Dysfunction

In the mid nineties, home computers were far less powerful and considerably more expensive than they are now. As a newly graduated Computer Sciences student, I wanted the best computer I could afford, and yet I had very little by way of disposable income to play with. To work around this problem, I decided to build my own desktop PC, so I could choose the parts that thought represented the best value for money at the time, and I also then decided to overclock the CPU. This was then (and to some degree still is) one of the easy and free ways to grab a little extra performance out of your PC, by making the CPU process more instructions per second than it is supposed to.

Unfortunately, overclocking doesn’t always work. If the CPU you bought was already running near the limit of it’s capabilities, then overclocking it can cause your machine to crash. And so it was for the machine I built. When the machine was idle or working at well under capacity, then it was fine. It would trundle along happily for days. Then when you asked it to do something that was intensive on the CPU it would crash within minutes.

I’m using the above as a metaphor for my life right now. My life is a little like my mid-nineties PC. I can manage the low-level and background tasks reasonable well, but ask me to do something more complex and I’m struggling.

In aspie terms, my executive function is failing me badly right now.

This is nothing unusual. My executive function isn’t wonderful at the best of times. I’m typically disorganised, and unless I’m prompted in some way about events like birthdays or Father’s Day (this Sunday here in the UK), then I’ll forget about them. I use a to-do list each day, but often have trouble thinking ahead regarding what needs to be on the list. I’m used to all of this however, and I’ve never been better set up to stay relatively organised, and thus under the radar of typical people.

The current problems that I have are very familiar, however. I’ve had this sort of problem frequently, for as far back as I can remember. Simply saying that my executive functioning is worse than normal doesn’t really cover it, but it does provide a starting point – a key if you like – for how the problem presents itself.

Right now, planning and execution feel really difficult for me – far more so than normal. Getting items on my to-do list is proving difficult, as I’m forgetting to write them down when they occur to me. Then, of course, I’m forgetting what it was that occurred to me in the first place. I’ll pick up my list book, and sit there thinking that there was something that I needed to do, but completely failing to remember what it was. I have trouble with having a small working memory at the best of times, but right now it feels thimble sized. If I don’t immediately concentrate on the item in my working memory and externalise it in some way, then it is gone, and very difficult for me to retrieve later.

By way of example, over the last couple of weeks I’ve come up with various ideas for articles for this blog, but at times where I’ve not been near a computer to jot them down. I haven’t the faintest idea what those ideas were now, despite feeling that they had legs at the time. What a shame.

I’m not faring any better once I have items on my list. Instead of checking the list regularly to see what I need to do next, I find that I’m forgetting to look at it. Worse, when I do look at it, I’m oddly finding that I’m not properly taking in what’s there. This means that sometimes I only see half the list, and then miss the equally important items on the other half. It’s not a concious decision, it just happens.

When I forget to look, I often find that I’m procrastinating my time away browsing the Internet, following links about an arbitrary subject. This has been happening a lot over the last couple of weeks, and large tracts of time disappear without me realising it’s happening. This following of links about a subject is a soothing mechanism that I have, and I take in large quantities of typically useless information.

When I do drag myself back to tackling list items, I’m finding that I just can’t get started. In the past I’d simply have put this down to a lack of motivation – after all, that’s the problem that typical people have in this sort of situation. It’s more than that though, because it’s not just dull work tasks that are getting affected by this problem, it’s more interesting personal tasks too. It feels like there is some huge physical hurdle that I need to get over to get down to tasks right now. That’s not a lack of motivation, it’s a lack of executive function.

When I do finally get down to starting tasks, then I manage them reasonably well. Well, that is, if you consider working on a single task until it’s done to be a good thing. Frequently it isn’t, and I should be dividing my time up between tasks, especially at work. That isn’t really happening right now, where as normally I’d manage this much of the time, as long as the tasks were on my list.

Along with all this executive dysfunction and working memory issues go various other familiar characteristics. I’m very blank and unfocussed right now. I appear to be drifting through life. My usually very active brain is dull and just ticking over. It feels a little like that feeling I get after too much sensory input – like I’ve withdrawn to be alone, but instead of that lasting a half hour or so, it’s been going on for days, or maybe even weeks now. I have no spark, no zone. My special interests – this blog for one – appear to have fallen by the way side for the most part. I’m quiet and uncommunicative. My routine doesn’t seem to be fully happening – not because I’m choosing to do something different, but just because I seem to be forgetting it.

I’m not sure if this sort of way of being has a trigger. I can’t think of anything in particular that has set this one off. Perhaps it’s just cyclic. Perhaps it’s a change in brain chemistry for some reason.

Maybe, and I whisper this, as it feels like a slightly scary proposition, it’s just that after a long period of acting as NT as I can, my brain waves a white flag and gives up. Perhaps this is just the more naturally autistic version of me, where my brain and nervous system are refusing to try and live up to NT expectations as they have become worn out doing it.

I do feel like I need a holiday. I am tired, and my life is hectic and not well organised right now. So just maybe my whisper is reality. Maybe my body can’t keep up the pretence right now, and the exaggerated (versus my normal state) executive dysfunction and working memory issues are the end result.

Whatever it is, I’d be willing to bet my mid-90′s PC would understand how I feel right now.

Dancing the night away

Since my son started School in January, my wife has become quite involved in the parents’ association, and it’s various fund raising events.

