I have conversations with myself. A lot.
Well, "with myself" being in my head with hypothetical versions of other people. This isn't re-hashing conversations I've actually had and wishing I'd said something different; this is complete new discussions on various topics or concepts. Sometimes they go on for hours, or even spread across multiple days - I can put on "on hold" one afternoon and pick it up again the following evening.
I also run a lot of "movies" in my head. Sometimes they're actual movies, where I'll re-watch (from memory) movies I like. Sometimes they're visual "movies" of books I've read. Sometimes they're just odd daydreaming-type scenarios that I stick myself (or others) into, just to see how they turn out.
I do this a lot. At almost any time of day, either a conversation or scenario is running through my head; I hesitate to call it daydreaming because I'm not distracted by it - it's just there in the background. I do it while driving, while working, even while having real conversations.
There have been moments when I've even had *two* running simultaneously, but that's just when I'm having one of my "hyper" phases. I suppose those deserve a little explanation.
I may have mentioned before that I'm hypersensitive in the physical sense - I've got a lower activation threshold than most people. This is probably related to the acronym soup (ADHD, AS, OCD, etc.), but under normal circumstances I can keep it under control: I can put a kind of conscious block on sensation so that, while I know it's there, I'm basically just ignoring it.
Once in a while, though - the last time was in Maui - I'll hit a period when it seems like my brain's on overdrive. If most people have a threshold of 5, and I normally operate at 3, it drops to 1 for these periods. I notice everything, actively, and it even feels like time slows down for the entire duration (which is usually the first effect I'm aware of being aware of).
One time, I was having dinner with Phil at a Hamburger Hamlet in Sherman Oaks when it kicked in on the drive to the place. Phil ended up commenting on it: I was anticipating actions and reactions so often that it started to bother him. Things like grabbing a glass just as he started to knock it over (my hand was on it just as his arm hit it), moving out of the way of people who were behind me (seeing them in the reflections of things), listening in on several different conversations and using that information with the waiter, etc., all while having a normal conversation with him (normal for us, anyway, which tends to be above the heads of most people). The rest of the night was the same way, where no matter where I was I picked up on a huge amount of detail for the environment.
It's very draining, so luckily it usually only lasts a few hours; I think the longest I was ever "hyped up" was a couple of days. It isn't just normal hyperactivity, either - I go that fairly often, and while I feel energetic I don't get the same time-slows-down type of effect or the added sensitivity.
Anyway, during these hyped-up phases I often have 5 or 6 active levels of thought going on (as opposed to the 4 that seem to be standard for me - usually two parts of me paying attention to whatever I'm doing, the part of me analyzing those parts, and a fourth separate piece that mostly just seems to map everything without critiquing but is generally the source of my intuition). I think, in general, it's whatever "active" thread that isn't busy that does the daydreaming, so that if I end up with more than 2 active threads I can have more than two daydreams going at once. Even meditating, there's always at least two of me with the "other" piece being the intuitive mapper in the background.
There are moments - all too brief and rare - when I can condense all the levels in my head into one single thought or thread. Interestingly enough, these also tend to happen in the hyped up phases, but I've had a few outside of that. For the lack of a better phrase, I usually refer to is as a "perfect moment" - something I stole from Terry Pratchett's book "Thief of Time" and, really, the trigger for this post since a friend brought up a quote in a conversation today.
Anyway, this has all been fairly stream-of-consciousness, and I'm not sure if it's relevant to anyone else. Not that that's ever stopped me.
(Random note - I can't find "imprementeur" in any dictionary, French or English, in any variation of spelling, and even yahoo and google only have three matches. Is it really that odd a word, or am I just horribly butchering it?)
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15 comments:
Hi there, Austin
Many thanks for posting this - it's fascinating, and remarkably relevant for me at least. It gives me a much better understanding of how your thought processes work - not least illuminating the several "nature of consciousness/identity" discussions we've had in the last few months.
It also, once again, gives me cause to wonder at how similar we seem to be. I don't experience the effects you describe anything like as intensely as you do - indeed, some I don't experience at all, particularly the "overdrive" / "hyper" state - but I can recognise fainter versions of a lot of the same things in me, not least frequent internal narration or dialogue. I also seem to be unusually sensitive to various things: touching certain materials (nylon as a particular case) makes me squirm; low-level intermittent noises really catch my attention.
(Random note: did you mean "imprimatur"? I.e. a mark of approval or endorsement, originally official permission for publication of a book from the Roman catholic church. If so, the Wikipedia entry is reasonably informative.)
Take care
Mark
(There ya go - I figured my brain was botching it, which is why I tried looking it up. It makes sense that it's Latin and not French, but I'm still surprised that I could find nothing in various dictionaries (I tried looking it up manually, even in an old printed dictionary, and came up with nothing). It was completely unrelated to this blog post, but for some reason my brain decided to obsess over the word, and it just didn't look right. Score one for the wandering pom.)
