Caetextia: A New Definition of Autism and Aspergers behavior

[SilverLining]

Hi Everybody.   Here's something I came across in my reading which may be of interest to some on the board.  These therapists propose the term "caetextia" or context blindness to describe behaviors on the higher functioning end of the autistic spectrum.  I find some of their ideas intriguing.  There is "left brained" autistic behavior which is close to the common description of aspergers syndrome.  But then there is a right brain variation (they believe more common in women) in which the left brain does not effectively discipline the random and imaginative associations of the right. 

http://www.caetextia.com/

I've been toying with the idea that my father demonstrates the left brain problem, and my mother the right brain variation. Opposites really do attract....

[Meh]

Now that "Skits" explained her self-diagnosis...Hum, makes me wonder how an expert can tell the difference between Aspergers and "Schizoid" personality traits. The two things both appear to have a "anti-social" flavor to them. It's all way beyond what my little brain can tolerate right now though so I'm not gonna think about it too much. 

[sKePTiKal]

Although missing the template for parallel processing, the more intelligent a person with caetextia is, the more likely they are to have access to universal reason. They may then be able to use thought to reflect back consciously on whatever has happened and construct another perspective. But this is a slow process and, without instant access to their own reinforcement history, their sense of self will be impaired – that sense of ‘I-ness’, of being separate from whatever context we happen to be in. People on the autistic spectrum, lacking this ability, may struggle to develop a sense of self and typically feel insecure in a world where everything is constantly changing. It may be this impoverished sense of self that keeps driving the more creative people with this condition to find out who they are, trying out roles to play in life and reinventing themselves, etc.

HUH. This paragraph opens up a lot of questions, for me.
For instance: what do the authors mean here, about "reinforcement history"?

Now the observing self - this is something I'm pretty familiar with. Starlight - if you only read that section, I think you'll find it interesting and helpful.

[BonesMS]

Hi Everybody.   Here's something I came across in my reading which may be of interest to some on the board.  These therapists propose the term "caetextia" or context blindness to describe behaviors on the higher functioning end of the autistic spectrum.  I find some of their ideas intriguing.  There is "left brained" autistic behavior which is close to the common description of aspergers syndrome.  But then there is a right brain variation (they believe more common in women) in which the left brain does not effectively discipline the random and imaginative associations of the right. 

http://www.caetextia.com/

I've been toying with the idea that my father demonstrates the left brain problem, and my mother the right brain variation. Opposites really do attract....

I have not heard of Caetextia before and I have not seen this discussed in my Aspie groups.  I'll have to ask them what their thoughts are on this.

Bones

[SilverLining]

Although missing the template for parallel processing, the more intelligent a person with caetextia is, the more likely they are to have access to universal reason. They may then be able to use thought to reflect back consciously on whatever has happened and construct another perspective. But this is a slow process and, without instant access to their own reinforcement history, their sense of self will be impaired – that sense of ‘I-ness’, of being separate from whatever context we happen to be in. People on the autistic spectrum, lacking this ability, may struggle to develop a sense of self and typically feel insecure in a world where everything is constantly changing. It may be this impoverished sense of self that keeps driving the more creative people with this condition to find out who they are, trying out roles to play in life and reinventing themselves, etc.

HUH. This paragraph opens up a lot of questions, for me.
For instance: what do the authors mean here, about "reinforcement history"?

Yeah I'm not sure what they mean by reinforcement history and "universal reason".   I get the impression a person with this condition has to sort of think their way into a sense of self rather than just being that self.  So for those with the right brain impairment, the self definition process is intellectual without the benefit of right brain intuition.   

The outcome is familiar in my FOO.  I've long suspected my father is in a constant process of self definition, even at age 78.   He reads a book, adopts the perspective as his own for awhile.  Then after the memory fades he's onto something else.  There is no stable "core self" there for him to fall back on.  Reading is probably his primary tool of self definition.  Another is opposition.  He's constantly defining himself in opposition to others.   

[sea storm]

I wish this information was written in a less dense and clearer way.  It is very important and in this academic format it isn't accessible enough. I am not kidding. I have a Master's Degree in Ed Psych and have worked and designed programs for children with Aspergers and Autism and I don't understand it. What is the point they are making. For Pete's Sake I also have a degree in English. I am sick of the pompous and acturally inarticulate musings of these scientists. Academia is full of it. It is like they are in a trance where they speak their own language.

The little I understood was extremely interesting.  Huff Huff

[BonesMS]

I wish this information was written in a less dense and clearer way.  It is very important and in this academic format it isn't accessible enough. I am not kidding. I have a Master's Degree in Ed Psych and have worked and designed programs for children with Aspergers and Autism and I don't understand it. What is the point they are making. For Pete's Sake I also have a degree in English. I am sick of the pompous and acturally inarticulate musings of these scientists. Academia is full of it. It is like they are in a trance where they speak their own language.

