Asperger’s Syndrome is a neurological disorder

jack65

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Hello

Quite good view points that have been posted so far, i would like to know how many parents have AS kids that relisze that they don't quite do the same things as there school freinds?, my boy ( going into high school next yr) has 3 friends that are close to him ( this has been for this yr only and is a great releaf to us for him to have these friends) the others tend to make fun of him because he jsut dosn't "get it" some times ( thats how they talk about or to him).

We have only tried to help him in the areas that he feels he wants it, thats to say things like smelling his food ( less now ) doesn't realy bother him,
yet makeing noises ( up untill last yr ) did, the way we "helped" him over come the noises was to "red flag " them ( my term ) every time he made these noises we would say hum and he would hum a song ( the same one ) until the day came when he just started to hum at times, the inprovement in the way he was treated by others at school was almost striaght away, which made him happy,
he often hums while doing school work or around the home ( we told his teacher that if he does hum in class just let him but if he gets to loaud then just tell him to be alittle quite with out making a big deal out of it & so far it has work well for him)
So back to the question does your kids know ( or precive there is a problem) and are there things like the above that you do to help them face life in this critical world when they precive it as a problem.

Thank you.
 

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I think that often the question is not the ability to detect facial cues but rather confusion about the best way to interpret them and how to react or not react to them. Of course social cues, however, are infinitely less evident than facial cues :(
Definitely.

I'm pretty sure I have asperger's syndrome, but I tend to go with the fact that I may not as well.

At any rate...I have a question for fellow Aspies on the board. Do you tell people that you have Asperger's Syndrome? Why and/or why not?
 

jason_els

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The non-verbal cues are things like micromovements of the facial muscles and eyeballs; tonality, volume, inflection of voice; positioning and direction of the body; and use of common idiomatic phrases to express ideas which the phrases do not empirically convey on their own. It's the nuance created by the combination of all these factors, including choice of phraseology and vocabulary, which convey the bulk of a message.

Apparently less than half of interpersonal communication is verbal. To miss these communications is to miss the bulk of messages unless the interchange is so verbally detailed that no other meaning can be conveyed. It's important for people who are not used to Aspies to speak clearly and be unafraid to explain themselves, asking for clarification, asking to have communication reiterated to be sure that the message was received as intended. Much depends on this. Most Aspies have come to learn that certain phrases and movements come to mean certain things. They must make themselves consciously aware of what normies do so on a culturally sub-conscious level because much of this communication is not only non-verbal but culture-specific.

I do not minimize the emotional toll of what autism can bring to everyone involved. I first encountered autism with my cousin Jane who is the same age as I am. She's low-functioning, difficult to control, and sometimes it's hard to know when she's understood what you're communicating. My heart was broken a second time when her father died suddenly and I went to help my aunt immediately afterwards. Jane seemed unaffected by her father's death. She seemed to be in her own world, doing puzzles as usual. At one point my aunt was hit by one of the many waves of emotion in such cases and had to sit down on an occasional chair in the dining room. As soon as she did so Jane rushed over to her mother, dropped to the floor and cried in her mother's lap for at most two seconds before she got up and ran into the other room making her everyday combination moaning and laughs as if nothing had ever happened. Jane knew her father had died, made a tremendous effort to convey it, but could barely communicate her sadness, frustrated as she was by the circumstances of the gulf between us.

Yes, evolution is painful. I'm quite sure the last Neanderthal was very upset to discover that she was the last one on earth even if she did mate with a Homo sapiens. Nature is the true bitch goddess, indescribable in beauty and terrible in her execution of the process of life. This is how it works and I make no value judgment about that. My apologies if I've come across as cold and distant.

When I speak about evolution being directed I don't necessarily mean it is done so by supernatural means, just means which may appear to be supernatural until they are explained. Right now life seems to exist simply for the purpose of creating more life. Reproduction is an inherent quality in life yet no other physiochemical process in the universe does this. Elements do not appear to reproduce nor does it appear that physical forces (gravity, strong force, weak force, subatomic particles, etc.) do this yet, for whatever reason, there is an exception. We, as a collection of elements and chemicals, do actively seek to reproduce. We are walking beakers of elements which actively seek, sometimes risking our own death, to reproduce our own peculiar makeup. If I were a chemist or physicist I'd say there was no known reason for biology to exist. We are a physiochemical process that cannot explain why we do what we do even if we are self-aware. Oh and we enjoy listening to music too. So if I pointed a giant loudspeaker blaring Mozart at the planet Jupiter and wondered if the planet enjoyed it, no doubt just about every scientist would think I was nuts yet here we are, also composed of elements as Jupiter is, as earth itself is, proving that at least some combinations of elements DO enjoy listening to Mozart. This question intrigues me more than any other and easily passes from physics itself into metaphysics and that's fine by me.

