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3:47am January 1, 2015

This whole collection of photos (and any hereafter) I’m calling “nightlights” I was thinking of the similarity between my nightlights(1) and the streetlight out my bedroom window. And up love looking out the window at night and seeing color and pattern and feel but not meaning, yet not painful like in daylight. This is the raw data of how my visual perception works, minus overload.

I hope I’ve managed to capture that. Autistic visual perceptual difficulties and differences are notoriously difficult to capture in photography or in film. Someone once„ for a documentary, handed Donna Williams a video camera and told her to capture what the world looked like without her tinted lenses. She was at a total loss: the problem was what her brain did to visual information once it got inside of her, not the visual information itself. She took pictures of a shattered plate to show fragmentation, but it didn’t feel right.

The only time I’ve managed to capture anything like my visual perception took over a day of taking photos then manipulating them in GIMP (short of s poor man’s Photoshop). Being able to do movement would be better but animation’s not a skill I have being rudimentary GIFs.(2)

And my eyes are easily and painfully overloaded just by using them, so the nights in which I can just relax with my glasses off and take in the beautiful blurry dark world… they mean a lot to me. Both blue b nd dark reduce but not eliminate visual overload and fragmentation. Donna Williams is one of the few people to even acknowledge what the visual world of many autistic people looks like, and to acknowledge something similar to visual agnosias of various types among the autistic population.

I still remember a shrink saying to me, “What you’re describing sounds exactly like agnosia, apraxia, and aphasia — more than one type of each — but that’s impossible, you can’t be born like that!”

Except now we know you can. Or at least, that you can be born with things that resemble these things that were once thought to be only possible from brain damage. They acknowledge the differences with the word “developmental”. So most famously among the agnosias, there is developmental prosopagnosia and acquired prosopagnosia (face blindness). They have similarities and great differences because growing up with an oddly functioning perceptual system from birth is not the same as being neurotypical until a stroke at age seventy leaves you face blind.

And there are good arguments for not using the same words for developmental and acquired agnosia, apraxia(3), and aphasia. At the same time, they’re the only words we’ve got and I’m too pragmatic not make use of them. Of course there’s always dyspraxia, dysphasia, and dysgnosia (is that last even a word?) But still. Agnosia fits me like a glove in some areas. Another difference between developmental and acquired I’d with developmental your brain is developing around it from day one, so you may at times overcome it and others slide back into it. And some people only experience these traits during shutdowns, while for others it’s our normal that we climb cognitive cliffs to get out of every day, if we even can. .

It does get tiresome, though, being one of a handful of the autistic community discussing meaning blindness and visual agnosias, and most places I go, being among the most severe visual perceptual issues. Everyone talks about things that could be called meaning-deafness, but fewer talk about being meaning-blind AND meaning-deaf, and the only visual agnosia discussed is developmental face blindness.

feliscorvus madeofpatterns natalunasans

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(1) Which I still need more of, for safety and to save on electric bills. Electric was mostly subsidized in my last apartment, not so here, And I run a lot of electricity gobbling medical equipment that I’m still looking for some kind of legal exemption for…. yeah I’m lookin’ at you, oxygen concentrator, air conditioning, BIPAP , and all the others.

(2) Weird how GIF has come to mean animated GIF, when it used to just be looked upon for what it was: another image format like TIFF or PNG or JPG, just one that happened to allow (but not require) animation. I also remember the rise of PNG, when GIF became proprietary or something and PNG was the alternative.

(3) I’m also annoyed that the word “apraxia” has suddenly become synonymous with “developmental apraxia of speech”. Before autistic catatonia became a recognized diagnosis, apraxia was my only reference point for my motor problems. Speech being the least of my worries when I couldn’t plan even rudimentary movements and carry them out. Parkinson’s was another reference point. But apraxia has a meaning beyond a shorthand for developmental speech problems that may not be apraxia at all.