Paranormal experiences?

Hello, everyone. 

I wanted to ask the following question, as it really intrigues me:

Have you viewed your paranormal experience(s) differently since becoming aware that you are autistic?

Yes. No. Maybe. 

I don't think of them as "paranormal" so much as... not currently explicable using a modern scientific/cultural frame of reference.  

I think of autism as largely a filtering problem. 

The brain is not a processor, it is not the seat of our thoughts, or even of our memories. It's a filter, with some other functions like coordinating sensory signals and motor instructions. The world is way bigger than what we can see, hear, taste, touch, and smell. Those are just the sensory organs we've been able to study pretty well.  But even with those...  your eyes don't filter.  You see everything around you. In order for that information to be useful, your brain filters out most of it, so that you see only what's useful to you, and kind of mute the rest. Normal people filter out most everything, and are able to zero in on what's immediately relevant to them. Autistic people have inefficient filters. We tend to see a lot more, and we're crap at filtering it, so we are often overwhelmed by the deluge of information. Ditto for the other four physical senses. 

Now, think about all the stuff we don't see. Infrared. Ultraviolet. Radiation. Those things are all real, but we don't have the equipment to perceive them.  The world is bigger than our physical perception. 

Then there are other categories of real things that we can't sense physically:  the number fourteen. The square root of nine. The concept of running.  Love. Hate. Confusion. Forgiveness. Grace. Stories. You can't touch or smell those things, but they are nonetheless real and important. They're not physical, we just find handy ways to represent them symbolically. 

Now, consider that basically every human civilization since the dawn of humanity (excepting our remarkably weird materialist age) has believed that there are whole other planes of existence apart from the physical (heaven, hell, hades, olympus, nirvana, valhalla, dreamtime), and that those planes are just as real, are concurrent with our physical plane, and that there are all sorts of beings that live there: spirits, gods, ancestors, ghosts, angels, demons, djinn, fairies, etc. 

I could be completely wrong of course, but in the context of autism as a filtering problem, it makes perfect sense to me that: 

A) in our current materialist age, it is maladaptive to perceive things from other planes of existence. Culturally we've chosen not to believe in those, so in the process of growing out of babyhood and pruning off un-needed neurons most people lose that perception. They filter it out. Tell a kid "that's not real" enough times, and they actually stop seeing it. Normal people see what they're supposed to see, and nothing else. And for the most part, this works well for them. It's functional. What's interesting is that completely normal people in other cultures, and in the past (effectively a foreign culture) can/could see those things because everybody believed in them, and it was not dysfunctional to perceive them, within their own cultural context. 

B) We're poorly adapted, specifically because we could not prune our neurons efficiently during development and now we do not filter out enough. It makes sense that we might, more often than the average NT, have perceptual experiences that are both real and outside normal and culturally acceptable perceptual parameters. 

Yes. No. Maybe. 

I don't think of them as "paranormal" so much as... not currently explicable using a modern scientific/cultural frame of reference.  

I think of autism as largely a filtering problem. 

The brain is not a processor, it is not the seat of our thoughts, or even of our memories. It's a filter, with some other functions like coordinating sensory signals and motor instructions. The world is way bigger than what we can see, hear, taste, touch, and smell. Those are just the sensory organs we've been able to study pretty well.  But even with those...  your eyes don't filter.  You see everything around you. In order for that information to be useful, your brain filters out most of it, so that you see only what's useful to you, and kind of mute the rest. Normal people filter out most everything, and are able to zero in on what's immediately relevant to them. Autistic people have inefficient filters. We tend to see a lot more, and we're crap at filtering it, so we are often overwhelmed by the deluge of information. Ditto for the other four physical senses. 

Now, think about all the stuff we don't see. Infrared. Ultraviolet. Radiation. Those things are all real, but we don't have the equipment to perceive them.  The world is bigger than our physical perception. 

Then there are other categories of real things that we can't sense physically:  the number fourteen. The square root of nine. The concept of running.  Love. Hate. Confusion. Forgiveness. Grace. Stories. You can't touch or smell those things, but they are nonetheless real and important. They're not physical, we just find handy ways to represent them symbolically. 

Now, consider that basically every human civilization since the dawn of humanity (excepting our remarkably weird materialist age) has believed that there are whole other planes of existence apart from the physical (heaven, hell, hades, olympus, nirvana, valhalla, dreamtime), and that those planes are just as real, are concurrent with our physical plane, and that there are all sorts of beings that live there: spirits, gods, ancestors, ghosts, angels, demons, djinn, fairies, etc. 

I could be completely wrong of course, but in the context of autism as a filtering problem, it makes perfect sense to me that: 

A) in our current materialist age, it is maladaptive to perceive things from other planes of existence. Culturally we've chosen not to believe in those, so in the process of growing out of babyhood and pruning off un-needed neurons most people lose that perception. They filter it out. Tell a kid "that's not real" enough times, and they actually stop seeing it. Normal people see what they're supposed to see, and nothing else. And for the most part, this works well for them. It's functional. What's interesting is that completely normal people in other cultures, and in the past (effectively a foreign culture) can/could see those things because everybody believed in them, and it was not dysfunctional to perceive them, within their own cultural context. 

B) We're poorly adapted, specifically because we could not prune our neurons efficiently during development and now we do not filter out enough. It makes sense that we might, more often than the average NT, have perceptual experiences that are both real and outside normal and culturally acceptable perceptual parameters. 

Coincidentally, I just deleted my Twitter account because the short format felt like an amputation. Nice to be among fellow pontificators!

Oh hell yes Betony....in this place, people do.  I did with your post above and found it to be very thought provoking and interesting.

Thank you for sharing....you make a lot of sense...irrespective of whether it is right or wrong, your thought is strong.  I like that.

We're autistic, many of us like to read and write long posts! Some of us won't read it, but probably more us will than on NT forums :) 

Thanks!  I do pontificate, and wonder if anybody reads past paragraph one ;)

That's a really outstanding post, I think.

According to string theory there are actually 14 dimensions but most of them are too small to affect anything. I saw a youtube video about how a 4th spatial dimension might interact with out world, weird stuff, and that is science!