motor/coordination skills

I 've been described as badly coordinated for many years. In 1962/1963 my first school in Bangkok was so concerned that they suggested ,to my parents, that I be tested for what is now called cerebral palsy. The result  was negative , and other possibilities weren't explored . That didn't stop comments about my poor coordination though. Like you I was no good at gymnastics and sport.

An interesting article from 2007.   www.sciencedaily.com/.../071019085951.htm

l've known this about myself for most of my six decades. Twenty years ago, a friend noticed it, while i was walking along a rickety pier. He really was quite concerned. But that is the only person who has ever observed it and mentioned it. I walk quickly to deal with this poor co-ordination. It took me for ever to ride a bicycle, and I still wobble quite a lot at low speeds I also used to have a lot of difficulty with co-ordinating gears, brake and clutch on vehicles. And yet I am generally considered to be good at walking and driving. I'm terrible at gymnastics and sport too.

My late wife used to comment  on the way I walked. My stepdaughter has said that I walk like I'm drunk.

Yeah; if there's a gaggle of cheeky schoolkids on a street corner, I always brace myself - my apparently Monty Python-esque walking gait is always irresistible to them. People have often said that they can spot me from miles away by the way I wobble (though I can wobble very quickly - I'd probably end up with my nose in the pavement if I went any slower!)

It has crossed my mind whether it might be used in Occupational Therapy. The main impact that it's had on me is the realisation that my masking is probably not half as good as I've imagined, as my sense of how I appear from the outside is obviously pretty distorted.

When they were much younger my youngest stepdaughter's children said I needed a pelican bib .

Yes!  Someone else that loses control of their spoon or fork.  I get so fed up with it.  It physically hurts my hand trying to peel potatoes or trying to mash something up with a fork, and I don't know how it happens but the fork goes flying in the air a lot.  

People have laughed at me for years saying I have weird posture and I have no control over my limbs or what I'm doing.  

I'm so glad someone else has said about walking into door frames!  I get so so angry that I'm so clumsy.  I'm forever dropping things, spilling drinks, completely misjudging distances, like I'll go to step over something-I've seen it, I've planned to step over it, I go to lift my foot, misjudge it and either stump my toe or trip over.  And I've smashed my hips so many times on door frames!  

Interested in what you said about videos. I really noticed a few things slightly adrift about myself from doing video self-observations of myself teaching; a statutory employment condition. Actually, none of those observations were entirely revelatory; they just confirmed what I had long known in my own mind. Also, I could frequently be seen slightly entranced whilst students were heavily engaged in productive activity. But that really is  part-and-parcel of being a 'reflective practitioner'. I was actually deep in thought about my next move;and there are times in which students should be encouraged to pick up the ball and do all the running with it; which is precisely how they were always acting at the time. You really should stand back from them at that point, and there is no reason why you can't zone out a bit at that point.

Video self-observation is a constructive thing. But it is right that your work supervisors do not get to observe videos; unless, of course, you really want them to.

Could this have some role in diagnosis, I wonder? Certainly, there would be a need for the subject to discuss what was happening on the video with the diagnostician. And as regards authenticity, it is worth noting that when one is heavily engaged in carefully carrying out a certain procedure, that one often let's one's mask slip. The obvious entrancement (on many occasions) clearly indicated to me that my mind was not at all on convincing the camera.

My sympathies. Fortunately, I’m only 5’8” so I fit quite comfortably into a standard length bed, but my dad is 6’3” and abhors any foot-boards even though his legs are quite well-behaved. I’m sorry you suffer so.

That's really interesting!

I remember that video - can't remember whether I spotted the gorilla or not.

In a sense we're all constantly hallucinating. The most detail sensitive part of the eye, the macula, is only a tiny part of our field of vision, so the scene before us has to be scanned in order to see all of the details. Yet our perception is usually that we can see detail throughout the visual field. We're not seeing the image from the eyes, we're seeing the "model" constructed in our minds.

The inverse of your experience would be inattention blindness, where we don't see something that is there because we're not expecting to see it. The classic experimental example is being asked to watch a video of people passing a ball around while counting the passes. Most people don't notice the man dressed in a gorilla suit who comes into the frame in the middle of the video, beats his chest, and then walks off again!

Glad it didn't last long.

It's so sad the way some children are treated. I don't understand parents who can't accept their children for who they are.

I've also read of the predictive processing model suggested as an explanation for the experience of deja-vu. In this case the prediction is a particularly close match for the outcome, but the prediction is also incorrectly perceived to have been a memory trace.

The child vision experience was distressing, fortunately it was short lived.

I think it was because I had been reading about some of the dreadful abuse some parents visit on their autistic children via quack remedies they find on the internet. My horror occasioned the hallucination.

It always shocks me how some parents describe their autistic child in terms of the child being possessed by a devil called autism, and proceed to search for exorcist like practices that will return the true child back to them.

The concept of synaesthesia really fascinates me - it's hard to imagine what it's like if you don't experience it. Love the reason for your choice of avatar - that's really interesting.

Was the child vision quite distressing for you, or did you just ignore it?

