Intuition

From the MBTI website / Information: Do you prefer to focus on the basic information you take in or do you prefer to interpret and add meaning?
This is called Sensing (S) or Intuition (N).

                            

Manipulation of the DSM-5: Robin S. Rosenberg, Clinical Psychologist

Abnormal Is the New Normal

Why will half of the U.S. population have a diagnosable mental disorder?

By Robin S. Rosenberg, a clinical psychologist in San Francisco and the author of Superhero Origins and Abnormal Psychology. Edited for length; bold my emphasis. Full article can be read in SLATE, Medical Examiner section, 4/12/13. 

In addition to classifying some medical disorders as mental disorders, the DSM also has been nibbling at the edges of “normal” by reclassifying as pathological the patterns of thoughts, feelings, or behaviors that were previously considered normal (albeit perhaps weird or odd). For instance, people who are extremely shy and concerned about how others might evaluate them, and who thus avoid certain types of activities, might be diagnosed with “avoidant personality disorder.” These same characteristics didn’t used to be considered pathological, and in some other cultures they are not considered to be so.

Another way that the increased prevalence of mental illness occurs is by lowering the threshold of what it takes to be diagnosed with a given disorder. For instance, DSM-5 will change in the criteria for “generalized anxiety disorder,” a disorder that involves excessive and persistent worrying. Whereas the criteria in DSM-IV required three out of six symptoms of worrying, only one symptom is needed in DSM-5. Similarly, whereas in DSM-IV the symptoms must have persisted for at least six months, in DSM-5 the duration has been reduced to three months.

One effect of a bigger mental illness tent is that there are fewer people standing outside the tent. Although the next edition of the DSM might not increase the overall number of disorders, if the criteria are loosened…then more people would qualify for a disorder. There are, and probably will continue to be, fewer and fewer people who will live their lives in relatively good mental health according to the DSM.

The normal trials and tribulations of life—the periods of sadness, or worry, of anxiety, or grief, of difficulty sleeping, of drinking too much caffeine or having caffeine withdrawal headaches—have been pathologized. They’ve been made into mental illnesses… providing a bigger tent for mental illness leaves us with an increasingly restricted definition of mental health and can make us all more likely to see mental illness even when it isn’t there—where there is just normal human struggle. We can become so used to seeing psychopathology that we think—erroneously—that being odd or having difficulties must be an expression of mental illness.

What is going in our culture that allows for this expanding definition of mental illness? There are many explanations. The first is related to payment for treatment. Psychological treatments and medications can be useful for a variety of problems, but for those treatments to be even partially paid for by health insurance companies, the problems must have a diagnosis. It’s not enough that there’s a problem that’s being addressed. It has to be a problem. (Of course, if you treat a problem before it becomes a mental illness, the health insurance company will have ended up saving a significant amount of money, but they don’t pay for early mental health intervention—there has to be a problem. But that’s a story beyond the scope of this article.)

Second, pharmaceutical companies search for ever-wider markets for their products. When more people are diagnosed with a given disorder (perhaps because of less stringent criteria), or a new diagnosis is created, it widens the market for their drugs. They push for “off-label” uses of their medications that in some way reduce a problem, and then they push for that “problem” to be redefined as a problem.

In fact, DSM-5 and the pharmaceutical industry have a significant number of connections: One study found that 70 percent of DSM-5 task-force members have financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry.

Anyone who maintains that the diagnosis put forth in the DSM are science-based is CRAZY...

In a crazy world, sanity must be earned.

 

"Abracadabra" versus "Make It So"

This is the erroneous belief at the core of magic, that words have the power to create reality. Modern humans suffer from the ancient supernatural assurance that "saying" is the same as "doing." This is most obvious today in the institutional practice of stating the intention to "fix" a problem such as child poverty, but the actions taken result in...nothing. Stating intent to solve a problem is not problem solving: political statements are not based on correct analysis of the cause or causes and in practice can obscure or cancel out what might be effective strategies. The result is more laws, and the application of a modern magical remedy: money. Money is believed to solve problems, but it doesn't. The sums allotted to even minor projects have escalated over recent years into hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, which the U.S. government doesn't have, but must borrow, and the debt is converted to funds that are "upcycled" to the wealthy. Problems become chronic, institutionalized, and falsely believed to be unsolvable.

