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CronoDAS comments on Ureshiku Naritai - Less Wrong
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My response to understimulation is isomorphic to overload, which happens if I am overstimulated because I'm autistic. "Underload" occurs when I have no interesting sensory or conceptual data to process. I haven't unpacked it completely, but it feels sort of like my brain decides it's not wanted and it shuts down to save energy, and then takes a long time to boot back up, during which period I don't have it handy to help me do things. Having a mostly-asleep brain is not at all fun. Boredom is not like underload because boredom stimulates a search pattern to find an activity, while underload usually doesn't stimulate anything at all, and if it does, it's not for an activity I find "interesting".
I can usually avoid "underloading" myself via fairly simple mechanisms like playing with my own hair, so it's not a huge problem - it only comes up in contexts where any of the things I'd normally do are proscribed by the circumstance, like if I'm supposed to be meditating.
From what I've read,
is the state that meditation is supposed to induce. In other words, a controlled shutdown of certain parts of the brain. Julie Taylor's description of how it feels to have a stroke is pretty much exactly the same as Sam Harris's description of how it feels to meditate.
From a transcript of Julie Taylor's TED talk:
Have you mentioned that before? Because I didn't know that about you until now. I'm just guessing, but not being neurotypical may have something to do with your reaction to meditation.
Interesting. So I get the right result and instead of going "aaaaahhhh..." I go "AAAAAHHHH!"
I'm pretty sure I've mentioned it. I'm not extremely autistic, but people who know what to look for spot it.
When did you switch from saying Asperger's to saying autism? Does it mean much? eg, did you learn something about yourself, neuro-typicals, or common usage? DSM-V?
I say "autistic" because a) the word is more aesthetically pleasant, b) it has better general recognition (same reason I say I'm a vegetarian than being specific and saying "pescetarian"), and c) it acknowledges for solidarity-ish reasons that it's all one spectrum.
Since Alicorn has politely asked that I not respond to her comments, I will reply to yours and speak in general terms:
Autism is marked by inability to pick up on social cues and form relationships that neurotypicals do naturally.
If someone repeatedly gave sincere advice on social skills which assumed away such problems, and required constant re-clarification ("just get out of the house", "strike up a conversation with random people", "meet local people on the internet -- I did, it's not hard", "just get your friends to introduce you to others"), that, to me, looks like strong advice that the person is not autistic.
Those of you who have seen me post can make your own guesses about my autism status. And, FWIW, when meditating, I've never been able to get my inner voice to shut down for more than a few seconds. The best I can do is to replace it with non-thinking thoughts (counting, observing my breathing, etc) and even then only for a short while.
My impression from reading meditation and doing some of it is that shutting down one's internal monologue is something that happens after a practicing for quite a while. (Months? Years?) It isn't an initial goal.
It's not a binary thing, either. One common technique is to be aware of one's internal monologue without investing emotionally in it or trying to suppress it; (this is described in lots of different language) this tends to reduce its intensity and ubiquity over time.
several times, notably here
Well yeah, but which parts of the brain? The difference in the two stories suggest very different parts of the brain were inactive.