is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

sinesalvatorem:

parhelioncomic:

Parhelion: Part 1, Page 7

Featuring Alison @sinesalvatorem as herself-in-roughly-a-century.

Previous

Beginning

Hey guys! I exist in comic form!

There are two things that are incredibly accurate about this comic:

  • In a century, I’m a space empress.
  • In a century, I’m still dropping Hamilton references.

…actually, now that you mention it, I could absolutely believe that century-old space empresses would make a habit of ancient pop-culture references, just in general. That particular reference is probably too obscure to communicate “Do not trifle with me, child. I was here long before your parents were born, and I have every intention of being here long after you are dust in the wind. You do not want to get in the way of that goal.”, but it could still serve as staying in practice for when it’s time to deal with other gerontocrats. (And there’s always personal amusement, of course.)

Tags:

#Parhelion #reply via reblog #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #it was interesting to listen to my brain attempt to synthesise what future!Alison would sound like #when I’m just reading her posts my brain gives up and just makes something up out of the stock voices #(though it’s worth noting that the thought-voice I read Alison’s posts in is both consistent over time and different from the default voice) #(but it has a very definite American accent because I tend to have trouble using thought-voices with accents different from mine) #(I did notice that after talking to her in-person and hearing her pronounce ”can’t” in the British manner) #(my brain started attempting to integrate that particular characteristic into her associated thought-voice) #(with limited success) #(anyway as I was saying:) #my brain actually made a proper attempt this time #and it’s always interesting to feel it scrambling to construct a thought-voice according to relatively precise specifications #even if it’s almost never as successful as I’d like #tag rambles

Anonymous asked: i didn’t ship you with nonternary, i’m curious about how you can be ace and have a hypnosis fetish?

~ Brin ~ 3 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

Ah, I’m guessing you read a reblog-chain involving this.

Okay, let me see if I can explain this without being either oversimplified or too dense with ace community jargon.

Often when people first encounter the word “asexual”, they think it means “lacking in sexuality”. It’s an easy mistake to make: it kind of looks like it ought to mean that.

Thing is, “asexual”, in the sense used in the modern day in this culture, actually has a meaning analogous to words like “heterosexual”, “homosexual”, “bisexual”. It denotes the types of people that the person in question can generally experience sexual attraction towards: in this case, no types.

Sexual attraction is just one aspect of sexuality. There are others: libido, various fetishes, capacity for orgasm, just to name a few. A person can have these aspects in any combination, or none of them.

Basically nothing is hard-and-fast when it comes to identity labels, but as a general rule, “asexuality” refers only to the absence of sexual attraction. An asexual may have any or all other aspects while still being asexual. (They can also have none, of course.)

Note: many kinky asexuals, if asked how they can be both, would respond that their kinks aren’t sexual: they’re non-sexual fascinations that bear enough resemblance to “kinks” in the sexual sense to make it useful for them to call themselves “kinky”. I am not one of those people: I do consider it a sexual thing, though it tends to look very different from “normal” sexuality due to the particular set of aspects and experiences and (especially) other quirks of brain wiring that went into shaping it, and someone else in a similar situation might have a different view on whether their kink is sexual. Still, I thought I should mention that this is by no means a universal or even necessarily the most common view among asexuals with kinks and/or fetishes.

Wait, I probably shouldn’t leave that ’looks very different from “normal” sexuality due to the particular set of aspects and experiences and (especially) other quirks of brain wiring that went into shaping it‘ bit buried in the middle of a sentence. See, just because, for example, asexuals can have libidoes, it doesn’t mean that their experiences of libido will be the same as those of non-aces. A given aspect of sexuality tends to manifest differently depending on what other aspects are around for it to interact with, as well as what the rest of the person’s mind is like. (Really, given that I tend to dislike overwhelming emotion in general (even the supposedly positive emotions), it makes a certain amount of sense that to me, the most satisfying form of pleasure would not be orgasmic ecstasy but rather calm contentment.) “Hypno-fetishist” is close enough to the truth to be useful, but I often find I approach things differently than other hypno-fetishists do.

I hope this helped. While I do have significant quantities of contact with the asexual community, I’m not an activist and don’t have much practice at explaining the intricacies of asexuality. Feel free to ask for clarification or more information.

Tags:

#tales from the askbox #sexuality and lack thereof #(that actually used to be my asexuality tag) #(in the early days of my blog) #(but these days it’s settled into being a kink tag instead) #asexuality #Anonymous

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

gruntledandhinged:

thing I have noticed in current workplace:

There seem to be significant class gaps in the use of “anger” vs. “frustration”. Specifically, it seems like using “anger” as a personal emotional descriptor is more common in lower-SES (American) conversations about emotion and that “frustrated” replaces that at higher SES.

People in both categories (in my limited experience) will describe a situation as making them “feel rage” in the moment, but when we talk about it more, one will say “I am still pretty frustrated” or “it makes sense for me to be frustrated because,” while the other will replace that with “anger/angry”.

Do you do this? Do you distinguish between frustration/anger? Regardless of the answer to the second question, how comfortable are you describing your emotional state as angry?

*This is interesting to me because I once had a therapist point out that I was using “frustrated” repeatedly and asked why I wasn’t angry.

**My SES measure is not fine-tuned here, I’m mostly using Has College Degree vs. Does Not Have College Degree.

I [in process of getting college degree] view frustration as a sub-type of anger, and mostly not a distinction worth making. When I do specify an instance of anger as being “frustration”, I mean that it was directed at an impersonal force rather than an agent. However, the sensation is the same, and the response is the same*, so I usually just refer to both sub-types as “anger”.

