Reflection: Occupational Therapy with Cyber-Slime

Sometimes I am struck by how much my netbook is like me. I have determined that the dear netbook has a processing disorder... no, no, I am not talking about its hard drive, I mean more of a sensory processing disorder. It's hypo-responsive to some stimuli.

It happened off and on for a couple months: There were several keys that would sometimes be difficult to use and then sometimes go out altogether. (Ever tried to paste in periods at the end of sentences?) Ah, but then it would be fine again, completely fine.

When one of the afflicted keys would go out, they would all go out. When one of the afflicted keys would return, they would all return. I wondered if temperature changes were causing condensation. It appeared to be something more than dirt, and yet -- here's where the story starts to get strange -- I learned that it really liked the yellow cyber-slime I bought to clean it. I mean, it really liked it. I mean, those keys could be the cleanest ones on the whole keyboard, but if I took a moment to massage them with cyber-slime, voila, they worked again! Like magic! Over and over again, the trick worked. As odd as it sounds, it's no coincidence. It might take a few therapy sessions over the course of a day before the keyboard is ready to work smoothly for an extended period, but then things will really kick back in gear and it will be fine for a long time.

I am actually at a bit of a loss to explain this. Is something slightly warped or out of shape? Or... Well, I've heard that occupational therapists sometimes have some success using sensory materials to rewire the processing systems of children with autism or SPD. Whatever the underlying cause, it appeared that my netbook just needed a little occupational therapy.

Now here's something that relates (though it doesn't involve netbooks or cyber-slime). I've added quite a bit to it recently, and it's probably the best job I've done telling my own life story on a Squidoo lens or a webpage: Memoir of a Hyporesponsive Child

Reflection: The Illusion of Privacy

There are parties downstairs at my apartment building a couple times a year. We munch, we chat. Someone that I have spoken to at those occasional gatherings -- and said hello to on the elevator now and then over the years -- said a curious thing. He said he has wanted to talk to me at times, but I seem like a private person.

Private? That is very much not how I see myself (and it is probably not how people see me who communicate with me mostly online). It tends to floor me when people say that. I think the misconception stems from people mistaking indifference for resistance. I am not more resistant to people getting in my face; I am simply more indifferent... to those who don't.

Once again, it's underwhelment masking as overwhelment. I am drawn (when I'm drawn) to people who are more intense than the norm, more emotional, more over-the-top, and often more needy. Interaction has to simply sizzle. Normal interactions tend to pass below the threshhold needed to... to stir up anything at all in me beyond the intellectual awareness that, hey, there's another human in the vicinity. The irony is if that person had been more in my face, they might have broken through that false veneer of privacy. Some people have created strong bonds that way. The illusion of privacy is more apt to vanish if you're the kind of person who (marvelous in my eyes!) can't contain your energy within your own borders.

Reflection: Different Ways of Experiencing

I think a lot of people, at this point, have at least heard of the brain chemical dopamine. Among the many things it does... Well, I've heard it described in this way: It makes things pop out from the background and seem relevant. It intensifies them. (The picture on the right, which had quite a lot of local contrast added, is intended to represent higher dopamine perception.)

Me, I perceive things more like the picture on the left. I know -- I mean, I can tell -- I don't have normal dopamine processing. As an example... The ayuderdic herb, mucuna pruriens, is one of the only things that naturally contains the most direct precursor of dopamine. It has legitimate medical uses. Some people, if they weren't used to it, would find that it made them more than usually cheerful or confident. Some would find that it sent them right over the edge into anxiety, agitation, mania -- like caffeine, but likely worse. (Some of the disorders that frequently show dopamine overactivity: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, anxiety.) My reaction to mucuna pruriens is that is calming and sometimes sleep-inducing. I consider it a preventative measure when it comes to bad dreams.

Sometimes coffee brings me down, too. Going to sleep on stimulants is not an uncommon reaction... for a person with ADHD. I don't have ADHD, but there are common threads. There's a theory that people with ADHD procrastinate so that they can add excitement to a task, so they can stir up enough stimulants in their brain that they are actually able to do the task. Me, I don't do that. It's when it comes to human relationship, very specifically, that I behave as an underwhelmed person. I have consistently, across most of my life, been attracted to people who are far, far more emotional than the norm, who are simply over the top. I have consistently been attracted to situations -- human situations -- where the stakes were high. My emotions are aroused. My bonding impulses come more strongly into play. Low stakes human situations fail to motivate me to the point where... where I can function.

