The Construct of Asperger's Syndrome

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MAN ON THE MOON

I will be going for another round of surgery next week. They will try and fix me. It turns out that my heart beats in non-uniform ways. Occasionally it will take off running for no reason at all. So this calls for some heart surgery.

Thanks.

So let's see. I need to go back on topic.

Humans are rather unique individuals because we possess four brains. Most people use parts of their four brains intermittently throughout the day. (At least that is what I am being told.)

But there exists a small group of humans that were damaged along the way. We never made it to this transition point in human development. We are Aspies.

In human development our brains developed from the time of conception. Prior to birth, we were an asexual being with a unique brain. (Asexuality is the lack of sexual attraction to others, or low or absent interest in or desire for sexual activity.) Jill Bolte Taylor in her book Whole Brain Living describes these individuals as Character 4's. They are very unique individuals because they possessed our knowledge before we were born. She then goes on to describe Character 3's which she uses the term PigPen.
Character 1 - Helen
Character 2 - Abby
Character 3 - Pigpen
Character 4 - Queen Toad
In my case at the age of around 3 years old, I sustained severe brain damage. At around 3 years, I was probably around 99% through the development stage. At this age my Character 3 and Character 4 that were developed in the right side of my brain structure were firmly in place during my sleep state. (REM and NREM sleep) My Character 1 and 2 were my brains that occupied my awake state. So because of my brain injury that severely damaged my left side of my brain. My brain did a flip. My right side decided to step in and substitute for the loss.

Character's 3 and 4 have the ability to do this transfer. But it takes some work and all the pieces are not developed or in place. But prior to the age of around 12, the two sides (left and right) of our brain are not completely tied together.

So for me, being a Character 3 (existing in a daytime environment) prior to the age of 12 produced little hardship. It was only in my young teens after children became young adults, that it became apparent that I was a little different. As a result I sustained 3 years of mental and physical attacks by my peers (young boys).

BUT What doesn't kill you makes your stronger.


But I was able to survive and quickly recover from the damage that they tried to instill in me. And life became good. I was still a child but I lived in an adult world. It was rather easy to do. I just grew a mustache and everyone then automatically came to the conclusion that I was a fully developed adult.

The interesting thing about Character 3s is that we exist in a truly giant world. For us dreams and reality are merged together. Because of that we have the power to change the WORLD.

I have begun taking classes for STROKE victims. Since COVID things have been pretty chaotic (in a state of complete confusion and disorder) in getting classes to recover from a stroke. I have made a lot of progress on my own and want to share it with the rest of the group.

Anyways, here is something VERY, VERY, VERY, VERY important.

We have multiple brains. On one side of the skull our brain has learned to communicate with the spoken language. But on the other side of the brain we have learned how to communicate with SONGS.

So even though I lost my ability to talk to others after my stroke because I lost ALL of my words, the other side still retained a number of words. They were the words from songs. Generally these are words that we learned when we were children. These were the songs that we sung when we were small. THESE WORDS SURVIVED AFTER MY SEVERE STROKE. They became the basis for me to RECOVER.

So if you ever come across a stoke victim, one who lost their words, try singing to them. Sing a song that they learned when they were around the age of 6.

I met a woman who suffered a stroke. She said that she remembered words in French. She lost all her English words. Well she was born in France and moved to the States and then English became her dominant language. So what she experienced was the words she grew up with when she was a young child - FRENCH WORDS.

For me it was words like Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious used in the movie Mary Poppins.

Or the songs from

We're Off to See the Wizard



Somewhere Over the Rainbow

I like you Jimmy, you are an interesting person. It is very nice reading what you write about.

Thanks Trachea

The concept of 4 brain theory by Jill Bolte Taylor in her book Whole Brain Living that is very interesting because it explains why I (and many Aspies) are different than NTs. In my case it was because I died when I was 3 years old. I was attacked by a large bull. I weighed less than 20 pounds and the bull weighed over 1,000. I died. It was the left side of my brain that died. It was almost like being attacked by a dinosaur. But my right side was given the option "Live or Die, your choice?". And I chose to live. The person that came back from the attack was a totally different person that existed prior to the attack. It was my right side of my brain.

