was actually my roommate for a while), and it was absolutely all white noise to me. I, like so many other people nearby, we were invariably left with the "huh?" expression on our faces, while those smart guys talked and laughed and explored problems in all directions.

Even just with my children (and they are not savants), I don't have the absolute pitch ability of my daughter. I tried many times to hum a song to its correct pitch. I would succeed maybe one out of 10 times, which was basically no better than random guesses. Every time I started humming, and then checked the pitch against the piano keyboard (or with an app on my phone), I was almost always disappointed... sometimes I was so far off that it was embarrassing. And compared to my son, it has also been impossible for me to feel color synesthesia, I can't see colors in numbers/letters, not in print, not inside my head.

Don't get me wrong, I am probably not that dumb, but I am surely below one in a million. (I have a pretty good idea where I sit.) When you hang around with people that get to the level close to one in a billion, you get humbled.

- - -

So I looked a bit into "Sudden Savant Syndrome," or "Acquired Savant Syndrome." These are people that have suffered head injuries, but that all of a sudden developed extraordinary abilities. Here is one exampel: Derek Amato.



Surprisingly, Derek Amato, after his head injury, exhibited so many traits of autism.

There are not too many cases of acquired savant syndrome out there. Around 50 cases or so. It could be that these people have the autistic savant abilities all along, in their visual cortex. But that these abilities were masked out in the conscious mind, due to connections to the frontal lobe, the social part of the brain. It was only when the front and the back of the brain got somewhat disconnected, that they were finally able to reveal their hidden talents.

So, in a sense, I don't think their talents are truly "acquired." Their talents were more like "dormant" in the background. Still, it is worthwhile to dig into these examples to understand more how human brains work.

- - -

I was thinking about the "phonon" aspects of how human brains get distracted. I felt I needed an example case to study. So I chose to learn to obtain the day of the week, for any given calendar date. It was all about modular arithmetic. It's not considered anything extraordinary nowadays, plenty of young kids learn to do it. But I simply needed an example inside my head, so I could analyze why/when/how human brains get wrong answers, get distracted, why it slows down, as compared to savants.

Well, at my age, it still felt like a sort of an accomplishment, since I had never tried to learn/derive it before. So, I asked my daughter to give me some random dates. She gave me two. And in both cases I got the right answers. I would verify them with Google assistant.

I turned to my wife, and asked her to give me a random date. Then I told her, it would be a Saturday. I said, let me try to verify it with Google assistant. She told me, there was no need to verify it, it was a Saturday. I said, oh, OK, fine, but how did you know it was a Saturday? She sighed, and then told me: "Because that was our wedding day." ... Oops! Talking about being distracted...

How do you think SSRIs factor into this? Is it just my health anxiety or do they actually harm superconductivity?

There is a standard answer to that: http://www.eikonabridge.com/anxiety.pdf. Many of today's smartwatches work, too. I always find smartphones hard to use, but a combination of voice assistant (Google assistant, Siri, etc.) and something like "Google Keep" perhaps may work, too. It needs to be voice.

Take a look also at this other article, and pay attention to the Yin-Yang (Taijitu) diagram: http://www.eikonabridge.com/fun_and_facts.pdf. The Yin-Yang diagram, the "Three Poisons" (attachment, aversion, and ignorance) as described in Buddhism, all tell me that anxiety (and autism) has been solved a long long time ago. Thousands of years ago. We have just forgotten about what we once knew.

I have met a few myself. Savant abilities are individual and unique. Generally the individuals have great strengths and also great weaknesses.

I had one newbie show up who really exhibited an unusual talent. In our organization we would take 100 page performance specifications and transform them into unique specially designed test equipment capable of product evaluation. Often times the fabricated test equipment would fail. This particular employee could take the drawing package (for example 6 sheets of detailed circuitry) and lay them flat onto a table. He would scan the first drawing starting from the left side and working to the right side of the sheet; then he moved onto the next sheet. When he was scanning the 5th sheet, he would suddenly stop in the middle and point to a piece of circuitry and say this is where the problem was. And he was always right. It was in a way a remarkable superpower.