My mother [has college degree] thinks this is weird, as she experiences anger and frustration as being entirely separate things.

(I suppose that explains why she doesn’t snap at the first person to ask if she’s okay after she stubs her toe or accidentally causes a frozen food avalanche in the freezer. For me, the target-less frustration!anger tends to latch on to the first target that presents itself, if one presents itself quickly enough.)

As for describing my emotional state as angry, I think I’m fairly comfortable with that. (I had roughly the opposite experience as you: I was talking about my emotional reaction to something and Mom said that I was using “angry” a lot more than she would have. This is how I learned about her anger/frustration distinction.) I’m not angry as often as I was this time last year, but that’s not because of a change in my capacity or definition, but rather because I’ve put more work into avoiding things that make me angry when I don’t have reason to think it will be worth the unpleasantness. (I am not one of those people who enjoys anger.)

*Theoretically the responses are different in that I can punish an agent but not a force, but in practice punishing either is equally impossible.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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justice-turtle:

brin-bellway:

ilzolende:

ozymandias271:

aprilwitching:

has anybody read the ted chiang short story “liking what you see”

its interesting sci-fi. i read it/am reading it today!

anyway, the reason im making this post is that the story made me realize i basically have the supposedly fictional condition that the story describes as “calliagnosia”? i think!

i mean, im not face-blind, but ive always known i had some perceptual oddities when it came to faces. the story seems to say that a normal person automatically has some kind of emotional or visceral response to seeing a really “beautiful” (or really “ugly”) face, and also that it is easy for a normal person to tell right away if another person is beautiful or ugly, without having to think about it. 

i dont have that, though! i asked @pipistrellus if it knew what that meant, to respond to human faces that way, if that was, like, a Thing. 

it didnt know, and then we commiserated over the shared experience of, like, trying to join in other peoples talk about cute boy band members or cute actresses or w/e, but not really being able to tell which ones were supposed to be cute

pip kind of associated it with asexuality, which makes sense, but im not asexual– i can definitely be physically attracted to people– and i still have this issue

and, yk, i can think someone is interesting or appealing to look at, for sure, but it doesnt really seem to map on to whether they’re…?? like, sometimes people call other people “striking” and i get that! i TOTALLY understand “striking”! when someone is unusual-looking, with a lot of character and presence and visual interest to them. and sometimes im really attracted to that unusualness, that interestingness, right away. but like… “interestingness” for me, when its really attractive, is as likely to involve highly visible scars or crooked teeth as it is to involve big eyes or long, shiny hair or something. and the attraction still isnt really like a “turn on” thing or even a pleasure thing, not initially and not just based on appearance. its more a fascination, like how i feel when i see a really weird-looking, cool giant bug and immediately wanna pick it up or draw it or something. plus, while im not really face-blind, i do have a lot of trouble telling people with similar features apart unless i know them pretty well. (if anything, i think this pulls me away from very conventionally attractive types a little bit, bc they can end up looking super indistinct/bland to me. sometimes i have trouble following the plots of movies if the actors look too similar in that way. its like im watching several copies of the man in the tan jacket– “well– he definitely had hair! and facial features!”)

anyway, i always figured most people look interesting and distinctive somehow when you look at them long enough, so i never really questioned those “everyone is beautiful in their own way!” and “if you have a really great personality, it will eventually shine through your physical appearance and you will look wonderful!” cliches. sure, i thought they were cheesy, and ineffective in actually changing social values/standards of beauty at all, and maybe a little misguided in the sense of why are we so focused on physical “good looks” over other stuff anyway. but i never felt like they were fundamentally untrue? i suppose a lot of people do though ( “well some people just ARE beautiful or ugly!”)

i remember telling someone about one of my many intense teenage crushes once, and i remember she said, after a really long, awkward pause, “well…im glad someone is really into [person]. im glad someone thinks [person] is cute. thats sweet.”

Ooh I definitely have an instinctive reaction of, like, “pretty face!” and “ugly face!”

It seems pretty uncorrelated to conventional attractiveness though? Like on one hand I go “pretty!” at girls with big breasts and lots of makeup and stuff, but on the other hand I also go “pretty!” at people with really kinky hair, or pudgy bellies, or big noses.

Also one of the biggest things for me seems to be, like, affect? Like there are people who are meh until you see them move or talk or, especially, smile, and then suddenly they are THE PRETTIEST and you want to stare at them ALL THE TIME.

And I *can* be sexually attracted to people who don’t make me go “pretty!” at first; like, I’ve definitely dated people where I can tell that they don’t have any of the traits that make me go “pretty!”, but also I am full of The Feels, and so they are SUPER PRETTY to me anyway.

Liking What You See is also interesting from a youth-rights standpoint (and other standpoints I have), and it might be nice to discuss it that way sometime. In a post that started out being on that subject. I’ll write one later, perhaps, unless someone else writes one first.

@ ilzo: I’d be interested in that.

As for this conversation:

I’ve been considering the term “grey-aesthetic” regarding my relationship with beauty, and this seems to support that. Like, I can tell when someone (or something, I don’t feel like it’s different with faces vs objects) is pretty, and all else equal I’ll pick a pretty object over an ugly one, but it doesn’t feel…I usually don’t feel a pull towards pretty things, a desire to stare at it longer than I would stare at an aesthetically-neutral thing, a reward of pretty things doesn’t motivate me. I say I usually don’t feel a pull because every so often I do, every once in a while I’ll see a particular pretty thing that I feel an urge to stare at, and to possess if applicable. It’s always fleeting, though: before long (hours, maybe a day or two tops), it fades, and I’m back to “okay, so it’s pretty, so what?”.