Stymied by their own lack of clear thinking, lack of science and technical knowledge, and belief in the magical power of words, officials and experts claim that no matter how simple the problem, it is extraordinarily complex, and that more funds must be allocated to initiate more studies which merely repeat the cycle and prolong the situation. The problem is PEOPLE who cannot take the step from magic to physical reality; people who believe that the social hierarchy is the only path to results, and that those results are conditioned on the "good will" and responsible feelings of those individuals who have gained power. Can you hear me laughing? Social people cannot seem to grasp this fatal roadblock to effective analysis and action. 

 

The anti-magic corollary to "abracadabra" is MAKE IT SO, used by Captain Picard on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. This command is a call to action, based on the fact that the ship has been designed to perform its functions, and that the crew has been selected and trained to utilize the ship's capabilities, and then some. How ominous is it that a Sci-Fi TV show is a real model for teamwork, competence and success, while the social world spirals out of control?

How ironic, when violence against women has high social value, and is advanced and taught by the entertainment industry.

Myths about Asperger Women

This Esquire magazine cover is from the 1960's, and despite equal rights legislation, nothing has really changed, because hatred of women is embedded in American culture. Women are bombarded by the message that we are childlike idiots whose sole purpose is defined by men, and utterly disposable when we fail to conform to their prescriptions. Self-hatred is learned by girls through socialization, and demonstrates the susceptibility of the "normal" brain to "brain-washing."

Asperger females are accused of being unfeminine and unattractive. The old male prejudice that any woman who is competent, intelligent, and ambitious must therefore be 'masculinized' is still being propagated by psychologists. Asperger females are accused of having a "male brain," which effectively ejects us, and all smart women, from the female half of humankind.

It's quite a compliment, if you think about it.

What Asperger children are doing with their brains when regular people think we are standing around being defective.

I was an uncomfortable child. I didn’t like the world much, and it didn’t like me. The world was confusing - disturbing, jarring, and alarming. I was frightened most of the time and most everything frightened me. Within my mind I was adventuresome and fearless, but people and their invasive habits and their intrusive rules and demands, scared the shit out of me. I didn’t know it, I instincted it. They wanted to keep me from adventure, from thought, and from truth. I hid. I still hide, because I was right. Social people confine and limit each other in terrible ways.

Women are confident that the man they live with is a nice guy and a good father. He’s just an average man, not a leader. Leaders know how to bring out the killer in every man. That’s why they are leaders. Men were a giant intellectual obstacle when I was a child. In their estimation of how things work, I was an insatiable little monster whose curiosity, hidden passion, obstinacy, questions, and rational seeking would be fine…if only I had been born a boy. How I learned to hate that pejorative and final indictment. 

Unbelievably, it was adult women who were most often the delivers of this life sentence of inferiority; women whose natural grace was replaced by restrictive clothing, rock hard hairstyles and icing-like make up, until nothing original remained. It was the 1950s and rigid sex rules demanded rigid bodies. Underwear was compiled in layers of girdles, brassieres, slips and garter belts, and stockings with seams that must be straight. Our mothers were Virgin priestesses who had been ceremoniously demoted by marriage, shamed and gagged by the function of their sex. I horrified my mother. I was not what she wanted in a child. My very existence challenged her acceptance of marriage as a woman’s inevitable defeat. My lively mind was a reminder of a dark female presence that she had murdered within herself.

The game unfolded: little girls were soon tamed. Female society ground on like a glacier that rolled over and pulverized every female that resisted its relentless power.

My father was a traitor to his gender. In matters of the mind he never slighted me. He was a mechanical engineer with wide interests, but his knowledge had one boundary, the artificial gulf between the priestly triumvirate of science, technology, and mathematics, the intellectual activities that divided the real world from everything else. He had an eidetic memory (he claimed) and rather than deflect my questions as unladylike annoyances, he fed me information about astronomy, geology, physics, chemistry, history, exploration and industry. He was not a creative person, but populated his mind with wonderful facts and figures in order to keep the world and his unhappy childhood at bay. He told me this, and let me know, without providing details, that he had idolized his father, a strict man who had used corporal punishment to toughen him up. 

