10:39pm September 4, 2013

“

Some Auties have such severe receptive-processing issues that they can struggle in developing ‘interpretive’ information processing. In other words, they may struggle to use their mind to grasp concepts or make sense of things. Instead, they may rely on their senses and on kinesthetic processing and the pattern, theme and feel their body ‘maps’. This is what I call ‘sensing’.

Many people confuse ‘sensing’ with being ‘psychic’, as is highly sensing people can ‘read minds’. I see sensing not as an ability to read minds but as an acute ability to feel pattern and theme and feel through one’s body. It is an unconscious, instinctual process, but some people can be so highly developed in this ability that they need only the first few bars of the song, so to speak, and they have a feel for how the tune will play out.  Sensing people may sense from a few fragments of pattern felt in their body what the next expected run of patterns is likely to be. So they may appear ‘psychic’, as much as the family dog might. 

The thing about sensing is that if you are remarkably good at it and remarkably bad at keeping up with interpretive processing, you are going to struggle with holding concepts in your head in a conscious way because you are far more oriented to holding ‘mapped’ patterns in your body in a pre-conscious way.  If you don’t hold concepts in your head, including those about yourself or others, let alone concepts about yourself in relation to others, then it can be extremely difficult ever to achieve a conscious, mental impression of self-awareness necessary to identify. But identify is not just about a conscious mental impression.  We can have a pre-conscious feel of our own identify, even a ‘body mapped’ sense of someone else’s ‘entity’ or ‘beingness’, in the same way that the dog has a feel of its own beingness and a feel for yours. It is not the same as a developmentally typical conscious mental awareness of identity and probably a lot less rigid and fixed (because most interpretive people get stuck on ideas), but it is a sense of identity nevertheless.

One of the findings of interpretive information is that of ‘getting to know’.  When someone relies on interpretive information processing they have to try to get information out of you in order to build up a mental concept, idea, or intellectual body of knowledge about you, or themselves for that matter. But with sensing, you don’t have to do that.  In fact, when people try to give your ‘mind’ information, it can be a distraction from the process of sensing , for sensing is most acute when intellect is not switched on.  With sensing, you don’t seek information, you absorb it, you pick it up, and you do this bit by experiencing it externally, but by merging with the source of the experience as though you become one with it; you may get acquainted now than you get to ‘know’. So not only may someone who relies on sensing have acquired a good ‘feel’ of your pattern, theme and the feel to you, your ‘music of beingness’, but they may still strongly lack a comparison of themselves with you as they know you through merging with you, and in merging there is no separation between self and other in this simultaneous sense of self and other. 

For developmentally typical people, a simultaneous sense of self and other may be present most of the time, and a normal part of having multi-track interpretive information processing. So the highly sensing Autie may swing between deeply having a feel of their own identity and deeply having a feel of your ‘entity’, but with little comparison between the two necessary for developing a mental concept of their own separate identity. In fact, the concept of comparison may not exist unless such an Autie is involved in watching themselves and the other person played out through representational objects in caricature, where they might view this as a whole singly external and interactive ‘movie’.

”

Donna Williams, The Jumbled Jigsaw

23 notes