(Actually, now that I think about it, sometimes it’s longer than a couple days with people; once it was a couple months, but that was someone I didn’t see very much. Perhaps the difference isn’t people vs objects, but rather level of access: a certain (fairly small) amount of time spent looking at the thing, however long it takes to get that much time in.)

(Also, on an unrelated note, this is the third Ted Chiang story I’ve been linked to (the others were “Hell Is the Absence of God” (broken link) and “Seventy-Two Letters”), and I liked all of them. Perhaps I should seek out more of Chiang’s work.)

*growls* I wrote a long thinky reblog about this and didn’t think to screenshot it, and tumblr mobile ate it… :P

(short version: I kinda remember having something like this as a teen but I’m not too sure I wasn’t just hella gay. Also long complicated questioning of possibly constructed sexuality with weird ties to childhood abuse factors.)

I was going to say “you really need an automatic text-backup add-on”, but then I looked and apparently add-ons have to be specifically made for mobile browsers, and a lot of the PC add-ons don’t have a mobile port. I couldn’t find any relevant add-ons on Android Firefox, so whatever you’re using might not have one either.

(Are you sure it’s not, like, hiding in your drafts folder or something?)

Tags:

#reply via reblog

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ 3 Comments

ilzolende:

ozymandias271:

aprilwitching:

has anybody read the ted chiang short story “liking what you see”

its interesting sci-fi. i read it/am reading it today!

anyway, the reason im making this post is that the story made me realize i basically have the supposedly fictional condition that the story describes as “calliagnosia”? i think!

i mean, im not face-blind, but ive always known i had some perceptual oddities when it came to faces. the story seems to say that a normal person automatically has some kind of emotional or visceral response to seeing a really “beautiful” (or really “ugly”) face, and also that it is easy for a normal person to tell right away if another person is beautiful or ugly, without having to think about it. 

i dont have that, though! i asked @pipistrellus if it knew what that meant, to respond to human faces that way, if that was, like, a Thing. 

it didnt know, and then we commiserated over the shared experience of, like, trying to join in other peoples talk about cute boy band members or cute actresses or w/e, but not really being able to tell which ones were supposed to be cute

pip kind of associated it with asexuality, which makes sense, but im not asexual– i can definitely be physically attracted to people– and i still have this issue

and, yk, i can think someone is interesting or appealing to look at, for sure, but it doesnt really seem to map on to whether they’re…?? like, sometimes people call other people “striking” and i get that! i TOTALLY understand “striking”! when someone is unusual-looking, with a lot of character and presence and visual interest to them. and sometimes im really attracted to that unusualness, that interestingness, right away. but like… “interestingness” for me, when its really attractive, is as likely to involve highly visible scars or crooked teeth as it is to involve big eyes or long, shiny hair or something. and the attraction still isnt really like a “turn on” thing or even a pleasure thing, not initially and not just based on appearance. its more a fascination, like how i feel when i see a really weird-looking, cool giant bug and immediately wanna pick it up or draw it or something. plus, while im not really face-blind, i do have a lot of trouble telling people with similar features apart unless i know them pretty well. (if anything, i think this pulls me away from very conventionally attractive types a little bit, bc they can end up looking super indistinct/bland to me. sometimes i have trouble following the plots of movies if the actors look too similar in that way. its like im watching several copies of the man in the tan jacket– “well– he definitely had hair! and facial features!”)

anyway, i always figured most people look interesting and distinctive somehow when you look at them long enough, so i never really questioned those “everyone is beautiful in their own way!” and “if you have a really great personality, it will eventually shine through your physical appearance and you will look wonderful!” cliches. sure, i thought they were cheesy, and ineffective in actually changing social values/standards of beauty at all, and maybe a little misguided in the sense of why are we so focused on physical “good looks” over other stuff anyway. but i never felt like they were fundamentally untrue? i suppose a lot of people do though ( “well some people just ARE beautiful or ugly!”)

i remember telling someone about one of my many intense teenage crushes once, and i remember she said, after a really long, awkward pause, “well…im glad someone is really into [person]. im glad someone thinks [person] is cute. thats sweet.”

Ooh I definitely have an instinctive reaction of, like, “pretty face!” and “ugly face!”

It seems pretty uncorrelated to conventional attractiveness though? Like on one hand I go “pretty!” at girls with big breasts and lots of makeup and stuff, but on the other hand I also go “pretty!” at people with really kinky hair, or pudgy bellies, or big noses.

Also one of the biggest things for me seems to be, like, affect? Like there are people who are meh until you see them move or talk or, especially, smile, and then suddenly they are THE PRETTIEST and you want to stare at them ALL THE TIME.

And I *can* be sexually attracted to people who don’t make me go “pretty!” at first; like, I’ve definitely dated people where I can tell that they don’t have any of the traits that make me go “pretty!”, but also I am full of The Feels, and so they are SUPER PRETTY to me anyway.

Liking What You See is also interesting from a youth-rights standpoint (and other standpoints I have), and it might be nice to discuss it that way sometime. In a post that started out being on that subject. I’ll write one later, perhaps, unless someone else writes one first.