Inexplicably, he hated his mother, whose sole flaw, as far as I could understand, was being a woman. His sister was also an object of his rage. He refused to provide any cause for his extreme feelings, and if my questions ventured to close to his wall of secrecy, he would turn on me. The experience was like that of trying to retrieve a bone from an ill-tempered dog that growls menacingly, curls its lip and commits a warning bite. Warning given: warning taken. I had to set aside this mystery concerning his female family members as a contradiction to the father I knew.

 

Standing Around Being Defective 2

My father was unhappy with social rules that he simply couldn’t comprehend. He sympathized with my complaints about female socialization and gave me a pass on conforming to what we both judged to be ridiculous and humiliating demands placed on women. Once in awhile, at some critical stage when my mother would insist that I dress up “like a lady” and attend some social function, he would sacrifice me to marital peace and order me to obey.

When I directly contradicted his strict adherence to the triumvirate of science, technology and mathematics as the only worthwhile human endeavors, he withdrew angrily. When I defended art, literature, foreign cultures and music as areas of growing interest to me, I witnessed the rigid and deranged male vision of superiority. I was swiftly demoted from being an equal and temporarily cast out as one of them, a category that included all lesser beings: women, minorities, artists, musicians, writers - literally, anyone who was not a white male engineer or scientist. It hurt terribly and compounding his vile attitude was the equally legitimate observation that my father was not an unkind man. His kneejerk hatred toward categories of lesser humans did not play out in daily life. He was helpful to neighbors and to strangers regardless of category, to the point of exasperating my mother with his generosity. He was an unrepentant chit-chatter with any and all who came his way. I never heard an unfriendly word in his conversations unless the topic turned to politics. It was then that the conservative white male monster emerged and we had to drag him out of the situation to avoid a confrontation. In the 1950s such unhinged political behavior was rejected as out-of-bounds, but today it has become main stream political behavior spread by rabid and irrational media ‘news.’


One of the highlights of my father's career in engineering
was the monumental leap from slide rule to the HP 35.

I was stuck with a schizoid model: Everything human was on the other side of the divide in my father’s male world. Female thoughts and opinions simply didn’t matter, and worse, formed some kind of cosmic threat to men. And yet, my father did not impose the standard “women are stupid, emotional, and should never attempt to think” regime on me, but encouraged my heresy. I think he also grasped that any censure of my particular interests would be fruitless. This conflict set me up for a lifelong interest in human behavior.

My hidden analysis of the family proved that both my father and mother were extreme cases of people who were locked into behavior they could neither understand nor modify. It turned out to be not that simple. Although their extremes were dysfunctional, each parent reflected common cultural beliefs promulgated by a particularly unhealthy supernatural script, which had been enacted over and over with tragic success for two millennia.  

When I look back to my childhood I see it ironically. The painful dysfunctional predicament in which I found myself provided material for a favorite type of Asperger challenge. What a mess! I bet I can figure it out. I'm still working on it.  

Standing Around Being Defective 3

My mother and I never were on good terms. She had bought into the myth of female shame and inferiority (I acknowledge the extreme social pressures on her to do so) and did her utmost to transfer that inferior status to me. The gap was too great. There was no place for self-hatred in either my intellectual or emotional life. Besides, my experiences with rejection and bullying outside the family had less to do with my social awkwardness than with a greater crime: the unHoly, unfeminine intelligence that erupted from within me like a fountain, and the audacity I had to use it.

As I moved out and into the world, I quickly discovered that my mother’s negative view of females was not limited to her, but was culturally pervasive. What I had hoped was an aberration, turned out to be open and acceptable discrimination, especially in employment. Within the 1960s - 1970s work place, sexual predation and humiliation were status quo. Accusations of inferior thinking ability, the supposed inability of females to learn skills other than typing, and the intent of seducing males in the office (snaring a husband) had to be born with stoicism or countered with vehement argument. These insults, and the vast invented vocabulary of female biology, which was a legacy of Old Testament misogyny, were counted as perfectly good and legal reasons for not hiring women. The ubiquitous practice of gross underpayment of women employees was a motive to hire ‘girls’ for inferior, servant-like work and was everywhere exploited. Sadly, much of this inequality remains.

