The Unconscious

Subsistence of the Soul

Especially in youth, an extreme introvert feeling little commonality with the surrounding society must find ways to nourish the spirit even through the most trying times. A life on the fringes is sin... [Read More]

on 11/28/11 | 1 Comment | Read More

Thinking In Binary: Recently at Reddit

This conversation (below) along with a parallel comment on another thread caused me to dig up a Douglas Rushkoff quote that keeps coming back to me: “The digital realm is biased toward choice, becau... [Read More]

on 10/12/11 | 10 Comments | Read More

Thoughts on Visual Thinking and Empathy

A comment left on one of my posts a few weeks back got me wondering about the connection between visual thinking and empathic response. About the idiom “It’s raining cats and dogs,” Lauren wrote... [Read More]

on 09/15/11 | 1 Comment | Read More

The Vividness of Memory

On September 16, my daughter will fly to California to begin life at UC Santa Cruz. These days, I find myself reliving much of her childhood in my memory: The rainy winter night we brought her home fr... [Read More]

on 09/15/11 | No Comments | Read More

Why a True Introvert Will Never Change

Introverts have wished many, many times that we could be more extroverted, that life in society could be just a little easier. We tell ourselves again and again that we ought to ‘get out more’. Ma... [Read More]

on 07/4/11 | 2 Comments | Read More

Small Changes

The news about my oven is not all stinky, I’m glad to report. I bought a new pair of cloth oven mitts, which arrived in the mail last week. While this may seem a trivial everyday purchase, it wasn... [Read More]

on 03/9/11 | No Comments | Read More

The Ghosts That Haunt the Human Mind

Alright then, I got plenty more; I’ll just keep tossing ‘em out, and you all catch the ones you like. It is, I think, a pretty standard practice among those who take the social model of disability... [Read More]

on 02/25/11 | 2 Comments | Read More

What’s in the Locker?

I had a dream recently in which I wanted to open a locker but couldn’t remember the combination. When I mentioned this dream to Mark Stairwalt, he suggested that the locker might be a subconscious ... [Read More]

on 01/12/11 | 6 Comments | Read More

A Haunting Photo

I want to share a photo of my father. In the photo, he is about eight or nine years old, and he’s kneeling behind his younger twin siblings. Except for a photo taken of him as an infant, it’s the ... [Read More]

on 12/17/10 | 2 Comments | Read More

The Albatross

Because introverts spend many hours alone, they are often misconstrued as lacking, or having lesser capacity for friendship and love for their fellow human beings. Nothing could be further from the tr... [Read More]

on 12/9/10 | 1 Comment | Read More

The Long Hard Winter

My mother-in-law, who grew up in the rural American South in the wake of the Great Depression, has a lot of interesting expressions that she uses in conversation. For instance, if someone tells her t... [Read More]

on 11/24/10 | 4 Comments | Read More

Talking to Ourselves

It’s not uncommon for autistics to talk out loud about things that come to mind. There are different situations in which this might happen. Sometimes it’s just a matter of echoing writte... [Read More]

on 11/17/10 | 2 Comments | Read More

I See Dead Blokes

Donald*, could you please tell me, what is this all about? I’m pondering the same question now that I wondered about twenty-odd years ago, when I was in my 20’s, a graduate on a quest to find a d... [Read More]

on 11/1/10 | No Comments | Read More

Coffee Casualty

My original plan for this post was to spend Monday evening reflecting on how today’s social and physical environment can be stressful for our kids and writing a thoughtful article on that subjec... [Read More]

on 10/27/10 | 6 Comments | Read More

I’ve Lost My Focus

You will have to excuse me, I’ve been out of sorts lately. The tide has gone out and I’m feeling all washed up. As I wait to pick up the kids in the car I slip into sleep-deprived but not tired dr... [Read More]

on 08/10/10 | 2 Comments | Read More

Requiem for a Houseplant

I have a potted plant in my dining room that mysteriously started losing its leaves sometime last year. As far as I know, it always had been watered regularly and given the proper amount of fertilize... [Read More]

on 08/4/10 | 4 Comments | Read More

The Unbroken Spectrum: Projection

Years ago, long before I had any familiarity with psychological jargon, I remember running across the phrase “egodystonic homosexuality” and being highly amused at what an absurdly clinical term i... [Read More]

on 05/28/10 | 5 Comments | Read More

On Styles of Consciousness, Autism Included

“Whatever else it may be, autism is a way of being in the world. It is a style, a manner of behaving and perceiving, and of being perceived.” Classical Greece had a whole lexicon of different “... [Read More]

on 04/2/10 | 11 Comments | Read More

Accompanying the Metaphor

…Primary process is the experience of an ever-present now, with little ability to estimate different times or to consider more than one location at any one time, and no ability to imagine someth... [Read More]

on 03/29/10 | 1 Comment | Read More

Performance

I am fascinated by the relationship the autistic have with music and rhythm. There is evidence that when language is tied to melody, it is easier for many with autism to absorb the words. The autist... [Read More]

on 03/10/10 | 1 Comment | Read More

Theory of Mind and Self

I’d been studying Asperger’s and autism in connection to human evolution for maybe ten years before it dawned on me, after reading Michael Fitzgerald’s Autism and Creativity, that Asperger’s w... [Read More]

on 03/8/10 | 4 Comments | Read More

Speed of Information

Light moves at a speed of 186,000 miles per second. Speed as a concept is also integral to biology. I hypothesize that the speed with which information passes between the two cerebral hemispheres im... [Read More]

on 02/24/10 | 3 Comments | Read More

Lifting Veils

There is this thesis that I’ve been playing with. Like the experience physics theorists have described, it seems too beautiful to not be true. Nevertheless, Stephen J. Gould has described the trap... [Read More]

on 02/22/10 | No Comments | Read More

Rich Shull: HBO Temple Grandin Special

Rich Shull writes with an intensity that befits a man struggling to whittle a rapid-fire slide show of thousand-word pictures down to a sentence or two at a time. Mr. Shull is a part of a longstanding... [Read More]

on 02/5/10 | 3 Comments | Read More

Mashup: Time, Death, and Ballastexistenz

There have been two significant deaths to me recently. My grandfather died just before Christmas. And Judi Chamberlin … died this weekend. And yet again I am coming up against my instinctive respo... [Read More]

on 01/29/10 | 2 Comments | Read More

Autism, Mysticism, and the Natural Self

There is a common phrase that “there is a fine line between genius and insanity.” I think that line is just the lines imposed by the extreme sensitivity of unorthodox people. Specifically, I am ... [Read More]

on 01/20/10 | 5 Comments | Read More

Social Media and Environmental Integration

I saw this piece appear in March: Too Much Facebook could cause Autism in Children. A doctor in the UK suggested that social networking applications were encouraging dissociation, making it more dif... [Read More]

on 01/19/10 | No Comments | Read More

What We Find Funny

Like most people I know, I had a somewhat odd childhood. I started talking when I was three. I remember spending a lot of time confused by adult communication. Speech therapy accompanied my schooli... [Read More]

on 01/13/10 | 1 Comment | Read More

The Tao of the Alarm Clock

Before the housing bubble burst, my husband and I were among those who built a house in an expensive subdivision, on the theory that it was just as good an investment as the stock market and—yay!—... [Read More]

on 01/11/10 | No Comments | Read More

The Path Home

As a child, I loved to wander through quiet woods and to pick wildflowers in meadows, following paths that I pretended would lead me into fairy tale adventures in a long-ago world.  I imagined myself... [Read More]

on 12/28/09 | No Comments | Read More

« Older Entries