@ ilzo: I’d be interested in that.

As for this conversation:

I’ve been considering the term “grey-aesthetic” regarding my relationship with beauty, and this seems to support that. Like, I can tell when someone (or something, I don’t feel like it’s different with faces vs objects) is pretty, and all else equal I’ll pick a pretty object over an ugly one, but it doesn’t feel…I usually don’t feel a pull towards pretty things, a desire to stare at it longer than I would stare at an aesthetically-neutral thing, a reward of pretty things doesn’t motivate me. I say I usually don’t feel a pull because every so often I do, every once in a while I’ll see a particular pretty thing that I feel an urge to stare at, and to possess if applicable. It’s always fleeting, though: before long (hours, maybe a day or two tops), it fades, and I’m back to “okay, so it’s pretty, so what?”.

(Actually, now that I think about it, sometimes it’s longer than a couple days with people; once it was a couple months, but that was someone I didn’t see very much. Perhaps the difference isn’t people vs objects, but rather level of access: a certain (fairly small) amount of time spent looking at the thing, however long it takes to get that much time in.)

(Also, on an unrelated note, this is the third Ted Chiang story I’ve been linked to (the others were “Hell Is the Absence of God” (broken link) and “Seventy-Two Letters”), and I liked all of them. Perhaps I should seek out more of Chiang’s work.)

Tags:

#storytime #recs #reply via reblog #(when I say it was a couple months I don’t mean it was *constant* for a couple months) #(just when he was around)

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

ozymandias271:

meaninglessmonicker:

funereal-disease:

earlgraytay:

How does one explain how important a special interest is to neurotypicals?

Fuck if I know, but I’ll signal boost in the hope that maybe someone else does.

An attempt: Imagine if the only thing people around you were genuinely interested in was the shade of white wallpaper. You’d learn to think about wallpaper in a complex way, hold down cobversations about eggshell versus alabaster, but ultimately, in your own time, you won’t spend a huge amount of time researching wallpaper, you’ll be learning about physics or celebrity gossip or whatever tickles your fancy, even though there’s been a hundred thousand times more ink spilled over wallpaper than anything else.And people will look at you funny for your obsession with non-wallpaper, but you’d just shrug and say “it’s what I’m into.”
And whenever the conversation shifted to a topic you knew something about, you’d go on and on about it, and the people you’re talking to might humor you or ignore you but ultimately they’d just want to get back to wallpaper.
Now imagine non-wallpaper is star wars or trains or whatever

it’s like falling in love with something that isn’t a person. 

The nice thing about the falling-in-love comparison is that it also works the other direction, should you ever be attempting to explain limerence to an autistic aromantic.

(This is a large part of why, as an autistic aromantic, I’m not really worried about missing out on the experience of limerence.)

Tags:

#autism #aromanticism

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

comparativelysuperlative:

cameoappearance:

jabyrwock:

breadstyx:

Hey there fellow person!

You like science? Pseudoscience? Statistics? Being part of weird projects? Just really passionate about surveys maybe?

Well aren’t you in luck! As you may or may not know (probably may not), the website xkcd, home of the webcomic of the same name and of the incredible What if? articles, has launched a survey full of kinda-weird questions in hopes of getting enough data to analyze it.

What even is the point?

If enough people answer, we have a good chance of finding ‘meaningful’ correlations (yes, just like in science!). The fun fact though is that given the content of the questions, these will be pretty interesting correlations. (Like.. “People who have already flown in an airplane are way more prone not to like cilantro” or stuff like that.)

Sure but why are you talking about it?
Well. Because the more people there is, the more ‘accurate’ those correlations will be because we’ll have more data to analyze.
Also, some of you might like to analyze data, and can be interested in having a bunch of it to have fun with.
.. And maybe some of you peeps just like to take surveys, who even knows?

So I’ll just be giving personal (even if weird) data to who-knows-who ?
Data will be anonymous. People will just have access to your answers. If that still bothers you though, I would definitely recommend you to avoid this survey.

I’m sold! Where do I sign up?
That’s the kind of energy I like to see! Well once again, the survey is here. Have fun and feel free to share it to everybody you know! The more random the ‘sample group’, the more accurate the correlations!

this survey is a gift to the world

It’s not every day you have a completely valid and scientific excuse to mash the keyboard for a good thirty seconds straight

I predict that my answer to the keyboard-mashing one will be the most common answer, and am curious about what it’ll correlate with.

I probably should have checked off “beer” on the list of foods I dislike, but oh well. (I’ve never had beer, but I dislike wine, hard cider, and creme de menthe/cacao all for the same reason (they taste like being stabbed with countless little needles), which suggests the reason generalises to all alcohol.)

Tags:

#signal boost #reply via reblog

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

‘“You know,” Harry’s voice said quietly from beside him where his arms leaned on the railing next to Draco’s, “one of the things that Muggles get really wrong, is that they don’t turn all their lights out at night. Not even for one hour every month, not even for fifteen minutes once a year. The photons scatter in the atmosphere and wash out all but the brightest stars, and the night sky doesn’t look the same at all, not unless you go far away from any cities. Once you’ve looked up at the sky over Hogwarts, it’s hard to imagine living in a Muggle city, where you wouldn’t be able to see the stars. You certainly wouldn’t want to spend your whole life in Muggle cities, once you’d seen the night sky over Hogwarts.”‘

excuse me but fuck you

Tags:

#Brin reads HPMOR #Brin is touchy about stars #I think this is a stronger version of the reaction I had a couple dozen chapters ago #when he casually claimed that human emotions were universal among humans #I know *very* well that just because you’re running on human wetware *doesn’t* necessarily mean you’ve got the full suite of human emotions #very well indeed #oh look an original post #things that make me uncomfortably aware of my apparent inability to feel awe

What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It?