Science will never truly get anywhere until it becomes holistic. There are, apparently, eleven dimensions. We can only perceive four of them. Gravity may be a force not of this universe but of another which leaks into ours (and possibly others). If there are interdimensional forces then we're limited by our own senses and four-dimensional world. It's as if we're trapped in Plato's cave and all the electron microscopes, Keck mirrors, Chandras, and CERN supercolliders can only reveal 36.3&#37; of our universe at any one time even though they much be revealing far more. We just lack the ability to perceive it.

This is what I mean when I say I suspect life has more purpose. We may be interdimensional beings, life may only partially exist in our four dimensional universe, existing only completely in the context of all eleven. Life is just to bizarre and inexplicable a process. Einstein famous said that God doesn't play dice with the universe. There has to be a cause for life, as fundamental a cause, action, and reaction as there is for every physical process. For whatever reason, evolution is a tool of that process. I would not be entirely surprised if the physical universe as we know it, complete in its elements, forces, and dimensions, are all part of an essentially biological process.
 

jack65

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Hello

jason_els, you have thought about this and i like it, though i have a diffrent view,

what if humans were allready genetically perfect in the beging and over the generations this genetic code was slowly breaking down so with each generation more and more imperfections happen, that along with our recent posioning of oursleves may be leading to more breakdown of our genetic codeing with the result of the human boady not beeing able to resist things like sickness, birth defacts & so on.

I'm not saying this is the case but just wondering.

Thank you.
 

jason_els

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The more specialized a lifeform is, the more fragile it is. Humans have adapted uniquely in some ways, but not well in others. We are delicate in the sun, having no meaningful fur, we walk upright which makes us fairly tall compared to most other mammals, yet we're really slow and, having no claws, fangs, quills, or other special defenses, you'd think flight ability would be emphasized yet it isn't. Instead, we've evolved to use tools. On our own, without any tools, we're nearly helpless. Yet with tools we are formidable. Far more powerful than any higher lifeform. We're also highly adaptable. We live as a species, not just a genus, in every climate on earth. Our diet is also sensational, extremely unique. We eat just about every other living thing there is and can live on it: grains, shell and fin fish, mollusks, insects, arachnids, mammals, birds, legumes, fruits, berries, nuts, and vegetables of every kind. No other animal can eat what we do so well and our digestive tracts are insanely long compared to most other animals so we can extract the last bit of nutrients from what we eat. Our eyes see an astonishing spectrum of colors, perhaps more than any other mammal though it appears cats see some spectrum of red and even infrared.

We've evolved into generalists, far more adaptable than other animals via the use of tools. Yet we may now need to become specialists. We generalised to leave the veldt or the seashore, and now specialize to contribute to the society as a whole. Where in a tribe a man needed to know how to hunt, fight, tell stories, build and make things, men now need to be specialists. Some people are so specialized that there are only handful of jobs for them. Put them in a hunter-gatherer society and the value of their PhD plummets. What parents would match their daughter to a man who can't contribute? Specialization has allowed our society to become ever more complex, ostensibly to make our existence easier or better. So where before generalization was useful in hunter-gatherer societies in which we lived for tens of thousands of years, it is only recently, the last 5,000 or so, that specialization has become important. Today a handy-man earns far less than a cytobiologist.

We're still in this process of change. There are, even today, a few true hunter-gatherer societies out there. They are fading but it demonstrates we're still in the process of adapting from a tribal society to a specialist society.

No creature is perfect save for the environment in which it lives and even then not always. Sharks, rats, crocodiles are close to what we regard as perfect lifeforms, perhaps sharks the most, yet they are vulnerable to the vagaries of their prey. For about 53 million years the famed Megalodon ruled the seas as the king of predators, feeding on cetaceans and other large sea creatures. Over time though Megalodon's prey evolved. The cetaceans became intelligent and cold-tolerant, migrating to cold waters where Megalodon could not follow, venturing into the deep ocean where Megalodon is thought not to have ventured, using collective pack strategies to outwit the giant fish. Megalodon, which had ruled for 53 million years, did not survive though its cousin, the small great white, did. Megalodon may have only died out only 12,000 years ago though there are occasional reports of giant sharks here and there. Still, 53 million years or so is a good run. Megalodon used the basic successful generalist template of the shark and specialized into its niche. Humans used the successful primate template and, I think, are just starting to generalize into our niche. We've lost nearly all physical self-defenses, becoming tool-dependent. The need to be a generalist in the hunter-gatherer mode is all but died out. To survive we will need to become specialists.

