Cognitively erratic-anyone ?.

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Much has been said about the spiky profiles we tend to have. I regard myself as being 'cognitively erratic'. When it comes to my ability to think I can go from near brilliance to, comparatively speaking, barely mediocre from one day to the next. I think I've always been like that. Is that typical for autistic people I wonder? It matters very little at my age, but I'm curious nonetheless.

That was me all the school years - anything from super gifted to unable to process my direct surroundings. In high school, some teachers were sure I was doing drugs.
Today, I interpret the "low days" as partial shutdowns. They often correlated with poor sleep.

Anxiety seems to be a factor with me.

I think I'm the same. It shocks people that some days I'm brilliant, others I'm in a fog. I am very changeable.

Mine seems to be either tied to my emotions and my hormones.
And I'm fricking tired of it.

Having to wait for those lucky days my body stop BSing. Then those days had gone rarer and rarer...

My best was over 3 years ago for a straight week of feeling and being "myself", not the stagnating unmanageable dysfunctional incompetent helpless sh*t that nothing what I do is right or in progress.

Dismissed as either autism or aging.
No one's considering alternatives, and me bringing up "alternatives" in hopes of curing whatever the heck this was as some form of 'excuse problem'.

I didn't have this as a child to be honest, even if my mood fluctuates, even sleep deprivation was nothing.
I started having this sometime on going adulthood, or as early as puberty.

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I had no consistency where I could learn something in school and then the next lesson have to completely start again as if I had never been in the first lesson which really puzzled some of my teachers. I remember a maths teacher who taught my Dad and went on to teach both my brothers (Youngest brother is 18 years younger than me so we had a theory that this maths teacher never dies and has always been there as to me he did not seem to age!), as at a parents evening in secondary school he said "I don't get it. I sit with him and makes sure he understands and he grasps it and can do it himself, and yet next lesson I have to teach it to him all over again."
I am one who either had low marks or very high marks in maths and I could not tell you what I did different, and it puzzled the school at times as to what maths set (Class level) I should be in as my results went from one extreme to the other. Many years later I workrd it out, as if I can "Surface think" so I do not hve to think deep I can calculate it as numbers, but if I need to deep think, I have to do it in pictures which involve a series of dots in patterns, and it is why I could (Most of the time) answer the sums or equasions correctly but I could not say how I did it as another maths teacher I later had was trying to puzzle how I think and back then I could not explain it as I was not thinking in numbers but using visible patterns of pictures in my mind and where I could mess up is these patterns were in different numerical bases which I had to convert adding an extra level to do in my mind to work it out. (I realized this when I had to do a bit of computer programming in binary and hexadecimal and also while doing electronics in college, which one would assume I would be good at, but unfortunately the bases I use in my mind are different bases so it just adds to the confusion.

When it came to English, I was found to have a very limited and narrowed vocabulary, but I was able to use the narrow vocabulary very effectively so only some teachers noticed.
Other languages I was not very good and never really did well despite my best efforts in trying. Had enough issues with English! Haha!

It was the more logical and practical aspects of design I could do, and I could think up designs and ideas in my mind.

Also as I am older I recognize that I am a very deep but slow processor and I pick up on patterns in a sort of 3D way in things that people don't see, so I can sift through things until I find answers. A bit like when a super computer was put to work on the question of what is the meaning to life and about a year or two later it said it was the number six (Or something like that? Heard about it from somewhere years ago). I can be churning away at solutions for a few years on the same question before I find the answer, where to others they just come up with a pre-concieved answer having never thought about it for themselves... Which is very noticable with some just don't see things beyond what they are told (Not saying that to be critical. Just saying that we all think in different ways and nothing wrong with learning from others.. Is just I used to assume that others could do their own years of mental sifting and say things based on their evential conclusions, without just repeating what they themselves had been taught).

It's very dependent on sleep. During the recent heat wave I was loosing keys, wallet, phone, couldn't think straight. When the weather cooled down I could sleep better and keep on top of things better.

This is deeply relatable. Spiky profile, narrow ideal operating range and occasional tendency to fail to apply knowledge or ways of thinking I already possess to novel problems, especially if I don't stop and catch that it's happening.

I also have a very spiky profile. I'm really good at some things and I'm horrible at other things.

I also have had a dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system for about two thirds of my life at this point. That is known to cause brain fog and stuff like that so much of the time it is unrelated to my autism.

Hmmm sounds relatable.

I tend to end up over-connecting ideas or just end up processing my surroundings way much greater intensity, at the expensive relevant information.
My brain has this this problem of hyping up certain things, over others, and obviously it takes away my conscious focus from things. There is only so many things the mind can focus on at anyone time.

For me it might be partially subconscious process as well that takes away from my conscious processing power.

For instance trying to explain this subjective experience on this post, I try to think of some concrete examples where it is applicable and how I experience, it and without any joy I realized I am experiencing it just now .

Suddenly I just start thinking about stuff and my mind just goes on its merry way.

For me dealing with new information is not a big deal if I know enough and I am clear in before I am doing something what information is relevant and so on.

However integrating new information is quite a challenge and that means processing things at your feet instantly and synthesizing them. Which as far as I know is either hit and miss.

If I am overwhelmed its miss, if I am OK its less likely I miss the relevant information.

Realistically though, its OK, because its normal to certain degree.

Idk sometimes I feel smart and sometimes I don't know what is wrong with my brain. Idk I kind of wish I could be like a vulcan from star trek and just keep my emotions in check at all times, and sometimes I feel I can emulate that a bit. But then other times the emotions overtake things and I act in ways I wish I hadn't after the fact.

I have been this way all my life. I learned when I was seeking diagnosis (through neurological testing) that I have only 25th percentile visual processing and 35th percentile audio processing, so anything I see in motion or hear is interpreted and recorded very unreliably. In places and situations where lots is going on visually and noisy, I miss a lot! I did not understand why I did so poorly in school in the early years but became brilliant and gifted suddenly when I got to middle school. Once I was diagnosed, I could understand that my only strength is reading and writing. I was given homework beginning in middle school , to read chapters and answer the questions in the book in writing. I was given written tests about things I read. I have almost perfect recall of anything I read. That was a huge "aha" discovery once I began to try to understand my life in context of autism having worked "behind the scenes" all those years.

Yes my brain's apparent strength varies a lot depending on the particular challenge. I'm often capable of impressive feats of thinking when I'm able to proceed in my own way and at my own pace. But my brain can easily become very confused when the task or the working conditions aren't a good fit for me. For example, understanding college work was a huge challenge, and I often got poor results in exams, but at the same time (the early 1970s) I was making a multi-track tape recorder from ordinary domestic tape recorders, and that project worked, even though I had almost no formal training in electronics.

And sometimes when I wake up I feel dippy for hours, so much so that if I have anything complicated and important to do, I try to create a simple step-by-step task list the day before, so I can just follow that robotically. If I'm clever enough to write such a list, why aren't I clever enough to be able to do without it?

Today is a good day cognition wise. I have a slight(putting it mildly!) autistic obsession with SloBRAIN



On a bad day the R.T.S.D will be in the 50s ,for more than a few attempts. I achieved my best ever result today.