I've never heard of it, but I'll definitely read-up on it. That does sound like it'd make sense of the experiences I have. With the waiting room example, it wouldn't be unusual to see a room full of people, so I guess my brain could have just been preempting what was on the other side of the door.

I feel like I learn something new every day on this forum.

My hallucinations are almost always abstract. This is similar to my sound to colour/shape synaesthesia. My avatar is a painting by the artist Carol Steen of a hypnagogic hallucination. (Hypnagogic hallucinations visit one just before falling asleep, hypnopompic greet one on awakening). Carol Steen is a famous synaesthete (in the world of synaesthesia at least). Her artworks are pictorial versions of her synaesthetic experience. My sound to colour/shape synaesthesia is more of an abstract video accompaniment to music or voice. My visual hallucinations are of a single frame version of my synaesthesia.

Whilst I was on mirtazapine I started to have visions of child floating in mid air. The child had a particularly malevolent vibe to it. Which is not a vibe one usually links to children. I have come off mirtazapine and these visions have ceased.

You account is interesting. Have you heard of predictive processing? This is a theory associated with the philosopher Andy Clark. It’s a theory of cognition where the brain is continually creating predictive models of sensory input and comparing them to actual sensory input. A sort of top down, bottom up continual confluence of two streams. According to this theory - which is proving popular in human and robot cognition accounts - your brain is predicting something that is then updated when it isn’t matched by your sensory input. This would account for the fleeting nature of your experiences.

Thankfully, I don't tell everyone (I have a tendency to overshare, but not usually with things like this!). It tends to be my partner and family, because I know they won't judge and they're very used to my quirks.

It's really interesting to hear about how you experience hallucinations. I wonder if what happens to me is more psychological rather than autism-related. For example, I walked out of the therapist's office the other day and as the door opened, I thought the waiting room was full of people (thought I could see them sitting there). The second time I looked, there was nobody in there. I've also had an experience where I thought I saw a solid fence moving to make a kind of gateway. These things are pretty rare for me and usually happen when I'm tired, so I think it's just my mind playing tricks. They don't distress me in any way - they're just odd and I shrug them off.

Graham Slight Return said:

I am interested in the neuroscience of sensorimotor processing as I experience visual, somatic, olfactory and proprioceptive hallucinations to varying degrees.

Snap! Much of my interest in the sciences of the brain developed because of my childhood discovery that some of the things that my senses reported to me seemed most unlikely to be part of the outside world. I get the impression that you have managed to learn rather more than I have, though!

DuckBread said:

I've had some very odd experiences where I've seen things that aren't there at second glance.

You told people? Oh no, you shouldn't ever do that! At least, that's what I'd learned by some time in the middle of my childhood. My hallucinations and synaesthesia are, for the most part, very little bother at all and rarely have the slightest emotional or narrative meaning. But oh boy, do people get their knickers in a twist if you let on that you see, hear, or feel "things". I only opened up again when I discovered that there were other people daring to in autism forums.

FWIW, mine are pretty banal.

- Constant visual snow - like the "static" on an old tube TV, only more colourful, and more 3D looking. I'd guess that's pretty much what it is, just random electrical noise that would typically be filtered out,

- Geometries - I assume my brains edge-finding and background-foreground analysis trying to make sense of the visual snow, but incorporating edges from what my eyes are actually seeing. Like a cross between a wire-frame 3D model and fractals, but not very prominent unless I'm looking at a blank field of colour.

- Migraine Aura - I get full-on ocular migraines a few times a year, but some of the aura type hallucinations can pop up at amongst the others.

- Every once in a while one or more of the above will be resolved as a real world object as if viewed from askance - no different than someone seeing a jumper out of the corner of their eye and thinking for a moment that it's the cat.

- Auditory Hallucinations - proper sounds that take a moment to work out whether I really heard them or not. But they're always really short, banal snippets of real sounds that I've heard recently; so memory related, I guess. I will hear my name spoken or called sometimes - that's as near as it gets to "voices in the head" type hallucinations.

- Audio/Visual to Somatosensory synaesthesia - seeing certain movements, shapes, or patterns, or hearing certain sounds gives me the feeling that an external force is moving my body or internals. It's hard to describe because it doesn't feel "like" anything else. I imagine it as ripples passing through my body, or the feeling of a shape being inside my head (especially for tile and chequer patterns). Sometimes it will throw my sense of scale a bit or make me feel like I've changed size, so I might feel as if my feet might not touch the floor, for example. Sounds can also modulate the visual hallucinations above to some extent (not "seeing notes in the air" or anything as definite as that). It's far more structured and rhythmic than e.g. an "adrenalin rush".

I was born with all of them, so far as I know. They're just my "normal". The biggest common problem that I have with them is that seeing in dim light can be tricky, as the hallucinations can then dominate what I'm seeing, obscuring the image from my eyes. Nothing for anyone to get their knickers in a twist about.

What are the visual hallucinations like? I've had some very odd experiences where I've seen things that aren't there at second glance. I'm sure my mind's just playing tricks on me, but other people seem to find it strange when I mention what I thought I'd seen!