The little I understood was extremely interesting.  Huff Huff

I agree Sea Storm!  It appears that these scientists are stuck in an ivory tower of their own making and have ZERO interest in LISTENING to anyone!

Bones

[sKePTiKal]

SL:

OK - I like your explanation! Let's use that until we find something better.

I get the impression a person with this condition has to sort of think their way into a sense of self rather than just being that self.  So for those with the right brain impairment, the self definition process is intellectual without the benefit of right brain intuition. 

It's kinda scary to me, to recognize myself in the above. Especially thinking my way into a sense of self and really craving that ability to just be myself - sans qualifications, asking for permission, apologizing for, etc. But then, I remember... that some types of dysfunctional parenting, especially with moms... does have this kind of impact on right-brain development (per my hero, Alan Schore). So... while I'm fairly confident that my "real self" isn't autistic or AS (after some dubious online testing)... I know that my brain was "trained" to be this way because of that FOO environment.

Un-doing that training is working for me; it's taken time (more than I realized or hoped) to clear enough space for me to stand in the middle, and turn all the way around and breathe - as just me. Maybe neuroscience will figure out a way to make it possible to help people who really are AS and Autistic, too.

[SilverLining]

It's kinda scary to me, to recognize myself in the above. Especially thinking my way into a sense of self and really craving that ability to just be myself - sans qualifications, asking for permission, apologizing for, etc. But then, I remember... that some types of dysfunctional parenting, especially with moms... does have this kind of impact on right-brain development (per my hero, Alan Schore). So... while I'm fairly confident that my "real self" isn't autistic or AS (after some dubious online testing)... I know that my brain was "trained" to be this way because of that FOO environment.

Hey Phoenix.  That's exactly where I'm at.  I've been an expert at the lifelong pursuit of identity and a sense of real self.  So then we're down to old nature/nurture question.  I've done the online testing as well, and my memories of early childhood don't suggest any sort of autistic or AS signs in myself (my brother and I believe my father had the typical AS late development of language, early problems with peers e.t.c..).  So I agree for us it was a matter of being trained into certain behaviors by a dysfunctional environment.  My memories of early childhood are fairly positive, but by the time I spent the required 18+ years in the FOO bizarro world, I was a mess.   

[sKePTiKal]

"I was a mess" you said...

does that mean you can notice an improvement now? That things are better, more often, than reminding you of "what was"?

[SilverLining]

"I was a mess" you said...

does that mean you can notice an improvement now? That things are better, more often, than reminding you of "what was"?

I'd say as time goes on and I continue working on these issues, that things have definitely gotten better, and the relapses have gotten less intense.  Maybe not all the time, but at least some of time, I can put things in perspective and see some humor in the whole thing.  Also maybe I'm getting better at recognizing and not getting sucked in by the usual triggers.  

I'd say this is another sort of self test for us.  I wonder about my own condition, but compared to what goes on with the other FOO members my progress seems pretty clear.  Things don't appear to be getting better for any of them.  They just get deeper into craziness, chemical cures, ritual behaviors, and other non-solutions.  Nothing ever really changes.   

[sKePTiKal]

Well, that's very good news, SL!

You know, my "theory" is that it's precisely that we were so affected by the toxicity in our FOOs that makes us "normal". If you expose a healthy person to a communicable disease... our immune systems go into over-drive to fight it off. Sometimes we get ill, too, for a time. But it's not permanent - we recover. For me, I got into the auto-immune cycle... where my silly body got programmed to believe everything it came into contact with was toxic... and started to attack itself. This is a bit harder to bring back to balance... but I think I'm getting there.

The hardest part was teaching myself to start from where I'm at, right this moment and to not compare myself to the end-result, the ideal or goal that I'm working toward. Where I'm at right now, I need tinier goals... the building blocks and the routine repetitions so that it becomes my day to day, automatic, don't have to think about it kind of "stuff in my life". I needed to learn to tell myself - that's good enough for today, try again tomorrow. And to take that moment to appreciate what I was able to do today, without beating myself up about how far away I am from where I want to go. That reflex to constantly berate myself for x, y, and z... is one of the toxic "hangovers" of being me in my FOO.

It's message is "I'm not good enough, I'm never gonna be good enough, look how out of shape, fat, old, addicted you are... it's hopeless... why try?" and that's exactly what has stopped me from getting started in the past. I don't need a sign on my back that says: Kick me... I've got that covered! Thanks very much. And since being kicked was about the only time I got undivided attention... well don't you know? That's how I validated myself.

Lately, I've been reminding myself that if I'm so deprived, neglected, etc. then I'd best take every opportunity, every good thing that comes my way - whether it's a chance to get know new people, help someone else out, snuggle with my honey, or eat something healthy and yummy or to run up & down the steps - take every chance I get and make something bigger (and hopefully better) out of it. Coz I have no idea, no one can predict, how many more chances I'm gonna get.