The disturbing ‘automatic’ attitude toward women that I saw in my father was also present in many of the men I worked with, and it seemed to drive the lives of the ones who were married. In addition to being regarded as the Alien Invader in a man’s world, I was also cast as a Trusted Confidant, a role I had learned to play for my father, and like him, men young and old shared details about the wife they had committed to and with whom they had children. Home was regarded as a jail. These men were boxed in between a real wife, with whom they played The Husband and males at work with whom they played the misunderstood and trapped victim of a powerful female conspiracy. In essence, they complained about having no one at home with whom they could speak openly and honestly, but didn’t connect this outcome to the practice of being dishonest with their wives.

The use of drugs to 'treat' (mask) depression and anxiety in housewives (happy pills, tranquilizers, sleeping pills, and a lot of alcohol) has a long history. The mass application of drugs to individuals who are made ill by toxic social environments has expanded to outrageous levels. 
 

Much of what I heard was shocking. When speaking to their wives on the telephone, these adult men were pleasant, obedient, contrite, and affectionate. When jousting with each other, the hated clichés came out and were fired back and forth like weapons, as if denigrating one’s spouse was both a competition and entertainment. What I heard in personal disclosures was both sad and repugnant. Men seemed to cling to a little boy fantasy that they were in fact James Bond, but somehow, through no fault of their own, found themselves clinging to women who provided comfort, children, and a home life, which is a normal and healthy state for an adult male, but a union in which they could not fully participate nor enjoy.

On the rare occasion when one of The Wives made an appearance at the office, warnings were given out to be on best behavior, as if the ruling males were soldiers facing a surprise inspection.  Wives naturally required a public display of affection; if it was a peck on the cheek at departure, all was fine, but any more intimacy than this was viewed as a public humiliation for the husband. Some wives furtively examined the physical state of desks, objects on desks, and stray papers as if they were at a crime scene investigation. I was sometimes asked to go powder my nose for the duration of the visit, because I was young and attractive and a prime suspect for shenanigans. These visits were mostly extremely uncomfortable for everyone. I found all of this rather strange and embarrassing but fascinating. 

My parent’s estrangement from each other had appeared to be an extreme case, but the discovery that for many people the person to whom one was intimately bound in marriage was also the person to whom one routinely hid from and lied to shocked me. Where was all the love, love, love in marriage? Fear of the opposite sex seemed to pollute relationships between men and women, voluntary and messed up partnerships that were nevertheless publicly declared to be happy. Women were classed us unequal and inferior at best, as evil and treacherous whenever it suited men, but in their minds a woman had incredible power. She could ruin a man by trapping him in marriage, and deny him true fulfillment as a rogue male. Sex played a huge part in all this. Domestication of the human male had turned out to be a terrible thing according to men.  

Unfortunately, the theme of man as an unbalanced woman-hater, and woman as dirty inferior, as described and prescribed in the Old Testament, has poisoned the relationship between natural partners. In the real world it’s male and female, different and complementary, co-conspirators in the survival of a species. We’ve gone the wrong way, Baby.

Cultural Imposition on Intellectual Pursuits

The modern arbitrary division between Art and Science was a childhood mystery. I read about men who during the Renaissance had created paintings, architecture, and sculpture, planned cities, invented weapons and battlefield strategies, uniting all these endeavors under the spell of a creative mind. There were priests who studied astronomy, painters who studied anatomy and chemistry, sculptors who studied the properties of stone and bronze and engineered monumental buildings. They were sought after by powerful families and institutions; the wider the range of their knowledge and skills, the more valuable their work. It never occurred to me that as a female I must be excluded from participation in such activities. Intelligent pursuits simply aren't sex-determined, but culture does its best to thwart women's ambitions by imagining that the intellect is gender-bound, that is, what you are permitted to do with your brain is culturally imposed.   

While looking at photographs of medieval architecture, a photo of Speyer Cathedral reminded me of the space shuttle on its launch pad - this impression is of course based on a particular view of the massive building. A supernatural thinker might claim that the similarity is proof that 'God' or some intelligent designer is at work, but both of these 'machines' were designed by humans working within the demands and limits of a universal physical system. Gravity, force, and mass must be balanced and environmental stresses accounted for. The deeper commonality between the massive 11th Century Romanesque cathedral (primarily a tomb for the Holy Roman Emperors, which has been damaged and rebuilt many times) and the Space Shuttle, is the will to obtain limitless technical power.