Link ~ ~ Brin ~ 4 Comments

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{{Title link: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/ }}

scientiststhesis:

Remember Galton’s experiments on visual imagination? Some people just don’t have it. And they never figured it out. They assumed no one had it, and when people talked about being able to picture objects in their minds, they were speaking metaphorically.

And the people who did have good visual imaginations didn’t catch them. The people without imaginations mastered this “metaphorical way of talking” so well that they passed for normal. No one figured it out until Galton sat everyone down together and said “Hey, can we be really really clear about exactly how literal we’re being here?” and everyone realized they were describing different experiences.

I thought about this recently during a conversation with Ozy:

Ozy: I am currently eating chickpeas and rice and I am _delighted_ by the fact that I can eat this _whenever I want_ The nice thing about DISCOVERING YOUR FOOD PREFERENCES is that suddenly all the food in my cupboards is food I like and am looking forward to eating. and usually I get food I like by, like, luck? So this is excitement.

Scott: I don’t understand, why didn’t you buy things like that before?

Ozy: It took me a while to have enough of a sense of the food I like for “make a list of the food I like” to be a viable grocery-list-making strategy.

Scott: I’ve got to admit I’m confused and intrigued by your “don’t know my own preferences” thing.

Ozy: Hrm. Well, it’s sort of like… you know how sometimes you pretend to like something because it’s high-status, and if you do it well enough you _actually believe_ you like the thing? Unless I pay a lot of attention _all_ my preferences end up being not “what I actually enjoy” but like “what is high status” or “what will keep people from getting angry at me”

Scott: How does that apply to food?

Ozy: Well, sometimes people will tell you a certain food is high-status or healthy or a thing that everyone enjoys, and then I would like it. And a lot of times I just ate whatever was in front of me or ordered whatever the cheapest vegetarian thing on the menu was. And I… sort of vaguely had a sense that some things were more pleasurable to eat than other things but I didn’t like _keep track_ of what they were or anything. Because if I knew I might like the _wrong things_. And also because I didn’t intuitively grasp that the “liking” thing everyone was talking about was related to pleasure and not to like popularity/status.

So the fact that people talk about what foods they like about a zillion times a day isn’t enough to make everyone realize liking foods is a thing.

But it gets worse. A high school friend posted on Facebook a link to a really interesting answer on Quora. It makes you log on, so I’ll copy the relevant part below:

I have anosmia, which means I lack smell the way a blind person lacks sight. What’s surprising about this is that I didn’t even know it for the first half of my life.

Each night I would tell my mom, “Dinner smells great!” I teased my sister about her stinky feet. I held my nose when I ate Brussels sprouts. In gardens, I bent down and took a whiff of the roses. I yelled “gross” when someone farted. I never thought twice about any of it for fourteen years.

Then, in freshman English class, I had an assignment to write about the Garden of Eden using details from all five senses. Working on this one night, I sat in my room imagining a peach. I watched the juice ooze out as I squeezed at the soft fuzz. I felt the wet, sappy liquid drip from my fingers down onto my palm. As the mushy heart of the fruit compressed, I could hear it squishing, and when I took that first bite I could taste the little bit of tartness that followed the incredible sweet sensation flooding my mouth.

But I had to write about smell, too, and I was stopped dead by the question of what a peach smelled like. Good. That was all I could come up with. I tried to think of other things. Garbage smelled bad. Perfume smelled good. Popcorn good. Poop bad. But how so? What was the difference? What were the nuances? In just a few minutes’ reflection I realized that, despite years of believing the contrary, I never had and never would smell a peach.

All my behavior to that point indicated that I had smell. No one suspected I didn’t. For years I simply hadn’t known what it was that was supposed to be there. I just thought the way it was for me was how it was for everyone. It took the right stimulus before I finally discovered the gap.

So I guess you can just not be able to smell and not know it.

This makes me wonder what universal human experiences I and my friends are missing out on without realizing it.

I know one friend’s answer. He discovered he was color-blind sometime in his teens. This still surprises me. People are always taking Ishihara tests (those colorful dotted circles with numbers inside of them) and discovering they’re color blind. Going through life with everyone else saying “The light was red, but now it’s green” and thinking it was weird that they were making such a big deal about subtle variations in shades of brownish-gray, but it was probably one of those metaphors.

As for me? I took a surprisingly long time to realize I was asexual. When I was a virgin, I figured sex was one of those things that seemed gross before you did it, and then you realized how great it was. Afterwards, I figured it was something that didn’t get good until you were skilled at it and had been in a relationship long enough to truly appreciate the other person. In retrospect, pretty much every aspect of male sexual culture is a counterargument to that theory, but I guess it’s just really hard for my brain to generate “you are a mental mutant” as a hypothesis.

But even bigger than that, I think I might not have had emotions, at least not fully, for about five years as a teenager when I was on SSRIs. I even sort of noticed myself not having emotions, but dismissed that as an odd thing to happen and probably other people were just being really overexuberant about things. Later I learned emotional blunting is a commonly reported side effect of SSRIs and I was probably just really not experiencing emotions. When I came off them it took me several years to get used to having normal-intensity feelings again, but it wasn’t a sudden revelation, like “Wow, I was missing a fundamental human experience for the past several years!” Just a sense of things being different which was hard to cash out.

As always, I wonder if a lot of what other people interpret through vague social things might be biological, or at least more complicatedly social. I can’t enjoy jazz music even a little – the best I can do is pick up something sort of like a beat and half-heartedly feel like maybe I could snap my fingers to it if I could build up the energy. My brother fell in love with jazz as soon as he heard it and is now a professional jazz musician who has dedicated his life to it. Are we listening to the same thing when we hear a jazz tune? Or am I like a guy who can’t smell trying to appreciate perfume?

 

benevolentwanderer:

For me, it was religion.

I’ve always been a natural storyteller, and when I was little no rock nor stone in my neighborhood didn’t have a name and a personality. I also made up gods, and various colors of magic, one of which was ‘black.’ I didn’t really understand why people got upset when I talked about my fictional gods, or why my mom told me to stop talking about ‘black magic.’ They’re stories that teach you something, right? Just like the Greek and Roman and Egyptian gods.

When I finally figured out that people actually like… something else??? Religion??? People can feel a literal connection to religion stuff? I don’t think it’s even possible to explain what it is that’s different, but when I finally figured out that it wasn’t some kind of really complicated game I pretty much wet myself in terror. I still don’t really get it.

This probably has a genetic link, incidentally – my dad doesn’t have a lot of religiosity despite being raised in a religious environment and neither does my maternal grandmother, and my mother and maternal grandfather were both as atheist as you get. My mom, a girl from a Christian background who liked going to Synagogue with a friend better…for aesthetic reasons. Yeah. We don’t get it, whatever ‘it’ is; and it doesn’t have to do with exposure – I’ve been around pagans of various denominations since I was little, participated in various solemn rites, felt deep appreciation for them… and yet, nothing more. Whatever’s there for them isn’t there for me. So, yeah. Defective brain. What gives.

 

justice-turtle:

@ursulavernon’s talked about this, that she just doesn’t seem to be wired to click with religion the way some people do, despite being raised churchgoing.

My own relationship with religion in this context is weird enough that I’m gonna go on about it at some length, sorry. ;S Short version is that I both do and don’t “get” religion, in ways that are definitely confusing to me and possibly to everybody else.

I was raised super-conservative Roman Catholic, lots of rules and shit. I was extremely good at the rules. I didn’t at all feel a personal connection to god, but I kind of did to some of the saints, in a similar way to how I connect and interact with “my” particular focus characters from any fandom. (Saint Peter, man, he’s a doofus and he continually fucks up and he’s still good enough to be Jesus’s personal next-in-line. I found that really encouraging through all of my you’re-not-good-enough braintimes.)

And… huh, Brin mentioned not experiencing awe, I guess I do, because that’s about the only word for how I connected to certain parts of Catholic ritual. Easter always really got to me, I still kinda miss it, because – Catholic, right, sometimes-Latin-Mass Catholic, it’s this massive multi-day set of ceremonies, these special rituals that only happen once a year. You stop ringing the church bells on Thursday night, you sing the Pange Lingua, you start the Forty Hours’ Adoration. You fast on Friday, you go to service and kiss the cross instead of taking Communion, you have to remember not to genuflect to the altar that one day. And then Saturday night, and it cannot happen before the sun is down (at least by the strict rules, y’know, all about the rules my subsect), you light the new fire with flint and steel, you bless it, and you light everybody’s little handheld candles from it and carry the Easter candle into the church singing the Sequence. And that always gave me the chills, still does, because it’s this big ceremonial ritual thing, every movement and every word packed full of symbolism, and it’s sweeping around the world with the sunset. Twenty-four hours of fire and joy and new light.

So – yeah. Religion, don’t know that I really get the spiritual connection part of it. Certainly I don’t get it in the “right” way; people will try to explain to me how they trust God even when bad things happen, or whatever, and I’m just like “no. Anybody that’s got the power to stop some of these objectively awful things and doesn’t, I don’t care what their ineffable plan is, if they’re fucking all-powerful they can make it happen without X. They choose to let super-bad shit happen anyway, they’re a fuckwad.”

And yet. I’m comfortable with the idea of a spiritual world possibly existing. Fairies, angels, gods. I actually really like the idea of genii locorum, that hits the same button – awe, I guess? – that Easter Vigil night does, the idea that there’s this particular thing happening that isn’t physical but that’s tied to this place and/or time. (Yes, “Brigadoon” makes me cry. ;S) I’m chill with the, the fact that by definition you can’t prove a spiritual anything exists, because it’s by definition not-material not-physical and not gonna do things you can measure on the physical plane, and I’m aware that functionally it’s all inside my head…

…I don’t know how to analyze the difference here, because there’s a lot of religion stuff that I’m like “it is all inside their heads and that makes me kind of uncomfortable”. I used to pass a little corner church on the way to college that advertised “Find Relief From ANYTHING!!!”, and I really despised them just because I was in a bad enough place myself that I could see how that would be appealing but since all the relief-finding religion can do is gonna be inside your own head, that meant they were preying on vulnerable people who’d do a lot better to go see a therapist, or at least jigger their own brains without needing to pretend a God was doing it for them.

(I don’t know if my ability to more or less consciously rejigger my own brainspace is unusual. I guess it must be, because I don’t see other people talking about anything similar much. Huh. Does religion fulfill that same purpose for other people? I wonder.)

But, yeah, there’s also this stuff that I’m aware it’s all inside my head but I still like it, prefer to have it as part of my take on the world than not. – and, yeah, thinking about it, a lot of it is the stuff that gives me that awe feeling. Huh. Interesting.

(Brin suggested to me a while back, and I’m still noodling with this enough that I don’t have a real coherent answer, that part of my “I don’t actually want to fuck that but looking at it turns me on” response to things like the Grand Canyon may be crossed wires with how I experience awe. I’m noting that here because this is another datapoint in me trying to figure out that one – the Easter sunset firelight thing, for instance, doesn’t hit my “hot damn sexy” buttons at all, it’s a totally different physical feeling. *is just thinking out loud here*)

(There might wind up being a post with me trying to figure out the sexy thing at some point pretty soon, because the bit with the not-limerence in my other reblog of this post is also a datapoint on that, and it ties into some of the stuff I need to work out with how I’m writing Zaeed. That’s not this post, though.)

Yeah. No real conclusion here, but since I hadn’t though of religion as one of the things I experience atypically until I saw this reblog, I wanted to write about it.

One of the problems with Tumblr’s note system is that I can’t like this post without unliking your other post.

I don’t know if my ability to more or less consciously rejigger my own
brainspace is unusual. I guess it must be, because I don’t see other
people talking about anything similar much.

I think that’s what they call “self-modification”?

I don’t think I’ve done much in the way of re-jiggering, but then I haven’t really tried. Most of the things I do are attempts to better understand the way I currently am, which is also something I see a lot of in your posts.

I haven’t seen the Grand Canyon, but extrapolating from stuff I have seen, I expect my reaction would be “I am uncomfortable with how much emotion I am not feeling”. I once described the feeling as my soul bumping ineffectually against the barrier you transcend when you have a transcendent experience.

(Mind you, the alternative might be worse. I tend to dislike overwhelming emotion even when it’s a positive emotion. *gestures at perseveration*)

It’s worse when it’s an awe-inspiring thing that’s been specifically hyped. I grew up in the Northeastern Mega-City hearing about how wonderful the stars were, how it was so much better when you could see them filling the sky rather than a dozen scattered points, how the stars were our birthright and everyone I’d ever known, including myself, was incomplete as a person because of not having regular access to their full glory.

I still haven’t seen the Milky Way in person, but I’ve been far enough out in rural Ontario at night that the stars were into the triple-digits. It was…the absence of feeling was like a feeling in itself. I felt empty. I felt broken beyond repair, too damaged even to assess the extent of the damage. The stars were supposed to fix some flaw I’d been carrying for so long I couldn’t even perceive the lack, but whatever it was, I could not be fixed. I could not be saved.

(It was pretty, I could tell that much, but I have a very limited appreciation for beauty. It ties in so much with awe.)

Tags:

#one of my tags is #things that make me uncomfortably aware of my apparent inability to feel awe #it’s mostly pictures of the stars #with a bit of ill-advised venting about religion #sounds about right #reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

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What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It?

Link ~ ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{Title link: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/ }}

scientiststhesis:

Remember Galton’s experiments on visual imagination? Some people just don’t have it. And they never figured it out. They assumed no one had it, and when people talked about being able to picture objects in their minds, they were speaking metaphorically.

And the people who did have good visual imaginations didn’t catch them. The people without imaginations mastered this “metaphorical way of talking” so well that they passed for normal. No one figured it out until Galton sat everyone down together and said “Hey, can we be really really clear about exactly how literal we’re being here?” and everyone realized they were describing different experiences.

I thought about this recently during a conversation with Ozy:

Ozy: I am currently eating chickpeas and rice and I am _delighted_ by the fact that I can eat this _whenever I want_ The nice thing about DISCOVERING YOUR FOOD PREFERENCES is that suddenly all the food in my cupboards is food I like and am looking forward to eating. and usually I get food I like by, like, luck? So this is excitement.

Scott: I don’t understand, why didn’t you buy things like that before?

Ozy: It took me a while to have enough of a sense of the food I like for “make a list of the food I like” to be a viable grocery-list-making strategy.

Scott: I’ve got to admit I’m confused and intrigued by your “don’t know my own preferences” thing.

Ozy: Hrm. Well, it’s sort of like… you know how sometimes you pretend to like something because it’s high-status, and if you do it well enough you _actually believe_ you like the thing? Unless I pay a lot of attention _all_ my preferences end up being not “what I actually enjoy” but like “what is high status” or “what will keep people from getting angry at me”

Scott: How does that apply to food?

Ozy: Well, sometimes people will tell you a certain food is high-status or healthy or a thing that everyone enjoys, and then I would like it. And a lot of times I just ate whatever was in front of me or ordered whatever the cheapest vegetarian thing on the menu was. And I… sort of vaguely had a sense that some things were more pleasurable to eat than other things but I didn’t like _keep track_ of what they were or anything. Because if I knew I might like the _wrong things_. And also because I didn’t intuitively grasp that the “liking” thing everyone was talking about was related to pleasure and not to like popularity/status.

So the fact that people talk about what foods they like about a zillion times a day isn’t enough to make everyone realize liking foods is a thing.

But it gets worse. A high school friend posted on Facebook a link to a really interesting answer on Quora. It makes you log on, so I’ll copy the relevant part below:

I have anosmia, which means I lack smell the way a blind person lacks sight. What’s surprising about this is that I didn’t even know it for the first half of my life.