The physical sensitivity issue is a common one; Wikipedia even mentions "sensitivity" in its article on Asperger's Syndrome:
" They may be unusually sensitive or insensitive to sound, light, and other stimuli; these sensory responses are found in other developmental disorders and are not specific to AS or to ASD."
Something like 50-60% of IT folk (and 80+% of programmers) are likely AS or on the autism spectrum (including ADHD). Now, I'm a bit unusual in certain respects (that's not ego - my biology and neurology have been proven to be "funky" in the words of my old doctor), so I'd expect others' experiences to be variant, but the theme is the same.
But it's nice to know I'm not totally insane, even if I still feel like an alien most of the time :)
BTW - you need to post on your blog more.
Hi there, Austin
(Thanks: you haven't encountered my fascination with words and language up till now, I think... Oh, and thanks for including these random notes: there's something about the non sequitur randomness that really appeals to my sense of humour :-) )
Thanks for the mention of Asperger's: I've known about it, and suspected that I have it (I wouldn't say "suffer from it"), for nearly 25 years. A while back I took the AQ Test; a score of 42 or 43 pretty much confirmed my conclusion.
I definitely think you're not insane: to the contrary, you're one of the most rational, clear-headed, articulate people I think I know. Your thought processes, and your (remarkably clear) understanding of them may distinguish you from the majority of people, but I don't think that affects your sanity in the least. As for feeling like an alien, I too am not sure sometimes whether I'm a participating member of the human race :-)
On which subject, thanks for the encouragement about posting. However, this shows up a major difference between us. Whilst I can respond to others' posts relatively easily (depending on how much thought is required to frame what I want to say in just the right way), I find it a lot harder to originate my own blog posts. I rarely come up with ideas that I feel are worth developing as posts, and even when I do, I often lose the struggle to focus for long enough to compose something I'm happy to post. If you have any suggestions for topics I should write about, please let me know - the more I have to work with, the more likely it is that something will emerge!
Take care
Mark
This is fascinating. I don't observe anything like what you've described, and it's really eye-opening to know that such things are possible. It occurs to me that God must have something like what you have to an infinitely higher degree in order to be able to think of everything at once. So having multiple trains of thought actively and consciously running puts you at a higher state in a way.
Mark,
On the AQ, I score a 26 - but that's probably not a fair evaluation. Many of the questions involve reading emotion and social psychology, and that's one area I specifically studied because I knew I was lacking in it. So, that probably skews my numbers. Having a massive information addition helps to overcome other problems :) (even if it does cause some of its own)
I find that, with rare exceptions, the only way I can write posts is to just sit down and start writing, usually in notepad or something non-bloggish. However, I've spent years going to coffee shops or such to just sit down and write out stream-of-consciousness, mainly as a way to better understand what's going on in my head. I've got stacks of spiral notebooks with just those writings scattered throughout my room. The main difference is that I never intend to show anyone those writings, whereas this is on the public internet.
Naturgesetz,
Be very careful there: "higher state" is a dangerous road to be led down. Such designations tend to infer "better" or "lesser" terminology, and that's the road to eugenics.
To me, it isn't any better than my "normal" state - for example, it makes the disassociation even stronger; when you spend your life feeling like the guy looking in through the window, anything that magnifies the sensation isn't really helpful. Granted, it has advantages, but it isn't all roses. Mostly it's just *different*.
I think, though I only have circumstantial evidence for this, that most people have at least two trains of thought going even if they don't realize it: there's you, and there's the you watching yourself. Since consciousness can be described as the ability to react to one's own reactions, any conscious being almost has to have at least those two.
Hi there, Austin
On the AQ test, I could have skewed it entirely one way or the other: I know the typical symptoms of the condition well enough to see right through the questions. Nevertheless, I tried quite hard to answer it honestly, even though I would have much preferred a "neutral" option for quite a few of the questions. I still feel that a "slightly" answer shouldn't score as high as a "strongly".
As for writing, much of my experience of it was at school and university, when it was done to order, mostly on topics I wasn't very much interested in, and all too often (the worst part) to a strict time limit. I can't say that it has put me off for life, but I very rarely feel moved to write prose, let alone poetry, for pleasure. Other forms of composing information are fine - databases of various sorts (specific or general sense), some recreational maths, the obscure art of optimal itinerary planning from railway timetables - but conventional writing just doesn't do it for me.
To paraphrase or expand on what I said before: if you ask me questions, you'll get answers; if you ask me the right questions (whatever they are), you'll get blog posts.
Meanwhile, I do do the "stream of consciousness" / "internal dialogue" thing, and it has given me some useful insights - but it usually happens to me when I'm walking from A to B, more or less on autopilot, and my mind is free to go where it will. Consequently, it doesn't get written down. I don't think a coffee shop would work for me at all - almost certainly there would be far too much going on to distract me.
