Summer is drawing to a close and a new term at MindFields College has begun. There are two new exciting new courses beginning this year: ‘Incorporating outcome measures into your practice’ with Bill Andrews and ‘Working therapeutically with couples‘ with Ruth Hazelton.
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Over the summer the new ‘Caetextia: a new definition of Aspergers and autism‘ site was launched including the full original article on caetextia and an hour long video of Joe Griffin explaining the theory and the latest developments of it.
‘Caetextia’ is defined as context blindness caused by an inability to keep track of multiple interconnecting variables and to reprioritise any change in those variables by referring to a wider field that contains the history of them. This causes people with caetextia to resort to one of two mental modus operandi: logical, straight-line thinking or thinking by random associations.
The site has received some fascinating feedback from everyone from professors to people on the autistic spectrum and we are grateful for all responses. Here is the video:
I hope everyone has had a good summer.
3 responses so far ↓
1 The Truth about Aspergers Syndrome and Autism. | EveryTherapist // Sep 23, 2009 at 6:17 pm
[…] “Caetextia”: a new definition of autism and Aspergers […]
2 Oliver Stieber // Jan 22, 2010 at 9:11 am
Hmm…. I can only imagine that Caetextia is the work of some very ‘emotional’ people.
I may or may not have Aspergers, they jury is still out because my condition is a little bizar.
I am almost purely logical, I do have emotions but they are rare and extream.
What does that have to do with anything?
Well, quite unusually as I have discovered I know how I think, that is I do not and never have experienced anything which I could call free will. I thought everyone was the same as me (don’t we all!), then I found out about aspergers and started quizing people about the way that they think. They also think pretty much the same as me, but have these things called emotions, not only that buy they bind emotions to ‘concepts’, not just in a few extream instances like I do, but all the time and to all sorts of things. Finally I realised why everyone had seemed so weird and a little ’stupid’.
Emotions are kind of leftovers so to speak, our animal instincts. They are largly ‘irrational’ or ‘exagerated’ and don’t obey any logicical reasoning. Also when a person experiances an emotion it overrides their logical thought and the emotion takes control. Emotions can be kept somewhat in check, but the thought processes around the emotion are derailed by the link between the contect / context and the emotion.
People with aspergers don’t experiance emotions in the same way as neurotypicals, because they don’t have the ‘illogic’ of the imotions in their mind, they naturally become very logical. It also means that they have difficulty ‘empathising’ in the same way that nerotypicals do. For instance I learn a person and empothise on a much deaper level, where as I experiance neurotypicals empathising on a very shallow level. (I wouldn’t call it empathy in the way that I understand it).
So that’s it basically, the more you experiance emotions the less logical you are because your brain has to try to reconsile the ‘illogical’ emotions it’s experiancing with the logic of reality. Being less logical can make you ‘irrational’ and have ‘weird’ associations which can lead to certain types of creativity.
Being less emotional means that your mind is more coherent and so tends to follow obsessive behavior. I for instance don’t ‘accept’ something as being true unless I have reasonable logical closure on it, since without reasonable logical closure there can be many possibilities all of which can be correct without greater understanding.
Logical thinking is nothing to do with ‘memory’ and everything to do with not experiancing emotions in a way that derails logic.
(the people who wrote that are highly lightly to be religious too since they do not appear to understand logic which is a clear characteristic of religious people)
3 Oliver Stieber // Jan 22, 2010 at 10:07 pm
I think a bit more of a simpler explanation would be, you remember / associate things that are important and significant. In the greater logical view of the universe how can you say that the things that aspies don’t remember / associate are actually significant? They may be significant to neurotypicals but does that mean that they are really significant?
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