What do you think that Asperger's really is?

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Throughout my life, I've been wondering how the mind worked, and mine, specifically. I think that I've got a decent idea of how the brain works. I think that the nervous system started out evolutionarily as a simple way for an organism to react to its environment. Imagine a jellyfish. If it feels something with its tentacles, it grabs and tries to eat it. All that is needed is for a sensor neuron to activate and transmit to the muscle activation neurons for them to grab. Nice and simple. As evolution marched on, layer upon layer of neuron activity was added. So instead of just simply grabbing your pray, an animal can decide whether or not to do so, or how much muscle contraction is ideal, or how to jump up on a rock. Also, the system of interconnected neurons became able to deal with many more types of sensory information. Then, instead of using neurons which mean something specifically, neuron systems developed that were able to abstract the general state of all the neurons. So now there are neurons which correspond to being happy and sad and lonely, etc., which allow an animal to have social interaction that means more than just "I'm hungry, lets hunt" or "I'm horny". They can play and understand they are just playing. It is some sort of abstract thing that corresponds to nothing concrete in nature. Humans added a few more emotions, especially the idea that something can be consistent and logical, and added the ability to directly communicate their abstractions. In other words, animal play games, but are not particularly good at communicating this math equation they came up with.

Now lets examine how people can think. I believe that there are basically three ways of thinking, corresponding with how much information each can process from least to most: extrapolation/interpolation, emotion, and logic. Extrapolation is the art of taking a few data points and predicting what should happen under new conditions and interpolation does the same thing but for intermediate conditions. Logic is good at looking at a lot of information and picking out a few particularly telling or important pieces of information and using sophisticated reasoning to understand how they all fit together. The last one I undertand least is emotion, which I believe makes arbitrary relations from certain groups of data points to certain feelings, emotions, or concepts. The reason I feel that way is that I feel that they correspond to three types of learning: learning by examining history up to the current point in incremental steps (interpolation/extrapolation), making arbitrary relations between concepts and information and sensation (emotion), and learning by looking at the most abstract form and filling in the gaps between abstract and experiment (logic). An example for each would be:

Interpolation/extrapolation: Since every other time I flipped the light switch up, the lights will turn on when I flip it up again.
Emotion: The light switch turns on and off the light, or The light switch controls the light.
Logic: The switch utilizes the laws of physics to open or close the circuit. On the other end of the circuit is a light that heats up to a temperature that causes the filament to emit light in the visible spectrum.

Notice how the first explanation is the least telling. It does not define an explicit relationship between the switch and the lights, but does notice that if you wanted to turn on the light, flipping the switch is a good bet. It the light doesn't turn on, then extrapolation implies that maybe the way you are extrapolating it is wrong: maybe the light will not actually turn on when the switch is flipped. Emotion says that the light is directly controlled by the switch and implies that the switch dominates the light. Since emotion is probably primarily designed as a social mechanism, it imposes emotion (dominance in this case) to the system. Notice that this doesn't really mean anything either anymore than extrapolation does, but it does imply that if the light does not turn on when you flip the switch, the bulb is not submitting and you should get angry at it since you obviously dominate the switch, which dominates the bulb. This anger, however, does encourage you to do something like change the bulb, or if you take the emotion a little neurotically, you would remain angry at the bulb and smash it. Yay, smashing is fun. Lastly, logic probes the issue a bit more and explains exactly why the bulb turns on when you flip the switch and what options are available if that doesn't happen. If the light doesn't turn on, maybe it is the power company that is the weak link and you should turn on your backup generator or call them. Or maybe you should buy a bulb that has a longer MTBF (mean time between failures) so that the bulb more consistently turns on when you flip the switch.

