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]
The Unconscious
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]
Mark Stairwalt 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]
Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg on 09/15/11 | 1 Comment | Read More
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]
Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg 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]
Zygmunt on 07/4/11 | 2 Comments | Read More
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]
Gwen McKay 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]
Mark Stairwalt on 02/25/11 | 2 Comments | Read More
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]
Gwen McKay on 01/12/11 | 6 Comments | Read More
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]
Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg on 12/17/10 | 2 Comments | Read More
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]
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]
Gwen McKay on 11/24/10 | 4 Comments | Read More
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]
Gwen McKay on 11/17/10 | 2 Comments | Read More
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]
Lili Marlene on 11/1/10 | No Comments | Read More
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]
Gwen McKay on 10/27/10 | 6 Comments | Read More
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]
Lili Marlene on 08/10/10 | 2 Comments | Read More
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]
Gwen McKay 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]
Mark Stairwalt 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]
Mark Stairwalt on 04/2/10 | 11 Comments | Read More
…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]
Andrew Lehman on 03/29/10 | 1 Comment | Read More
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]
Andrew Lehman on 03/10/10 | 1 Comment | Read More
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]
Andrew Lehman on 03/8/10 | 4 Comments | Read More
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]
Andrew Lehman on 02/24/10 | 3 Comments | Read More
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]
Andrew Lehman 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]
Mark Stairwalt 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]
Mark Stairwalt 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]
Guest 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]
Andrew Lehman on 01/19/10 | No Comments | Read More
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]
Andrew Lehman on 01/13/10 | 1 Comment | Read More
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]
Gwen McKay on 01/11/10 | No Comments | Read More
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]
Gwen McKay on 12/28/09 | No Comments | Read More
