PDA fae

Tag: perception

  • What if..

    I’m not actually autistic?

    What if PDA is it’s own neurotype?

    What if it’s an epigenetic related neurotype – i.e. rooted in neurodivergent trauma, but inheritable mainly through the mother line?

    What if being a super social PDAer actually makes you allistic, but also highly neurodivergent?

    What if PDA can be researched enough to prove this? What if I’m not able to, when I know so much about my own hypotheses, methods I’d use..

    What if there’s a point I have to give up, and hand over my passion to another researcher because I’m not able?

    What if, though, it does all work out? What if I can work this hard? What if I can become a truly high flying PDAer – with all my disabled complexity?

    What if, what if, what if?

    One’s thing for sure, I agree with that Newcastle Uni research that the PDA brain has an “intolerance for uncertainty”!

  • The demand of wanting to

    As mentioned on pdafae on instagram, I really want to read my Baye’s Theorem book. During the course of my psychosis, I started developing a special interest in perception. I think through the muddling nature of illness, I was reflecting on my past studies and realising that perception was the area I find most fascinating in psychology.

    It’s lasted since I’ve regained touch with reality. A patient was kind enough to purchase me my uni’s perception textbook to cheer me up, and I’ve read most of – that too has become slightly a demand to finish. Baye’s theorem is very relevant to perception, particularly autism and perception as I’ve mentioned before.

    It would do me good to engage in a special interest, but because it is a special interest that I’m really interested by, my PDA is responding to that with a lot of avoidance. I suppose there’s a big sense of “should” and “want”, and I need to find a way to relieve that.

    Something that might work is to just allow myself to ignore it for long enough, because that tends to remind me that I don’t have to engage with something.

    Alternatively, I could try just reading small amounts? I think I need to find a way to be in my flow. I’m really eager to study the signals and perception module at the OU, and that might be because it’s possible it’ll be difficult for me to do so – whereas the books are readily available. Possibly therefore, putting them accessible but out of sight might also help, because it may be that seeing them regularly is increasing the demands.

  • Perception (and PDA?)

    I studied psychology at Cardiff University, and as part of that we covered perception. I achieved only a DipHE, due to my mental health, so I am not yet a psychologist. I am currrently studying the Open Degree at the Open University, in which I am hoping to re-study perception, and then go on to read a psychology conversion course, ideally at Cardiff.

    Looking back at my studies at Cardiff University, perception was my favourite area of psychology, followed by brain imaging. Concepts like conditioning are central to understand well, but I do not find them engaging – they are very dry to me, and rather dull.

    When it comes to the study of the sensory system however, it’s very difficult, but really intriguing. It’s so interesting to me how we make sense of the world around us, and the information coming into our brain from that world. Through our vision, taste, touch etc. Psychophysics is the study of these systems and the brain regions that process them.

    I’m intrigued as to how these differ in PDAers. The sensory system can be used to explain some of the differences in Autistic individuals – unfortunately usually in terms of deficits. I don’t believe any research like this has been done on our population, and I do wonder if there may be clues as to why we experience demand anxiety within these systems.

    In Autistics, a major difference is that we use “priors” differently. A prior is a concept from Bayesian probability, something humans are very bad at when undertaking it consciously, but may well use very easily intuitively within our sensory processing for example. We usually make use of prior likelihoods about the world to process what we are likely receiving input from – but Autistics weight this much less heavily, making less use of these – I will add a citation to this shortly, after accessing my iPad.

    This is used to explain some of the differences experienced in Autism. I shall need to re-read the paper before summarising that here, but I will attempt to do that shortly (if PDA allows!).

    I also wish to create infographics about perception – particularly the Bayesian Perception that differs – on my instagram.