This was why I found myself in the local village hall with my wife last Saturday night, to attend a ceilidh (pronounced something like ‘kaylee’). If you are British, then you’ll know what one of these is (I hope), but for those of you not familiar with this Scottish tradition, I suppose I’d better fill you in. A ceilidh is, I suppose a little like American line dancing. It’s a traditional Scottish folk dance performed by a collection of couples, accompanied by a traditional band with instruments like fiddles, whistles, accordions and a bodhran drum. A caller explains steps that the dancers then perform, making complex patterns, usually of intermingled people across the dance floor.

I’ve been to a ceilidh before, a couple of years ago. I didn’t join in. This time though, I was determined to take part. To this end, I dragged my wife up for the first two dances. I felt this was psychologically important, because if I had taken part at the start, when everyone was still finding their feet, I’d feel less out of place. This little trick worked, and both me and my wife took part in all but two of the dances across the whole evening.

It was fun!

It really was good fun, and I didn’t feel out of place. Most of those taking part (and there were fifty or so of us) had clearly never done much dancing, never mind much ceilidh dancing. We were a bunch of novices that made countless mistakes, and laughed about them as we made them! Fabulous!

This all meant that no-one noticed the extra little mistakes that I was making. The funniest of these was where we had to stand in a circles and then wheel either to the left or the right. I have trouble with left and right at the best of times – I have to consciously think which is which when someone asks me to do something that invovles a left or right action. So it was that for the first few dances we’d be commanded to ‘circle left’, and I’d be standing still thinking for a half second whilst the circle was already moving in the correct direction. In the end I gave up trying to think about it, and just went with the direction the circle decided to go. That worked nicely!

I found, to my own surprise that I didn’t have a problem keeping the rhythm of the dances, indeed many others were far worse at this than I was. I’ve commented in the past that I have no rhythm. This clearly isn’t true. I don’t dance well or imaginatively – that’s a better description, because clearly in a prescribed dance such as a ceilidh I can have a good go at the steps, and can keep the rhythm quite well.

Some dances had sequences of eight or ten different moves. I found these difficult from the point of view that I’d mix up the sequencing. I punctuated these dances with little verbalised reminders to myself – “right wheel, pass partner, dosey doe, oh – no – promenade then dosey doe – sorry, polka” – that sort of thing. Despite the sequence of moves repeating every minute or so for a good five minutes, I’d still make the same sequence errors each time. Oh – and because of the intense concentration on the moves and the sequencing, I didn’t hear much of the music – it just washed over me providing the rhythm and nothing more. That’s a shame, because the band were rather good, I thought.

What I really wasn’t good at were the knots. These are complex moves performed in small groups where everyone holds hands and then people weave through each others arms and spin around to unwind the knots they’ve created. We’d try these slowly and a little repetitively without the music first, and then perform them in the dance. Whilst I’d feel I’d understood how it worked when we first tried it out, I’d inevitably have forgotten the intricate details by the time we danced, just a minute or two later. How did the other dancers manage? Well some managed the knots, and others didn’t, and everyone found them difficult.  Perhaps the difference here is that I was paying very good attention as to how the move worked and then still failed, whereas some others having trouble were clearly taking things far less seriously, and weren’t paying as much heed to the instructions as they might have.

So the dancing was fun, and because it was complicated and we were all amateurs, I didn’t feel self concious about getting bits wrong, or about forgetting the sequence of moves. Others were making the same mistakes.

What wasn’t so much fun were the social bits in between the dances. The dancing is hard work, so the format was typically two five minute dances and then a 15 minute break for people to recover. In these breaks, many of the attendees wandered around and chatted socially. My little group of me, my wife, my wife’s friend and her friend who we’d not met before didn’t really mingle. This suited me fine – the dancing was hard work mentally as well as physically, which didn’t leave much room in my head for making small talk. Even in our little group I kept mostly to myself, and listened more than I talked. My head was full of dance moves and how they worked.

I wondered before the start if I’d feel over-stimulated by the music and the noise. In reality I didn’t feel it as much as I thought I might. I was a bit blank during the breaks, and undeniably tired at the end, but elated. And the elation over-rode any feelings of over-stimulation.

Would I go again?

Yes. The combination of someone else telling me how to move, plus everyone being an amateur who made mistakes really did work well for me.

Eye contact

I just can’t do it.

I’ll look at your shoes and maybe your trousers. I can often remember what people were wearing on their bottom half, but hardly ever the top.

I just can’t look you in the eyes.

This phenomenon is widely known as a trait with people on the Autism Spectrum, but I’ve never seen a convincing write up of why it happens. Perhaps this isn’t all that surprising – I struggle to understand it myself.

Looking in someone elses eyes feels wrong to me. By that I mean that it feels like something I shouldn’t be doing. There’s sometimes literally a thought of  “damn – you caught me looking” in the brief fraction of a second when eyes meet.

Moreover, it feels intensely uncomfortable too. When I make myself look someone else in the eye, I find myself almost physically flinching. My eyes want to look elsewhere, and it takes real effort to stop them doing just that. More than a few seconds of enforced eye contact and my brain is screaming at me, almost in pain.

And that’s just made a connection. The feeling of something akin to pain is actually just like the feeling I get when I’m tickled, or if I hear a loud noise. It’s not a physical pain as such, but it is excruciating all the same – a sort of mental pain. The feelings it stirs in me are those of getting away from the pain. With loud noises I’ll scrunch my face up and sometimes cover my ears. With tickling I’ll push people away or run. These are all reactions that happen without me consciously thinking about them.

I suppose that eye contact has an equivalent reaction too – I’ll simply look elsewhere.

So maybe the eye contact problem is caught up with the sensory over-stimulation problem in some way.

What ever it is, I simply can’t make eye contact with anyone comfortably, and I doubt that will ever change.