But he had a major weakness that made him incapable of designing any piece of equipment. The way he designed equipment is he would read the first page of the specification and design some circuitry and then read the next page of the specification and redesign his initial circuitry. In essence he was patching on top a patch, on top another patch, on top another patch. When he was done, the drawing package was 20 sheets instead of 6, and was so complex that even he was unable to understand why it didn’t work when it was finally built. I tried to teach him that he needed to read the entire specification first before he even started drawing the circuitry but he would have none of it.



I can go along with that. When I was in elementary school I considered myself average in intelligence maybe even a little on the low side. But then the Junior High School years hit and I experienced 3 years of severe bullying. I clammed up and resisted the best I could and never allowed myself to be broken. I blended in better in High School and intellectually I became like a rocket in college. The difference was that I had learned a trick. Under stress I am able to control my outer brain, the social brain. I can completely turn off the emotional brain that controls fear, hate, rage, helplessness and terror. Completely shut it down. Then spin up my analytical brain, supercharge it. I use my analytical brain to derive the solution to the current dilemma. And then I implement the best choice. This ability is a form of disassociation, similar to daydreaming.

One can choose to fall into a daydream. One can also choose to disassociate elements of one's brain (the analytical and the emotional brain). And I suspect this is one of the elements that distinguishes savant abilities.

Here is a video that has recently gone around the world.



I understand this might be hard to watch for some people on the spectrum. I have sympathy on the poor guy. I mean, frankly, if you put regular people through this exercise, I would think at least 90% of people would panic just like the poor guy. So, it's understandable. Of course, in the military they would provide some training before the actual jumping.

I am not paying attention to that poor guy, I am paying attention to the other cadets. Think about it. Everyone has fear of jumping out of a plane. But, how come the other guys (and at least one gal) were able to do it?

There were clearly two competing forces: (1) the natural reflex of fear from survival instinct, (2) the rational mind that told you it was OK to jump.

For the other cadets, their reasoning skills overcame their fear.

- - -

Autism has a plethora of manifestations. Lack of eye contact, absence of speech for some, ADHD, tantrums/meltdowns, sensory issues, rigidity issues, anxiety, etc. We tend to look at all these manifestations as abnormal, and not simply as children-being-children. So, we mount psychological and pharmaceutical warfare to combat those manifestations. In the process, we forget to develop the reasoning skills of the children. We think that we need to fix all those other issues before the children can develop "normally," which is totally and completely BS. That's how we create low-functioning autistic people. In particular, children don't need to learn to talk, at all, for their brain to develop. Don't people remember the case of Helen Keller? Don't we have deaf-mute students in our society? They surely develop very well, even without any speech. My son was non-verbal, extremely hyperactive when he was young, his attention span did not last beyond 2 or 3 seconds, he had zero eye contact, couldn't focus his eyes on any pictures, let alone read any letters. Anyone would think they needed to fix my son's ADHD first. BS. Those 2 or 3 seconds were plenty enough for me to teach him a whole bunch of skills, including reading. Before he was 3 years old, he was already reading books.

We forget that, once a person acquires reasoning skills, actually all the problematic issues can be handled, from another level. A bit like jumping out of an airplane.

Anxiety, is no different. What you need is simply a rational mind, and read through those articles I have linked, and put those steps there to action.

People really need to have faith that the children are perfectly fine. The mental illness and intellectual disability are completely on the other side.

I checked some websites, and guess what? People also talk about front and back of the brain, just like what I said.

But even more interesting is this video:



Especially the last guy (Leslie Lemke), the pianist with cerebral palsy. Upon hearing a new piece of music only once, he was able to reproduce it immediately.

