Why Aspies and Neurotypicals do the things they do

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The default Media Player does start playing random things at first. That's part of the process. Having that happen is just a stage to go through in meditative practice.

One part of meditation is to let the media player play, but to pay no heed, and not get caught up in the sounds and images. Just let whatever comes into your head be.

That's called "Monkey Mind," isn't it?! Or the "chattering monkey." And you just let that monkey chatter away! And the overwhelming default is that you don't need to follow through about a thought that comes into your head, and you don't need to make any special effort to either remember or dis-remember it.

I think zen meditation is often described as "just sitting." You're not trying to do anything special at all. You're just sitting. And any practice of meditation works for some people some of the time. It's definitely not an obligation or a "should."

For example, some people get kind of a meditative state from riding a bicycle. Some people don't. And either way is perfectly okay.

Yeah, exactly! I like your way of putting it. The monkey mind. Just let him chatter away to himself without getting involved. He's just trying to get a rise out of you, and when you react (during meditation), he wins. Sometimes listening to the monkey is a good idea.

Shebakoby, a good way to meditate at first is with a mantra, as this tends to drown out the 'media player' or 'monkey mind'. You repeat a word or sound or phrase in your head over and over, and try to stay focused on that.



I don't know enough about Zen Buddhism to feel comfortable commenting. But there are indeed many different approaches to meditation and any one can be more or less useful at various times. Shinzen Young, who I think is a great teacher (look him up, there's loads of great stuff on this websites), has a five pronged approach, with five different meditation styles.



That's a kind of meditation where you are just doing what you are doing, and your awareness is fully on or into what you are doing, instead of thinking about what you are going to have for lunch, or what someone said to you the other day that really irritated you, or whatever.

Personally, I find it hard to stay with it while bike riding, and I end up thinking about other things and then I find myself almost crashing into lamp posts and parked cars and whatnot.

Last edited by Moog on 31 Mar 2010, 1:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.

1. Why people send to each other postcards every Easter and Christmas and write the same meaningless wishes every year? I feel obligated to write to my family on such occasions and I feel sick when I think about it. If I don't write to them, then I don't remember about them, huh? I am rather glad when somebody stops writing to me, since I don't have to write the same thing again and again to them. It doesn't feel like I was forgotten. Why do others think otherwise?
2. If it is 20 C degrees outside, no wind and it is the end of March, why you have to dress your toddler like it was a middle of winter and if you don't put a hat on their head you are a bad parent and you shouldn't have kids. Is calendar magic or what? My daughter hasn't ever get cold, people! She is perfectly healthy and I know what am doing when I put lighter clothes on her. I am her mother, don't you understand it?! Pardon me WP, I had to say it aloud

It's a symbolic way people show one another they care for each other. I personally hate it as well and I'm glad my friends are not very mainstream so I don't have to bother



Most people don't have a clue. My mother was the exact oposite : she ALWAYS dressed me as warm as she could and as a consequence I was sick quite often because I couldn't build up an immune system. Fortunately all that changed when I became a teenager. Now I rarely ever get sick

I'd say just ignore them or tell them WHY do you what they do. If they don't want to listen to your argument, it's their problem and not yours.

Thanks, Salonfilosoof for your reply

Opinions strongly welcomed.......

http://www.reuniting.info/science/artic ... l_distress

Hey man I think you're on to something

Maybe this explains my question...read here http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt128304.html

The post was about people who say that if someone ignores them or ignores their message then "f them", but those same people do that. Me on the other hand, I don't do that type of stuff, and it's also very hard for me to say "F the people who ignore my messages". I am too sensitive and I think too much about how it may hurt the other person's feelings if I ignore them. thats why I reply to every message I can. but an NT won't even think about something like this, they tell me I'm too obsessed with this subject matter anyways.

But I can say "F them" on that matter

Are all of your symptoms gone? What about the noise and the lights and the occasional genius gifts, the sensory integration dysfunction? What about the obsessions? Did they go away too?

This is scary to me because if there was a "cure" when I was diagnosed with NVLD my parents (namely my mom and her husband) would have given it to me. If I refused they would have coerced me or scared me into taking it. She wanted me to have no symptoms, and when she spoke to me she would treat me as if I was supposed to understand all her social cues, and she reacted the way she would react to an NT not responding to her social cues. She really, really wanted me to be normal. She had an image in her mind of what I was going to be, and it was going to stay the same no matter what I was diagnosed with. My stepfather made me listen to loud noises, find my way home under threat of never coming back if I didn't (people with NVLD have horrible senses of direction), read columns, and preform mathematics. When I would become frustrated and start to cry, he would stream at me and thunder around the room sometimes overturning furniture, demanding that I calm down. If and when I did, he would turn the TV back on as loud as he could, or make me get back to my endless multiplication drills, or however he was torturing me that day. I know that there are other parents like this.

