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Kevin comments on Introduction Thread: May 2009 - Less Wrong
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I've been commenting for a little while, but it was requested that I post here, so, here I am.
I'm a 27 year old female programmer, currently working from home on complex Second Life projects. The company I work with is in the process of expanding into the OpenSim realm, so I'll be learning that soon as well. I'm mostly self-taught when it comes to programming, and did not go to college at all. I also recently left my 'day job' of working in the activity department of a nursing home; I held that job for four years, and had various retail jobs before that, mostly cashiering.
I'm deeply interested in brain function, mind function, neurology, and most related topics. One of my closest friends is a retired professor of neurology, so I do get to discuss those topics fairly regularly. I tend to be a bit aggressive about accepting unusual neurologies as natural variation, and have a distinct personal interest in that ideology, as I'm not neurotypical myself.
I was diagnosed as being ADD when I was five, but personal research has led me to the conclusion that I'm almost certainly autistic, with (now-)occasional attention issues depending on how much mental overload I'm dealing with at the moment. I am moderately faceblind, have several sensory sensitivities, intermittent sensory processing difficulties of various degrees of severity, occasional motor planning difficulties, poor episodic memory, and difficulties processing normal-style social signals. I also have an excellent semantic memory, excellent pattern-matching capability, perfect pitch, several other minor-to-moderate sensory advantages, and, apparently, a much better ability to 'see' what my own mind is doing than was previously thought possible. (I know the last one probably sounds unbelievable. From this perspective, I had a hard time believing that normal people couldn't perceive their brainbits activating to work on a problem, and probably wouldn't've believed it at all if I didn't know someone who's studied that specifically... and even then, I found it incredible enough of a limitation that I confirmed it for myself with a few carefully-placed questions to other friends.) I also have an unusual emotional system - I am not and would not try to be completely unemotional, but my emotions tend to be relatively 'quiet' and not distracting, which makes certain tasks, particularly rational ones, much easier.
I am currently starting a neurodiversity-related project called The Neuroversity. The web page is very much still under construction, but there's a description of the project, and the forum is open to anyone who's interested.
I have several different angles of interest in social signaling, most notably how and why normal people use it. I've also noticed that there are several different 'layers' of social signals, some of which I'm actually quite good at noticing and parsing, and I'd like to figure out why, but I don't have much to go on, there. Another angle of interest is non-human social signaling, which I am in some cases quite good at understanding, and which most people seem to underestimate the sophistication of.
I'm a member of Play as Being, an open-source meditation group. The group itself is not religious, but religion is often discussed there, so it may or may not be if interest to anyone here. That said, the meditation exercises can be very useful, and many of the discussions are very interesting.
I also tend to be very open about my life, and am certainly willing to answer questions. :)
I'm sure you already know this, but I think that rather than saying you are almost certainly autistic, you can say that you are on the autistic spectrum. I think psychiatry puts too much emphasis on diagnoses when it's widely understood that many if not most issues with mental health exist on a continuous spectrum.
More interestingly, can you discuss your brainbits in much greater deal? I think it would make a great top-level post.
You're probably one of few people in the world capable of discussing such a topic with the linguistic precision demanded on Less Wrong. I assume by brainbits that you don't mean individual neurons, but some collection of neurons or generalized electrical patterns bouncing around in your brain?
Can you make a step-through description of brainbit activation for some basic brain tasks? Can you only perceive conscious actions/problem solving?
How confident are you that your brainbit awareness corresponds with specific neurological actions? Do you think that your awareness forms a model of reality that could be useful for describing brains other than your own?
I have a lot more questions I could ask but I'll stop there because there's a good chance I am asking the wrong questions, until I get clarification from you. Feel free to answer the questions I didn't ask rather than the questions that I did ask.
They're both accurate descriptions, but I think the former is clearer: The latter would likely be taken to imply that I'm nearly NT, which isn't the case at all.
I'll think about it. I expect that the hardest part of that will be figuring out which aspects of it are most interesting to other people.
Much of what I can perceive correlates well with identified brain structures. (But not 1:1 - in some cases I have slightly more information, and in some cases I have much less, about a given system or subsystem.) I can also perceive a few things that I believe are specific electrical patterns - extremely minor seizures (rare for me; more common in the population than you might think) and specific kinds of overload - and more general states, like specific kinds of mental fatigue.
With effort, I could. Did you have a particular task in mind?
This question almost doesn't make sense, but I think the proper answer is no: I can perceive and influence things about how I'm processing information that, according to my neuroscientist friend, are not normally consciously perceivable, and I can also observe the workings of various brainbits that I don't have any direct way of consciously influencing, to various degrees.
Pretty confident. What I perceive squares well with neuroscience, and on top of that, I do actually make use of my awareness. I've picked up a few tricks that way that work reliably enough to convince me even if the correlation with neuroscience wasn't so strong. The most convincing one is that I can consciously stop a brief memory from forming, if I have warning beforehand - that particular one is rarely useful, but since I can remember having done it, and what general type of information I did it to, without remembering the actual information despite much curiosity, it makes a good proof. (A more useful, but slightly less provable, one, is 'next time I see X, remember Y'. That one is also usefully reliable and has been known to trigger over a year after having been set, but there's an anthropic bias inherent in it: If it fails, I'm unlikely to realize that it has, in many situations.)
I suspect so. The correlation with neuroscience implies that my neurodifference is a difference in degree more than a difference in type, and my interactions with other people since I've figured out how to compensate for that have generally supported that theory.
You seem to be on the right track. What else are you curious about?