Take care
Mark
Ah, yes... schools have a way of beating mediocrity into us whether we like it or not. Well, different people have different motivators and different interests; it certainly shouldn't be considered a detriment that you don't want to write most of the time. Though it makes blogging difficult.
I think I concur on the "ask the right questions" part - that's pretty much what OutNotUp is about. It's where that sort of dialogue takes place, at least for me. That's also why I separated it from this stuff: this is far more personal and less abstracted. Other there, I can talk about programming in general; here, I talk about a program I'm writing. Etc.
See, the distractions at a coffee shop are exactly why I go: for me, anyway, they provide enough background-level distraction that, similar to walking to driving, I can put some of the threads on autopilot and then let the rest wander. Stick me in a quiet room by myself with nothing going on, and it's nearly impossible for me to focus - unless I can slip into hyperfocus mode, in which case I don't even notice my surroundings at all, populated or otherwise.
My joke about my ADHD is that it isn't a deficit: my problem is that I've got *too much* attention to pay out.
So, here's a subject for a post at some point - describe the kinds of problem-solving tasks you enjoy and why. Maybe what you experience, subjectively, during the state collapse (the moment of inspiration or intuition in which you see the answer to a problem). That might suggest other topics.
Hi there, Austin
I may have misrepresented my experience of education somewhat: as I recall, I enjoyed a lot of it, and I was kept reasonably well mentally stimulated. It was just the having to write bit that was a particular struggle for me.
Not wanting to write much does indeed make blogging difficult, but posting to my own blog is (no surprise) not what really interests me here. What I spend the vast majority of my blog-land time on is reading and commenting on other people's posts. Responding to something already written is generally quite easy for me, possibly because there are evident boundaries to the discussion; it's just writing something from scratch that's the real difficulty. Hence the "right questions" point: the right combination of boundaries and inspiration will get me to produce something quite easily.
Meanwhile, I have passed your suggested subject to my mental process that thinks about things in the background for me, and I'm waiting for it to report back :-)
On another, more annoying note, my comment of yesterday evening seems to have disappeared (at least for me) since I posted it. I've noticed this happening a few times before, and I think it may correlate with writing the text outside Blogger and pasting it in to the Post a Comment box. It's all the more bizarre in that I have subscribed to this thread, and hence have an e-mail with the comment text in!
Take care
Mark
I've rescued the comment; it had been (automatically) banished to spam-land, probably because we've been posting so much :) However, I've reinstated its visa permanently; if any others get deported, let me know.
Ah, yes. Limits, rules, boundaries, conditions - the set and setting of the AS mind. As I've said before, I consider myself more adaptive than creative - and largely for exactly these requirements: give me boundaries in which to play and a topic on which to focus, and I'll goof off for hours. On the wide-open field of infinite "anything", there are just too many variables and the mind can't contain them all, much less reduce them to something that can be related.
I may have been projecting a bit there - I couldn't stand most of my education experience. Sitting in a room being talked at for hours, even about interesting subjects, is not compatable with my learning style.
Hi there, Austin
Apologies for suddenly going silent: I wasn't feeling up to thinking much for most of the weekend.
Thanks for rescuing my comment; it would be nice to know what Blogger's metric for spam is, so that I could avoid triggering it.
Hmmm, let's see, where were we...
My recollection of school is that it was a lot more varied than just "talk and chalk" - obviously the exact mix of teaching techniques varied by subject, but generally each lesson contained some "talk", some writing, some working from textbooks, and so on.
These days, by contrast, I find almost any sort of learning that involves being talked at to be frustratingly slow: I would much rather read the same content from something written (a lot faster for me than having someone explain it aloud) and then practice it in some way. I could wish that my employers understood this...
Boundaries: I know what you mean - I feel much happier working with an area of knowledge with well-defined boundaries. Sometimes they arise naturally; sometimes I can set them myself. Sometimes they're not there, and I can feel my mental grasp somehow diffusing outwards, at which point I typically decide to move on to something else.
An example that may help explain this: I'm interesting in railways, and I can, and do, learn the structure of rail networks - where the lines are and how they connect together - from maps and by travelling around. Some networks are too simple to be really interesting, e.g. Luxembourg, Portugal. Some are too complex and extensive to be readily grasped, e.g. France, Germany, USA. In the middle are those which are complex enough to be interesting, and small enough to be "understood" in one go, Austria probably being my favourite example at the moment. I can get to grips with the bigger networks, but I find I have to mentally divide them into smaller areas and deal with those one by one.
Hmmm, that was geeky :-)
I could ramble on more about this sort of thing, but I think it's time for me to find some sort of dinner (8.30pm here). More later, I hope.
Take care
Mark
I'd say most geeks are the bookish type who learn better from "reading and doing" than from listening. I'd probably argue that part of it has to do with the way we handle language structures; I know that, when tackling complexities, I'll sometimes go back and re-read a sentence three or four times to make sure I grasp all the nuance. You can't do that with speech.
Railways - time for a CSB (that's Farkish for 'cool story bro').
So, if you've studied the US rail system you know that almost all of the rail in the network is owned by freight companies of various kinds. Most commuter services, like Amtrak, get special license to run on these rails since they don't own their own (and it would be silly for them to have such).
In the late 80s or early 90s (I can't remember exactly when; I think it was 89, but not sure), one of the unions working on the freight lines went on strike. Now, while they weren't protesting Amtrak directly, this caused Amtrak to almost completely shut down as well, since Amtrak runs almost exclusively on freight rail.
It so happens that my parents and I had gone on a vacation that summer. The plan was to fly to DC, take the train to Boston, rent a car in Boston and drive around New England, up to Quebec, then over to Chicago, then catch the train from Chicago to Seattle and down the coast back to California.
So, while we're in DC, the talks break down and the strike happens. Amtrak is shut down across the country.
Well, not quite. I did say that Amtrak runs almost exclusively on freight rail - it turns out that Amtrak owns one set of rails in the whole country (or did at the time): the line going from DC to Boston. The exact line my parents and I were taking the morning after the strike was announced.
So, here we are, sitting at the station in DC with almost no one else around since every other train had stopped running, and the news crews came out of the woodwork to find people to put on television. My stepdad - a fine fellow with a seargant's bellow and the opinions to back it up - had no problem giving interview after interview.
To add to the feel, we had a huge pile of luggage that we were obviously takinng with us, and since I'd been woken up early, I was "napping" while laying across it. This looked forlorn enough to the photographers that I must have appeared in half a dozen newspapers and television shots.
Anyway, we got to Boston, and while the train ride from Chicago to Seattle is pretty dull, the Coast Starlight down the west coast was actually pretty cool. We even went quite literally through the middle of a forest fire at night, while I sat in the observation car and watched the glowing embers and flames pass by.
Haven't been on an Amtrak since, though.
Railroads are a pretty good way of getting around. Of course, now that there are airplanes, there are limits. But when I was a boy, we went by train from Boston to Cleveland to visit my father's aunt. On another occasion we went to New York for a few days. And when my brother was looking at colleges, the trip to D.C. was by train. When I was in college in D.C. the trips back and forth were sometimes by train, sometimes plane and occasionally in a classmate's car. Thanksgiving was so short a break that planes were preferable, but Christmas, Easter, and summer gave no such motive for haste.
The interstate highway system did a lot to put an end to trains as a primary means of personal transportation, but one train is certainly more energy efficient than hundreds of cars. And it may be better in that regard than an airplane, but I'm not sure. The plane has to overcome gravity and the resistance of the air. The train has to overcome a lot of internal friction. But even now, for travel from Boston to New York or New York to Washington, the time from downtown to downtown must be comparable, and as a bonus, you avoid airport security.
I actually enjoyed the train, and as a concept it seems great. If/when they get the high speed rail from here to SF going, it'll be faster doing that than driving, and considerably more comfortable; at that point, I'll probably take the train to SF and the rent a car for my trips to Guerneville.
I'm actually one of those people who thinks plane flights should be more expensive and, thus, rarer but more comfortable. Most business folk travel around a hell of a lot more than they need, and for vacations and such there is definitely benefit in taking things slowly. Now, obviously across major bodies of water, one will need to fly (cruises are great but way too slow for anything practical). But I see no reason why our IT manager in NC needs to hop on a flight out to California for one meeting he could have joined via conference call.
Hi there, Austin and naturgesetz
I think the North-East Corridor (Boston - New York - Washington) has a better rail service - faster and more frequent - than at any time in its history: New York - Washington in under three hours, New York - Boston in three and a half hours. Both those sectors must be competitive with flying.
There are still trains to Cleveland. It's on two routes: New York - Albany - Chicago, and Washington - Pittsburgh - Chicago. Unfortunately all the trains pass through Cleveland in the small hours of the morning. The New York train even has a section from Boston, attached to the main part of the train at Albany.
And for you, Austin, the Coast Starlight still runs, and will take you from LA to Oakland in about 11 hours - not particularly fast, but you get to relax and watch the world go by. It's a journey I would very much like to do, some time.
As for the efficiency of plane vs. train, I think the train wins on almost every measure: per passenger, per mile, etc. Planes are very inefficient, because they have to burn so much fuel just to stay up in the air. I could probably come up with some figures, if you're interested, but not until tomorrow (it's 1am here now!).
Austin: I hope you don't mind us wandering off-topic like this.
Take care
Mark
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