Maybe this is why Mad Max is so frightening to us. Our ancient ancestors would have recognized the post-apocalyptic world of Max right off. They would understand tribalism, know that sort of world intimately. If anything, Mad Max shows us how helpless we would be outside of the world we know now; its inhabitants still trying to live a technological life. It's interesting to note that the most successful society in Mad Max isn't Bartertown, but the appropriate technology world of the lost children. I hated, hated, even LOATHED Lord of the Flies as a child because I think it was the work of a technoimperialist convinced that without the veneer of modern society we'd descend into anarchy when classically that hasn't been the case. I may sound like Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, but civilization finds a way. Anarchy doesn't last for long as it either burns itself out or succumbs to other civilizing forces. What both Lord of the Flies and Mad Max demonstrate is the fear we have of what we were and going back to living what then would have been a very ordinary (if dramatic) life where survival depended on quick reflexes, reading subtle clues in the faces and words of ones friends or, more still, those who pretended to be friends; where anger and adrenaline rushes were life savers, not a basis for being fired.
 

jack65

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Hello

jason_els, I agree with alot of what your saying in so much as we are becoming more specialized and that it makes us more fragile, but realy al this does is tell us that we are going that way it dosn't realy say anything about where we came from, apart from being more generalists at one time.

I would argue that all you have said is that we are going back wards not forward, because as you say we are becoming specialized and not generalists any more which could lead to a very bad ending if left unchecked.

even if we could argee at this point are you preposing that the neurological disorders of to day are realy evalutionry tracks for a species trying to become even more specialized and in need of new or higher brain fuctions to survive in the world of tommorrow?

I'm thinking that it would depend on what you view as advancement of the species is as to if it is realy advancement or going further away from it.

You put some interseting views accross, some i havn't realy thought about i can say,that i agree with you that things a changing, wheather for better or worse is realy a matter of how we precive the world around us.

Thank You.
 

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I'm pretty sure I have asperger's syndrome, but I tend to go with the fact that I may not as well.
At any rate...I have a question for fellow Aspies on the board. Do you tell people that you have Asperger's Syndrome? Why and/or why not?
Actually I normally don't tell people anything :cool:
I have to have developed a high degree of trust or, failing that, at least an adequate level of anonymity before I will let my guard down at all.
The reason is for self-protection.
 

str82fcuk

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The non-verbal cues are things like micromovements of the facial muscles and eyeballs; tonality, volume, inflection of voice; positioning and direction of the body; and use of common idiomatic phrases to express ideas which the phrases do not empirically convey on their own. It's the nuance created by the combination of all these factors, including choice of phraseology and vocabulary, which convey the bulk of a message.
Apparently less than half of interpersonal communication is verbal. To miss these communications is to miss the bulk of messages unless the interchange is so verbally detailed that no other meaning can be conveyed. It's important for people who are not used to Aspies to speak clearly and be unafraid to explain themselves, asking for clarification, asking to have communication reiterated to be sure that the message was received as intended. Much depends on this. Most Aspies have come to learn that certain phrases and movements come to mean certain things. They must make themselves consciously aware of what normies do so on a culturally sub-conscious level because much of this communication is not only non-verbal but culture-specific.

I do not minimize the emotional toll of what autism can bring to everyone involved. I first encountered autism with my cousin Jane who is the same age as I am. She's low-functioning, difficult to control, and sometimes it's hard to know when she's understood what you're communicating. My heart was broken a second time when her father died suddenly and I went to help my aunt immediately afterwards. Jane seemed unaffected by her father's death. She seemed to be in her own world, doing puzzles as usual. At one point my aunt was hit by one of the many waves of emotion in such cases and had to sit down on an occasional chair in the dining room. As soon as she did so Jane rushed over to her mother, dropped to the floor and cried in her mother's lap for at most two seconds before she got up and ran into the other room making her everyday combination moaning and laughs as if nothing had ever happened. Jane knew her father had died, made a tremendous effort to convey it, but could barely communicate her sadness, frustrated as she was by the circumstances of the gulf between us.

