The Interaction of Body, Brain, and Conscious Awareness - Sameer Dahar

Part One: How Information Arrives in Me

Beginnings

As a small child, the initial thinking on my condition by society was that it was mental impairment, as my behaviors seemed eccentric and I had inability to communicate with words. The road from mother to my independence has been an incredible fight in holistic mind over body. Later in life I found my calling to understanding my special autism through science. The time I spent in homeschool taught me subject knowledge, measurement of sensorimotor ability, functional analysis, and typing to communicate. In time I have learned to verbalize the few words in my daily life that matter most.

How does information become my experience? Lets examine the interaction of body and brain. My structure of information processing is the center of my autism.

Ontologically, the identity I have is my mind — its patterns and perceptual thought. Information is an independent organism with its own characteristics and potential. Information is not waiting on my reception of it. It arrives having own characteristics and potential. Meeting it is the work of my mind. Learning and discrete activation of models or maps are incumbent upon information processing.

If my identity is my mind, then I must say what my body is to me.

I Experience Myself as Separate from My Body

As a person with autism and sensory motor challenges, I see that my ontological self is separate from my brain's neural activity. It is because of the body apraxia and brain-body disconnect that I am able to experience myself as separate from my body. How does my mind talk to my body? Motor parts and cognition are not linearly correlated. Initiation is important but I cannot locate which impulse of my senses and my body I trust. Individual muscles increasingly form their own intentions.

Temporal flow and sensory thresholds are all altered for me. I cannot count on memory, information retrieval, and sensory functioning as a neurotypical would. One theoretical determination I made is that time is man's construct.

Memory is a discrete function of a temporal stream of data — the internal clock in my movement of particle transmission. Prediction is anything that can take consequences.

Out of this comes the strangest part of my autism, which is the way time arrives in me.

The Time Travel of Autism

I measure my theoretical time travel of autism. In profound autism we have a reality interpretation that is dependent on the timing of our neurons. This is why we experience asynchronous sound, images, and tactile sensations. How do rivers of stimuli compute to the evaluation of the process of perception?

Binding of my senses cannot be measured in time. Time I take from change — of shape, of orientation, of the frequency and location of a sound. Sounds arriving out of order are also time to me. Where the binding is loose these changes do not line up, and the event does not come together as one.

The asynchrony has to do with how much is let in at once. Science has made breakthroughs in computational neuroscience that recognize open processing measure in the mind. Having this open processing allows for multiple streams of stimuli and neural structuring. In autism, we have open sensory systems — those in which geophysical stimulation generates noncommensurate responses. These responses are a consequence of altered sensory thresholds and filtration of stimuli. Sensory thresholds are not regulated and open to feedback. Stimuli are fighting for bandwidth and more whole processing. In my experience, I find myself utilizing only one channel or sense at a time.

Open does not mean all of it is processed. It means the stimuli are not filtered on entry. Where the streams are few, and are ones I can track, processing runs in parallel. Where they exceed what I can hold, processing narrows to one channel, or fixates on a single stream while the rest is unattended. The theater of the mind is continually practicing the roles of identity and possibility.

Momentum and the Threshold of Movement

That is what comes in to me. What gets out of me is a different problem.

Society is oblivious to momentum understanding in autism. Structured language — the inner language structure — depends on the presenting stimulus, and so does the movement that has to carry it. This movement marks autism challenges.

Momentum is mass times velocity. This analogy I apply to autism. What I call momentum is the total energy that drives our thresholds of motor response, and it is what decides whether a response can form at all. Mass is the load I am carrying. Velocity is how fast an impulse can travel through me. Where the energy is not there the threshold is not crossed, and the movement does not come. Impulses have additive properties, so what arrives keeps adding to what is already waiting. More data leaves us conflicted and we are afraid to move.

There is also a momentum in my mind. It gathers before anything shows on the outside, and what it proceeds to may be a thought or it may be an action. In my view it is its own system and not the same as the momentum of my body. But the thought and the action both come out of it.

Having been in biology, I understand that it is the functions marked by motor skills that challenge us in autism: skills like complex problem solving, timing the motor skills, perception that collects information that is filtered, modulating auditory frequencies, and internal open processing.

What Biomedical Treatment Has Changed

If it is the delivery that fails and not the thinking, then physiology is what I have to work on.

My internal structure is intact; however, the neurons in my brain fire like cannons, and they are not firing correctly. Though neurons are still in operation, the speed is not controlled. If I am making corrections to my brain physiology through biomedical treatment, then I should sense improvements in social awareness and speech.

In my experience, as binding improves the speech follows.

The improvement I am seeing is more verbal — in the participation in open dialogue. Movement based language is the sensory motor language between me and my environment. My stimming is part of it. Previously people moved away from movement-based language. I was the afterthought. What looked to them like behavior was language they were not reading. Movement-based language is shifting to spoken language.

That is what happens inside me. In the second part I will say what I think is outside me, and where I think reality comes from.