From my experience, my senses work together to inform me about what is good for me. My sense of taste tells me what my body wants to eat. My sense of pain tells me when my body is dangerously stressed. My sense of fatigue tells me when my reserves have been spent, and so on and so on. Are these things thinking?

No. They are sensations. I also find that my emotions arise with my sensations. When I experience pain, I begin to feel a sense of danger, defensive, reserved. When I experience pleasure, I begin to feel a sense of motivation, desire. Are these things thinking?

No. If I stopped here how out of touch with reality would I be?

Not at all. I find that as my emotions arise and fall away, memories surface. I recall other things that taste like what I’m tasting, or feel like what I am currently feeling. Is this thinking?

No. It is experiencing. Now according to what science has learned about people who have my diagnosis… Where my experience differs is that these sensations don’t get automatically handed off to other parts of my brain. My mind doesn’t automatically form ideas about my sensations. If you ask me to tell you if I like the food I am eating, it takes time and effort for me to determine the response to your question.

So sensations don’t spur any memories for you? They do spur memories. They don’t spur links, no associations.

Would aroma therapy work for you then? Aroma therapy doesn’t affect me as it would you. In general, it increases my stress level. It is over stimulating.

So you don’t connect the scent of baking to a pleasant time in your life? No, just an awareness of food, and motivation regarding food or the sensation. It takes a bit for me to reflect on something from my past.

You don’t get the concept of comfort food I bet. I do not get the concept of comfort food, no. I do form thoughts. My mind engages in dialogue, analyzing old memories, comparing relative concepts for relationships or differentiation, forming connections for easier access later, at the same time that the other part of my mind is smelling and reacting to the smell of bread. This is why my thoughts are structured so strange and I seem unnaturally focused. Your brains follow a natural pattern of switching. Your attention moving along a cycle. Mine doesn’t do that really. Your mind scans your environment and performs a sort of sampling, and excludes irrelevant data. It’s well trained in giving you relevant information, and this relevant information is shaped by your habits of thought. My own does not do this.

Too much irrelevant data makes you over loaded? Yes, and reconciling data is what motivates my thinking. This is what makes me do what they describe as hyper systematizing.

Thinking makes clutter? Yes, thinking makes clutter. A lot of your subconscious content is your brain taking clutter and parceling it together in ways that make sense with the habits you already have. Your brain will make thumbnails of everything you experience even if it refuses to process it while you are awake.

I use my thinking to deal with my feelings and experiences, and I do make an effort to interpret other peoples thinking. I find it interesting to explore these systems of perception, even if I don’t make sense of them very well.

So, I function primarily from my sensations, and my sensations are over exaggerated. A hormone in my brain makes my synapses switch on and stay on most of the time. This is why I can’t screen data very well.

You are like the opposite of a robot or is that silly? No, that’s a good description.

The reason I am sharing all my personal nonsense is this. I can follow the same processes that occur in others as occur in myself, and I don’t have the cognitive overlay. They have disproven the poor mirroring theory. In fact, it looks like the opposite. Rather than having no sense of other people, I likely have a poor sense of self.

I’m glad that you don’t get impatient with us trying to understand. Getting impatient with you would require I have some idea of why I should be impatient.

Have you found any upside to the process in the traditional ‘thinker‘ that society loves so much? As regards intellectuals, I find that highly intellectual people, motivated thinkers, do tend to hit the boundaries of thought faster, and tend to find the flaws in thinking easier, more rapidly, but mostly they tend to double back and try again. They often assume that they just made an error in their thinking so their strength is also what gets in their way. The upside is also the downside.

Is intellect the same as intelligence? You can be quite intelligent and not have gone to school. Intelligence as a raw faculty? Yes. As an adopted affectation, no. Everyone has intellect, some use it, many are used by it, and few can conceive of function beyond it.

Martial arts uses repetition to teach your muscles before, and many times instead of, explaining cerebrally. The “muscles” can think. In fact, it is how I think. I am what some refer to as the philosophical zombie. I can report experiences that match your own in every way, but I am not experiencing what you do. My higher brain functions work in a way comparable to your own, but are patterned is such a way that they conform to my baser brain functions.

For me, anger isn’t a long list of social moments where I adopted an angry role. For me, anger is every time my sense of stress triggered an aggressive response. So I have “anger” about a great many things. Few of which have anything to do with social norms, I have learned to recognize some social behavior as a reason for stress, but otherwise for me it’s largely irrelevant.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~