Yes, evolution is painful. I'm quite sure the last Neanderthal was very upset to discover that she was the last one on earth even if she did mate with a Homo sapiens. Nature is the true bitch goddess, indescribable in beauty and terrible in her execution of the process of life. This is how it works and I make no value judgment about that. My apologies if I've come across as cold and distant.

When I speak about evolution being directed I don't necessarily mean it is done so by supernatural means, just means which may appear to be supernatural until they are explained. Right now life seems to exist simply for the purpose of creating more life. Reproduction is an inherent quality in life yet no other physiochemical process in the universe does this. Elements do not appear to reproduce nor does it appear that physical forces (gravity, strong force, weak force, subatomic particles, etc.) do this yet, for whatever reason, there is an exception. We, as a collection of elements and chemicals, do actively seek to reproduce. We are walking beakers of elements which actively seek, sometimes risking our own death, to reproduce our own peculiar makeup. If I were a chemist or physicist I'd say there was no known reason for biology to exist. We are a physiochemical process that cannot explain why we do what we do even if we are self-aware. Oh and we enjoy listening to music too. So if I pointed a giant loudspeaker blaring Mozart at the planet Jupiter and wondered if the planet enjoyed it, no doubt just about every scientist would think I was nuts yet here we are, also composed of elements as Jupiter is, as earth itself is, proving that at least some combinations of elements DO enjoy listening to Mozart. This question intrigues me more than any other and easily passes from physics itself into metaphysics and that's fine by me.

Science will never truly get anywhere until it becomes holistic. There are, apparently, eleven dimensions. We can only perceive four of them. Gravity may be a force not of this universe but of another which leaks into ours (and possibly others). If there are interdimensional forces then we're limited by our own senses and four-dimensional world. It's as if we're trapped in Plato's cave and all the electron microscopes, Keck mirrors, Chandras, and CERN supercolliders can only reveal 36.3% of our universe at any one time even though they much be revealing far more. We just lack the ability to perceive it.

This is what I mean when I say I suspect life has more purpose. We may be interdimensional beings, life may only partially exist in our four dimensional universe, existing only completely in the context of all eleven. Life is just to bizarre and inexplicable a process. Einstein famous said that God doesn't play dice with the universe. There has to be a cause for life, as fundamental a cause, action, and reaction as there is for every physical process. For whatever reason, evolution is a tool of that process. I would not be entirely surprised if the physical universe as we know it, complete in its elements, forces, and dimensions, are all part of an essentially biological process.


I have now twice written a very long detailed response to this post, only to have them both deleted by this user-unfriendly sytem, so I am giving up for now. I have to go and do other things now that I have had so many hours' work erased. I will be sure to write somewhere else that is safe next time before attempting to post anything substantial here ... but that will all be in a couple of days as I have other things to do before I come back with my applecart-upsetting refutatons :biggrin1: muahahaha deranged demonic hysterical laughter, wailing, moaning, and gnashing of teeth echoes eerly through the withered Pythea's deserted cyberspace chambers as the writhing serpents and other menagerie assortments wriggle free and flee in terror at her wrath :eek:
 

Principessa

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Actually I normally don't tell people anything :cool: I have to have developed a high degree of trust or, failing that, at least an adequate level of anonymity before I will let my guard down at all. The reason is for self-protection. I understand that. People can be cruel when you trust them with the truth. There is no reason for everyone you encounter to know.
 

jason_els

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I hear that!

Too many times I've had long posts just lost by this damned unreliable server. I hope Rob_E finds more reliable hosting soon. One of the most recent was for this very topic.

You know you can visit the ruins of the Oracle? You can actually stand in the pythia's chamber itself. It's amazing to be able to do that. I don't know if Europeans quite get the same thrill from their continent that we do. Everything's so damn old.

I have now twice written a very long detailed response to this post, only to have them both deleted by this user-unfriendly sytem, so I am giving up for now. I have to go and do other things now that I have had so many hours' work erased. I will be sure to write somewhere else that is safe next time before attempting to post anything substantial here ... but that will all be in a couple of days as I have other things to do before I come back with my applecart-upsetting refutatons :biggrin1: muahahaha deranged demonic hysterical laughter, wailing, moaning, and gnashing of teeth echoes eerly through the withered Pythea's deserted cyberspace chambers as the writhing serpents and other menagerie assortments wriggle free and flee in terror at her wrath :eek: