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sevEver had one of those moments where a collection of information is finally graspable as a coherent whole? It's like parts clicking together, a puzzle piece found, an ordered picture where moments ago there was chaos.
I had that today. The information has been collecting for several years, and in the last week the data started making different kinds of sense. And then, mid-sentence...I *understood* things about Z's brain that I'd never understood before. I'm not sure I can explain it to somebody else and I'm not sure it applies to anybody but Z, but suddenly I have a mental model of the way he functions so even when it's aggravating at least it makes *sense*.
it's about time, eh?
Anyway.
Last week I wrote: " His brain fills in the gaps with things that seem logical to him, and he never even notices there's a hole that was filled". That's kind of where this started. Z and some subset of people with ADD experience what they describe as something of a discontinuity of reality -- they blink out, miss moments, cleanly sliced out of time. Z, at least, usually doesn't notice those moments are gone; his subconscious is that good at filling in the holes. The discontinuity is only visible under fairly specific circumstances (for instance: following a set of instructions about unfamiliar, discrete actions. If each action requires the previous in order to proceed, eventually he'll hit something that's impossible because he lost the previous step, and subconsciously either spliced his reality back together on either side or filled it in with some logical extrapolation that, because the situation is unfamiliar and therefore less permeable to guesses based on what-he-already-knows, isn't really appropriate).
(note: I talk here about one aspect/another aspect/a third aspect. I think it's quite relevant to note that I first metaphor'ed this up as a linear spectrum, because that's what my brain defaults to if I'm not paying attention.)
In one aspect, I sometimes describe it as "his brain makes shit up" and, for my own peace of mind, that's kind of how I default to thinking about it. Otherwise, I start thinking that I'm crazy, because I'm too concrete to deal with it when he and I both insist we're sure that we're remembering something correctly. He can accept that we remember things differently and just be flexible and eventually figure out what the right answer is. I think I perhaps used to be better at that, but eight years has chipped away a lot of my certainty, and now when those kinds of mismatches occur, I start wondering if I'm just nuts. (The answer is generally, no, I'm not nuts. But I'm going to have to keep reminding myself of that for awhile before it sticks. I only *just* figured out how we got here; it'll take awhile to get back.)
In another aspect, this tendency gives Z a powerful creativity and ability to synergise. He doesn't have to line things up in order to play with them. He thinks outside the box, because he fails to notice the box is there in the first place.
In a third aspect, it's a metaphysical experience I can't really describe because I don't really comprehend it. All I can really do is describe around it.
Walking home from yoga this morning (well, yesterday morning, at this after-midnight point) I was thinking about the various standing poses that really tax my balance, starting with tree on up through today's Warrior III, which I'd never done before. In order to do these poses without tipping over, I need to distract my conscious mind from the problem, or else my mind will try to "help" and it just gets in the way. My hindbrain knows how to stand up.
To keep my conscious mind occupied, I focus on the visualizations that all my yoga teachers have offered during these poses -- most frequently, the helium balloon whose string starts somewhere around my pelvis and comes all the way up out of the top of my head. This makes me stand taller, which is a good thing.
I wondered, this morning, how exactly someone less visual than I would experience this. I mean -- I can tell you instantly what color that balloon is and about how big it is. (It's red, and it's somewhat but not too much smaller than my head.) I have a very clear picture, but I don't know what temperature it might be, whether it's squishy or firm, or even really what it feels like in my body to straighten and lengthen like that. I've done it, but I can't figure out what it feels like.
I know kinesthetic memory is often (usually?) muffled in people (the explanation I've heard is that otherwise, we're incapacitated every time we remember extreme pain). But for me it's not just muffled; it's mostly just...not there. Learning physical activities tends to be harder for me than learning anything else (other than foreign languages -- in part because my auditory memory is similarly constricted, though I seem to have another way I end up dealing with music) and harder for me than for my peers. Recognizing that and figuring out how to bring my richer visual lexicon into play instead has been a very good thing for me. Learning that I periodically need to stop and visualize in order to make reliable progress and minimize mistakes has also been a very good thing for me.
Anyway. I still can't really wrap my head around how people's imaginations work when they're not primarily visual. But I did puzzle a little over: I should at least be able to *guess* what kind of imagination Z has, after all these years. And I was pretty sure I had an accurate guess. It's not really visual the way mine is. I imagine things, and I see them. Z imagines things, and he believes them. He's there. Usually not for very long, but he gets the full sensory experience.
We're pretty sure this is related to the way he fills in the gaps in his consciousness-of-reality (hereafter mostly shortened to 'reality'. I realize that that-which-is-his-reality is not the reality that neurotypicals like me experience, but it *is* reality as far as he's concerned and we get nowhere denying it. Yes, reality's subjective. Because otherwise, I'm right and he's wrong and that's an unworkable start.) I'm not speculating on cause or effect, but there's some awfully similar mechanism that seems to be at play in both the "blink" case and the "imagination" case.
Celebrations and milestones in general and Passover specifically are, for Z, moments of deep connection with his ancestral and cultural past. ("Remember how *we* were slaves in Egypt," the passover haggadah goes. "It is not a story of a far-off land in a distant time, but a story of us, here.") The best way I can describe what I think he was trying to say he experienced was that there's just the one happening, and we all experience it ("in whatever time we're in right now," I must add, in order to make that make sense in *my* worldview).
His concept of legacy is very n-dimensional, and mine's pretty damn linear. If I'm engaging in an act with an important history -- reading from the haggadah, polishing my great-grandmother's silver, voting -- I can view it one of two ways. I can see the long tradition as something at odds with my beliefs and worldview. As of today, I'm trying to stop doing that. No wonder I feel so panicky when I'm engaging in religious traditions that have ever been associated with oppression! That long tradition outweighs me by a mile. It can run me over with nothing but inertia. Instead, if I choose to partake of tradition, I can see the long legacy of people as a line, and at the moment I'm about to act, I'm at the front of the line. The line is going somewhere the way all cultural traditions evolve, and by acting, I'm adding to its direction as well as to its magnitude.
As I said, Z's concept of this is n-dimensional. When he engages in an act with traditional import, he feels -- the same way he *believes* -- all the other people who've done that act, doing it, right there with him. It's as if space and time folded and there is only that one moment that all of those people who have ever done that thing experience. He gets a mystical, metaphysical moment. The closest I can get is a meaningful visualization. And I think that's okay. :)
Some time around this point in the conversation I told him about my balloon visualization and we revisited my understanding of how his imagination works. Just like it worked for me, when I talked about the balloon, he imagined one, and I expect it was a far more detailed balloon than I had. His, it turns out, was blue. When I told him mine was red, his imagined balloon...well, I would say that it changed to red. But what happened for him was that it changed so that it had always been red.
I don't do that so often. When reality changes out from under me I feel scared and lost and panicky. But Z lives in a world that changes like that *all the time*, and that's comfortable and normal for him. His reality contains some things that are based entirely on ever-changing possibilities; in my reality, those things don't exist (yet). He said he can't really *understand*, at anything other than the most superficial level, that anyone else's brain works any other how.
This explains a lot about his habit of waltzing blithely ahead based on what I would call pure conjecture. The way things shift around for him, "conjecture" isn't all *that* far different from "real".
Well, it's now 1:30 and I've been writing this for an hour. Z and I talked pretty deeply about a lot of this stuff this evening, but I think this is as much as I'm going to manage to get down on "paper" before I get to sleep. Perhaps I'll add more later.
I had that today. The information has been collecting for several years, and in the last week the data started making different kinds of sense. And then, mid-sentence...I *understood* things about Z's brain that I'd never understood before. I'm not sure I can explain it to somebody else and I'm not sure it applies to anybody but Z, but suddenly I have a mental model of the way he functions so even when it's aggravating at least it makes *sense*.
it's about time, eh?
Anyway.
Last week I wrote: " His brain fills in the gaps with things that seem logical to him, and he never even notices there's a hole that was filled". That's kind of where this started. Z and some subset of people with ADD experience what they describe as something of a discontinuity of reality -- they blink out, miss moments, cleanly sliced out of time. Z, at least, usually doesn't notice those moments are gone; his subconscious is that good at filling in the holes. The discontinuity is only visible under fairly specific circumstances (for instance: following a set of instructions about unfamiliar, discrete actions. If each action requires the previous in order to proceed, eventually he'll hit something that's impossible because he lost the previous step, and subconsciously either spliced his reality back together on either side or filled it in with some logical extrapolation that, because the situation is unfamiliar and therefore less permeable to guesses based on what-he-already-knows, isn't really appropriate).
(note: I talk here about one aspect/another aspect/a third aspect. I think it's quite relevant to note that I first metaphor'ed this up as a linear spectrum, because that's what my brain defaults to if I'm not paying attention.)
In one aspect, I sometimes describe it as "his brain makes shit up" and, for my own peace of mind, that's kind of how I default to thinking about it. Otherwise, I start thinking that I'm crazy, because I'm too concrete to deal with it when he and I both insist we're sure that we're remembering something correctly. He can accept that we remember things differently and just be flexible and eventually figure out what the right answer is. I think I perhaps used to be better at that, but eight years has chipped away a lot of my certainty, and now when those kinds of mismatches occur, I start wondering if I'm just nuts. (The answer is generally, no, I'm not nuts. But I'm going to have to keep reminding myself of that for awhile before it sticks. I only *just* figured out how we got here; it'll take awhile to get back.)
In another aspect, this tendency gives Z a powerful creativity and ability to synergise. He doesn't have to line things up in order to play with them. He thinks outside the box, because he fails to notice the box is there in the first place.
In a third aspect, it's a metaphysical experience I can't really describe because I don't really comprehend it. All I can really do is describe around it.
Walking home from yoga this morning (well, yesterday morning, at this after-midnight point) I was thinking about the various standing poses that really tax my balance, starting with tree on up through today's Warrior III, which I'd never done before. In order to do these poses without tipping over, I need to distract my conscious mind from the problem, or else my mind will try to "help" and it just gets in the way. My hindbrain knows how to stand up.
To keep my conscious mind occupied, I focus on the visualizations that all my yoga teachers have offered during these poses -- most frequently, the helium balloon whose string starts somewhere around my pelvis and comes all the way up out of the top of my head. This makes me stand taller, which is a good thing.
I wondered, this morning, how exactly someone less visual than I would experience this. I mean -- I can tell you instantly what color that balloon is and about how big it is. (It's red, and it's somewhat but not too much smaller than my head.) I have a very clear picture, but I don't know what temperature it might be, whether it's squishy or firm, or even really what it feels like in my body to straighten and lengthen like that. I've done it, but I can't figure out what it feels like.
I know kinesthetic memory is often (usually?) muffled in people (the explanation I've heard is that otherwise, we're incapacitated every time we remember extreme pain). But for me it's not just muffled; it's mostly just...not there. Learning physical activities tends to be harder for me than learning anything else (other than foreign languages -- in part because my auditory memory is similarly constricted, though I seem to have another way I end up dealing with music) and harder for me than for my peers. Recognizing that and figuring out how to bring my richer visual lexicon into play instead has been a very good thing for me. Learning that I periodically need to stop and visualize in order to make reliable progress and minimize mistakes has also been a very good thing for me.
Anyway. I still can't really wrap my head around how people's imaginations work when they're not primarily visual. But I did puzzle a little over: I should at least be able to *guess* what kind of imagination Z has, after all these years. And I was pretty sure I had an accurate guess. It's not really visual the way mine is. I imagine things, and I see them. Z imagines things, and he believes them. He's there. Usually not for very long, but he gets the full sensory experience.
We're pretty sure this is related to the way he fills in the gaps in his consciousness-of-reality (hereafter mostly shortened to 'reality'. I realize that that-which-is-his-reality is not the reality that neurotypicals like me experience, but it *is* reality as far as he's concerned and we get nowhere denying it. Yes, reality's subjective. Because otherwise, I'm right and he's wrong and that's an unworkable start.) I'm not speculating on cause or effect, but there's some awfully similar mechanism that seems to be at play in both the "blink" case and the "imagination" case.
Celebrations and milestones in general and Passover specifically are, for Z, moments of deep connection with his ancestral and cultural past. ("Remember how *we* were slaves in Egypt," the passover haggadah goes. "It is not a story of a far-off land in a distant time, but a story of us, here.") The best way I can describe what I think he was trying to say he experienced was that there's just the one happening, and we all experience it ("in whatever time we're in right now," I must add, in order to make that make sense in *my* worldview).
His concept of legacy is very n-dimensional, and mine's pretty damn linear. If I'm engaging in an act with an important history -- reading from the haggadah, polishing my great-grandmother's silver, voting -- I can view it one of two ways. I can see the long tradition as something at odds with my beliefs and worldview. As of today, I'm trying to stop doing that. No wonder I feel so panicky when I'm engaging in religious traditions that have ever been associated with oppression! That long tradition outweighs me by a mile. It can run me over with nothing but inertia. Instead, if I choose to partake of tradition, I can see the long legacy of people as a line, and at the moment I'm about to act, I'm at the front of the line. The line is going somewhere the way all cultural traditions evolve, and by acting, I'm adding to its direction as well as to its magnitude.
As I said, Z's concept of this is n-dimensional. When he engages in an act with traditional import, he feels -- the same way he *believes* -- all the other people who've done that act, doing it, right there with him. It's as if space and time folded and there is only that one moment that all of those people who have ever done that thing experience. He gets a mystical, metaphysical moment. The closest I can get is a meaningful visualization. And I think that's okay. :)
Some time around this point in the conversation I told him about my balloon visualization and we revisited my understanding of how his imagination works. Just like it worked for me, when I talked about the balloon, he imagined one, and I expect it was a far more detailed balloon than I had. His, it turns out, was blue. When I told him mine was red, his imagined balloon...well, I would say that it changed to red. But what happened for him was that it changed so that it had always been red.
I don't do that so often. When reality changes out from under me I feel scared and lost and panicky. But Z lives in a world that changes like that *all the time*, and that's comfortable and normal for him. His reality contains some things that are based entirely on ever-changing possibilities; in my reality, those things don't exist (yet). He said he can't really *understand*, at anything other than the most superficial level, that anyone else's brain works any other how.
This explains a lot about his habit of waltzing blithely ahead based on what I would call pure conjecture. The way things shift around for him, "conjecture" isn't all *that* far different from "real".
Well, it's now 1:30 and I've been writing this for an hour. Z and I talked pretty deeply about a lot of this stuff this evening, but I think this is as much as I'm going to manage to get down on "paper" before I get to sleep. Perhaps I'll add more later.
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Thank you.
on 2004-07-23 04:42 am (UTC)I also identify a lot with the n-dimenstional, "feeling" sprirituality you describe. My mind is not primarily visual, but all the visuals in it are very quick to shift and change. And when I picture people they appear (briefly) as something a lot closer to cartoon drawings than to photographs. The color and tone of my mental pictures are more about emotion and mood than they are about realism, as in comics. In real life it's easier for me to recognize people based on how they move or how they talk than on the details of their looks. If I don't really know yet how they move or talk I may not recognize them at all (which has embarrassed me on more than one ocassion). But (as a teacher for example) I can usually tell who is absent from a room without looking carefully--I can just feel the lack of them among the various presences in the room, and I don't mean that in a metaphysical way necessarily, because I'm pretty sure it could be explained by a combination of perfectly ordinary measures.
Anyhow, thank you again for talking about this; not only has it taught me a bit about you two, it's also given me a new perspective on some of the ways my own mind work.
no subject
on 2004-07-23 08:54 am (UTC)I like to think logically, and I'm reasonably good at it, and I believe it is very important in discovering "truth," but for me it's an exercise, not a native mode. Mostly, I think in "related" chunks. And I don't think of them as disjoint -- I think of them as tangentially related. "How did you get from A to Q?" is a hard question, because the point of contact was so small, and not verbalized. And there are potentially zillions of tangents to be used.
Conjecture, yeah. And I sort of expect that other people are going to understand where we're in what-if land and where we're in this-here land, and that what-if can get tossed on a moment's notice, and that this-here has many possible appearances, without saying so in so many words.