When I look back and analyze the changes that took place after the brain flip (between the right and left sides of my brain). One thing really stands out. I became fearless.

One of the duties of my right hand brain (before I died when I was 3 years old) was to take all the things that occurred during the day (short term memory), choose the important stuff and file it away in (long term memory). But there was a final step. I had to erase all the data from short term memory. Otherwise the short term storage area would be overfilled, data would be lost, and the daytime brain would wake up with a severe headache and would not experience A GOOD NIGHTS SLEEP. That is what I did at age 3 every night before I experienced my dinosaur attack that killed my primary daytime brains (as Jill would define my characters 1 and 2 that existed on the left half of my skull).

There is a plus side to this. I suffered a massive stroke a year and a half ago. Very severe damage, one that normally is a life ender. But I am back. It is almost like being bullet proof. My body knew what steps to follow to fix me and it went right to work. (This is something like a repeat performance.)

(Important Side Note: After my stroke I tend to repeat things. You are not seeing that I am getting forgetful. Rather you are seeing my original brain doing its normal nighttime job. But I am having problems storing data in its right location.)

I find the name of this website to be rather interesting. WRONG PLANET.
It is very fitting. It is the way we feel. It is almost like we are living on the wrong planet.
Why is this?

I will explain this. If you look in the human skull, it has two sides. The left side is dominant. It is our daytime brain and it controls the body because it has some extra tissue that make it the leader. We are the subordinate right side. Somewhere along our lifetime either before we were born or before we transitioned between childhood and adulthood, our dominant left died and we made the decision to step in and continue living. It was a hard decision to make and many of our idiosyncrasies that we have came about because it is difficult to make this transition. But we did and life was fine at least for awhile. But then children grew into adults and we found it very difficult to make this final transition. Many of us tried to copy the ways of adulthood. Some did better then others. But we all have quirks. And these quirks stand out and allow adults to quickly determine that we are from the WRONG PLANET.

When I died at age 3, my left brain went off line. It was a live or die decision. My right brain stepped in and volunteered to CARRY ON. And that is what happened. For over 70 years my right brain has stood guard. My left brain eventually recovered and took part in running the functions of my right side. It was a brain flip.

I believe both my brains (right and left sides) are comfortable with this arrangement. We are different but we work as a team. And if we ever break free from the confines of this planet Earth, it will be this brain that will lead the way and allow humans to venture forth and explore the known universe and beyond.

After my stroke a year and a half ago, I lost all my knowledge of words. It is a type of Aphasia. This condition lasted for a few days and I worked very hard to self correct. It was one of the hardest things I ever did. So after a week, I was remembering words. Within a short while, I had around 80 percent of my words back. But there were still some words that never came back. These were names of people, cities, states, countries. In the beginning I had to say a name around a thousand times to myself to get it back. It was just too much work, so I stopped after I relearned the names of me, my wife, my daughters, their husbands and grandkids. That was enough.

The knowledge of spoken names is stored on the left side of my brain. But the knowledge of names that are sung are stored on the right side of my brain. Since the stroke smashed the left side of my brain, I lost my knowledge of spoken names. The names I remembered after my stroke were from songs. But now at the year and a half mark, I have discovered that some of these names did survive. I have also found a way to bring them back.

There is a special time when my night time brain has done it work and I turn it loose on recalling names. I wake up in a shared state between sleep/awake around 6:30 AM and for a half hour I turn my left side of my brain loose to remember names. It spits them off at a hundred miles an hour. And my lost names reappear, brought back from the dead.

Well I finally underwent an operation yesterday. A little over a year and a half ago I was about to suffer a massive heart attack, but they caught the problem and fixed it but unfortunately a few weeks later I suffered a massive stroke. Well I guess you cannot win them all. My heart somehow lost its way. And my heart rhythm became sporadic.

