Thread: Roll Call 190
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Desoxyn
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Desoxyn We are one mind
 
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Default Jan 14, 2022 at 03:46 PM
 
Finished work. I came home and the compulsions are unreal and are getting worse. I spent an hour organizing things - But I'm OK with it. I get everything done first and then relax - Perfection. The stimulant could be making it worse for me - But I like it this way.

I can't focus. The Dexedrine should kick in and I should feel better.

I've been trying to understand the difference between schizophrenia and conspiracy theorists;

"First, some background. I'm autistic and since discovering that fact I've learned about the Autism Spectrum. Autism is recognized as a collection of many specific symptoms that fall as a group outside the normal distribution for humans. Everyone has some autistic traits to some degree or another. To be diagnosed requires exceeding the threshold for the level of extremity at which these traits are expressed and the threshold for the number of them at these extremes. Hence, the autism spectrum. It's a gradient along which we all fall and which we begin to assign labels when we get a bit out of the neurotypical range.

It wasn't always like this. When I was in my teens I was at the top of the spectrum and suffered from full-on paranoid delusions, which I wrote about in FAQ: Ask An Aspie Reality Policy. In hindsight it is obvious that I was delusional and hallucinating. At the time though it was my reality. Had you put me on a lie detector and asked about the people who I saw and you didn't, I'd have passed. I could converse with, smell, and even touch my invisible friends. My brain created them as a way to reconcile patterns I saw that had no reasonable explanation, and it filled in all necessary sensory data to make the experience real. Kind of like how your brain fills in the image in your eye's blind spot but on a much grander scale. It took a lot of practice to dial down my pattern recognition to where it was useful instead of harmful.

I'm not saying that conspiracy theorists are seeing something real that the rest of us miss. My own experience suggests the opposite. But speaking as a guy whose pattern recognition today straddles the line between genius and insanity, I can tell you it's a pretty fuzzy line with no clear demarcation points. Whether someone is a genius, a conspiracy theorist or schizophrenic depends a lot on how often their extraordinary claims turn out to have any merit. extrapolating from my experience, I suspect many people would be reevaluated one notch closer to neurotypical on the spectrum in hindsight.

The difference between conspiracy theorist and schizophrenic, at least as far as I can tell, is one of degree and not one of kind. I accept the premise of the question as being fairly accurate."

Idek man. I'm trying to understand everything so hard. All of these things that I think about are important but I have no TIME.
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