Echo Chamber

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A year or two ago, knowing nothing about AS, in speech class, I was asked to describe myself. I think I accidentally came up with an interesting description of AS: my mind is like an echo chamber.

As I am self-diagnosed, I am curious as to whether this description is valid for many of you.

I would also be interested in any other models you have to describe it.

[quote="hrmpk"]A year or two ago, knowing nothing about AS, in speech class, I was asked to describe myself. I think I accidentally came up with an interesting description of AS: my mind is like an echo chamber.

As I am self-diagnosed, I am curious as to whether this description is valid for many of you.

I would also be interested in any other models you have to describe it.[/quote

I am not sure what you mean. Could you give examples and say more about it?

ruveyn

Like when a person says something to you, it's not over when they stop talking, but the processing continues for a period of time wherein what they said is replayed. And memories come back randomly, from random points in my life, often with little connection to what I'm doing, but almost in their original form, just weaker, like an echo. Even our behaviors are like echos sometimes.

That kinda describes how mine works from time to time. Just curious, when something important happens, does your mind tend to replay it over and over for hours, sometimes days, on end?

Yes, though more specifically I would call it trauma...I've replayed the worst ones for my whole life, giving me random spasms of self-hatred. So I'm kind of afraid I'm mixing this up with some other issues I have. But also, I'm curious as to whether this could be related to a basic neurological difference we have from NT's. Not that any such theory would be useful, original, or provable; I simply want to hypothesize.

I get this with images too. If I see something that catches my eye it kind of loops over and over after it's passed and mingles with what I'm supposed to be paying attention to in the present. I don't know if this happens to NTs or not. My perceptual 'world' is like one big echoing blurry mish-mash of past and present sensations.

i get that sometimes too, random things just replay in my head, sometimes just one word that came outta nowhere. The only way I found to stop it is to write it down on paper. Useful when something's made me sad.

I've always thought of it as having a simulator mind. Scenarios play out, new information is being added, old information recalled . . . sometimes its audio only, sometimes its like a movie.

For me, things replay just long enough to be matched up with other thoughts. It sometimes feels like my thoughts are cataloged and cross indexed so they get corrected by new information. When things don't match up it really bothers me until I figure it out. A lot of things just end up making me wonder.

I read this post earlier and I've been thinking about it all day.

Yes, I live in an echo chamber.

When I'm given rapid fire verbal input, such as instructions on the job, the verbal sounds bounce around in my head for several seconds before I can decipher the meaning and put it in context. Through long practice, I've learned ways of covering up for the time delay. Asking someone to 'say again' is one of the best ways to get out of it. Another is to act like I'm finishing up something else before I'm able to get to their question. It buys me precious time. Unfortunately, I sometimes still get caught red-minded.

Yupyup. That's a good way to put it.

This kind of echo is what makes casual conversation difficult for me sometimes.

That's the same way my mind works, as well.

Today, I have come to the tentative conclusion that Aspergers is not a learning disorder or a developmental disorder, but rather an inability to focus on the present. We live entirely based on our memory, and skip the actual experiencing part that NT's seem to have. I have yet to consider a scenario that this model cannot explain.

Take for example, jokes. If I consider a joke to be funny, I laugh at it about a second later than most people, I tend to keep laughing unless I suppress it, and I laugh whenever I remember the joke.

More generally, this explains why we are bad at things requiring fast response times, such as talking, driving, certain card games, etc. while not suffering impairment in anything based on memory, except in the case of the memories that arise from this NT experiencing thing.

my mind is like a Rube Goldberg machine.

maybe we are telling the same story here, using different metaphors.

I'm sorry to be horribly pedantic, but we can't skip the experiencing part, because then we'd have nothing to remember.

We might well have more problems detaching ourselves from the echoes... I couldn't say whether NTs experience the echo chamber phenomenon or not. Can't say that this is purely an Aspie experience.

I agree with you that Aspies do seem to have a 'problem' with rhythm... I always seem slightly behind the NTs in most things. From what I've seen, we tend to need to process things in a way that takes more time and effort, hence the delay.

I recommend various forms of meditation to become either or both:

1. More able to focus on phenomena arising in the present, and not be distracted by internal memory echoes.

2. More able to determine when one is lost in the 'tape loops' (that's common vernacular in certain Buddhist circles, and quite appropriate here - I'm thinking of tape echo machines) and more able to let them go at inception, or as soon as is useful.