To read my book, Top Males - Anger by Design, go to: http://ginarex-angerbydesign.blogspot.com

 

Personal Experience with Sensory Sensitivity

Although I was not diagnosed as an Asperger until late adulthood, sensitivity to certain places and situations has affected me all my life. Disturbing reactions began in early childhood, as I remember, when I was about three years old. The severity of my reactions, notably nausea, fear and panic, and an overwhelming urge to flee, were judged by adults to be a willful state. There was little awareness back then, that any manmade products (such as pesticides) affected humans, or that the sounds produced by machinery (from airplanes or in industry) could be harmful. It seems unbelievable today, but cigarette smoking was promoted as positively healthy!

We're not as smart as we think we are. Denial
persists as to the harm produced by products.

Our pediatrician believed that nothing in the environment could be a trigger or cause, and she advised my parents that I did have control of these physiologic responses, but was using them to get attention. (It was all in my head.) She simply concluded that I was a bad and selfish child: Punish me and I would soon "shape up." This pronouncement left me even more desperate and vulnerable. Not only did I fear the strange mystery of people and places and circumstances that caused pain (that's what sensory sensitivity is.) A new layer of anxiety was added: I must hide the pain. If I didn't (and I couldn't) the consequence would be further reprimand, isolation and emotional abandonment.

The adult view of my strange behavior did not include compassion or empathy; it was self-centered. The environments that elicited upsetting reactions in me were benign for them, so how could it be other than my fault? It never crossed their minds that I was suffering, and I was repeatedly told to just stop being upset or afraid. End of concern. Other people suppress their emotions, why can't you?

I refused to enter certain houses; to me they smelled like death. Being in a crowd of people disrupted my equilibrium. The cacophony of sound was like information that had been chopped to pieces in a blender and thrown at me, and it physically hurt. The panic and urge to flee that overwhelmed me were immediate and instinctual, commanding me to 'just get away' and find a quiet place. I was admonished by my mother to stop embarrassing her and was forced to remain in situations that were almost unbearable. Blame, blame and shame was the consistent message. Is there any reason to wonder why Asperger children (and adults) become reclusive?

The tragic mistake was that everyone concerned assumed that I was experiencing a 3 or 4 on the pain scale, when my pain was actually shooting off the chart. I assumed that other people lived with this same pain, but were very strong and courageous and could control fear and panic. The adults around me had no clue as to the level of pain I lived with. Their conventional and conformist social orientation completely discounted that there is anything personal about human sensory experience. The brain? Just some blob stuck in our heads into which information can be stuffed.  We're all supposed to be the same, and anyone who isn't is just plain bad.

Listen to Infrasound Made Audible by Infrasound Lab, University of Hawaii

"At the Infrasound Laboratory of the University of Hawaii, we use very sensitive microphones to listen to low-frequency sounds in the atmosphere. These sounds, known as infrasound because they are too low in frequency to be audible to the human ear, can carry through the atmosphere for thousands of kilometers."

http://www.isla.Hawaii.edu
Brief audio samples are available of infrasound emanating from volcanic activity, earthquakes and storms. These have been compressed (speeded up) so that humans can hear frequencies below the human range. Samples are available on ISLA home page and under Infrasonic Zoo.

If anyone does access the audio samples, I would appreciate comments on reactions, if any, to specific samples. Infrasound generated by an Arenal Volcano provides several of the audio recordings.

Much of the research being done in infrasound is aimed at verification of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban-Treaty. I'm trying to track down scientific work on manmade infrasound and its effects on the human body. Too many articles are repeats of old conspiracy stories to be useful.

Sensory Diversity, Brains, and Judeo-Christian Myth

Does the Autism Spectrum make any sense?