All these phenomena can only be explained, if we assume that the brain effectively has multiple people living inside it. That is, our consciousness, our conscious personality, is just one of the "people" living inside our brain. We, are a collection of organisms. We are led to believe that we are one single entity, but that is not true. We are more like a company, with many employees. The CEO makes the speech and does the outside business deals, but the CEO is not really fully aware of what each employee is doing. So, you ask many of these savant people how they manage to do what they do, and they cannot give you an answer. It's like asking the CEO of a company (say, Tim Cook) how an iPhone is assembled or manufactured, and he won't know the answer. I know from personal experience: I've asked repeatedly one of these savant students to provide explanation on how he achieved his results, and he wouldn't give us an explanation. Now I know that it's not that he did not want to give us explanations, it was that he himself couldn't give us an explanation. I invite people to watch the movie about Srinivasa Ramanujan ("The Man Who Knew Infinity"). Ramanujan could derive unbelievably complex and elegant mathematical results, yet he was not able to explain the steps to G. H. Hardy, his host and collaborator in Trinity College, Cambridge. This irked Hardy to no end. Now we know why Ramanujan couldn't provide an answer to the detailed steps of his derivation: because his conscious self is but just one person inside his brain: there are probably 10 more people inside his brain! Given all these phenomena, we must accept that, at least for some people, and maybe for all people, we effectively have multiple "workers" or "people" inside our brains, working hard. Our conscious self is but just one of these people inside our brains.

We have the illusion that each one of us is just one person. We are wrong. We have been wrong since the early dawns of civilization. Our consciousness (and the social part) somehow is impeding us to reach out to the other employees inside our brain. I mean, look at professional pianists. A serious pianist nowadays has a pretty tough life: they have to start learning piano from age 2 or so, practice 10+ hours a day, go to top universities/conservatories or directly to Vienna, play piano non-stop day after day. Only then, can they become proficient piano players by today's standards. Yet, you see these savants: they can play really complex piano music overnight. They can replay a piece upon hearing it only once. I mean, that's the difference between when you only have access to your CEO, and when you have direct access to your engineers!

I am not sure whether this is a universal phenomenon, but it surely looks like for autistic people, we are one step closer to be able to interact with the "engineers" inside our companies. Scary, but all this is really exciting stuff, and has direct relevance to the development of modern AI (artificial intelligence).

As I have always said, autism is boring, it's kind of trivial. All the issues have been solved, anyway, thousands of years ago. Nothing new or exciting. But, understanding autism is an important stepping stone towards the understanding of human brain. I compare it to Gram staining (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gram_stain), which allows us to see bacteria better. Understanding autism allows us to understand human brain better.

It all of a sudden hit me... that is just the "Two-Fluid Model"!

The funny thing about a superfluid (like He4) is that it's kinds of paradoxical. On the one hand, it can flow through narrow pipes with zero viscosity, yet if you let a torsion pendulum rotate in it, the pendulum does slow down, meaning that it can exhibit viscosity. To solve this dilemma, Laszlo Tisza and Lev Landau came up with a "Two-Fluid Model" to explain the macroscopic behavior of superfluids. In this picture, we can think of the superfluid as being made up of two fluids: one normal component, and another one that is truly superfluid (and carries zero entropy, meaning it can't get excited). It's not like there are really two fluids, it's just that it behaves like a mixture of two fluids.

So, it is understandable that inside our brains, our mind would behave like two people. One component reacts to phonons and corresponds to the conscious part, another component doesn't react to phonons and corresponds to the savant part. Isn't it amazing that we are starting to understand where the savant abilities come from?

Before I forget, let me talk about alpha (and theta) waves.

Human reaction time is typically 0.15~0.25 seconds. If we view it as one cycle for input and another cycle for output, then we are talking about 0.075~0.125 seconds, or, in terms of frequency, 8~13 [Hz].

Brain's alpha waves have frequencies in the range 8~12 [Hz], which matches almost perfectly with the human reaction time.

