11:38am December 29, 2011

Memory of early development?

I know that at minimum for me my memory starts some time in infancy. But I’m curious about the timing and quality of other neuro-atypical people’s early memories.

I know already that there are people who can remember back to infancy, and even have met a few autistic people who remember details of their own births that nobody ever told them. (One of whom also remembers before she was born.) I remember reading an autobiography of a woman with SMA (which somewhere in the book a doctor said makes people “smarter”, which to me points to neuro-atypicality, and it’s usually neuro-atypicals who can remember that early) who remembered back to infancy in a way that included well developed comprehension and thought, neither of which I seemed to have at the times I’m remembering.

So I’m particularly interested in whether any other neuro-atypical people remember developing in a way anything like what I’m about to describe. I know one person who did and have read stuff by one person who might have. But I don’t know how common it is because I’ve never talked to many people about their experiences.

My memories of how I experienced the world seem to come in several stages. Not discrete stages – there’s a ton of overlap and moving back and forth and even now I can slip into states that resemble my earliest experiences of the world. But there are still differences I can describe, even though the transitions were incredibly gradual.

The way things start out, most of my sensory processing seemed to be in a mode that, today, would indicate moderate shutdown. Where I had little to no conscious awareness of standard sensory data, and no ideas about things at all. But where I did have, and have intensely and strongly, in great detail, what today I would talk about as the “feel” of things.

Like when my brother started taking me back to see the Mother Tree, it had this intense familiarity because I’d been going there since infancy and early childhood. When I talk about the “feel” of the tree (or of that whole region, for that matter), that’s what I remember from that time period. And it’s the only thing I remember, no sense of texture or color (aside from the kind that I associate with that kind of “feel”, which is very different) or anything like that. (I’ve also checked these perceptions of these places with other autistic people and they get identical impressions to mine.)

So then, gradually, “regular” sensory input started coming in. Experienced in strange ways, but definitely there. There was a sort of “floating” quality to everything that I’m not good at describing.

And then sometime after that, things started feeling more “physical”. I don’t mean I never felt texture before that. In fact I was often better with texture than with a lot of other things. But the “floating” quality rather suddenly lessened. And ideas started becoming more possible, not sure if it was exactly the same time but it was similar times.

And then there was another abrupt sense of the “floating” thing being even less. At which point… I’d always been aware of the chronic pain I was experiencing, but at this point both that pain, and the discomfort from overload, and emotions, became unbearable. I don’t think pain or overload actually increased though, but rather my experience of them drastically changed. And ideas kicked into an almost overdrive state at the same time.

There have been several more changes since then but that takes me up to mid grade school.

And what happened, is none of these experiences of the world ever went away. It’s more like they layered on top of each other. And I came to essentially “live” in the first few layers but with effort “climb” to the “higher” ones, frequently “falling back down” again if I don’t volitionally spend a lot of time in the “lower” ones. (And with even more overload can shut down into the ones even lower than I’ve described.)

And while I’ve developed skills for operating in all of the layers, the “lower” ones are the ones I’m best at, while the “higher” ones take extreme effort to sustain. I think skill in all of them is very valuable, and I try to use everything I’ve got, but my cognitive skills are definitely “weighted” towards the lower layers.

Which actually accounts for a lot of my language translation problems. Because the lower layered experiences don’t translate. As in it’s worse than translating between two utterly different languages – as what I have isn’t a language at all in any conventional sense of the word. (No symbol system, etc.) So most words I put on top are like… based on correlations between words I’ve heard and particular experiences, rather than based on words for an idea or symbolic thought. Which can be completely screwy.

Also, if I remember anything at all about an event it will almost always be on the level of “feel” if no other memory is present. (And “feel” is still there when other memory is there. It’s just that it seems my “sturdiest” form of memory even for recent events.)

So… any of this seem familiar to anyone?

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