I want to spend some time on sensory sensitivities, because I believe that the myriad confusing symptoms that are considered to be diagnostic of Asperger's are the RESULT of a different sensory reception and processing scheme than is present in so-called normal people. The unusually broad array of behaviors and thought processes used to diagnose Asperger people is internally contradictory and inconsistent. Also, these symptoms are unequally distributed among individuals diagnosed as Asperger. A grab bag of 'suspicious' or unwanted behaviors is being used to diagnose an increasing array of new disorders without looking deeply into the origin of such disparate symptoms. Dozens of characteristics are  grouped as a spectrum more from convenience than evidence. The range of possible drivers of behavior is left unknown, and therefore facts that might untangle the mess and lead to a better understanding of developmental diversity in our species remain hidden.

An analogy: A panel of experts decides that having a pain in the neck is pretty much the same as having a headache, so neck pain is swept into a Headache Disorder spectrum. Regardless of how many, or which symptoms the individual may or may not exhibit along this spectrum, he or she is then told that the problem is a defective brain. There is no cure or treatment, but a person can be trained to act is if no pain exists. The CAUSE of the headache (or neck pain) is ignored. The pain might be traced to a brain tumor, allergies, or whiplash, but no differentiation is made.  

The sweeping conclusion that diverse humans can be categorically removed to a "disordered" space reflects a dominant religious attitude that a male god made man in His likeness, therefore there is only ONE God-given correct set of thoughts and behaviors acceptable in human beings. Note that the "disordered space" by definition includes females, and any person authorities designate.  Too many experts and scientists have this conceptual structure embedded in their work and don't even realize it, but cultural ideas taint their assumptions and therefore their conclusions. The insistence that Homo sapiens is the ultimate human, divinely inspired and separated from the animals by a towering barrier of supernatural origin, is only recently being challenged in anthropology and evolutionary science. The supposedly rock-solid line that was drawn by religious males over two millennia ago, which divides "sub-humans" from a self-designated Supreme Man has wrecked the lives of millions of human beings. 

Possible Asperger Sensitivity to Infrasound

Infrasound is sound waves below the normal range of human hearing. Infrasound is common in nature, but additionally the environment is flooded with manmade low and high frequency sound. You know those industrial strength subwoofers that cause some of us severe pain, anger, irritation, and the urge to run away? Those effects are real.

 

Natural sources of infrasound - many animals can detect these low frequency sounds; a few, such as elephants, can also generate infrasound. Humans can't HEAR these long wavelengths, but they do have effects on the human nervous system and organs.

"Oobleck" is the now famous non-Newtonian fluid composed of cornstarch and water. Shown here is the Oobleck "dance" produced by infrasound from a subwoofer. I'm not claiming that infrasound has the same effect on any part of the human body. I'm using the photo to show that infrasound, even though humans can't "hear" it, has a physical existence and is part of our environment, from both natural and manmade sources. 

For a look at non-Newtonian liquids:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN2D5y-AxIY

Are Asperger's Individuals the Canaries of Toxic Human Environments?

The sensitivity of Asperger children and adults to specific sound frequencies, noise levels, chemicals, pollution and chaotic human activity is labeled a symptom of a defective brain. Really? Do dogs and cats run away at the sound of drills, saws and vacuum cleaners because their brains are defective? Do pets sneeze and hide when household cleaners are sprayed in the air because their brains are defective? Are cigarettes banned in many public places because toxic smoke is good for people? Do fish die off when fertilizer concentrations in rivers and lakes cause algal blooms that deplete oxygen in the water because fish are developmentally retarded? Do sea birds that consume plastic trash that blocks their digestive system die because they are stupid? Do turtles get caught in fishing nets and die because their brains don't 'get' human indifference to the survival of other species? Do wild animals flee humans because they just don't understand that cruelty is empathy in disguise?

Are Asperger people averse to social environments because their brain-sensory system is broken, or is it because we have more acute sensory perception, and toxic environments make us sick? 

A Link to Basic Genetics and Environment

Both Environment and Genetic Makeup Influence Behavior

By: Michael D. Breed (Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado at Boulder) & Leticia Sanchez (Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado at Boulder) © 2010 Nature Education 

http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/both-environment-and-genetic-makeup-influence-behavior-13907840

Good grief!Advice on dealing with sensory sensitivity? Have your Asperger child wear earmuffs to dampen noises that cause distress. Better stock up - you'll need these for a lifetime of environmentally induced pain!