See also this paper on alpha and theta waves (4~7 [Hz]) and central executive functions.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Manuel_Schabus/publication/7774968_Fronto-parietal_EEG_coherence_in_theta_and_upper_alpha_reflect_central_executive_functions_of_working_memory/links/5a25a6ea0f7e9b71dd09cb06/Fronto-parietal-EEG-coherence-in-theta-and-upper-alpha-reflect-central-executive-functions-of-working-memory.pdf

These low-frequency waves reflects thinking processes, crucial for social aspects. They are the "phonons" that bounce back and forth between the front and the back (visual cortex) of the brain. For neurotypical people, single neurons in the back of the brain capture these phonons, and return some response, as phonons as well. It's a bit like a scattering experiment between a fermion (single-neuron) and a phonon (alpha~theta wave). The point is, neurotypical people respond well to social (and speech) signals, and return appropriate signals as well.

In the autistic mind, the unit of information processing is no longer a single-neuron. It's not a "fermion" anymore. Instead, due to the tight coupling between near-by neurons (fermions), the unit of information processing is now a cluster of neurons (~"bosons"). Moreover, these bosons like to interact with each other, behaving like superfluid. Bosons hold hands with each other. They work in gigantic blocks. I usually describe this coherence phenomenon with the picture of a giant sequoia tree. You touch any part of the tree, and the whole tree feels it.



In comparison, the neurotypical brain is more like an alfalfa grass field. The coupling between the grass strands is rather weak.



So, sequoia trees and alfalfa fields. Those are the two components in the two-fluid model.

Phonons don't couple to the bosons. You send a phonon to the superfluid, and nothing happens. It's impossible for a single phonon to "kick" the bosons of a superfluid, because the bosons are holding hands and act as a single block. These means autistic people won't respond to social cues.

How to develop autistic people so that they can respond to social cues and gain executive functions? Well, that's what modulation is all about. You modulate those signals that you want the autistic children to pick up, into their favorite activities. So, at one moment, the phonon is attached to the fermion (neuron) before it holds hands with other fermions to become a boson. Similarly, the boson splits, virtually, into fermions, allowing them to return a phonon. That is, to first order, sure, there is no interaction between bosons and phonons. But at higher order, it becomes possible for phonons and bosons to interact, indirectly. You kind of develop a two-fluid model of Tisza and Landau. One part of the fluid remains superfluid, and the other part can now respond to phonons. And that's the case of well-developed, high-functioning autistic people. In the two-fluid model, only one fluid is responding to the phonons: that's the part that we are conscious of. The other fluid, the superfluid part, contains savant abilities, and is disconnected to the phonons, so, disconnected from our consciousness. The most interesting part is, in the two-fluid model, the underlying fermions (neurons) actually double work for both fluids. That is, you can't really separate the two fluids. In reality the fermions (neurons) are part of both fluids, at the same time. That is the most intriguing part of the two-fluid model. What does this mean? This means that, although we cannot talk directly to the savant part of our brain, we should still be able to interact with it indirectly.

I think, for the vanilla type of autistic people, our brain is disrupted into small patches while we were growing up. Sure, we do have some superfluid patches, but they are like one ounce here and another ounce there. Our superfluid spots are not fully connected. Our boson networks are split into small local networks, whereas true savants have large, global boson networks.

More complicated is the case of low-functioning autistic people. Their superfluid part is full of vortices and turbulence. Sure, a phonon may hit a vortex, but the turbulence in vortex-vortex interactions lead to dissipation, and no coherent signal is returned.

Like the baobab trees in The Little Prince story, the best thing to do is to deal with them when they are still little weeds. That means you develop your children early on, from their interests. When you wait for too long, the baobab trees may end up destroying your planet. Baobab trees are a good analogy for vortices and turbulence inside the brains of low-functioning autistic people. We autistic people all have some baobab trees, but hey, it's two sides to the same coin: by having a superfluid component, we also have powerful brains. The key is to keep the baobab trees under control.