I think it would fly in the face of logic, for a lot of people, that my reactions to certain substances would be characteristic of the underwhelmed as opposed to the overwhelmed. And yet it seems so obvious to me. I am the polar opposite of the hyperaroused person... when it comes to just strolling around. (Though yes, I do respond in intense, 0 to 90 ways to a very few things -- the same ones, predictably, year in, year out... Hey, do you think the light in the corner stands out maybe even a little more on the picture on the left, where there is so little contrast. maybe that's why I calm a little on stimulants. More of the world starts popping out a little and commanding my interest.)

Reflection: The Fear Response(less)

We were at the bus stop by the main drag of the U-District when the 43 came up the road, wearing the wrong sign, like it was going toward Wallingford. A woman seemed to get very excited; at first I thought she was frustrated because she thought she was on the wrong side of the street. "It's going toward..." I said.

She called me the B-word several times. "That's what you are!" she shouted... or maybe she didn't quite shout, but she said it loudly. People around us heard. I'm not sure what all she said. Her face was pretty near mine.

Most people, I imagine, would not have felt actual fear in that situation. Yet I think there would have been some physiological response, some quickening of the pulse, some startle response somwhere. I was aware, once again, how in me there was... just nothing.

Humans are designed to have a fear response that precedes conscious thought. This is how nameless fear -- that I'm afraid, but I don't know why sensation -- begins. It's strongest in the trauma-disordered, but it's in most of us to some extent. I'm hard pressed to think of a time -- even one time in my life -- when I felt nameless fear. The conscious awareness of exactly what afraid of tends to precede any physiological response.

I've read it: Neurologically, attraction (and I mean the word in a broad sense!) is a close cousin of fear; they're both changes in arousal levels, and they often involve the very same chemicals. We're supposed to undergo these subtle little changes in our arousal levels. They're supposed to be highest in response to novel situations. In novel social situations, my arousal levels don't change. They are so low that... I would say they'd make folks' heads swim, except that folks don't see the situation for what it is.

I don't experience nameless fear, but there have been times I have been irresistibly drawn to those who do. There have been times someone has behaved inexplicably toward me and instead of standing there impervious, like I did with the woman at the bus stop, I have experienced emotion at the level... the level that I love, love, love to experience emotion. And then I have wanted to dance that person off on a white horse.

I do experience intense fear. Mostly it's aroused by the fear of losing those who manage to evoke strong emotion in me.

Reflection: A Glimpse of Heaven

A new section of online CLEP begins today -- I'm expecting probably a couple students -- and I think it's understandable that I've shut out news from the world (taken the phone off the hook) these few hours before. Here I sit writing... and I want to write more about my 'underwhelment' theme today. It can be difficult to know what another's experience is like. Sometimes it's hard for me to tell to what extent I'm experiencing or feeling things less than others -- and to what extent I have a stronger need to feel them.

Understand: Some of us need a lot of 'whelment' to function optionally. It's not that I want another human to cost me or bring me pain, but it's hard for me to imagine experiencing real pleasure in human interaction that isn't based on the willingness to incur tremendous cost. I don't see that there's that much pleasure or excitement in flirting with another person. And I don't see that there's that much comfort in a hand on the shoulder. There some, yes, but compared to the strength it takes to get through this life the comfort seems awfully flimsy. As for people getting highs from stuff like sex... well, to me it seems not much of a high compared to looking at another human in an "Anything for you" way.

Being really, really 'whelmed' -- whelmed by obsession, whelmed by love -- that's what I depend on. Some of us are made of pieces that seem contradictory or paradoxical til you look. I don't let others put me through things because of low self esteem. I let them put me through Hell because with that willingness to go through Hell comes the only glimpse of Heaven that I've ever seen.

Reflection: Memoir of...

I've been continuing to ask what it's appropriate to post this week... and I've been continuing to put up memoir.

Ravenna-the-big-old-computer didn't explode when its monitor did. I was able to retrieve a flash memoir, "Playing With Fire", and use it as part of a Squidoo lens, Memoir of a Hyporesponsive Child which continues the 'underwhelment' theme. I'd written some time back in "Tagging: A Metaphor for Monotropism": "This is just a theory, but it seems to fit. Deficient in body signals, deficient in the very mechanics of attraction (interest) and repulsion, I just want my favorite. I just want whatever it is I've tagged as my favorite."

I didn't know how much scientific evidence there was to back up the idea of hyporesponsive sensory processing and high-intensity thresholds. I didn't know the key words to enter, but a week or two ago, I stumbled into some material. So this resulting piece is a combination of memoir and scientific ramblings and annotation.

My brother will remember the girl who appears in the opening module of this Squidoo lens, though I did change the name. He asked me if he could access my lenses from this blog. Well, not all of them -- and especially not easily -- but I'm going to add some more to the sidebar list shortly.

