Catmachine

It turns out that there are a number of very real autistic traits which are not "textbook" at all – in other words recognised by mental health professionals in the official literature – but nevertheless are very familiar to anyone who has experienced them. None of these are official diagnostic criteria, but they are nonetheless real. When I was part of a group of autistic people who met regularly to share our experiences we discovered several of these that we all had in common but which hadn't even occurred to the group's NT facilitator. One was an aversion to the overuse of names in conversation. It's fine when there's a group of people as of course you need to be able to know who is being addressed but when it's one to one it just feels... unpleasant and sinister. No matter how illogical that may actually be. Another of these non-textbook traits is what I think of as the Selfishness Paradox. During our group discussions we all discovered that we had a te...

Anyone who read this blog in May 2010 might have seen a post entitled Intellectromagnetic Spectrum in which I wondered - having read up on some of the symptoms for reasons which are not going to become readily apparent again at this juncture - whether I might in fact have Asperger Syndrome . From what I could see I considered it likely, but I couldn't quite silence that little nagging voice at the back of my mind. You are probably familiar with That Voice yourself. It's the one that constantly puts you down and emphasises your worthlessness. In this instance it was whispering Of course you don't have Asperger Syndrome! You're just saying that to make yourself seem interesting, you're using it as an excuse for your social failings. You don't have it at all. You're just shit at life and don't you forget it . Hardly the most cogent of arguments, but there's always been something convincing about That Voice. No matter how much you might try and dismis...

As I have so often remarked I don’t cycle into work nearly as often as I should. After all the reasons for doing so are many and varied. It’s greener for a start and saves me money that would otherwise end up in the pockets of Brighton and Hove Buses. And most importantly, it is at least a nod towards making me fitter. I know that in an ideal world should go down the gym of course, but never seem to have the time. However seeing as I have to spend at least 90 minutes a day travelling, I might as well make the most of those minutes getting exercise. Unfortunately the arguments for not cycling are far more persuasive. It’s dark. Often it’s cold and wet. I’m tired. I’m lazy. And perhaps, most importantly, I usually end up as a seething chamber of suppressed rage by the time I reach the end of my journey. This is not because I have an exaggerated sense of self importance and sense of entitlement when it comes to my position on the road. This is because so many other cyclists, pedestria...

There are no emotional qualia . As I have discussed before , it's all very well saying you're happy, but how can we possibly tell that your happy is the same as my happy? Describing it is no good, because any qualitative words we use would by definition only refer to our own emotional experiences and our personal definitions. The only way to be sure would be to become each other and then... well we'd actually be each other so we still wouldn't be able to compare and contrast. Given that this is the case, it is odd that some emotions are treated the same in different people. Treated being the operative word. I am talking about depression. Unfortunately it's an emotion that is never really taken seriously and often misunderstood.  On the one hand the unsympathetic tell you to " snap out of it ", " pull yourself together " or " cheer up (it may never happen) " whilst on the other the condition is used to describe trivia: " ...

I don't have any wisdom teeth. I didn't have them taken out or anything, they're just not there and never were.  I am a mutant.  One of the first things some people say upon hearing about this unusual state of affairs is usually a hilarious variant on the " Why am I not surprised? " gag - the implication being that I'm a bit daft and lack wisdom. Of course that's all a bit arse over front and back to tit. As we all know very well they're called " wisdom " because they appear later in life when (presumably) one has accumulated some.  They're not called " wisdom " because their appearance imparts it, nor because their eruption makes you stagger about calling for Mr Grimsdale (unless that's your dentist's name). Age and wisdom used to be inextricably linked. Not so much nowadays. Anyone who hates Thugg the Caveman and his illuminating antics should skip to the end of the next bit. In Thugg's day reaching the rip...

Back in the mid-nineties I read an interesting post to a Usenet group (remember them?) about a psychological condition that apparently more people suffered from than was generally thought. The gist of it was " Are you lonely? Are you this? Are you that? If so you may be suffering from the other..." This instantly started ringing bells. Could this be why I'd always felt that I was a bit, well, rubbish when it came to dealing with people and life? Why I rarely seemed to find myself in a successful relationship? However, as was so often the case on Usenet, this interesting post was immediately shouted down as being a load of old mumbo-jumbo dreamed up by inadequates to give themselves legitimacy. Amongst the more typical of the responses was: Will you kindly take your quack psychoanalysis, your novice Neuro Linguistic Programming techniques and your painfully inadequate hypnotherapeutic attempts and ram them where the sun don't shine? I forgot about it and if anything...

"Analogies prove nothing, that is quite true, but they can make one feel more at home." Freud How can you ever really know what someone else is feeling? Claiming empathy is all very well, but how can you know that what they call "sad" is the same as what you call "sad"? At first glance this might seem to be the same problem discussed in the last entry , in which I concluded that qualia , the basic thingness of stuff, didn't actually exist, our experience of, say, red being linked to the wavelength of light hitting our retinas, our brains' processing of that data and any associations we have linked to it. There is no ur- red of which our experience of the skin of a tomato is but a pale reflection. The reality of emotions may be a different facet of the same problem, albeit one with a different conclusion. It's much more difficult to put your finger on an emotion. Whilst Patient A can say to Patient B "That's red" and point at a...