I believe that what is most human about people in general is that we play a very delicate balance between logic and emotion. Since not only does emotion affect how you act externally, but internally as well. Imagine that I'm attacked by a horde of mongol warriors while in the middle of a deep thought in a forest. I would prefer to finish my thought, but my emotions would tell me that that is a bad idea, for obvious reasons. So emotion saved me from Ghengis Kahn. But move to a restaurant that you are manager at where a kitchen worker who is not particularly bright yells across the dining room "We're out of cold water!". You could use your emotions and panic, but you use your logic instead and yell across "Is there any hot water left?" and when he yells "Yea!" you realize that you didn't need your emotions at all. (Story taken from a real life story my boss told me . It is that fine ability to balance use of emotion and logic that allow a human to be human, as well as communicating completely abstract ideas.

I know that there are many forms of Aspergers, it is a spectrum disorder, and I think that mine is a result of lack of communication between the emotional side of my brain and the logical parts. So that if a mongol horde surrounded me, I wouldn't notice that they are threatening, or I might panic and not be able to use any sort of logic to come up with a plan. But I think that an NT would be able to notice the threat (if they were sufficiently experienced) and utilize their emotion to push their rational mind to formulate a simple plan to get out of the bad situation. And if a situation requires a response to several different events that seem to have equal importance, emotion allow you to pick when you have that kind of deadlock. I remember that at work one time, all at once I was in a position to take money from someone at the register, take the phone, and wrap up a hoagie (I work at a sub shop) and I couldn't pick a thing to do because they seemed equally important and couldn't tell someone to help because I was on the verge of panic. Someone notice and we worked through it, and I do have enough control over myself that I rarely explode in even terrible situations (I see it as having enough communication between my emotions and my logic that my emotions can limit me from having a blowup), but it was a hard situation that would be easier for an NT.

So I believe that the lack of rational and emotional communication in my brain affects me in a way that could be considered to be Asperger's. It results in me not understanding the game very well while it is going on, but if I can remove myself from it I can understand it pretty well. It allow me to still empathize and to display enough emotion that I look fairly NT. But my emotions are not trained that well to my environment due to the lack of communication so I have to work it out logically to try to train myself emotionally. The same would happen if an NT was not given enough social interaction to learn it well. But with me, I can usually undo the stuff I learned quite easily, while NT who learn, for example, improper social interaction will not understand why people don't interact well with them since they don't think about themselved enough. It does make me quite bad at maintenance things like repetitive activities since emotions also have an effect that they push you toward "good" behavior and away from "bad" behavior. That's why psychopaths repeat bad behavior because in their mind, the "good" or pleasure or whatever emotion is associated with it.

But since Asperger's is a spectrum disorder, I'm sure there are a variety of things that can cause similar effects. But I suspect they would all correspond with their own specific type of Aspergers. I believe that Aspergers is just a different way of thinking that is not particularly suited for society, leading people to label some as insane. Psychopaths are also not particularly well suited to society, so they are considered insane as well. And people on LSD are the same way.

But the awesome advantage to my shifted balance between logic and emotion is that I see a lot of things that others don't see and can be much more than my environment. You see, I believe that pure emotion, due to the requirement that it needs some sort of behavior training, can never result in it never being more than its environment. But being able to think about what you are doing allows you to do more than just a part of the system. You can use logic to step out of the system for a minute and see what is really going on.

Just remember, I am a scientist (or at least think that way) and admit that this is only a hypothesis with a little backing in experience. But I've done my best to back it up with various examples and think it is fairly reasonable. But it is very easy to be wrong and very hard to be right, but people have still not figured the brain out too well. I mean, this borders on philosophy, which can't even be wrong! Anyhoo, I hope you find it interesting.

An sorry if you saw the duplicate posts. WrongPlanet went wonky and I wound up posting several times.

Have a read of this book, 'On Intelligence' by Jeff Hawkins + co :
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0805074562/002-8535483-1058446?v=glance&n=283155

If you're interested in how the brain could possibly work, this book has a pretty strong, interesting and well presented theorys.

A great read for brain lovers

Autism May be Caused by an Immune System Response to a Virus.

Same story again.

i find it strange that the brain trys to figure out how its self works

one train of thought could be it evolved from some situation which benefited possibly less emotional possibly more logical creatures, or it might just be a random blip in our DNA which didnt affect those individuals enough to kill it off, assuming its a genetic thing. Theres probly many possible reasons for aspergers.