I had Supraventricular Tachycardia (SVT) and they spent over 3 hours performing an Ablation to fix the problem. I was awake during the entire procedure. They cut a hole in my groin and slowly inserted a long flexible tube (catheter) into the vein. The catheter is gently guided up to the heart. Sensors on the tip of the catheter send electrical impulses and record the heart's electricity and uses it to apply the ablation treatment. (in other words ZAP me). They have three ways to ZAP me. These are using (1) Extreme cold (cryoablation), (2) Heat (radiofrequency energy) or (3) Lasers. I DID SAY THAT I WAS AWAKE THE ENTIRE TIME!! !! !

Well it was NOT very painful. It took over a half an hour to put all the items on my back and front and almost all over my entire body of every size and shape. Somewhere around 150 items covered my body and strapped me in so I could not move during the entire process. I DID SAY THAT I WAS AWAKE THE ENTIRE TIME!! !! !

They burned ZAPPED me three or four times in the defective areas that cause my heart to beat irregularly. Now it beats smooth and doesn't miss a beat.

They then had me rest for around 2 hours to make sure all was fine after the operation and then they set me free.

That was yesterday and my heart rhythm is back to normal.

The surgery seems to be effective. I have used my FITBIT to track my sleep cycle since the beginning of 2019. It showed me the REM and NREM sleep cycles each day. After my heart rate increased dramatically because my main artery to my heart was 90 percent plugged, fitbit began to show that my heart rate became erratic. Because I was placed into various medications, this pattern of heart failures was significantly hidden from view. But FITBIT would see the problem every now an then for a week or two and be unable to show my sleep cycle. I was treated by having a stent put into my main artery but that did not cure the heart rate problem. And then instead of dying from a heart attack, three weeks after the surgery I suffered a massive stroke a year and a half ago.

So if it is not one thing it is another.

My body was beginning to fail after a year and a half of stress caused by high heart rates and then my heart freezing up (across all the valves) for several seconds before it started up again. So after this surgery my heart appears to be back to normal. I checked my FITBIT and it is giving me accurate nighttime readings (REM and NREM) again.

So FITBIT is telling me that I am on the mends.
Now if I can only finish the repair that the massive stroke did to my brain, life will again return BACK TO NORMAL.

I woke up this morning and was thinking about the construct of the human brain. (At least my sleep side of my brain was hard at work on the subject.)

The main point is how human brains work. In general, most NTs operate on a parallel structure. But I tend to operate on a serial structure. In order to complete a task, I start at the beginning and work my way step by step to the completion point. This approach is a major difference between Aspies and NTs. It explains why NTs tend to skip around during a conversation. They start talking about a subject and then instantly skip to another subject and another. They never seem to reach a final conclusion - just a simple solution (that may be wrong).

Our cells in our brain work both from a serial and parallel combination. It is how we are constructed. When I suffered a devastating stroke a year and a half ago, I lost around 2 percent of my brain cells. But because of this combination within my brain, it took around 20 percent of my cells off line. Most people who experience this level of destruction tend to not survive very long. But I am alive and still ticking. I am primarily focused on regrowing the two percent that was destroyed. Its a lot of hard work, to regrow cells.

One of the differences of having a brain designed in a serial structure (Aspies) is that our thought processes are much slower than the average NT. We analyze everything from different perspectives and that just takes longer to achieve. One of the advantages of a serial structure is that we can reach THE BEST SOLUTION to any problem. We see everything from many angles and compare probable results. Aspies have the potential of developing the best and most accurate solution to any problem. (But Aspies have to believe in themselves.)

The right side of the human brain works primarily from a series structure. The left side of the brain works from a parallel structure. Both halves of the brain exist at the same time, but the left side is normally dominant because it has a small series of extra cells. (As an Aspie who experienced a brain flip at around 3 years old, my right side is dominant. That makes me different.}

So what is the best solution? In reality, working from both a parallel and series structure produces the best results. By combining both halves of our brain (parallel and series) together, we can accomplish great things in this world.

This is probably where the phrase "sleep on it" comes from. Whenever we need to make a serious decision to a major problem in our lives, it is important to sleep on it. It allows both halves of our brain (daytime and nighttime) to analyze the problem and obtain the best results.