Is there a way of getting rid of the baobab trees when they are already big? I wish I knew. I would say, developing a person from their interests (by expanding their skill sets and knowledge areas) is still the best route to go, no matter their age. Pull, not push. Connect also their bad moments to their good moments, and vice-versa.

The autistic brain is a strategic reserve of any developed country. It's something to hold dear and treasure. I don't know about you guys, whenever I meet low-functioning children, I still get excited. I just wish the adults in our society were smarter.

I have been exploring stress relief recently. One of the methods used to vent stress is low frequency vibration. This is the approach that animals use to vent unused stress energy. Quoting from the book by David Berceli called "The Revolutionary Trauma Release Process":

The first serious application of vibrational therapy on humans was by Russian scientist Vladimir Nazarov in the 1970's on gymnasts in training for the Olympics. Since then numerous studies have demonstrated that low-amplitude and low-frequency mechanical stimulation of the neuromuscular system has positive effects on athletic performance. For many years it was primarily used by elite athletes to help increase the strength and coordination of the musculoskeletal and nervous systems, as well as to increase the rate at which athletic injuries healed.

Over time, vibrational therapy has developed as a serious field of research known as Biomechanics Stimulation. It is used in physical therapy and rehabilitation programs to correct restricted body mobility, range of motion, the coordination of musculoskeletal and nervous systems, and to accelerate the rate at which injuries heal.

This research has demonstrated the exposure to vibration frequencies between 20-50 Hz increases bone density in animals. It's also helpful with pain relief and in the healing of tendons and muscles. Vibrational stimulation between 50-150 Hz has been found to relieve suffering in 82% of person's with acute and chronic pain.

Also your discussion reminds me of one of the characteristics of an INTJ personality.

As another INTJ has said:
“I learn quickly, sometimes intuitively. I can ride a motorcycle, go to sleep, play a computer game or otherwise ‘turn off’ active thinking, and come back and sit down and know exactly how to solve extremely complex problems. It's not that I didn't think about it, but instead my mind thought about it for me.”

So from my perspective, the outer brain called the social brain is comprised of two components. These are the emotional brain and the analytical brain. Humans have both components and use both components. NTs rely more on the emotional side where Aspies if they develop properly will rely more on their analytical side.

I get that. Interesting analogies all around (fluid dynamics and plants).



Sign me up for stress relief.

So, if an Aspie is INFJ? Did I develop properly? Yes: I rely more on Feeling, and have high Analytical clout. It's been a great combination for me in customer-facing design. I have drive to meet customer needs (feel good) and I know how to do it (technical). Too bad the new NT management can't stand the "high standards" I have (and my quirks). Which refers back to low-frequency vibration needs...

Well it depends. Do you feel good about yourself. If the answer is yes, then you did develop properly. There are differences between male and female Aspies.

Then obtain a copy of the book "The Revolutionary Trauma Release Process" by David Berceli. It contains a step by step instructions with photographs of the process.

I thought you meant "develop properly" was that an Aspie relied more on Thinking than Feeling, as opposed to that "develop properly" means good self esteem. In either case the answer is "no" for me. Shucks.

I am #3 on the library hold list for the book. Thanks for the recommendation!

Some words... Some of these were the words I've been looking for... FOR SO LONG.
Someone else finally have the some of the words -- on why I don't have anxiety issues so most of my life and what I've stumbled upon during my late teenage years.

Instead of recording and other people, I got something else -- something more of an internal 'reminder' than external.
Channeling part made too much sense. If only I can be specific on how... I don't have the words, and I still suck at analogies on how to describe these things. I do not have the vocabularies -- and someone else finally does.

How come I never noticed this thread sooner????

@Edna3362, thank you for drawing my attention back to @eikonabridge's link. Encouraging.