I do not like some things about my condition, but I love the beauty it has shown me. I love the patterns I see in nature, the social rituals I observe in animals and in neurotypical people. I love being an outsider, that way I can look in. I can see things that other people can't, feel things that they can't. I would never voluntarily give that up. I believe that the world needs people on the autistic spectrum, not just because we are occasionally ingenious or beneficial to society, but because we see the world in another way and can observe and challenge social norms in a way NTs seem to be incapable of doing. I'm not going to judge anybody's decision, because everyone's experience with ASD is different. I have heard it is possible to experience all of the negative symptoms of a spectrum disorder and none of the positive ones, and I really can't even imagine.

I will say, though, that I'm afraid of a future where autism-spectrum people are "cured" as soon as they are diagnosed. Because that is what parents want as soon as they hear "autism" or "Asperger's" or any like disorder. From what I have learned from personal experience and research, a lot of parents ask, "is there a cure?" the second their child is diagnosed. Because perfect socialization is so important to them, they think life would be completely empty without it, but its not empty at all, at least not for me.

Ironically, there are probably "normal people" who would willingly become aspies as well as the other way around. That would be interesting but equally terrifying future, actually. Any future where someone can go into your mind and change it is going to be pretty scary to me, I like George Orwell.

Based on my experience with taking dopamine-increasing substances, it seems that autism is caused by our brain largely ignoring the frontal cortex and as a consequence generating not enough dopamine.



I think the problem is you just communicate at a different level... at different wavelengths. They think they're responding to your needs but they don't and you think you're responding to their needs while you don't.



My brains have a very high processing speed and performance IQ (both scored 142 at the WAIS-III test while my general IQ is 137). As a consequence, I never had any problem with filtering noise or lights and in fact I tend to be understimulated most of the time (which is common for people with a high IQ). This means I tend to actually look for intense noise or lights to gain inner rest. This tendency is somewhat reduced now.

With regards to the "genius gifts", I've always been quite überrational. At maths I was better than anyone else in my high school and I'm now into programming. Since the methylone my IQ seems to have stayed the same, but my head doesn't feel like a busy highway anymore. I not longer need to think about every little thing I do and this makes life a lot more comfortable.

My interests are still more or less the same, but I'm less obsessive about them and I gained new interests as well. Thus, I feel like I'm more emotionally balanced.

Unfortunately, I need to take methylone or a similar substance again for the empathic effects. Although many effects have remained permanent, other effects (especially the empathy) fade away in about half a week to a week.



This reminds me of an ex-girlfriend. As much as she said she was willing to live with my being "different", she nevertheless kept desiring me to behave like a "normal" human being.



I guess I'm very lucky I never had that problem. It was sometimes a bit difficult focusing on reading and it took me a while to adapt to a new space (both seem to have improved), but my sense of direction and affinity for mathematics were more than decent.



It's the traditional way of raising kids. It sucks, but it used to be the default up until a few decades ago. Don't take it personally.



I still have all that. The methylone didn't take anything away. It just added things to my personality.

Can you explain to me how it is possible to be good at recognising patterns everywhere while being bad at maths and having a poor sense of direction? This seems contradictory to me.



I now have all of the positive symptoms but far less of the negative ones



I had a very rich life with major ups and downs. When I became 28, my life started to feel empty because there was only litle left that could really give me any satisfaction. This has really changed! Although I still get a bit depressed due to loneliness, it's become a lot easier to just live and appreciate it.

I would definitely NOT immediately go for medication if I ever get a child that is diagnosed with AS. I would even avoid telling it to the school he/she is going to to avoid special treatment. Only if the child has significant trouble coping with the burdens of daily life that can't be dealth with otherwise would I take measures. I wouldn't have learned nearly as much as I've learned due to my AS and if my life didn't feel as meaningless as it felt a few months ago I would not have desired any change either in spite of all the mess I've been through.



It's interesting you mention Orwell. Here's a quote by Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) about a similar topic :
"And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing … a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods."

Doesn't this sound very much like Western society already?!

Hi, new here. Your 'dopamine bomb' link just goes to a page regarding setting your age (which I have done) - I'm desperately curious as to what this dopamine bomb is?