MemeMachineGo!

In My Language is a powerful video by an autistic woman doing what she refers to as speaking her own language, and then commenting on language, thought, and ideas of personhood. This Metafilter thread called my attention to it, and the videographer herself replied.

It’s interesting how many people describe what I do as checking out of reality, or various variants on this. In fact, this has more to do with which parts of reality a person is paying attention to. Somehow it is “reality” to engage in a lot of abstract symbolic thought (and sort of paste that thought on over one’s surroundings and believe oneself to be perceiving them) but “not reality” to engage in interaction more or less directly with one’s surroundings. If you talk to me for awhile you will find me quite a bit more lucid than some people are painting me as. […]

As far as research is concerned, they seem to be finding that non-autistic people filter out large parts of the world around them, imagine a whole lot to fill in the gaps, and are generally unable to stop even when it would be useful to stop. This has its useful points, and I would never deny that. But they are finding that autistic people, while we can and do filter our experiences like that, can drop the filter when necessary to directly perceive things (inasmuch as the human brain can directly perceive things). Much of our understanding of the world (including pretty high-level understanding) is taking place through things like pattern-matching that are often thought to be “mere” perception instead of “real thought”.

I highly recommend watching the video and reading the whole of her follow-up.

Update: the videographer has a blog.