A characteristic common to many Asperger individuals is sensory sensitivity. The link above goes to a clear and simple discussion on how genetic make up and the environment affect animal behavior. It's a good place to begin understanding our sensory differences.

Although these sensory sensitivities are noted in articles on Asperger symptoms, there is little apparent interest in research on the actual source and nature of these noteworthy physical experiences, which Asperger individuals frequently describe. Instead, these differences are commonly written off as defects in the Asberger brain, an astounding attribution that like too many assumptions about Asperger symptoms is accepted merely on repetition.

Wolf _ Dog.... Asperger_ Neurotypical?

All dogs are wolves; domestic dogs have been, and continue to be,  manipulated by humans for physical and behavioral traits we desire, tameness being the most fundamental. Evidence suggests that modern humans are also the result of selection for juvenile qualities. If so, Asperger individuals may be the developmental equivalent of wild dogs, which cannot be socialized.

 

Are Asperger people the equivalent of Wild Type Adult Dogs who are simply not fully domesticated?

 

If modern Homo sapiens is the product of domestication, might not this juvenalization apply to us, with the result that humans exhibit a range of developmental stages? Once humans were domesticated, the wild form (Asperger) of a species often becomes the object of unreasonable fear and attack. Example: the violent extermination of wolves in many parts of the world.

 

A chart showing stages of arrested development of domestic dog breeds compared to wild dogs, such as Coyotes and Jackals, which develop to full adulthood. Domestic dogs are the product of human selection, in which animals are intentionally retarded in a stage of juvenile development that is characterized by behavior that humans find useful. Not only is behavior arrested at various developmental stages, but the animal's physical appearance retains typical juvenile attributes. Thus domestic animals are the result of selective breeding that prevents the individual from becoming an adult. 

 

Not only the physical evidence for a juvenile status of modern humans is being studied, but the psychological effects also.

 

The Asperger Mind Makes Art

My education is in geology, but I do not work in the field, rather, my appreciation for 'how the world works' is expressed through photography. I am fascinated by manmade objects being broken down (or not) by the desert climate, and most significantly, by the effects of wind that scours the landscape and by patterns generated by the freeze-thaw cycle. The desert remains a wilderness despite generations of human occupation; old dumps, although covered, have been exposed by natural forces.
     The photographs begin as color photos, which I then manipulate in the computer. My desire to make art began very early, but I had no dexterity - what I saw in my mind was impossible to create on paper. I worked as an advertising designer for many years, but could not draw a damn thing! I got around the problem by creating collages. Photography allows me to show what I see without the physical need to manipulate materials.


Top photo: the coils of an old box springs.
Left: Children's hand prints in paint on the side of a house.

Brilliant!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

The absolutely most true and hysterical video of what it's like to be an Asperger forced to deal with Neurotypicals.

Childhood: A Female Asberger Mystery

My relationship to my own childhood is sketchy; I think it must be due to being Asperger, because most of the people I know remember almost everything that ever happened to them, and to friends and family. I remember pictures, as if I had stopped once in a while to take a snapshot of what happened, but then left the images behind. The image is the memory. Read more: Post 6/25   

  

Trying to Remember My Mother.

Months ago I assigned myself the task of remembering good things about my mother. Ours was an unhappy relationship, and my first attempt resulted in an image of glass bottles on a window sill. Some were filled with colored water; a few had marbles in them, but I may have added the marbles just now. My imagination inserts objects with similar physical qualities into my memories, a habit that has caused the family to accuse me of lying.

     Weeks later, the image of bottles filled with colored water remained the sole entry on the "Good things about my mother" list, so I tried again, but instead of a touching scene of her doing something motherly, a vivid yellow shoe intruded. The leather was shiny and smooth. Unless I’m lying again, these shoes refer to a Polaroid taken of me as I walked across a polished gym floor between rows of folding metal chairs during eighth grade graduation. The yellow pumps matched a sleeveless dress; a yellow band held back my hair, which had been done up at a beauty salon in a style that advanced my apparent age from thirteen to about twenty-seven. Pointy black eyeglasses exposed a nerdy streak. My recall of this event, and indeed of that year, begins and ends with this photograph, which may or may not exist.