[SilverLining]

It's message is "I'm not good enough, I'm never gonna be good enough, look how out of shape, fat, old, addicted you are... it's hopeless... why try?" and that's exactly what has stopped me from getting started in the past. I don't need a sign on my back that says: Kick me... I've got that covered! Thanks very much. And since being kicked was about the only time I got undivided attention... well don't you know? That's how I validated myself.

And those messages get programmed in all sorts of subtle ways.  In recent years I see how my father went into a mid life deflation stage (starting when I was about 10), and then started passing off his own toxic programming onto the offspring.  It was along the line of, "I'm a failure, you are related to me, biology is everything, therefore you don't have a chance".  And I think he gets some sort of narcissistic kick by repeating this type of message.  I was well programmed with this  by the time I hit adulthood. 

The stuff sure gets deep in our toxic FOO's.  Lately I've sometimes had the weird feeling that I am watching a sort of drama with these people in which I am no longer really involved.   It's weird but also liberating, because it finally seems to be something outside myself.   

[SilverLining]

[‘Context blindness’ — the inability to switch easily between several foci of attention and track them — is clearly seen in autism (the child transfixed by spinning the wheels on a toy car has no sense of a car’s real purpose, for instance) but is the most dominant manifestation of autistic behaviour in high-achieving people with Asperger’s syndrome. We have therefore named it ‘caetextia’, from the Latin caecus, meaning ‘blind’ and contextus, meaning ‘context’. We are suggesting that caetextia is a more accurate and descriptive term for this inability to see how one variable influences another, particularly at the higher end of the spectrum, than the label of ‘Asperger’s syndrome’.

I've been mulling this article over for a couple of weeks and I think they are onto something (although the presentation needs work).  I'm thinking the minds of other people are an especially challenging piece of "context" for a  person with this affliction.  At an intellectual level, they might know the other person is a complex,  and intelligent person with their own experiences and perspectives.  But in the day to day process of interaction, they cannot efficiently access their intellectual knowledge of the other.  So their modes of interaction tend to be literal, one dimensional, and often insulting to the other.  

Of course I've been trying to apply the idea to my FOO.  My father at age 78 could probably sit down and pass a college algebra test without studying in advance.  He has a prodigious memory for this kind of stuff, which made him successful as a career engineer.  But he is a complete bumbler when it comes to taking into account the mind of others in conversation.  The multiple streams of information going into his brain seem to instantly overwhelm his processing ability and he reverts to monologuing and explanation, his preferred modes of interaction.  

So maybe it's not so much "mind blindness" as an inability to quickly process and act on what he knows intellectually.  Where others intuitively and routinely access their knowledge of others, someone like my father can't do it.  He can only easily and efficiently access his own (often random) stream of consciousness and this is becomes his main mode of interaction. 

[BonesMS]

[‘Context blindness’ — the inability to switch easily between several foci of attention and track them — is clearly seen in autism (the child transfixed by spinning the wheels on a toy car has no sense of a car’s real purpose, for instance) but is the most dominant manifestation of autistic behaviour in high-achieving people with Asperger’s syndrome. We have therefore named it ‘caetextia’, from the Latin caecus, meaning ‘blind’ and contextus, meaning ‘context’. We are suggesting that caetextia is a more accurate and descriptive term for this inability to see how one variable influences another, particularly at the higher end of the spectrum, than the label of ‘Asperger’s syndrome’.

I've been mulling this article over for a couple of weeks and I think they are onto something (although the presentation needs work).  I'm thinking the minds of other people are an especially challenging piece of "context" for a  person with this affliction.  At an intellectual level, they might know the other person is a complex,  and intelligent person with their own experiences and perspectives.  But in the day to day process of interaction, they cannot efficiently access their intellectual knowledge of the other.  So their modes of interaction tend to be literal, one dimensional, and often insulting to the other.  

Of course I've been trying to apply the idea to my FOO.  My father at age 78 could probably sit down and pass a college algebra test without studying in advance.  He has a prodigious memory for this kind of stuff, which made him successful as a career engineer.  But he is a complete bumbler when it comes to taking into account the mind of others in conversation.  The multiple streams of information going into his brain seem to instantly overwhelm his processing ability and he reverts to monologuing and explanation, his preferred modes of interaction.  

So maybe it's not so much "mind blindness" as an inability to quickly process and act on what he knows intellectually.  Where others intuitively and routinely access their knowledge of others, someone like my father can't do it.  He can only easily and efficiently access his own (often random) stream of consciousness and this is becomes his main mode of interaction. 

For Aspies, multi-tasking is nearly impossible and a source of frustration.  Multiple streams of information can be a source of sensory overload.

Bones