Reflection: High Intensity Threshold

A quote to begin this post, from "Regulation Disorder of Sensory Processing": "These children require high-intensity sensory input before they are able to respond. They are quiet and watchful at times and may appear withdrawn and difficult to engage."

If ones sees someone with that withdrawn, difficult to engage manner, it may not be that they're overwhelmed by sensory stimuli or social interaction. Quite the opposite. They may be starved for the very the things they seem not to respond to -- starved largely by their own neural wiring. They may have such a high threshold for intensity that most of what's around them passes below that threshold... too far below to motivate an emotional response.

I have sometimes gotten 'Squid Angel blessings' for pieces that I haven't specifically asked for them for. It's when I really, really want people to see a piece that I do post it on the angels forum. It's been quite a while. I did it with the monotropism piece, and I also said something on this blog, to the effect of 'friends, please be my squid angels, too' -- meaning help me with my goal of having people see this.) I'm doing that again. Here's Processing Disorders: The Understimulated Brain.

Photo Credit: FreeDigitalPhotos

Reflection: Underwhelment (Again)

I've got some big time fears in some areas, but not others. Different forms of fear can be dissociated from each other in striking ways: social from nonsocial anxiety, and phobic or narrow fears from vigilant or paranoid ones. It's only when friends realize this that they can consider that I'm not overwhelmed but seriously underwhelmed by most social situations. There's some evidence of underwhelment, I think: I lived five years in a dorm and seven years in housing co-ops. I frequently slept on the couch in the common area of a sixteen bedroom housing co-op --by day, amidst frequent chaos and confusion. Since girlhood, too, I've been drawn to people with very intense energies, including those who are majorly hyperactive and those who are clinically bipolar.

I know friends have tended to look to my childhood seek answers for some oddities. Ah but what if, in some ways, I am what I am not because of my childhood, but despite it. When I was fifteen, my foster mother commented that I wasn't an introvert but rather an extrovert trying to get out. Both my parents said that in our earliest years (quite a bit before the photo you see here!) it was my brother, two years my senior, who was the painfully shy one. I was the friendlier child, the bolder child, the more outgoing child. (I don't think I was truly outgoing, actually, but enough so that I stood out in contrast to my brother.) My father said in later years that he wished he'd known to be concerned about me -- that he hadn't because I acted like a child who could take on the world.

I have to take care how I explain the next thing, so it doesn't come across as arrogant: People vary in how they process stimuli -- in how much neural activity takes in response to particular things. What's overstimulating to one person may be felt as a mere blip by another. So I think some things just trigger a milder neural response in me than they do in a lot of people. It seems to me that the majority of social situations (including those that have the potential to be sexual) don't have that much at stake -- it just seems to me they hold neither aversion nor the promise of real reward. (I know that I stand in contrast to a lot of people when I express that.)

Don't we all try to make sense of one another's behaviors using our own as a guide? People who are overwhelmed by, say, a party or a date are not going to realize I have a sense of underwhelment -- of too little being at stake. There have been so many times when people have been sure they saw overwhelment in me, when something very other was going on inside. For instance, I don't get overwhelmed by the thought of changing for another person; in most situations, I'm too underwhelmed -- I have too little a sense of anything really being at stake -- to experience strong motivation. And that's actually very painful for me. I don't thrive in situations of too little 'whelment'.

Reflection: Whelment Issues

I found a book Fidget to Focus on the lobby bookcase and have been read it intensely. Ever since college, I have been aware that I identify with some ADHD behaviors characteristics (again) others are simply the polar opposite of me. A relatively new theory, based on brain research: that a person with ADD has some brain systems that process stimuli so poorly that it results in constant boredom, or underwhelment.

I not only sleep well with caffeine in my system -- I seem to sleep better with all around lousy sleep hygiene. I know there are people who can remember me sleeping on the couch of a 16 bedroom co-op, amidst the chaos and the activity. I wonder if anyone sees some humor in the following passage. "Fidget strategies work for falling asleep, just the way they do during the day, the goal being to help us achieve optimal arousal for a given activity. One mother reports that her daughter, who occasionally declared herself too bored to sleep, experimented with different sleeping venues: the floor, the couch, and once even the bathtub."

On the next line, though, I cease to identify with the phenomenon: "Changing where she slept created just enough novelty that the strategy worked every time." There's a general assumption that the chronically bored seek out novelty... But what if one's brain processes novelty so poorly, on an emotional level, that they simply fail to experience normal 'whelment' from it? What if, in order to experience 'optimal arousal' or 'whelment', they have to get a good rhythm going?

To be continued...