     A second pair of shoes then popped into mind: sturdy leather loafers accented with brass buckles, easily identified as those that were purchased for my freshman year in high school. During winter I changed to snow boots for the trek to and from school and carried my shoes. One afternoon a single loafer vanished, and despite retracing the route back to school and home again, the shoe was lost, even though it had to be somewhere. I had chosen the loafers myself, but discovered that I didn’t like them much, so it’s possible that the shoe accidentally-on-purpose dropped out of my life, but that could be my mother talking.

     One spring day during junior year, my best friend and I decided to walk to Chicago, about fifteen miles distant from our town. I wore a beautiful pair of boots made from thin buttery leather, lined with elastic, which left no room for socks. Within the first mile multiple blisters swelled and popped, but had I stopped to inspect the damage, I wouldn’t have been able to get the boots on again. Regardless, my friend and I made the city without incident and recorded our excursion at a subway photo booth, which I know is true, since my friend has the pictures.

    We took a train home; neither of us could have walked the last two miles. Our faces were black from auto fumes and our raccoon eyes were a giveaway that we had been up to something. When my mother picked us up she only commented on how dirty we were. At home I locked myself in the bathroom and peeled away my beautiful glove-tight boots. One toenail came off and I swabbed the blisters with mercurochrome, but my blazing orange feet drew no notice. My parents ignored me; I thought it was because they trusted my judgment, but in truth, they didn’t want to know anything that might upset them. Of course, I could be lying.

     It was beginning to look as if good memories of my mother either didn’t exist, or were weirdly inaccessible, so I switched to searching for instances when my mother was happy, but I’m not sure she ever was. Everything she said sounded like, “I’m broken. Fix me.” 
 

My mother's ideal woman, Zsa Zsa Gabor. For an Asperger girl, this female model was terrifying and soul killing.

My mother was always on the hunt for shoes, and our arrival in any shoe department was a dark day for the clerk. Stacks and stacks of boxes holding pumps or sling backs were brought forth, but none fit. My mother was a Cinderella for whom no shoe was good enough and she delighted in the fiction that her feet were impossibly unique, even though stores always had a selection in her size. No matter which pair of shoes she purchased, by the time we got home they hurt her feet; her closet floor was a mosaic of wasted cow hides. Perversely (from her point of view), my feet found satisfaction everywhere. Any style of boot or shoe would do, which reminds me of a pair of blue boots I once owned. All I can say is that I wish I still had those boots.

     My mother saw this democratic aspect of my anatomy as an indictment of commonness, which she reinforced with cutting questions such as, “Why is it that only the wrong type of men look at you?” The truth was that I was young and pretty and men looked at me, but it could be that I was a she-devil and didn't know it.

     One twenty-something birthday my mother sent a pair of Jesus sandals as a gift. These articles of 1st Century torture were clearly marked two sizes smaller than the size I had worn since I was twelve. Mom was one of those gift-givers who require that unwanted items be returned to her, so I phoned to say that the sandals were in the mail.  She became furious, and then pathetically hurt, which is what one expects of a tyrant. She insisted that the sandals weren’t too small, my feet were too big. She had gotten them at a clearance sale and could not return them. Couldn't I squeeze my feet into them if I really tried? Refusing to try  meant that I didn't love her. Besides, I had to be lying about my shoe size, since I lied about everything.

Lifestyles that may have appealed to Aspies...

...and which also provided protection from the 'Wrong Planet' social predicament.

In the Middle Ages some children were 'packed off' to a monastery at an early age; a few may have been Asperger 'problems' who fit in well with simple rules and routines, and who were oriented to intellectual pursuits and isolation. Many early and important scientists were indeed monks. Female Aspergers may have found refuge as nuns, but others were likely burned as witches or otherwise disposed of. 

"I don't want to live that way." - Krishnamurti

 

Nature requires that we support ourselves and our children, but nowhere can it be shown that the social version of 'being human' is correct or wise or healthy for any individual or family. The 'socially normal' have no scientific basis by which to dictate how we express our humanity. In fact, the social hierarchy creates misery by denying food, clean water and shelter for millions of people; by polluting the environment, stealing resources, and bringing plants and wildlife to extinction. The Pharaohs of today care nothing for humanity, the planet or its future. This exploitation and careless destruction of all that is worthwhile on this planet, goes against the Asperger core: life matters.