Each night I would tell my mom, “Dinner smells great!” I teased my sister about her stinky feet. I held my nose when I ate Brussels sprouts. In gardens, I bent down and took a whiff of the roses. I yelled “gross” when someone farted. I never thought twice about any of it for fourteen years.

Then, in freshman English class, I had an assignment to write about the Garden of Eden using details from all five senses. Working on this one night, I sat in my room imagining a peach. I watched the juice ooze out as I squeezed at the soft fuzz. I felt the wet, sappy liquid drip from my fingers down onto my palm. As the mushy heart of the fruit compressed, I could hear it squishing, and when I took that first bite I could taste the little bit of tartness that followed the incredible sweet sensation flooding my mouth.

But I had to write about smell, too, and I was stopped dead by the question of what a peach smelled like. Good. That was all I could come up with. I tried to think of other things. Garbage smelled bad. Perfume smelled good. Popcorn good. Poop bad. But how so? What was the difference? What were the nuances? In just a few minutes’ reflection I realized that, despite years of believing the contrary, I never had and never would smell a peach.

All my behavior to that point indicated that I had smell. No one suspected I didn’t. For years I simply hadn’t known what it was that was supposed to be there. I just thought the way it was for me was how it was for everyone. It took the right stimulus before I finally discovered the gap.

So I guess you can just not be able to smell and not know it.

This makes me wonder what universal human experiences I and my friends are missing out on without realizing it.

I know one friend’s answer. He discovered he was color-blind sometime in his teens. This still surprises me. People are always taking Ishihara tests (those colorful dotted circles with numbers inside of them) and discovering they’re color blind. Going through life with everyone else saying “The light was red, but now it’s green” and thinking it was weird that they were making such a big deal about subtle variations in shades of brownish-gray, but it was probably one of those metaphors.

As for me? I took a surprisingly long time to realize I was asexual. When I was a virgin, I figured sex was one of those things that seemed gross before you did it, and then you realized how great it was. Afterwards, I figured it was something that didn’t get good until you were skilled at it and had been in a relationship long enough to truly appreciate the other person. In retrospect, pretty much every aspect of male sexual culture is a counterargument to that theory, but I guess it’s just really hard for my brain to generate “you are a mental mutant” as a hypothesis.

But even bigger than that, I think I might not have had emotions, at least not fully, for about five years as a teenager when I was on SSRIs. I even sort of noticed myself not having emotions, but dismissed that as an odd thing to happen and probably other people were just being really overexuberant about things. Later I learned emotional blunting is a commonly reported side effect of SSRIs and I was probably just really not experiencing emotions. When I came off them it took me several years to get used to having normal-intensity feelings again, but it wasn’t a sudden revelation, like “Wow, I was missing a fundamental human experience for the past several years!” Just a sense of things being different which was hard to cash out.

As always, I wonder if a lot of what other people interpret through vague social things might be biological, or at least more complicatedly social. I can’t enjoy jazz music even a little – the best I can do is pick up something sort of like a beat and half-heartedly feel like maybe I could snap my fingers to it if I could build up the energy. My brother fell in love with jazz as soon as he heard it and is now a professional jazz musician who has dedicated his life to it. Are we listening to the same thing when we hear a jazz tune? Or am I like a guy who can’t smell trying to appreciate perfume?

 

comparativelysuperlative:

It took me approximately forever to find out I was faceblind.
In retrospect, the incident with telling someone she looked like Evil Galadriel from the FotR movie and having everyone including her deny it…makes a lot more sense.

#prosopagnosia  #that is such a boring tag; does anyone have more interesting suggestions?

“You humans all look alike to me”?

(I was thirteen myself. Since autism and prosopagnosia are often found together, when I started reading autism neurodiversity blogs it came up early and often. I was occasionally confused as a kid when others could not only tell people with the same hair colour and style apart, but expected me to do the same.)

As for the article, I do wonder what experiences I might be missing. I have gradually figured out over the course of my life that my emotional range is non-standard: I appear to be missing awe entirely, I don’t feel limerence but I do feel perseveration* (which I’m told is both a similar feeling and one that most people lack), I have most** of the sex-related emotions but in such a way as to make them nearly unrecognisable (so I’m missing out on other people’s experiences of them, but everyone else is missing out on mine), my mother says that she experiences frustration as an emotion all its own rather than a sub-type of anger so apparently that’s a thing. (There might still be other emotional divergences I don’t know about yet.) I don’t know what thorns sound like (though I do know what eths sound like). I’m not entirely convinced that sour and bitter are actually separate flavours to me; I’ve been meaning to investigate that further. There’s probably others I don’t even suspect.

*Well, I did, and I still could if I allowed myself. The beginning stages are so unpleasant that once I figured out how to nip it in the bud (also age thirteen, as it happens), the temptation to do so was overwhelming.

**I don’t seem to have anything even resembling “looking at someone and wanting to fuck them”, not counting extenuating circumstances like the person being in a sexually suggestive pose.

Tags:

#is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #’I’m missing out on everyone else’s experiences of sexuality but everyone else is missing out on mine’ #is why my kink tag is ‘sexuality and lack thereof’ #which (tying in with Nate’s tag) is one of my few tags that isn’t completely obvious #I think that and the country tags for my countries of citizenship #(‘our home and cherished land’ and ‘home of the brave’) #are pretty much it #the wondrous variety of sapient life #(well maybe that’s also non-obvious but it’s actually *supposed* to be vague) #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #reply via reblog

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